The Lost Daughter (24 page)

Brooke’s face flushed. She nodded. She bent down and kissed the back of his palm. If he only could know her! But he could not—could not know what she had done, and still love her. Sitting in the quiet backyard, all the familiar materials of her life around her, Brooke felt her marriage was impossible. Stroking Blackie, she released fur that coated her clammy palms and got on her tan shorts. Sean wasn’t denying drinking; wasn’t even saying he would try to stop. How often they had talked about drinking, about his parents. She pushed Blackie from her lap. “We should get rid of these stupid cats,” she said.

“I thought you loved them.”

“I don’t—” she began, but couldn’t finish.
Love anybody
: Was that how the sentence ended? She rose. She went to the patch of zinnias and began pulling weeds. Lex and Mocha followed her, sniffing among the flowers. “You’ve got rehearsal tomorrow, right?”

“I’m going early. Geoffrey’s got me learning the Evangelist.” Turning, Brooke frowned. “Solo,” Sean explained. “Just for rehearsal, to help out the group.”

“Oh, honey. That’s terrific.” She stopped herself.
Honey.
It had slipped out. Well, why shouldn’t it? Her heart surged with pride.
“He’s lucky to have you,” she said, turning back to the flowers, “and he knows it.”

“Not lucky when he has to shove me past the trained musicians.” He shook his head. “Showing up with a cold won’t help.”

“Anyone can catch a cold.” She brushed dirt from her hand and came back to the patio. Leaning over his chair, she kissed him on the lips, coffee tinged with beer.

Her blood surged, then. Because she was proud of Sean? she wondered the next evening. Or because she had confirmed the evening was free? Innocent, she told herself; this drink with Alex was innocent, however guilty their past. After Sean left for rehearsal, she simply put away the dishes and combed her hair. A quiet, pudgy twelve-year-old, Emma, walked over from around the corner at seven and took instructions to get Meghan ready for bed.

“I’ll be back to tuck her in,” Brooke said. She caught a last glance in the hall mirror before she headed into the twilight. She wore jeans and a knit top with a loose vest that hid her figure, but she had threaded garnet earrings through her lobes that reflected light and caught the deep embroidery of the vest. Quickly she pushed her fine hair one way and another, seeing what best drew the eye away from the harsh lines around her mouth and toward her arched brows and high, clear forehead. “Damn it,” she whispered at last, and stuck a clip in her hair.

They met on the south side, in an Afghani place where they were unlikely to run into any O’Connors, especially on a Monday night. Alex’s posture, Brooke noticed, was almost frozen, his arms close to his side, not the loose-jointed familiar figure she’d first greeted at Starbucks ten weeks ago.

“I have to come clean,” he said after he’d ordered a bottle of wine.

“Clean about what?”

“What I did. To the baby.”

The bottle came. Brooke frowned. Would they drink all that? Did they need all that? “Is that what you came here for in the first place?”

“No. I wasn’t thinking about it. But now I can’t help myself. It’s all connected.” He poured wine for each of them, then took a slow sip. “I want to back up. Face consequences.” He reached into his jacket pocket. Drawing out a black ring box, he snapped it open. “I clipped this,” he said. “From his head. With my nail clippers. Don’t ask me why.”

Brooke looked at the tiny lock of hair with horror. “Put it away,” she said. “Please.”

“I should toss it out. But I can’t.”

He snapped the box shut and tucked it into his pocket. Still trembling from the sight of that hair—dark, curled like a
C
—Brooke searched Alex’s face in the dim light.

“Lex,” she said. She had expected banter, idle bits of news, his life in Boston. But from the sleepless glaze of his eyes, she saw he had no energy for niceties. “I should have gone to my mom, the way you told me. You’ve got nothing to come clean about.”

The scent of cardamom and nutmeg came through the bead curtain partitioning the dining room. A votive candle sat in a red base between them. The dimple in Alex’s right cheek looked sardonic one moment, nostalgic the next. Under his unruly hair his eyebrows, thicker than before, rose toward the center as if in a question. His blue eyes flitted around the room, then settled on her, taking aim. “You don’t really know what I did, Brooke,” he said.

“Of course I know. I was there. You wanted to go to the hospital. I wouldn’t. And you know, maybe it was alive in there. I never felt it kick, but still. Maybe I killed it, suffocated it or something, because I wouldn’t go. But all you did, Lex—”

“He was alive.”

