The Lost Daughter (12 page)

His dad’s funeral, that had been. Her heart had lodged in her throat, all the way through the service. Afterward they had served sandwiches and coffee, but she couldn’t swallow a thing. The sorrow in Alex’s eyes—she saw it and wanted to go to it. To wrap her arms around his firm young body and say something, say anything, say
love
. She had drifted close. Stood in a loose circle with Alex’s old friend Jake, next to his kid sister, in middle school by then, a firecracker
of a girl with coltish legs. Searching his face, she found the same eyes that had looked into hers that afternoon in the motel room, after he came back up and it was gone, emptied out of her. She saw the same dull blue in his eyes and she shut the doors of her heart. She locked them together with a key. She excused herself from the circle, said good-bye to Mrs. Frazier. When Alex caught up to her outside the church, tried to get her to walk with him, said he was going away, she shook herself free.

She wished, walking the dogs, that she hadn’t erased the message. She wanted to hear his voice again, camouflaged by age and the answering machine. That voice conjured not the man in his thirties in his business attire, not the grieving son with words strangled in his throat. It conjured the sixteen-year-olds they both had been, back in Windermere. It conjured the hoarse cry of victory after the goal Alex had scored to win the soccer game; the steam that came off his body after. It conjured his swift, tightly packed body as he charged down the field, the feet so nimble, capturing the lofted ball and dancing it past the opposition. And his hands. Corralling the dogs toward the park, she stopped suddenly on the street corner, struck by the memory of Alex’s hands.

The fingers were short, stubby, the palms no longer than Brooke’s own though Alex topped her by two inches and had feet like a puppy’s, too big for his build. She loved to lace her fingers with his, to feel the calluses that developed from the landscaping job he held on weekends. Of course he never touched the soccer ball with his hands—and sometimes, watching him work the ball down the field, she imagined that he was keeping the hands for her. The way he touched her wasn’t like other boys. He didn’t grope or pinch her. He brushed her skin with the blunt tips of his fingers; when she took her bra off for him, he cupped her breasts in his palms as if they were baby birds he might keep warm until they flew away.

His being her boyfriend, even after they’d gone steady for a year, had still been such an unbelievable thing, an accident due at any moment to be corrected, that she had to perform certain rituals—hold her breath to the count of forty-three, repeat the Nicene Creed, keep her eye on Alex’s jersey number rather than his face each time he headed a soccer ball—to keep the spheres of chance in their proper alignment. When she missed her period, she didn’t go to him at first. She didn’t go to her mom either. She went to Isadora.

She had babysat for Isadora for four years, and Isadora was still the only adult who asked Brooke to call her by her first name. “Please, none of this Mrs. Bassett,” she said. “Bad enough that I gave up my name and didn’t even take it back when I left him.” Isadora was a painter who had lived everywhere—California, Europe, India—and had a house full of exotic fabric, sculptures, boxes filled with mementoes. She always asked Brooke to stay a while when she came back home from parties. She asked Brooke about her life, and Brooke got the feeling Isadora really wanted to know; that she found Brooke’s life not silly or wrongheaded but downright fascinating. In return, Brooke learned plenty about Isadora, about the drugs she’d done and the lovers she’d had, about her stint in a rock band in London back in the seventies. She had turned out all right, though. She had a big house in Windermere and a pair of sweet kids. From Isadora Brooke had learned that you could live your life in ways different from your parents. Disaster would not strike.

“Deciding not to have children,” Isadora had said when Brooke explained her dilemma, “is as old and natural as deciding to have them.”

Isadora gave Brooke a tea that tasted like hot mud. Pennyroyal, she explained. You sprinkle it on baked potatoes sometimes. Plus black cohosh, tansy, mugwort, goldenseal—all of them the leaves and flowers of plants, the recipe as old as humanity.

“How long will it take to work?” Brooke had asked, tucking the little baggies of herbs into her parka pocket.

“That’s hard to say. You shouldn’t drink it more than ten days. That’s all it takes, and any more might start to affect you systemically. It won’t necessarily happen right away. A friend of mine took this cure in her fourth month, and miscarried in her seventh. But it wasn’t alive; it hadn’t been alive for a long while.”

“What if it doesn’t—you know—work, completely?” Brooke couldn’t get herself to say
kill the fetus
, even though that was what she was thinking. “Does it get messed up, somehow? Its brain, I mean.”

