Except for one. The youngest of the Sisters ran away and was married for a brief time. Years later she returned quite suddenly, and she lived on the estate long after the two older ones had died. Because no one in the family had left a will, the city claimed the estate and sold it off, parcel by parcel. But no developer seemed to want to touch the house itself—it stayed empty and intact until the Long Beach earthquake split the foundation and tumbled the turrets onto a grove of Hawaiian palms. In the neighborhood, people liked to say that the youngest sister had given birth to a child during her time away from the estate, a true heir who would one day return to claim the property. Then they would all have to move out of their houses and the block would once again be planted with eucalyptus and juniper trees and thick old rose bushes imported from New York and France. People actually seemed to look forward to this time when they’d be removed from their houses, either because it seemed so unlikely or because they were so tired of working in their fruitless backyards that they were willing to give it all up just to see somebody succeed.
For the most part people who owned houses on Three Sisters Street had the sense that their homes didn’t really belong to them. Yet since Lila had come back from the hospital she felt more at home than she ever had before. The bungalow seemed simple and clean, and when the afternoon light came in through the windows it was so sharp it took your breath away. It was the nights that were difficult, because at night Lila could tell that she was losing her daughter. It was a case of neglect: she just didn’t have the strength to will her daughter to life. Every night the baby was more transparent and her skin grew colder by the hour, even after she’d been covered with a towel to keep her warm. When it was very late, and everyone in the neighborhood had been asleep for hours, Lila could hear her baby struggling for breath. But there was nothing she could do. Richard wasn’t sleeping on the couch any more, he was right there beside her, and because she was afraid of waking him all Lila could do was bite her lip and listen to her baby’s chest rattling.
She knew that the kindest thing to do would be to let her daughter go. It seemed so simple and rational when she thought about it during the day. But at night she couldn’t bring herself to give the baby up, and sometimes she took a terrible risk—she dragged herself out of bed and went to open the dresser drawer. But each time Lila held the baby the weight in her arms was lighter, and after a while she realized that her daughter could no longer open her eyes.
Richard insisted on treating Lila like an invalid and she didn’t try to stop him. He’d changed his schedule and hired another mechanic so he had to go into the shop only in the afternoons. In the mornings he made certain Lila stayed in bed; he brought her tea and muffins and magazines. Her visions and headaches had never returned and her doctors insisted she was getting stronger, but after lunch, when she was alone in the house, Lila found herself listening to her own heart, waiting for an irregular beat. It was awful to want so much to be alive; it left you with no pride at all. When Rae phoned and said she could arrange to leave work early Lila found herself agreeing and let her come visit, although when Rae got there Lila wouldn’t talk to her—the most she would tolerate was being read to from the L.A. Times. Rae would let herself in the front door with a key Richard had hidden under a terra-cotta flowerpot, then go to the kitchen and get one glass of milk and one glass of lemonade before going into Lila’s room. Richard left a chair for her near the bed, and she kept her feet raised on the edge of the mattress. She usually began by reading the headlines, then the editorial page, the horoscopes, the TV listings for that night. Reading aloud reminded Rae of those nights when her mother would read her recipes listed in French cookery books as they dined on baked beans and hamburgers. Maybe that was why she felt homesick whenever she left Lila’s house, and she looked for excuses to stay. If Lila fell asleep while she was reading, Rae went into the kitchen and finished reading the newspaper, and then, if there were no dishes in the sink to wash, she simply stood by the window and watched the light.
Even when Lila didn’t fall asleep there were times when she didn’t seem to notice Rae was there. But once, as Rae was reading the TV listings, Lila sat up straight and turned to her.
“I may be trapped in bed, but I don’t have to listen to this garbage,” Lila said. “Who in their right mind would read the plot summary of Charlie’s Angels?”
“I think it’s kind of interesting,” Rae said. “The way they can reduce everything to one sentence. It’s in my line of work—if I ever do anything more than file and answer the phone.”
