The Lost Daughter (13 page)

“Colds don’t get communicated down there.” She giggled, though it hadn’t been a funny movie. When he still didn’t reach for her she said, “It’ll make you better. Blow your nose.”

That got a laugh out of him. He shoved his jeans to his knees. He was plenty hard. They had to be very quiet; his house was new construction, thin walls. Suddenly he turned her over, so she was kneeling on the scratchy cushions. His knees shoved between hers, pushing hers apart. She spoke his name, but he didn’t answer; he was in her, at once and deep. He thrust, and in her head she heard
the violins from the movie, then the drums. Then he brought his hand around her hip. He kept moving in her, but his hand, his hand— “Oh!” she cried. The tingle rushed to her lips.

“
Ssh.
You’ll wake Charlie up. What is it?”

“I…I
came
.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I think. I must have. God, Lex.” Tears started unbidden to her eyes. She swallowed; she reached back to touch his naked hip, to keep him moving. “It was so sudden.”

“I’m proud of you, you fox.”

“Oh, Alex. I
liked
it.”

“I thought you
always
liked it.”

“I did, but—you know—I didn’t, like that. Oh, Lex, I love you.”

“Brookey, Brooke.”

He was moving faster already. Then it was over, his belt buckle slapping the back of her thigh. The tears wouldn’t stop leaking from her eyes. They sank to the couch. He brushed her cheek with the back of his index finger. Then his eyes widened. “It didn’t hurt,” he said.

“What didn’t hurt?”

“Your diaphragm.”

“I didn’t wear it.”

His eyes widened further. “But my God, Brooke, that’s—”

She put her finger to his lips. They were full pursed lips, a rosebud of a boy’s mouth. “I’ve been pregnant,” she confessed. Her heart thudded in her chest.

“What d’you mean, you’ve been…are you pregnant now? Brooke, this is the first time—” His head pulled back. His hand hovered over the tiny curve of her belly, as if measuring it. For a moment, his face filled with a soft wonder.

“I don’t think I am, anymore. I’m waiting.”

It all spilled out then. She told him about the bad fitting of the diaphragm, the parental consent clause, her visit to Isadora, the tea. “That’s why I didn’t have anything to eat at your parents’ holiday party. I felt so rude, but—”

“You’re saying you’re going to miscarry?”

She nodded. She felt his muscles tensing. The wonder was gone from his face, and his stare frightened her. “That’s what Isadora promised.”

“Isadora’s a dreaming hippie.” He rose. He pulled on his T-shirt, his shorts. When he sat in the chair opposite her, fully clothed in front of her nakedness, his face had rearranged itself into hard, practical lines. “You can’t be ridiculous, Brooke,” he said. “You have to get an abortion.”

T
he dogs were whining. Brooke looked down. Lex’s leash was tangled with Bitsy’s, and Mocha’s rear leg was trapped in her leash so she limped. Lex had just laid a poop in a bed of black-eyed Susans. Quickly Brooke glanced at her watch. Eleven o’clock already. “Christ,” she muttered. She disentangled the dogs, swept up the mess in a bag, and jogged back through the park’s rose garden to the tree-lined street. She would be late for work, even if Meghan cooperated. What, oh, what did Alex want with her?

I
t was funny, Alex’s sister Charlotte said to him over coffee at Lalla Rookh, how people looked at them and thought she was dating this cute older guy.

“Do girls at Tufts do that?” he asked her. “Date their professors?”

“I don’t know.” Charlie picked at her pilaf. “I think it’s against the rules these days. There’s this one psych professor you hear about. But I think he’s gross.”

“Well, you tell him hands off you. Big brother’s back in town.”

“You sure about that?” Gingerly she lifted her wine. She was twenty-two now, legal, but on both the occasions when Alex had taken her out, she had studied the clear glass globe and its rich red elixir as if the wine had magic tricks to perform. Yesterday had been her birthday; she’d gone out with friends from Tufts. Today, Alex’s turn; he’d picked this restaurant, a bejeweled little Persian place, because it was named after some nineteenth-century poem by Byron or one of those guys. Charlotte was majoring in literature. “I mean, are you really going to settle here? Seems so boring, after Tokyo.”

Alex’s mouth twisted. “Every big city’s basically the same, Charlie.”

“Nuh-uh. Those kids we saw out in the Ginza District? You’d never find them here. That was like sci-fi.
Blade Runner.
Haruki Murakami.”