“That’s what I’m saying, Alex. Maybe I could have brought that pregnancy to term. We’ll never know.”

“When he came out, he was alive. I saw his eyes. I squeezed him too hard.”

“Alex, you’re not remembering anything right.” Panic built in Brooke’s chest. “It was not a he. It was a she. And it—she—never breathed air. Never cried. My God, Alex, I would remember that.”

“You’d practically passed out.”

“I wanted to hold her. I remember that.”

From the corner of her eye Brooke saw the waiter, hovering. She and Alex were speaking in low tones, but the air crackled between them. “Is everything all right?” the waiter asked hesitantly. He was young, maybe nineteen. He wore a fez with tiny mirrors on the sides. “Would you like to see menus?”

“Maybe some water,” Brooke said. She turned back to Alex. “I wanted to hold her,” she repeated, “but I knew she wasn’t alive. And whether it was worse, what we did, or whether some pro-lifer would say an abortion would’ve been the same thing…” She held up her empty palms. “We can’t go back, either way.”

“I looked at him,” Alex insisted. “I saw his eyes move. Then they stopped. And the head—the skull’s not completely hard, you know. You can hurt it. And I think I did. My hands squeezed, and I—” He extended his hands, as if they cradled a baby’s skull between them. Brooke reached out and held them. He had to stop talking, she thought. She had to make him stop. “If I’d been a doctor,” he finished, looking at her through the wreath of their hands, “I might have saved him.”

“Her.”

“I might have done some emergency procedure. Got him breathing and then seen what damage I’d done. But I was so glad to have the thing out of you. I wanted it to be over.”

“We both did. And if by ‘over,’ you mean dead, she was, no matter what we wanted. Okay, Lex? Imagining anything else is crazy. Completely crazy.” The young waiter brought two glasses of ice water. Brooke let go of Alex’s hands and drank hers.

“Crazy, maybe,” Alex said. “But I want to go back to Windermere.”

Brooke signaled for more water. She felt she had never been so thirsty, her throat so dry and hot. “There’s nothing there to help.”

“I’m going to turn myself in.”

The water came. With the glass halfway to her lips, Brooke blanched. “Turn yourself in? To who? For what?”

“To the police. For killing that child.”

“What possible good would that do?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not any. Or maybe…I’m starting to think like you, here.” A rueful grin crossed his face.

“Think like me how?

“Magically.” Finishing the wine in his glass, he refilled it. “I feel like I didn’t just come back to the States because my marriage tanked. I came because I needed to rip the cover off. To be honest for a change. And I mean honest about a crime, my crime.”

“But if I don’t believe—”

“I’m not asking your permission,” Alex said. “I’m telling you, so you’ll be ready.”

“For what?” Brooke said—though she knew the answer before he gave it.

“For when they come,” he said, “asking you.”

A
t the break, Sean approached Geoff and asked for the rest of the night off. “Don’t want to infect anyone else,” he said. Geoff told him he looked like hell and shooed him out the door. Driving home, he felt his ears ringing, the soreness descending his eustachian
tubes to his throat. This cold was going to be a doozy, he thought. He’d crawl right into bed, ask Brooke to fix him a whiskey toddy. But when he pulled into the drive and saw her car gone, he knew. He pressed his heavy head against the steering wheel for a minute, then hauled himself out of the car and into the house. Gave little Emma ten bucks; she could walk herself home. Meghan was already in bed. He poured his own whiskey, neat, and nursed it in the kitchen.

By the time Brooke’s car crunched on the gravel, he’d played out the fight in his head a dozen times, and left himself bloody and bruised at each round. “Eight years,” he said when she’d come into the kitchen, startled as a doe, those red earrings glinting in her hair. “And you haven’t been honest with me for a single day.”

The whiskey bottle stood on the breakfast table. Christ, he was hammered. Hammered and horny and sick as a dog and wanting his wife, and what had Danny called her? A cold bitch.

“You’re drunk,” she said softly.

“And you are a whore.”

“What. The fuck. Are you talking about?” She went over to the sink, drew a glass of water, and chugged it.

“Ah. Now, there’s the stuff. Never heard you say ‘fuck’ before. Is that amazing or what? Too much the lady. Now you meet your boyfriend, and you come back saying ‘fuck.’ What do you think of that, guys? Huh?” He nudged Lex with his toe. “She doesn’t take you along, either. Little miss lover of all things dependent but she leaves you behind for the old flame. Why d’you suppose that is?”