“Anything but TV listings,” Lila said, and Rae felt as though they’d had some sort of breakthrough that afternoon. It was almost as if they’d had a real conversation.
The next day Rae brought a book of baby names instead of the Times.
“I can’t seem to find a name I like,” Rae explained.
“I’m sorry,” Lila said, “this is not an appropriate thing to read to a sick woman.”
But once Rae began, the litany of names was mesmerizing, and when she left off—at girls’ names beginning with M—Lila felt disappointed. All through the weekend Lila looked forward to hearing the rest of the names, but on Tuesday Rae was late. At three thirty Lila actually got out of bed and went to the window to wait for her. For no reason at all she felt slighted, and as soon as she saw Rae’s car pull up she got back into bed. When Rae came in with the tray of lemonade and milk, Lila pretended to be sleeping. Rae waited till four thirty, but Lila still refused to open her eyes, she closed them so tightly they hurt.
That night Rae began to have strange little spasms and her womb tightened until it was hard as a rock. Suddenly the birth of her baby seemed much too near, and by the time she called her doctor’s service she was so hysterical that she lost her voice and had to croak out what her symptoms were. Her doctor insisted it was nothing for her to get alarmed about, only Braxton Hicks contractions—false labor. Still, the contractions changed something—it was no longer possible to imagine that this pregnancy would go on forever. She was really going to have this baby.
After that Rae couldn’t concentrate on anything. At work she filed contracts into the wrong folders and disconnected everyone who tried to reach Freddy. One afternoon Freddy invited her along to a screening of a Canadian film—in it a woman named Eugenie was widowed after following her husband to a place that was so far north the snow was twelve feet deep; she fought off wolves with a shotgun, and loneliness with strong Indian tea. As she watched Rae was reminded of her own mother, Carolyn, and by the time the picture was over she was in tears.
“Give me a break,” Freddy said when the lights came back on.
“Seriously?” Rae said as she wiped her eyes with the cuffs of her blouse. “You’re not going to distribute it?”
“This is a picture for Canadians,” Freddy told her. “In Toronto they think sitting around and waiting for spring is exciting.”
Maybe it was because business was so bad, or because Rae felt the sort of daring that comes when you think you’re about to lose your job anyway—Freddy had certainly never promised her a job to come back to after the baby was born—but when Rae went back up to the office she forged Freddy’s signature and bought rights to Eugenie. When she drove to Three Sisters Street after work Rae was still flushed with the excitement of having done something rash. Not even Lila’s flat-out refusal to let her read aloud from the book of names could dampen her spirits. But it didn’t last long—on the way home Rae stopped at the Chinese take-out place, and while she waited for her order she had an overwhelming sense of disappointment. The only man she had ever loved would never be true, the labor coach she wanted wouldn’t even discuss names for the baby, and the coach she had was so distracted he hadn’t even talked to her in a week, he just left her notes taped to the refrigerator: She’s in a good mood today or Watch out—she woke up on the wrong side of bed for sure. When she got back into the car the smell of eggrolls on the seat beside her made her feel queasy and even more distra
ught. Parking the Oldsmobile, all she could think about was the fact that her own mother was three thousand miles away, and she backed into a Mustang and had to leave a note wedged in behind one of the windshield wipers with the name of her insurance company.
She was still making a list of everything that had gone wrong since last summer as she crossed the courtyard, but halfway to her apartment she stopped cold. Just ahead of her, standing in the shadows, was the wild black Labrador she had seen in the courtyard before, just after the heat wave. Rae knew that the one thing she should not do was run. She stood there and held the brown paper bag of Chinese food to her chest. The air seemed cold, not like April at all, and even from this distance she could hear the dog growl. Anyone could see it was underfed; when it began to walk toward her, Rae could count its ribs.
“Good dog,” Rae said.
Jessup had told her once that dogs always brought down deer by attacking their delicate legs. They had been driving along the Skyline Drive, to see the changing leaves, when they sighted a pack of dogs, running through the woods, after prey. Rae had been surprised that Jessup knew anything about deer, she’d doubted him until they heard the dogs yapping wildly, and then she’d begged him to step on the gas and get them out of there, fast.
