The Lost Daughter (10 page)

A truck horn sounded. Alex bolted upright. His heart was racing. The sky was pale gray, stars winking out. He had fallen asleep on the knoll of grass by a chain link fence—where? He wiped his eyes. Hartford—he was in Hartford. He was looking through the fence at the house where Brooke lived. Christ. He must have slept four hours, maybe five. He stretched his neck; the vertebrae popped. He felt as though he’d sunk to the bottom of a deep ocean.

In the dark house, a light snapped on. Upstairs—the bathroom. They could not see him, but Alex felt suddenly exposed, ashamed, a trespasser in Brooke’s predawn life. Stealthily, his body sore from the hard ground, he rose and slipped through the trees, back to the sidewalk, and quickly eastward toward his car.

I
t took twenty-four hours for Brooke’s notion really to sink in. That first night, Monday, Sean was beat. Laying off those two guys had knocked the stuffing out of him. Well past dinner he was still unsettled by the things Clyde had said, even though they were stupid and pointless, the kind of crap a cokehead getting fired would let loose. Plus Meghan was cranky. He’d been late fetching her from dance, and she hated Madame Cassat, she said; she hated the girls in the class who’d laughed at her when she got her legs all tangled up in fifth position, and ballet was stupid. Madame Cassat had made her sit on the piano because she slapped Bethany, the girl who laughed at her. She hated the piano, and she didn’t like the ice cream Daddy had bought her, it had nuts in it and she hated nuts.

“She’s coming down with something,” he’d said to Brooke as he came downstairs. Meghan hadn’t wanted a story; she’d wanted Daddy to sing to her, and he’d gone through every lullaby in the book and finally sat on the edge of her bed stroking her hair until she snuffled into dreamland.

“That’s no excuse for whining,” Brooke said.

He’d poured himself two fingers of Jim Beam and collapsed in front of the tube in the back room.
ER
was on, a rerun. “Maybe we should let her quit the dance class.”

“It’s important for her to stick to it.”

“Maybe she’s overscheduled,” Sean said. He was only half listening, half responding. He felt drained. If it weren’t for the risk of keeping Meghan awake, he’d have sat down at the old upright and banged out Beethoven’s Pathétique, which always captured his frayed emotions and distilled them. Instead he muted the sound on the TV and turned to his wife.

“Four afternoons of camp and two hours of ballet? I don’t think so.” Brooke was cleaning the canary cage, scraping the shelf underneath into a plastic bag and changing out the food and water. The birds twittered and tilted their heads, begging for a scratch. Sean helped out with the dogs, and Blackie the cat was splayed across his lap, but he balked at birds. He liked to tell Brooke he could get a CD with pretty sounds, and it wouldn’t shit. “She’s an only kid with two working parents.”

“Who maybe need to listen to her?”

Brooke nodded. A smile crept across her features. “And not spoil her by letting her change her mind every week,” she said. “What’s she going to do at home, all by herself?” Under the overhead light, her hair shone like polished oak. She twitched the slim line of her nose, with the bump below the bridge that he practically worshipped. The male canary—Dum, she called him, for Tweedledum—hopped onto her hand and she pulled him out of the cage. “This is what I wanted to talk to you about,” she said, coming to perch on the edge of the couch. Blackie raised his head, shot a hungry look at the bird, and twitched his tail, but otherwise he lay still. One false move, he knew, and Brooke would knock him across the room. With animals as with
plants, Brooke was impressive. “I want to talk,” Brooke said, stroking the bird but looking at Sean, “about another child.”

His heart, right then, had expanded with hope. As she went on, it shrank. She was talking not about birth but about adoption. About all the babies waiting for them in China, in Peru, in Lithuania. Did he want a Lithuanian kid? He could not picture a Lithuanian kid. Brooke stroked Dum faster as she talked, until he wanted to take the bird from her hand and feed it to the cat, just to get his wife to slow down, to back up. When had she started thinking adoption? Just recently? Because of the bed rest she’d been on with Meghan? Made no sense. The doctors had said there wasn’t any further risk of it happening the next time, and anyhow it was Brooke herself who said every second in bed had been worth it for their little girl. Wouldn’t it be worth it this time, too?

She explained to him. She stroked the bird. The female, Dee, began scratching with complaint at the sides of the cage. Even the dogs trotted into the room; they smelled the anxiety, the storm brewing. Finally Brooke said, “Sean, I’m answering your questions, but I don’t think you’re hearing me.”

