“We both know you didn’t come out here just to see me,” Jason Grey said. “I’m not asking why you’re here, you understand.”
Jason sat down across from her and Lila pushed a glass ashtray toward him. He smoked only half the cigarette before he stubbed it out and coughed for what seemed too long a time. If Lila didn’t go after her daughter soon, she would never do it. And if that happened she would never be able to leave this house; she might be able to go as far as the driveway, but then a feeling of pure terror would force her to run back inside and lock herself in the upstairs bedroom.
“I figure you’ll need my car,” Jason Grey said. “Just remember to pump those brakes before you make a stop. They work. They just work better if you pump them.”
Lila pulled on her boots and left the house. The thermometer nailed to the porch was at fifteen degrees. It took ten minutes for the car to heat up enough so that it wouldn’t stall out every time she put it into gear. Jason had always said that it was an auto mechanic’s duty to have a car that always needed repairing—that way if he had no business he could always give himself a job. As she sat in the idling car, the smell of gas made her sick to her stomach. She drove down the driveway carefully, and when she pulled out onto the East China Highway she skidded; if there had been oncoming traffic she wouldn’t have been able to pump the brakes in time.
She had forgotten how small the place was—two long streets and a marina, then the circle of residential streets on a hill above the harbor. On one of these streets was a small housing development that had been built the year before Lila first came to East China. It was easy to find the right address, but, once she had, Lila turned the key in the ignition and just sat there, looking at the house. All along she’d imagined a two-story house, and here it was a ranch in a neighborhood that was so deserted that when Lila finally got out of the Ford and the car door slammed behind her, the sudden noise made her jump.
The ground was frozen and there was a cover of ice on the asphalt driveway. Lila tried to tell herself that the worst part was over—she had found the house where her daughter had grown up. But already it felt wrong to her. She walked up to the door and knocked. She could hear something inside—a dishwasher or a washing machine. She realized then that she had expected some signs of children—a bicycle or a set of swings. The idea was ridiculous—it was winter, and her daughter was a grown woman—she probably only came back to this house on holidays, two or three times a year.
Lila could hear someone walking down the hallway, but it wasn’t until the door opened that she believed it was finally happening. A woman stood looking at her through the storm door. The sound of water was even louder, and Lila could tell now—it was a dishwasher.
“I’m Lila Grey,” Lila said right away, as if that explained anything.
The woman nodded, expecting more, a sales pitch for cosmetics or vacuum cleaners. Lila could tell that she had already decided to say no and was just being polite.
“My father-in-law used to own the first gas station on the highway,” Lila said. She was talking too much and too fast, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “He lives just past the station, in that old green farmhouse you can see from the road, and that’s his car out there. I knew I shouldn’t have borrowed it, but I did, and now I’m stuck and I have to call him.”
When the woman looked out at the parked Ford it was easy to believe that Lila had indeed had car trouble. And then she actually did it; she unlocked the storm door and let Lila inside.
“Everything’s a mess,” the woman said apologetically as she led Lila to the kitchen. There was a wall phone above the table, and the woman turned the dishwasher off so that Lila could hear. Her name, Lila knew from the file, was Janet Ross, and she had been thirty-three years old when cysts were discovered in both her ovaries. When the cysts were removed the surgeon found that the walls of her ovaries were depleted and thin. Janet Ross had come to see Dr. Marshall for a second opinion, and she had broken down in his office when he told her she’d never be able to have a child. When the doctor phoned her a few months later to tell her he had found a baby for her, it was late at night and the ice storm had made driving impossible. They took a train into Manhattan at five that morning. By seven they were in Dr. Marshall’s office at Beekman, and the doctor couldn’t help but notice that Janet Ross had dressed so quickly she was still wearing a nightgown underneath her dress and the flowered hem hung down past her knees to the tops of her boots.
Lila held the phone down with her finger and dialed; she kidded Jason for lending her a wreck of a car and suggested he bring his tools and meet her out on the street.
