The Lost Daughter (28 page)

Brooke smiled, or tried to. “We don’t get back much since Dad died.” Had Isadora been at her father’s funeral? She couldn’t remember. Her memory seemed to sponge away so much, even the most innocuous markers, anything that might lead her thoughts back to the motel, the stillbirth.

Isadora offered her coffee—“I’m supposed to be at aerobics, but let’s forget that”—and they sat in the renovated kitchen, on high black metal chairs at a freestanding granite countertop. Brooke asked after the kids. Ethan and Josie, she remembered their names just in time. Isadora rolled her eyes. Kids, what a mess. “Josie’s in college now, can you believe it?” she said. “Premed at Penn State. Where she got those genes, I’ll never know.”

“And Ethan?”

Isadora looked into her coffee cup. Her mood darkened for an instant. “He’s figuring some stuff out,” she said. She tightened her mouth into a smile. “Boys are funny creatures. I think he’s in California these days. But I can’t be sure. His dad sends him money.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Hey, it’s fine. Nobody’s perfect, right?”

Whether Isadora meant her son wasn’t perfect or her parenting skills hadn’t been perfect, Brooke couldn’t tell. She tried to stick to the purpose of her visit. “I was pretty stupid when I was a kid,” she said. She hooked her ankles around the rung on the stool, as if to anchor herself. “As you may recall.”

“You were foolish, not stupid,” Isadora said quickly. “And you got lucky.”

“Did I?” Brooke held herself still, her fingers clutching the mug handle, as Isadora slid down from her stool and began filling a watering can at the kitchen sink. Plants filled the open kitchen and breakfast room—cyclamen and begonia in the window, a big pot of dracaena on the floor, hanging baskets of callisia and wax plants, an orchid in the center of the table, small pots of herbs slowly fading. They all looked overwatered to Brooke’s trained eye, but now was not the time to instruct. She watched Isadora move around the space. Gone were any signs of children—the drawings, the bulletin board with clippings, even photos of Josie and Ethan. The walls, once hung with Isadora’s weaving projects and soft-focus posters of Buddhist monks or nude women, now sported bright abstracts that coordinated with the curtains and upholstery. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, actually,” Brooke said.

“Your luck?” Isadora stepped on a stool to water a hanging plant. “How’s that daughter I’ve heard about? She with you?”

“Meghan’s with her dad in Hartford. I came by myself.”

“Everything okay?”

“I suppose.” Brooke felt fatigue at the back of her neck. But she had to do this. “You know Alex moved back to the States. From Japan.”

“I hadn’t heard.” One of the baskets began dripping—overwatered—and Isadora pulled off a half dozen paper towels to wipe it up. If Brooke hadn’t been so tired, she would have chuckled. The old Isadora had never let her hands touch paper towel, any more than her lips touched refined sugar. “So you’re in touch with your old flame?”

“Sort of. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about that time.”

Isadora set down the watering can and returned to the counter. She leaned her elbows on the granite. She was wearing makeup, Brooke noticed—a thin film of foundation, careful application of blush, whisper-thin liner accenting her eyelids. “Not a good idea, Brooke,” Isadora said firmly. For the first time she met Brooke’s eyes. “You had an accident. You took a big risk. It worked. If you knew how I worried about you back then—”

“Did you? Is that why you gave me a bunch of herbs instead of talking sense into me?”

“You were a determined young woman. I tried to help you.”

An unlicensed fury welled up in Brooke’s throat. She swallowed it down. No point in raging at Isadora. She put her question squarely. “How much faith do you have,” she said, going to rinse her mug, “in that little recipe you gave me?”

“Good Lord, Brooke. I’m not an expert. You’re the only person I know—”

“You said you had friends who’d used it. You said you’d known those herbs to work. You said it took a while, for one friend. I remember distinctly.”

“Well, people I’d heard about. Sure.” The smile on Isadora’s face
seemed made of crayon. Brooke pushed the anger back down, to the pit of her stomach.

“And did you only hear about miscarriages?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean did you ever hear about people who took the herbs and delivered early? I don’t mean a premature stillbirth. I mean a preemie, a baby.”