“Because I needed to talk to him.”

“To Alex. You can say his name, Brooke. I know his name now.”

“Yes, to Alex. We needed to work out some stuff. From long ago.”

“Without telling your husband. Where I come from they call that sneaking around. Not working stuff out.”

“I knew you’d be jealous, Sean. I’m sorry.”

“Hear that?” He nudged Lex again, harder. The Labrador growled. “The adulteress is sorry.”

“I’m not sleeping with him.”

She said that quickly, too quickly. His head stampeded. His throat was sandpaper, coated in phlegm. “ ‘I am not having sex,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘with that man.’ Which means you did. Or you will. And I don’t fucking care which it is.”

“I did sleep with him, Sean. In
high school
.”

God, he loved her. He knew he loved her more than his life, even as he knocked back the last shot and went to take a piss, his muscles weak. In his stuffed head now he heard the chorus they’d been singing before he left rehearsal—the chorus coming in as the Wise Men, saying,
“Wo? Wo? Wo?”
Where is the king of the Jews
, they wanted to know, but all Sean could hear in the tiny room was the voices piling in on top of one another,
woe woe woe, woe woe woe
.

This was the third time in less than a month that he’d picked a fight. All he’d accomplished was to make Brooke lower her head and push forward with whatever she was doing—letting the phone ring unanswered, taking her night walks, drifting a million miles away whenever he tried to have a serious talk with her. And now, pouncing on his Monday night absence to sneak out for a date. She was fucking the guy, how could she not be fucking the guy? He heard his brothers Danny and Gerry in his head, somewhere mixed in with the insistent chorus. They went from asking what such a babe saw in him to promising they could get him a sparky Catholic girl who’d give him all the kids he wanted. He heard Mum, calling him a dreamer. He blew his nose on the toilet tissue, felt the pressure behind his eyes.

He shook himself dry and went back out to the kitchen. The microwave dinged; Brooke pulled out a mug of chamomile tea.
When she turned to him, her eyes were frightened, and not just frightened: guilty. He walked right up to her. He was barefoot, so she stood even taller over him than usual. He put his arm around her waist and yanked her to him. Quickly she set the hot mug on the counter. “Kiss me,” he said.

“Sean, you’re drunk. It’s a problem, you’re—”

“You’re my goddamn wife.” He put his free hand to her crotch. “Kiss your husband.”

“Don’t talk to me that way, Sean.”

“You’re coming fresh from him. Don’t lie to me. And if you put something in the oven, it’ll be his little bread loaf. Won’t it? C’mon, Brooke. Tell us the truth.” He grabbed her crotch. Brooke gave a soft cry. He felt himself getting hard. “I’m going to get it out of you. Somehow or other I—”

She twisted free of him. He lunged for her hand and caught her forearm. “Ouch!” she cried. “Sean, you’re hurting me!”

“Come to bed, we’ll get the truth out.”

“You’re
drunk
.” She grabbed her fettered hand with her other and pulled it free. When he lunged at her next he caught only an inch of T-shirt as she moved away. “Let go,” she ordered, and he wouldn’t, he couldn’t, and that was when she kneed him in the groin.

He sank to the cold tile, the old, sharp, sickening pain climbing from his balls through his belly. He twisted. With a grunt, he vomited into the dogs’ bowl. Immediately Mocha came trotting over to taste it, and he smacked her nose away. Then he didn’t care. “What the hell,” he said. “Eat it.” He tried but couldn’t stand. Knees up, back against the lower cupboard doors, he dropped his face into his hands. Brooke had left the kitchen. She wasn’t going to comfort him, help him, make things better with him. He’d muscled her and she’d fought back. He heard her tread on the stairs, and then sounds from above. He needed to stop her. Fine, he would say. We’ll just
have Meghan. Meghan is great. Or adoption, he’d say. He could love a kid with shy knees, sure he could. Only don’t go. Wait, don’t go. Whatever else is wrong, whoever he is, don’t go. Woe woe woe.

He couldn’t get his ass off the cold floor. Brooke walked right past him, a breeze brushing him as she opened the back door. She left it open; he heard her car door open and shut. Then she was back. “Don’t go,” he murmured.

She crouched next to him. With the tips of her fingers she combed what was left of his hair back from his sweating forehead. He couldn’t look up, but he could tell from the rhythm of her breathing that she was crying. “You’ll have to look after Meghan,” she said. “For a few days.”