Janet Ross was at the table, polishing a silver creamer when Lila got off the phone.
“He’ll have to take a cab over,” Lila said. “I guess I’ll wait in the car. I just wish the heater worked.”
“No heat,” Janet Ross said sympathetically.
Lila kept looking for a sign: a Mother’s Day card taped to the refrigerator, a photograph hung on the wall.
“How about some coffee?” Janet Ross asked.
“Great,” Lila said. “But why don’t you make it tea. I read tea leaves,” she explained.
Janet Ross put some water up to boil, but she gave Lila a look.
“It’s a hobby,” Lila explained. She waited just the right amount of time before she spoke again. “Why don’t you let me read yours?”
“I couldn’t ask you to do that,” Janet Ross said, taking two teacups out of the cabinet.
“Oh, you have to let me,” Lila said. “I’ll feel much better about barging in on you.”
She took the teabags Janet Ross had put in each cup and tore them open with her fingernail. As water was poured into the cups Lila realized how uncomfortable she was in this kitchen; she had expected it to be much nicer than it was: the walls were covered with something that was supposed to look like slate, and the appliances were all a too bright yellow.
“Lovely place you’ve got,” Lila actually said.
“Do you really think so?” Janet Ross said, pleased. “We moved out here from the city thirty-two years ago—right after we were married.”
Lila held up her hand. “Don’t tell me any more about yourself,” she warned. When Janet looked puzzled, she added, “Otherwise, what’s the point in having your fortune told?”
The women smiled at each other, but all the time Lila was thinking what a fool Janet was. First she pretended to be someone’s mother, and now she was about to tell Lila everything she wanted to know.
“Can I add milk to this?” Janet Ross asked. Used to coffee, she was having a hard time with the bitter taste of tea.
“Just drink it,” Lila said.
She sounded harsher than she’d planned, but Janet quickly finished her tea, as though, for a moment, she’d been frightened of Lila. Lila held the cup and peered into it.
“I see the letter L,” she said. “A man who is very close to you.”
“I can’t believe it,” Janet said. “That’s Lewis. My husband.”
Lila smiled; she had her now.
“This Lewis,” Lila said, “he’s an engineer someplace where they make airplanes?”
Janet Ross grew rigid. “How did you know that?” she asked.
Lila pointed to the teacup. Dr. Marshall’s files were very complete. “See this,” she said. “This little airplane in the corner?”
Janet Ross looked and couldn’t see a thing.
“Well, it takes years to understand the symbols,” Lila said. “Take this one.” She briefly passed the cup in front of Janet. “This is clearly the symbol for your daughter.”
“My daughter?” Janet said, confused.
“I see here that she is twenty-six—no, twenty-seven years old this month.”
She looked at Janet Ross out of the corner of her eye, and kept her voice as even as possible.
“I can’t quite make out where it is she’s living now,” Lila said. “Is it East China?”
Janet
Ross seemed to be having trouble breathing. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“Your daughter,” Lila said impatiently. “Where is she?”
They looked at each other across the table, and Lila could feel something passing between them.
“I don’t have a daughter,” Janet Ross said.
Lila sat straight in her chair; her head snapped back, as though she’d been slapped. She had the file in her suitcase and she knew this was the right house. This was the right woman—you could tell she was a thief just by looking at her.
“Wait a minute,” Lila said. “I see the symbol for your daughter in the tea leaves, and the tea leaves never lie.”
It was all a show for Janet Ross, and so it was even more terrible when Lila looked into the teacup and really did see something. There were arms and legs surfacing, and then, for a moment, a child’s face.
“Oh, my God,” Lila said. “She’s right there.”
In the fluorescent lighting of the kitchen Janet Ross suddenly looked much older than she was.
“What do you want?” she whispered.
Lila knew that she could lose it all now; one more outburst and she might never find out where her daughter was. “You don’t have to be nervous now that we’ve begun to talk about children,” she said. But she could tell that Janet Ross wasn’t quite as stupid as she’d thought.
