Fortune's Daughter by Alice Hoffman Page A

feet away, Lila was certain that she had to yell to be heard. “I have to go to a hospital,” she cried. “Something’s happening to me.”
    Lila’s mother ran over and put a hand on her daughter’s forehead to check for fever, but a strong contraction came that made Lila drop down and crouch on the floor. Through the wave of pain, Lila could hear her mother shrieking, and the moment she was able to stand again her mother slapped her face so hard that Lila could feel her neck snap backward. It was then Lila’s parents began to argue and accuse each other of stupidity, lunacy, and every other parental crime possible. They nearly forgot that Lila was there in the room with them. At last, her mother and father both agreed that an ambulance’s siren was too deep a shame for them to endure, and so Lila’s cousin, who was a nurse in the emergency room at Beekman Hospital, would have to be called.
    At that point, Lila didn’t really care what was decided. It didn’t matter that her mother was crying hot tears as she telephoned Lila’s cousin, or that her father had already left the apartment, even though he had no place to go—too humiliated to sit in the lobby or ask a neighbor for a glass of water or tea, he went to the stairwell and sat there, and prayed that no one he knew would see him. Lila let them make all the decisions. When they refused to take her to the hospital, she went back to her room and knelt by the side of the bed. After a while, she put her face down on the cold sheet and gripped the mattress with both hands. She felt herself slipping into something dark, and each time a contraction came her waist was ringed with a band of fire. Each time the band grew hotter, until finally it threatened to burn right through her spine. One thing Lila knew: she could not live through this kind of suffering. But even now, she didn’t dare scream and bring the neighbors running. She simply begged for someone to help her, and although her mother must have heard her she did nothing more than come into the hallway and quietly close the bedroom door.
    The night grew so cold that when it began to rain the drops froze the moment they hit the sidewalk. There were hundreds of accidents: cars and buses skidded on the icy avenues, lights in hotel rooms flickered as generators came to a halt, pipes froze and then burst, and every frail tree in the city was hidden beneath a shower of ice. Up in her room, Lila was surrounded by black fire. She might have slipped into the darkness forever if her cousin Ann hadn’t arrived a little after midnight. The bedroom door opened slowly, and the scraping of wood against wood sounded like the flapping of some huge bird’s wings. Lila gasped when the sudden light from the hallway filled her room. For one calm moment Lila wondered if she had imagined the pain, and she watched as her cousin took off her gray wool coat and her leather boots. Before the bedroom door was closed Lila had enough time to look out and see her mother peer into the bedroom. At least, Lila thought it was her mother—she wore her mother’s clothes, and was her mother’s shape and size. But if it really had been her mother, wouldn’t she have run into the room and thrown her arms around her daughter and tried to save her? Lila blinked and strained to see, but the figure in the hallway just grew shadowier, and when Lila’s cousin walked toward the door she blocked the light, and then there weren’t even any shadows. There was nothing at all.
    When the door closed the sound echoed. Lila could actually feel the sound somewhere beneath her skin. Immediately the room was airless; the heat in the radiator poured out until it was impossible to breathe. That was when Lila knew she couldn’t have this baby.
    â€œI’m sorry,” she told her cousin. “They made you come here for nothing. I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going through