That was when he could have said something, done something. But fatigue clamped his tongue. “Let’s talk about this tomorrow,” was what he answered instead.

“Okay,” Brooke had said. “No rush.” She’d finally put the damn bird back in the cage and covered it, and he’d more or less stumbled into bed. He’d fallen into sleep as if he were racing away from thinking—about the guys at work, about Brooke, about Meghan, about the child who didn’t exist but he could feel like a ghost inside him. He didn’t dream, or at least didn’t remember any dreams. Only deep, empty darkness. He’d startled awake at quarter to five and hadn’t found a way back to sleep, so he’d gotten up even earlier than on a weekday and tiptoed to the bathroom.

They didn’t talk about it on Tuesday, or any day that week. Distractions abounded—a rush print job, Meghan’s summer cold, yard work, a neighborhood cookout on Saturday. Throughout, Sean chewed on what Brooke had said. Let me get this straight, he said to her in one of maybe two dozen imagined conversations. You do want a second child. You think it would be good for Meghan. You’d like us to be a bigger family, a family that fills all sides of the kitchen table. But you don’t want to get pregnant. Excuse me—you don’t want to be pregnant by me.

It’s nothing to do with you, she said.

It’s everything to do with me! Aren’t I your husband? Aren’t I Meghan’s daddy? Don’t I deserve to know why my wife can’t stand the thought of carrying my child?

I told you, she said in these conversations. But she never really told him, just hung her head and looked mulish.

Don’t tell me it’s the bed rest, he thought of saying. Who waited on you hand and foot when you were in bed? We’ll go to the doctor together, that’s what we’ll do. Listen to him tell you you’re not at any greater risk than the normal woman. Don’t bullshit me about the bed rest.

By the following Monday, he was driving to work with the conversations already in his head. Let’s be honest, he’d hear himself saying. Let’s be honest. Brooke, honey. All the good stuff, our little girl got from you. The brains, the looks. Even the way she does cartwheels—I could never do a cartwheel. But in the end, okay, she’s an O’Connor. You don’t want another one. You don’t want to give birth to my baby. You’d rather get yourself a little Oriental. They’re so smart and you don’t think about the looks the way you would with my kid. Go ahead, Brooke honey. I have a constant disposition to promote your good. Do what you want. Just don’t lie to me.

This conversation made him feel sorry for himself. Tears of self-pity let loose, right there in his office. When Larry called him in to schedule the art catalog, he had to duck to the men’s room and press a wet paper towel to his eyes before he went upstairs, and even then he looked like a blubbering idiot. But the worst came in the conversation he imagined with Brooke after he’d picked Meghan up and was repairing the back fence as she drifted from sandbox to swing. It’ll be easier for you to leave me, won’t it? he said to Brooke this time around. With just one kid? Get pregnant again and you’ll be stuck with us forever. Don’t tell me you’re not thinking about leaving. What else do you think about, when you get that look in your eyes, that look like you’re watching someone a million miles away? Or maybe just five miles, at Starbucks, with your “friend” you refuse to name. You’re so smart. You offer me what I’ve been asking for, another kid. Then you tell me it can’t be my kid. If I insist on my kid, I’ll put your health in danger. So it’s the Chinese kid or nothing. I say nothing. Then you can leave. Just like you left that high school guy, that guy you went with right up to graduation. You can find the guy you’ve been looking for, all these years with your eyes fixed on the distance, and have his beautiful kids.

That evening was his first chorale rehearsal of the season. They were working on the Bach Christmas Oratorio, with all its complicated fugues. Sean’s sight-reading wasn’t good enough to let him miss a single rehearsal. Usually he made a casserole for all three of them and ate his first, to be out of the house by six thirty. But tonight, by the time Brooke got home from the nursery, he’d polished off a couple of beers, had cooked nothing, and was wallowing in self-pity. From her, by contrast, came a lively happiness. “What’s got you so cheerful?” he said as she hummed in the kitchen. Meghan sat at the table, drawing by numbers.

“I don’t know. It was a good day. Meghan’s over her sniffles. I’m
not so sure about you, though,” she said. She put her hand to his forehead, like a mother. It irritated him. She hummed a few more bars. “Remind me how this goes?” she said. “You sing it all the time. ‘Oh what care I for my money and land—what care I dum dee dum dee dum.’ Remind me? It’s so pretty when you sing it.”