“It
will
work.” They were in Isadora’s kitchen, which faced south and caught all the light winter had to offer. Isadora put her cool, slender hands over Brooke’s warm ones. “And remember, you’re not alone in this.” She made Brooke look at her. “Alex is a good boy, Brooke. He can help you in your decisions.”

“I know that,” said Brooke. But at first she wasn’t sure. What had occurred to her, once she knew—rather, once she had proof, because she knew, in spite of having worn her diaphragm, that very night—was that she didn’t have a clue about Alex, not really. They knew each other’s bodies, sure. They both liked Deep Blue Something and neither of them was a Phishhead like so many kids at school. Brooke knew Alex wanted to travel to exotic places like Cambodia. She knew he worried about Charlie. Alex’s parents were both as old as Brooke’s dad; when they compared their moms it felt intimate, like something you didn’t share with just anyone. But even with the plan to be together next year in Boston, they were still a high school item. Anything could happen, and suddenly they’d break up, and it didn’t mean Alex wasn’t a good boy but you didn’t want to depend on that.

The only thing Alex had ever complained about in their relationship was Brooke’s diaphragm. It hurt him, he said. He didn’t
understand why, if her mom was willing to take her to have a diaphragm fitted, she wouldn’t let her go on the Pill.

“She doesn’t want me putting chemicals in my body,” Brooke had tried explaining. “She wants something I’ll take responsibility for.” She did not add, as her mom had,
And if boys know you’re on the Pill they’ll think you’re loose
.

“You’d have to take responsibility for one of those tabs every morning,” Alex said.

“I know. But she wants me to be conscious of what I’m doing. What we’re doing.”

Strictly speaking, it had been the parental consent clause that sent her to Isadora. On a scrap of paper, during math class, she had scribbled herself a syllogism—they’d just learned syllogisms, in Humanities—
A. You can’t get an ab— without telling your parents; B. If you tell your parents, they’ll refuse to sign; C. You can’t get an ab—.
But in truth Brooke wasn’t sure about B. Her mother would probably sign eventually, vindication curling her lip as she read the clause aloud. Brooke thought less about the prospects of having a baby or giving it up or even marrying Alex (Alex! Whom she hardly knew! Even after two years!) than about how justified her mother would be when she learned that Brooke had neglected to wear the diaphragm.

“But I did wear it!” she had told the nurse at the free clinic in Scranton. Confidential, the ad had said, and the place was tucked away in a seedy office building that made her think of drug dealing. The woman who examined her was dark-skinned but not African; something more exotic. She spoke with a lilt that turned each sentence into a question.

“It was sized too small?” the woman said, moving her fingers around inside Brooke.

“My mother’s gynecologist sized it. She’s been going to him for twenty-five years.”

“But it was sized before you had engaged in intercourse?”

“Well, we’d done it once—”

“And a girl’s body stretches? You can feel this shifting around in here?” Brooke nodded, though the woman couldn’t see her head. “This may cause pain to your partner, also?”

“He always says it hurts him. I thought it just was like that.”

“In any case, not adequate protection? This is the explanation of your pregnancy?”

The woman pulled the diaphragm out; Brooke felt, as always, the queer, damp explosion of the rubber coil. The woman asked if she knew about the parental consent clause; when Brooke nodded, she received a sheet of paper with boxes to check off. “You need only one signature?” the woman pointed out, her varnished fingernails tapping the paper. “The court may approve a grandparent?” The cost would be four hundred dollars, which Brooke knew she could get from Alex. Only once he had paid it, would he ever want to see her again? She wasn’t a safe bet anymore, as a girlfriend. She’d screwed up.

Late at night, drinking Isadora’s tea, she told herself it could not be true. She did not screw up. This was not the sort of event that happened to her. The readings were false; this was a trick God was playing, testing her. Brooke often thought of God as a sort of club president, setting up initiation rites and watching from his tree house to see if you passed. Her parents were Presbyterians, who talked mostly about changes in the wording of the service, not about God.

She had trouble taking the proper doses of the tea. You had to drink it on an empty stomach and not eat or drink anything else for at least an hour. “Get an immersing coil at the hardware store,” Isadora had instructed her, and that wasn’t hard—they cost a dollar sixty-nine and looked like a giant IUD—but even with brewing the
stuff in her bedroom over that Christmas break, Brooke was always making excuses for not having a cup of eggnog or for running upstairs in the midst of stringing cranberries. You couldn’t even put honey in it, Isadora had cautioned, and if it steeped less than five minutes you didn’t get the right mix of reactions.