“There’s nothing wrong with your car,” Janet said.
“Of course there is,” Lila said quickly. “Just take a look at it.”
“I don’t want you here,” Janet Ross told her.
“You’re the one who invited me in!” Lila said.
She could feel the edge of Janet’s hysteria as Janet stood up and reached for the phone.
“I’m calling the police,” Janet Ross said.
Lila leapt up and grabbed the phone receiver out of her hand.
“Don’t you dare call the police,” Lila said, and when she let go of the phone Janet obediently hung up. Lila had no time to waste. She went into the living room and began to search for signs of her daughter. Janet followed her and watched as Lila tore through the house. She went through the bureau drawers and found nothing—not a photograph, not an address. She went through the bedrooms, the closets, the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, and all the while Janet followed her, watching. By the time Lila had finished with the last room—a den in which there was a fold-out couch for guests—she was shivering.
“I don’t know what you’re looking for,” Janet said. “We don’t have anything worth stealing. Take the color TV if you want it.” She took off her wristwatch and her diamond ring and held them out to Lila. “Here,” she offered. “Take these.”
“There’s nothing here,” Lila said weakly.
“I could have told you that,” Janet Ross said. “You picked the wrong house.”
Lila went to the front door and let herself out. It was freezing cold, and Lila just couldn’t wait for the car to warm up, so every time she shifted into gear, the engine stalled. She should have known from the minute she walked through the door that no child had ever lived there. If her daughter had grown up in that house she would have left some sign for Lila: a framed picture of a robin, bronzed baby shoes, fingerprints that Janet Ross could never get off the kitchen door. Lila immediately blamed Dr. Marshall for giving her the wrong address to throw her off the track, but maybe it was an innocent mix-up of his files, and after all these years what could anyone expect? Files got lost, names misplaced, children disappeared on cold, clear days. And as Lila drove away she had only one wish: that she had come here last night at midnight with a pack of matches and some kerosene and burned this house to the ground. Then, at least, there’d have been smoke and ashes, and when Lila had picked through the rubble she could have imagined that everything she touched had once belonged to her daughter.
Lila went back to her father-in-law’s house and sat down in the kitchen with her coat still on. Jason Grey was in the back, putting out salt licks for the deer. When he heard the Ford pull up he finished and came inside. As soon as he saw Lila he knew she hadn’t gotten whatever it was she’d wanted.
“Do you want me to ask you what’s wrong?” he said.
Lila shook her head no.
He made her a pot of coffee and set it down on the table, then he left her alone. Lila sat in the kitchen all afternoon. She could hear the TV turned on in the parlor, she could hear footsteps in the hallway every once in a while when Jason came as close to the kitchen doorway as he dared, just to check on her. When it started to get dark, Lila didn’t bother to turn on the light. She could sit there in the dark forever, and the colder it got in the room, the less she felt like moving. She let the cold get into her bones and if she waited long enough, if she really tried, she might be able to feel nothing at all.
It was seven in the evening when the phone rang, and by then Lila was so cold that she could barely move. Jason came in from the parlor and they both watched the phone, set out on the kitchen counter, as it rang five more times.
“You know who that is,” Jason Grey said. “He always calls me on a Friday night.”
Jason went over and turned the oven on.
“You shouldn’t be sitting here,” he told Lila. “It’s too cold.”
The phone began to ring again.
“I take it you don’t want to talk to him,” Jason said. He lit a cigarette and leaned against the sink. Bent over that way he was actually shorter than Lila.
Everything seemed to have a hard edge; when Lila looked at her father-in-law she could see only his skeleton.
The phone had stopped ringing, and this time Jason went over and pulled the plug out of the wall.