This dog’s tail was up, and she knew that wasn’t a good sign. She could feel something sour in her mouth, and she wondered how a pregnant person could possibly be given rabies shots. Inside her the baby moved; when it turned on its side like that it was almost as if there was a wave trapped within her.
“I’m going to keep walking,” Rae said to the dog. It was close enough so that she could feel the heat of its body. “I want you to stay,” she told it.
Her legs were shaking, and maybe that was why it seemed to take such a long time to get to the front door. As soon as she heard the lock click she pushed the door open and ran inside. She stood there with her back to the door, shivering. Then she put the bag of Chinese food down on the bed and went to the kitchen window. The dog was still out there, in the exact place where she’d told it to stay. It looked around, confused; if it had come down from the canyons during the heat wave last summer it had spent the last months hiding, coming out at night to turn over garbage cans and search for water in birdbaths and gutters. But someone had once trained this dog well and it was compelled to obey Rae’s command. It might have stood out in the courtyard all night if Rae hadn’t filled a plate with fried rice and eggrolls and opened the door to call to it.
It was a female, and not quite as vicious as it had first seemed. It watched Rae, puzzled, but when she closed the front door, it ran to the food and devoured it. Rae sat in the easy chair and ate the rest of the food out of the containers; later, when she went into the kitchen to boil water for tea, she looked out the window and saw that the dog was still out there, curled up on her doorstep. That night, Rae took her embroidery into bed with her and she used a cross-stitch and red thread to make a border of hearts along the hem of a baby blanket. Through the locked front door she could hear the dog breathe in its sleep, long easy intakes of air that sounded like sighs. It was amazing how the sound of another creature’s breathing could get into your dreams and bind you together. In the morning Rae set a bowl of milk outside her front door, and after a little while she found the courage to reach down and pat the stray dog as it drank.
The next morning she took the dog in for a rabies vaccination and bought it a collar and leash. She walked the dog three times a day. Her doctor agreed that it was good exercise, but she also suggested that it was time to start taking it easy, maybe time to stop working.
When Rae went to visit Lila, the dog climbed into the car and insisted on going with her. She left it tied to the garage door. Lila was crankier than usual, and after a while Rae gave up trying to read to her. At a quarter to five Rae went into the kitchen; she washed out some cups and cleaned the counter with a paper towel. When Lila heard the front door open she thought Rae had left, and she sat up in bed, frightened at being alone. But Rae had only gone out with a bowl of cold water for the dog. She came back and rinsed out the bowl, then stood in the doorway to Lila’s room.
“Didn’t you leave yet?” Lila said.
“Not yet,” Rae said. “But I guess I won’t be coming back any more.”
Lila reached for the remote control and snapped on the TV.
“My doctor wants me to take it easy,” Rae said. “It makes me wonder if there’s something wrong with my baby,” she blurted.
“Of course there isn’t,” Lila said. “They tell everybody to relax in the last weeks.”
“Yeah,” Rae said, unconvinced.
Outside the dog looked mournfully at the front door and then began to bark.
“Sounds like a big dog you’ve got,” Lila said. She just couldn’t bring herself to look at Rae.
“I’m scared,” Rae said.
Even if Lila had tried there was no way for her to tell Rae just how much agony giving birth would be or how, in an instant, the pain would be so forgotten that it wouldn’t even be like a dream, but more like a dream someone else had had. It was easier, of course, when you had someone there beside you to remind you how quickly it would all be over, how much you stood to gain: one child who reached out for you even before it opened its eyes.
Rae stood where she was in the doorway, and Lila knew that if she took one more step it would be impossible to turn her away. She wouldn’t even want to. Rae held her car keys in her hand; the metal bit into her fingers until she couldn’t stand it. Then she let go. She walked over to the bed, and together she and Lila listened to the dog outside, tied to the garage door, barking.
