Fortune's Daughter Read Online Free Page A

after she was released from the hospital everything looked funny, as if bleach had been added to the air, and a hazy filter hung between Rae and the rest of the world. Jessup telephoned her every night, but after he’d called, he hadn’t had much to say. They stayed on the phone for hours, in silence, as if the only way for them to communicate was by telepathy. But once, Jessup had actually said that he missed her.
    â€œWhat?” Rae had said, certain that she’d misunderstood.
    â€œAre you trying to embarrass me?” Jessup had said. “I said it once, don’t ask me to repeat it.”
    There was something about her illness that made Rae fear she would never get well. She could only see white things: the sheets on her bed, the cream-colored walls, the ruffled curtains at her window. Everything else was fading; when she squinted, she couldn’t make out the titles of the books on the shelf.
    â€œI think I may be dying,” Rae told Jessup one night when he called. She could practically hear him smirking. “I mean it,” Rae said. “I think I may be going blind.”
    â€œI’ll tell you what your problem is,” Jessup said. “I’m not there, and the only thing worth seeing is me.”
    A few days later a dozen roses arrived. Carolyn considered throwing them out; even though there was no card, she knew who they were from. But she made the mistake of opening the cardboard box, and once she saw the roses she couldn’t bring herself to put them in the trash. Instead, she filled a tall glass vase with water and carried them upstairs. As soon as she saw the expression on Rae’s face when those flowers were brought in, Carolyn knew that she had lost her daughter.
    All that week Rae watched the roses, and as they turned from scarlet to a deep, mysterious purple, she felt her vision returning. But when she was allowed to go out again, and she shyly thanked Jessup for the flowers, he acted as if he didn’t know what she was talking about. By then, the roses had withered and Carolyn had tossed them into the trash, and Rae was left wondering if she had imagined the glass vase on her night table. After all, she had imagined other things when her fever was at its highest: a plane that was circling above the ceiling turned out to be just a buzz in her head; a green lion that sat by her clothes closet was only a sweater that had fallen onto the floor. It was possible that there had never even been flowers in her room, and once she was well again, roses really seemed too trivial a thing for Jessup to send.
    Even though she had no fever now, Rae couldn’t continue on to Musso Frank’s, where she’d planned to put her lunch on Freddy’s tab. The sidewalk was like quicksand, the next corner seemed miles away. Rae ducked into the closest doorway, the entrance to a place called The Salad Connection. When she leaned against the plate-glass window she could feel the shudder of an air conditioner’s motor; each time a customer walked through the door a rush of cold air escaped, then was swallowed by the heat of the boulevard. Quickly, Rae began to count. She hoped that by the time she reached one hundred, she’d feel strong enough to walk back to the office and lie down in the dark. But she hadn’t even gotten to thirty when she noticed a sign offering free psychic readings every Wednesday and Friday. And that was when Rae stopped counting.
    Ten years earlier, when Rae and her mother were engaged in the worst of their fighting about Jessup, they had gone to a tearoom near the Copley Plaza Hotel to have their fortunes read. They’d been arguing about the curfew Rae always ignored, when Carolyn had thrown up her hands, turned, and walked into the tearoom. Rae had followed and they waited, side by side and in silence, until the fortune-teller signaled them to a table. The fortune-teller was hidden beneath fringed shawls and thick rouge; she offered