What care I for my new wedded lord
, he thought to himself,
for I’m off with the raggle-taggle gypsies, oh
. But he only said, “Got a bit of a sore throat. That’s an ugly song really. About a wife who runs off.”

“With the gypsies,” said Brooke. She started humming again.

“What’s a gypsy?” said Meghan, looking up from her drawing book.

“A lot of nonsense,” Sean said.

Brooke glanced sharply at him. “You sure you’re not coming down with something? Should you be going to rehearsal?”

“I should, yes. Why? Have you got a date?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“You had a date last week.” She looked puzzled. “Last Monday.”

“Oh, that.” She stuck her head in the refrigerator, pulled out a bag of baby carrots. “We’re all so old.”

She hadn’t said that it wasn’t a date, or wasn’t a
he
. “You can’t catch up to me,” he said. “Unless this fellow was your babysitter.”

She was humming again, that goddamn tune. Then she smiled like he’d made a joke. “Oh, no. Alex was in my class in high school. Two months younger than I am, but you know, he’s going gray already.”

“Must have been nice to see an old flame.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “So long ago. He was in Tokyo for years. Now he’s in Boston. Next time I see him we’ll all be gray.”

Alex
, he thought. The gypsy tune dinned in his ears.
Tonight you’ll sleep in a cold open field along with the raggle-taggle gypsies, oh.
He glanced at his watch without even registering the time. “I’m running late,” he said.

“But you haven’t eaten.”

He rinsed the beer bottle and kissed Meghan on the head before he left. If Brooke worried about anything besides his being ill, she didn’t show it. She was still humming as he headed out the back door. It was nothing, he told himself all through the drive. It was coffee with a fellow she threw over long ago. Lives in Boston. But wouldn’t she like to have his babies, oh.

The chorale rehearsed in the community room of a wealthy Episcopal church at the west end of Hartford. Nine years, now, Sean had sung with them. For his audition he’d chosen the tenor solo, “Comfort ye,” from Handel’s
Messiah
, and had worked on it for weeks before showing up to sing it to Geoffrey, the potbellied bass who directed the group. Geoffrey’s eyes had widened as Sean began, and then his face had settled into a beatific smile as Sean got to the part about warfare being accomplished. Sean’s sight-reading had been more than rusty at that time, but Geoffrey had let it go; he needed tenors, especially ones with honeyed, pitch-perfect voices.

Early to the rehearsal hall—he had not been running late—Sean helped lay out the folding chairs and bantered with the other guys who’d escaped their households or their lonely apartments to set the hall up for rehearsal. Gradually he pushed the name
Alex
to the back of his mind. Here, he felt at home. It was strange how well acquainted he was with all these people without really knowing them. When rehearsal fell on someone’s birthday, they all sang “Happy Birthday” in harmony. When one of the older singers—and there were plenty of those—went into the hospital, a card was passed around. A few members were married to one another, and now and then there was a romance that bloomed and faded.

As Sean unfolded the beige chairs in the alto section, he caught
sight of Suzanne, the soft-featured accountant he’d dated the year before he met Brooke. She smiled at him—it had been nine years, after all—and found her seat, arranging her pocketbook and music and water and the knitting she always turned to when the altos weren’t singing. She was a few years older than Sean and was settling, he sometimes thought, into a fussy middle age. When they first met she was recently divorced, plain-faced but shapely and friendly in the way of people who expect the world to reciprocate about a third of their generosity. Insecure, in other words, but hopeful. When they made love in her apartment—Sean still lived at home then, with Mum and Danny—Suzanne worked hard to please him, murmuring (when her mouth was not otherwise occupied), “Oh, be happy, be happy, be so happy.”

Driving with Suzanne to rehearsal one night, as they chatted about Sean’s work, about Gerry’s upcoming wedding, he had glanced over her eager, open, needy features, the bones of her face like putty. At once he had felt how her devotion would descend on him, would choke him, and he had known they had to break up. It had taken place gradually, over several weeks, and Suzanne had never protested, had never challenged him to “talk,” had never asked why he was drifting away. It amazed him, he told Danny back then, that you could know a woman naked, could be inside a woman one night after the next, and then you could change your mind and gradually become strangers. Danny had shrugged. Thank sweet Jesus for that, he’d said.