“I’m really, really scared,” Rae whispered.
Lila leaned over and touched her hand. “Don’t be scared,” she said.
Each day Lila was able to get out of bed for a little while longer. Richard went back to work full time, and the doctors told Lila that her recovery was complete. But she still felt unsteady, as though bedrest had softened her bones. And she still couldn’t bring herself to open the dresser drawer—it had been shut tight for nine days in a row—although sometimes she heard a rustling sound among her nightgowns.
Early one afternoon, when Lila went into the kitchen to make herself some tea, she looked out the window and noticed that all the birds in the yard had suddenly taken flight. For a moment the sky was filled with birds, and feathers fell to the ground in backyards and vacant lots all over Hollywood. When the birds disappeared the sky was still and gray. Everything was much too silent; Lila could hear a lemon as it fell from the tree and rolled across the patio.
Richard hadn’t bothered to replace the teapot Lila had burnt when she first got back from New York, so she filled a saucepan and set it on the stove. As soon as Lila lit the flame the water in the pan appeared to be boiling. The water bubbled and swirled in a circle, first to the left, then to the right. Without thinking, Lila stuck her finger into the water to test it, and she would have been much less shocked to have burnt herself than she was when she discovered that the water was ice cold. It was then Lila knew that this was an earthquake. Tremors had begun to move up through the earth, through the foundation and the linoleum floor right through her bones. Lila held on to the countertop as the kitchen floor shifted. Dishes rolled out of cabinets, spices fell from their rack, glasses in the sink broke without being touched. A hot wind blew in through the open window, scorching the curtains, burning Lila’s face. The lemon tree in the yard fell over, but it wasn’t until it hit the ground that Lila realized the wrenching sound she had heard a moment earlier hadn’t been thunder but roots being torn from the ground.
Richard was in a panic to get home; he left his mechanics to sweep up the broken glass, got into his car, and took off, leaving a hot trail of rubber behind him. It should have taken fifteen minutes to get home, but it was over an hour—the roads were jammed with traffic, and all over the freeways and side streets there were hundreds of frogs no one had even known existed until n
ow when they fled from sewers and aqueducts. Richard pulled into the driveway so fast that he missed the asphalt and the tires tore up the lawn. He looked for her first in the bedroom. The mattress was tilted off the bed and the lamps had overturned and fallen to the floor. The house was so silent that Richard could hear his own pulse. He found that he could still feel some of the same fears he’d had as a boy, when the woods just behind the house seemed too dangerous and dark. As he looked into the empty bedroom, Richard had a sudden longing for his father. It seemed that everything he had ever done he’d done with his father in mind—not the old man back in East China, whose health and unpaid bills he worried about, but the man who’d seemed taller than everyone else. It was possible, Richard knew, to be away from home too long, to forget all the things you once knew by heart. He didn’t want just his father, he wanted the boy he used to be, someone who could be comforted by the sound of his parents talking in the next room, someone who refused to come into the house for supper until after dusk because that was the hour when deer mysteriously appeared in the driveway.
He found Lila in the kitchen, and he felt as if he had never needed her quite as much. She was staring at her wind-burned hands, puzzled, and as soon as she saw him she lifted up her hands so that she seemed to be asking for help. Richard led her back to bed, then got some vinegar to cool off her burns.
“It’s a good thing you weren’t in bed,” Richard said. “You would have wound up on the floor.”
He got a handkerchief and Lila watched him fold it into quarters and pour out some vinegar. When he dabbed her skin the vinegar was so cool that she shuddered.
“I think I’d better start by cleaning up the kitchen,” Richard said. He recapped the vinegar bottle and started to go, but Lila put her hand on his arm and stopped him. When he got into bed beside her Lila knew that it was possible to love two people best, and when he put his arms around her both of them could imagine that they were in the bedroom of his parents’ house in East China, and that it was the time when orange lilies bloomed right outside the kitchen door, and without even trying to, they both fell in love all over again.