“I don’t think the tea worked,” Brooke said in late January.

Isadora looked her up and down, as if there would be a sign. Brooke’s pants were just a little tight around the waist, like everyone’s after Christmas. “You sure you drank it on an empty stomach?” Brooke nodded. “Three times a day?”

“I set my alarm in the morning. Then I skipped lunch and steeped it in the girls’ room by the gym. Then late at night.”

“You let it steep—”

“Five minutes.” Brooke had started to get annoyed at Isadora’s questions. She’d always been a smart girl, good at following directions. She’d followed her mother’s directions with the diaphragm. “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” she said, in a voice that surprised her with its sternness. “I need to know how much longer I should wait.”

Isadora had gone to her kitchen window. Thoughtfully she picked brown leaves from one of the many plants she kept on the sill. The low midwinter light and artificial heat weren’t doing them any good. In her winter turtleneck, her brown hair combed straight, she looked scarcely older than Brooke. “Not much longer,” she said.

“But you said your friend. In her seventh month.”

“She was an adult. She was ready to take on the consequences.”

“Well, jeez, what consequences are you asking
me
to take? I mean, either my parents disown me or I end up an unwed mother! I thought this was a better
option
, that’s why I took it.”

“Your parents won’t disown you, Brooke.”

“You don’t know them.”

“And maybe Alex would like to be a father. Have you asked him?”

“Alex’s got a soccer scholarship to Boston University.” Isadora had no answer to this. She was looking out the window, her face pale; she might have been crying. “Will you get me more?” Brooke asked.

“Of the herbs? No.”

“I’m willing to wait. But I have to be sure.”

Isadora had shrugged; she had turned from the plants and come to stand next to Brooke. “This is an old, old recipe,” she had said. “I’ve never known anyone to take it and bear a child. But I’m not a doctor. I can’t make you guarantees. You’re scaring me, Brooke.”

“Scaring
you
,” Brooke had said, with a twist of her mouth.

Now, in the park, she waved at another dog walker, an older fellow she often saw there with a pair of basset hounds. He tipped his hat to her and smiled, pleased at a young woman’s attention. She wasn’t far, she realized with a start, from the age Isadora Bassett had been when she gave Brooke those herbs. At the thought of handing a seventeen-year-old a recipe to rid herself of a baby, Brooke shuddered. How weak Isadora had been! Wearing the same fashions as the high school girls, talking about drugs as though they were cool. Well, it was a long time ago. Except Alex was back now; she had seen him, the old question still lurking in his eyes.

She had told him only because of the diaphragm. They had been at his house one Friday that February, babysitting his sister Charlie. How old had Charlie been, then? Six, maybe seven. First grade. Alex’s mom had tried for years to conceive a second child, and when she had given up, Charlie at last came along. Mrs. Frazier seemed to resent the whole thing, as if Charlie had played a trick on her, like a kid who will hide and hide until the adults are exhausted, and then spring out. But Alex was crazy about her. He was so protective, Charlie called him Alexander the Great. When he and Brooke
babysat Charlie, they all played Chutes and Ladders, which Charlie loved, and sometimes Brooke read to Charlie from the edition of King Arthur tales illustrated by Arthur Rackham that Alex’s mom kept on a top shelf of their den. At age seven, Charlie had a whole family tree in her head, starting with Uther Pendragon.

Brooke had read to her that night about the birth of Galahad. Charlie had already learned of Lancelot and Guinevere and sat with her pale eyes gleaming as Brooke explained why it was necessary to bewitch Lancelot into becoming Galahad’s father. She left Charlie turning the pages of the book, her brow furrowed, determined to read the book for herself.

My God, Brooke thought as she pulled the dogs around the rose garden. The details that came back! Later, in the basement, she and Alex had watched
The Fisher King
on videotape, with Robin Williams playing the medieval history prof who goes mad. Alex had had a cold and sniffled all through the movie. When it was over, she’d made him play out the scene where Robin Williams tells Amanda Plummer he has a hard-on for her the size of Florida but he doesn’t want just one night. She’d unzipped Alex’s pants. “You’ll catch my cold,” he whispered huskily as she slid beneath him—her own pants off, her sweater hiked up, the scratchy weave of the basement couch against her back.