Alex knew better than to ask her who Haruki Murakami was. He loved listening to his kid sister show off. When she had come to visit him and Tomiko, the summer before her senior year in high school, she had learned enough Japanese to get around on the subway, and she insisted on going off by herself and then meeting them hours later, exactly on time, draping her parcels over her forearm exactly as she’d seen the Tokyo girls do. Tomiko, eight months pregnant then, had loved her. A half dozen times, during the week she visited, he’d found his sister and his wife bending their heads together, whispering and then giggling about something. When he’d asked what the joke was, they had both wiped their hands across their smiling lips—like sisters—and said it was nothing very funny.

“So?” Charlie insisted. “Don’t you think you’ll move back there?”

“That chapter’s over, Charlie. I can’t keep living somewhere just because you like to visit.”

“Well, I did. But it’s not that. It’s…you know. Tomiko.”

He met her gaze. She’d always been a robust kid, loaded with baby-of-the-family pranks. While he was away at school or later in Japan, he would get e-mails from his parents wringing their hands over Charlie’s suddenly purple hair, her high school crush on another girl (who was, true to form, a Very Bad Influence), the popcorn balls that set the kitchen on fire. If she hadn’t been so smart, so alert—he could swear her ears pricked up, like a fox’s, at a new idea—she might have spun off into real trouble. As it was she studied Milton and wrote biting satires. Before she left Windermere, she had founded a children’s theater program and directed a Christmas farce that scandalized the town. Any guilt Alex had felt for being absent
so much of his sister’s life was assuaged when he saw how completely she threw herself into that life. “You can visit Tomiko anytime you want,” he said. “She really likes you.”

“I never even met Dylan.” She took a large bit of lamb stew and talked around the meat. “I wish you guys could have gotten over it. Had another. Pushed on. I mean, it was awful. But shit happens.”

“Not that simple, Charlie.”

“You sent two Christmas cards with his picture. I saw what kind of kid he was. He would have wanted you to stay together.”

“You’re right about that.” He drained his glass and refilled them both from the bottle he’d bought. He didn’t want to talk about Tomiko anymore. “But then I wouldn’t be here, taking you out for birthday dinner.”

“It’s weird having you in town.”

“I love you, too, Charlie.”

“No, I mean…I’m used to e-mailing you, Facebooking you.”

He looked around. “And now we come here and some stranger thinks you’ve got a sugar daddy,” he whispered conspiratorially. “What’s with your own boyfriend?”

“What boyfriend?”

“My point.”

She wrinkled her nose. She was not, he thought, a conventionally pretty girl. Her features were too strong—a prominent chin, heavy eyebrows—and she had cut her dark hair into ragged locks that she finger-combed back from her face. She would look great astride a horse, and in fact he remembered tales of her brief adolescent obsession with riding, though he was gone from Windermere by then.

“There was a guy,” she admitted, “last year. But he graduated, and you could tell it wasn’t going to work. He wanted, you know, something more domestic.”

“You mean he wanted you to move in.”

“More than that. He was going to want a wife. He’d started talking about kids!”

“You don’t want kids?”

“Alex, I’m only twenty-two.” She met his eyes and then focused on her wineglass. How grown-up she was, Alex thought, and still the same scamp who had gobbled up all his devotion two decades ago. “But no, I don’t think I’ll want children. I hope that’s not horrible.” She drained the glass. “I’m ambitious,” she said bluntly. “And I don’t care what those old feminists claim; a kid is like a ball and chain for a woman trying to make it.”

“Make it as what?”

“Anything. I don’t know yet. As a lawyer, maybe. Maybe a playwright. Let me get through my Chaucer seminar first.”

“Okay.”

“But you. You should still have them.”

“Have what?”

“Kids, silly.”

Alex regarded his sister fondly. He felt the temptation, after more than three decades, to unburden himself to a sibling—to someone who could absorb all his pain, all his mistakes, like a sponge, and who would still be, after it was all told, his sister, his brother. Charlie had that, because she had him, and he…but no. She was still a kid, with that bounce in her step. He wasn’t going to filch it from her. “Not a lucky part of my life so far,” he said.

“I always thought you and Brooke should have a kid.”

His wineglass halfway to his lips, Alex felt his throat close up. He set the glass down.

“The unmentionable Brooke,” Charlie continued. “We never talked about how attached I was to her, you know. That was long before Tomiko. We never talked about what happened with you guys.”

“Is this your psych professor talking? Early childhood trauma.”

“Don’t be sarcastic, big brother. That’s
my
job.”

