Fortune's Daughter by Alice Hoffman

of stairs before she realized she couldn’t go any farther. She held on to the iron banister and slowly sank to the floor. In the middle of a terribly cold winter, there had been an oddly warm week, with rain instead of snow, and everyone in the city seemed sluggish and out of sorts. Lila’s parents had come to agree that their daughter’s strange behavior was caused by a combination of the weather and the mysterious pains of being eighteen. Ever since autumn, Lila had refused to wear anything but the same wide, blue dress, which hung from her shoulders like a sack. She refused suppers and lunches, yet she looked heavy and she walked as if off balance. At night, the next-door neighbors could hear her crying, and when she finally slept nothing could wake her, not even a siren right outside the apartment building. No one had dared to ask Lila what was wrong for fear she might tell them. And so, it had not been very difficult for her to keep her pregnancy a secret. But on that day in January, when her legs gave out and she sat huddled on the second-floor landing, Lila knew there was just so much you could hide.
    Lila was expected home for dinner, but she sat in the stairwell for nearly an hour. Outside the sky filled with huge white clouds. The weather was changing that night, dropping five degrees an hour, and Lila tried to convince herself that the sudden shift in the atmosphere was what made her feel so exhausted and sick. In her calculations she had at least six more weeks to go. Lila was still stunned by what had happened to her, and every time the baby moved she was amazed all over again. On those rare days when she accepted that she was indeed pregnant, she could never quite believe she would actually give birth. Perhaps after nine months of pregnancy the process would reverse itself: the baby would slowly dissolve, forming, at the very last, a nearly perfect pearl, which Lila would carry inside her forever. But there on the stairs, Lila knew that something was happening to her. When she found the strength to stand up a wave began somewhere near her heart; it traveled downward in a rush, and then, without warning, exploded. Suddenly, Lila’s dress was drenched, from the waist to the hem, and as she climbed up the stairs a trail of warm water was left behind that would not begin to evaporate until the following day.
    Lila managed to get into the apartment unnoticed, then she undressed and crawled into bed. When her parents realized she was home they came to knock on her door, but by that time Lila’s voice was steady enough to call that she was really too tired to join them for dinner. She closed her eyes then, and waited, and she was in her own small bed, in that room where she’d slept every night of her life, when her labor pains began. At first it was nothing more than mild cramps, as if she had pulled the muscles in her back. But the cramps came and went in a regular pattern, and no matter how hard Lila willed the pain to stop it rose upward; it was climbing to the roof. The movement of time changed altogether; it seemed as if only two minutes had passed since Lila had managed to sneak into her room—but it was more than two hours later when the pain began to take on a life of its own. There was a steady rhythm it complied to, and as the pain gained control, Lila panicked. She jumped out of bed, pulled a blanket around her, then ran out of her room and into the hallway. Lila’s parents had long finished dinner, but her father was still at the table reading the newspaper, and her mother was returning the dishes to the cabinet in the dining room. When Lila’s mother saw her daughter in the hallway with a wool blanket wrapped around her and her dark hair flying wildly, she dropped a large platter which broke into a thousand pieces on the wooden floor.
    â€œSomething’s wrong,” Lila screamed. Her voice did not sound at all like her voice, and though her parents were only a few