“You don’t have to talk to him if you don’t want to, Lila,” Jason Grey said. “But I’ll tell you one thing you do have to do—eat dinner. And I’ll tell you what I have in mind.” He was talking to her as if it were the most natural thing in the world for them to be there together in the dark with her not saying a thing. “Helen never liked for me to have Italian food, she was sure it was bad for your heart. But I’ve been thinking about going to a restaurant in town. And that’s what I’m going to do—I’m going to take you out to dinner.”
They left the kitchen oven on, so that the house would warm up. Jason Grey put on his down jacket, and his high boots, and then they walked arm in arm down the dirt driveway toward the Ford. Lila held on tightly to her father-in-law, so that he wouldn’t slip on the ice. The stars were brighter than they’d ever been and the sky was so huge it made you aware of how fragile you were, how easy it would be to slip on the ice and break something. As they walked past the pines it grew even colder, and Lila breathed in deeply, but she didn’t dare speak. Already, she could feel that the stone had formed and was waiting to drop from her tongue.
On the day of her daughter’s birthday it was fifty-eight degrees, one of the warmest days in January anyone in East China could remember. By now Lila couldn’t go any farther than the end of the driveway, and she knew it was pointless to try. It was as if there was a sudden drop in the oxygen out there, or a pack of half-starved wolves roaming the East China Highway, out for blood.
Of course there were things she could have done: hired detectives, made phone calls, pored over school records in the basement of the elementary school. But nothing outside the yard of Jason Grey’s house seemed very real, and California seemed most unreal of all. Richard kept calling. Twice, Lila had overheard Jason Grey talking to him on the telephone, and each time she had been startled by the idea that you could talk to someone who was three thousand miles away.
“I’m telling you she’s all right,” she had heard her father-in-law tell Richard on the Saturday after she’d been to see Janet Ross. But Richard refused to believe him; he phoned again and again, and when he called one night after midnight, Lila could tell he was thinking about following her. She stood in the kitchen doorway, near the cabinet where the brooms were stored; she dreaded the possibi
lity that Richard might come after her. Jason sensed her presence in the room and turned to her. Lila couldn’t seem to blink, and Jason was reminded of the deer who edged closer and closer to the house each season, as the woods claimed more and more of the yard.
“Don’t argue with me,” Jason had said to Richard. “Sometimes people need to be alone and you can’t take it personally.”
Richard stopped calling after that. Lila tried to thank her father-in-law by baking him a cake, but she ran out of flour, and she couldn’t go into town any more, not even to the grocery on Main Street. Each day she stayed closer and closer to the house, but on her daughter’s birthday the weather was so seductive that even Lila went outside. She pulled on a pair of Jason Grey’s old boots and began to rake the mud in the front yard. She had been working for nearly an hour, and had broken two fingernails when she heard the car pull into the driveway, its wheels spinning in the mud. The birds had gone crazy with the sudden warmth; there were so many of them searching for worms that from certain angles the earth looked blue. At the far edge of the yard were the shells of two Chryslers waiting for spring when Jason would rebuild them. If he worked slowly enough, he had told Lila, those Chryslers might keep him busy for the rest of his life.
When the car pulled in, Lila stood up and put one hand on her hip. Every time she licked her lips she tasted salt; she had lost so much weight in the past two weeks that her wedding band slipped up and down her fourth finger easily. But now she held on to the rake so tightly that the ring stayed in place. She knew, right then, as the car pulled over and parked, that she was about to find her daughter. The first thing she did was make a quick list of things she had to do: wash her hair, file down the nails that had broken while she raked, look through her mother-in-law’s closet for a leather belt, polish her one good pair of shoes.
Janet Ross didn’t see Lila out in the yard, and Lila let her walk to the house without calling to her. She enjoyed watching from a distance as Janet navigated through the mud and knocked on the front door and she stood still as Jason Grey invited Janet inside. Lila wanted this exact moment to go on and on. She wanted the same sound of the birds, and the thud of the front door as her father-in-law closed it, and the air so surprisingly warm and sweet it made you feel like crying. And when she finally walked back to the house, Lila made certain to take her time—because, after all, she had been waiting for this moment for more than half her life.