Alex shifted in his chair. In her teen years, Charlie had become an expert at annoying their mom this way—desanctifying every sacred cow, no adult subject off-limits to her callow wit. Over long-distance calls, after hearing his mother ignite into rage, he’d made her pass the phone and ordered Charlie to cool it. Now he was the one with a tinderbox sparking. “Brooke and I were children,” he said now, his lips tightening. “Younger than you. We did stupid stuff.”

“I hear she’s in Hartford now. You should go see her. Rescue her from her life. That was what happened in all those stories she used to read me.”

“What stories?”

“Blond maiden locked in tower, handsome knight with magic lance.”

“That’s phallic imagery, Charlie.”

“Good boy.” Alex’s kid sister grinned at him, her mouth stained pink with the wine. “You’re not just a bean counter, after all.”

I
t was easy to stay busy. The Mercator office in Boston controlled staffing in five dozen branches around the world. Alex spent days huddled with the IT guys, debating how to drive corporate traffic onto the web without diminishing service. Evenings went to predictive flowcharts, the imagined shape of corporate finance after the crash. A note on the bulletin board by the coffee machine advertised a soccer team—
See Fabrice in Accounting
. He jotted down the name for when he had more time. As summer mellowed into fall, he took a couple of Sunday hikes. In the leafy hills west of the city, he felt the loss of the high peaks in Japan where he’d summited with Tomiko, before sorrow piled on thick enough to force him down
into the foothills of the past. He took calls from old buddies he’d last seen at his dad’s funeral—Brian, practicing law now in Rhode Island; Jake, still in Windermere. Sure, he said smoothly, I’m in the States for good now. We’ll catch up. Sure, sure. Balding, energetic Francisco, one of the IT guys at Mercator, threw a Labor Day picnic, and Alex woke the next morning from a vivid dream of Tomiko to a strangely white apartment and the sweetly curved hip of a disheveled market researcher next to him in the bed. He gave her a nostalgic kiss, as if she had already receded into a hazy past, and exited into the dry, windy day, his eyes blinking tears.

The previous week, after a second meeting in Hartford, he had paced up and down Brooke’s street until some drunk accosted him and he walked rapidly away. She wasn’t returning his calls. On the cracked streets of that city—a tumbledown version of Boston, a jacked-up version of Scranton—he couldn’t get her out of his head. And not just Brooke but Windermere, the flat-roofed high school, the sloping soccer field, the cheap diners and motels strung out along Route 6. Two weeks later, leaving Mercator’s brick-front Hartford office, he thought he glimpsed another familiar face, wolf eyes in a gaunt frame that stared at him before turning and trotting swiftly to a low-slung Mazda. Someone from Windermere. Not a friend. Reece? Clyde? Clyde, that was it. Quickly he took a second look. Sure enough, it was the same guy. Of all people to turn up here. Clyde had been a thug in high school. He’d had a big-breasted, slow-witted girl—sophomore year? junior year?—whom he beat up; rumor was he pushed her down a flight of stairs so she would miscarry. By senior year he was gone from school, working in the coal mines to the west. Thinking of that sad, humiliated girl, Alex felt ready to turn back and take a swing at Clyde, for old times’ sake. But when he wheeled around, the bum had vanished.

Hiking through the Massachusetts hills, he had mourned his
marriage and his lovely lost son. Driving east from Hartford, he mourned further back—to Brooke, to the newborn whose eyes he had glimpsed only the one time. His fault, all his fault and always his fault. And for what? How did he ever find himself in that motel room, doing the things he did? It hadn’t been that uncommon, knocking up your girlfriend. For a couple like Alex and Brooke, it shouldn’t have been a disaster. If only Brooke hadn’t started on that stuff, that “tea,” that creepy brew mashed up by Isadora Bassett.

March, he thought as he drove east. The month of March had tipped the scales. Over that spring break, Brooke had been supposed to come to Florida with Alex’s family, but she wouldn’t. Because nobody knew yet, she’d said. Not that Alex had wanted anyone to know—Christ, he hadn’t wanted it to go on that long, had wanted to go down to Planned Parenthood right away, but there was the consent clause. She had been stuck on it, the consent clause. The bit about her mom, who’d had Brooke when she was eighteen and was always thanking God for her little girl—she would never sign. “You can’t be positive of that,” he’d said, taking Brooke’s hands in the cold car, the night before he left with his family. “She could surprise you. Remember how she surprised you when she let us go camping alone last summer?”