Fortune's Daughter by Alice Hoffman

Author:Alice Hoffman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781497652422
Publisher: Open Road Media

PART FOUR

IT WAS SNOWING WHEN LILA first got to New York, and that made her arrival easier. Everything was white, and when she took the limousine from Kennedy Airport into Manhattan she could have been anywhere: in the middle of a frozen city in Europe, deep in the iciest part of Canada. She was dropped off at the Hilton, and it felt so anonymous there that she stayed. She ordered room service and had her dinner at a table by the window on the twenty-third floor. Below her was a grid of lights. Each time a building dared to seem familiar it was swallowed up by snow; this high up above the city it almost seemed as if Lila was farther away from New York now than she had been for the past twenty-seven years.

At midnight Lila got into bed, but every time she closed her eyes she thought she heard something, and at a little after two she got up and turned off the steam heat. In the morning it was so cold that ice formed inside windowpanes all over the city. Lila ordered breakfast from room service, and then, when the waiter had left her alone and her coffee had been poured, she took out the Manhattan Telephone Directory. Her parents were no longer listed, and when she dialed the old number, which she was surprised to find she still knew by heart, a stranger answered and insisted she’d had the number for more than fifteen years.

She would get the information out of them no matter what. She didn’t care how old they’d become: she would shake her mother by her shoulders until her fragile bones snapped, she would stare her father down no matter how sightless his eyes had become. She got dressed and went down to the lobby at a little after ten. Her wool coat was much too thin for a New York winter, and even after she had gotten into a cab she was still freezing. She gave the driver her old address and sat on the edge of the back seat. The city seemed much more complicated, and there was so much more of everything: traffic, and lights, and fear. When they got there Lila made the driver circle the block four times before she admitted that her building was gone. The old brownstones had been knocked down and a new co-op had taken their place, and it was the oddest feeling to be back on her old street without really being there at all. She had the driver circle the block one last time while she tried to decide what to do. She could feel herself begin to panic. All she could think of were the smallest details from her past: the numbers of the buses that used to run crosstown, the varieties of flowers their neighbors used to keep in a window box, how many cracks in the sidewalk had to be stepped over and avoided when she walked from the front stoop to the candy store.

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