“It…It could have happened. To someone. Herbs are a lot more potent, you know, than people realize. I used to swear by them, but when you’ve got an unregulated industry—”

“You did swear by them,” Brooke said. She leaned against the sink.
It could have happened.
A preemie could have happened. For the first time it seemed possible that Alex had been speaking the truth. “I reported back to you the week after I miscarried, don’t you remember?”

“Not really, no.”

“More than five months after you gave me those herbs. And you were like,
I told you it would work
. You did swear.”

“But Brooke, I wasn’t God.”

“No, you weren’t. You were an adult. I wasn’t. I was seventeen. I believed everything you told me.”

“Do we have to go back to this?” Isadora no longer met her eyes. She drained her coffee.

“No. We don’t. I just wanted to know how sure you were that those herbs caused a miscarriage for me.”

“Well, I’m not sure.” Her movements jerky, Isadora returned the milk to the fridge. “I don’t think it’s my job to be sure. I didn’t hurt anyone.”

“Did you ever hear of people having trouble later?”

“What do you mean later?”

Brooke’s mouth was dry. She filled her coffee mug with water
from the tap, drank it down. “With other pregnancies. I was on bed rest for Meghan. Three months.”

Isadora’s eyes darted around the room. “There could be a connection,” she said evasively. “I don’t know.”

Yes, you do, Brooke thought. But the toned, conventionally pretty middle-aged woman in front of her was not going to come to grips with the past. She was as smooth and tightly knit as the track suit she wore. “Well, thanks for the coffee,” Brooke said.

Isadora followed her to the door. “What are you doing now?” she asked. “What are you after, back here?”

Brooke turned. She might tell Isadora she was headed to the police station, to search their archives of unsolved crimes. Or to the Scranton
Times-Tribune
, to see if the discovery of a baby’s corpse had been buried in the back pages. Or to the Econo Lodge to confront the Pakistanis if they were still there. Instead she said, “I’m not sure anymore.” She smiled diffidently. “Maybe myself. You know, I haven’t been myself since that night.”

“What night?”

“The night I gave birth.”

“Brooke, it wasn’t birth—”

“It felt like birth. And it felt like death. And I buried myself along with whatever came out of me. And I don’t want to be buried anymore.”

It wasn’t what she had meant to say, to Isadora or to anyone. It wasn’t a thought she had ever had. But Brooke left the blue Victorian with a new quickness to her step, as if she had to get to her destination without losing a second, though she had no idea where that destination lay.

A
s he lifted the metal latch on the gate to approach the O’Connor house, Alex heard music. Not just music; a human voice. From inside the house came a clear, lilting strain, haunted with longing. He could make out no words. As he stepped closer, he realized the song was in another language—German, that had to be it, something baroque, Bach maybe. Strange. He hadn’t figured Brooke’s husband for a classical music buff. Jazz was the only genre Alex knew, and even there he was a tenderfoot. Halfway down the walk, the song stopped abruptly. Alex halted. Then he heard a note on a pitch pipe. A moment later, the song began again. This was no CD, but an actual singer—a nimble and muscular voice, in Brooke’s house. It had to be the husband himself, singing. Alex’s eyes widened. She had said nothing about the guy’s voice. However much he needed to find Brooke and get on with his plan, he would not break the magic of the aria. He turned to go. But then the dogs spotted him from inside the house, and set to barking.

The song stopped. Ten seconds later the door opened. A heavyset
man of middling height, a few years older than Alex, stood framed. “You must be Alex Frazier,” he said.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“What do you mean? You called ahead, you’re on time. I was just practicing.”

“Pretty damn good, for practice.”

Brooke’s husband didn’t respond to this. He held the door open. Alex stepped in around the panting dogs. “Sean,” the husband said. Alex shook his extended hand. Neither man smiled. “So you’re looking for my wife. Can I get you a beer? Wait, scratch that. Can I get you a Coke?”

“Thanks, no.” The house was not particularly warm, but Alex felt himself starting to sweat. He unbuttoned his jacket. “I was a friend of Brooke’s,” he said, “growing up.”

“Her high school sweetheart, I think.” Sean led him into the living room, where Alex noticed an old piano, a music stand, the pitch pipe on the coffee table. Motioning to Alex to take a chair, Sean settled on the couch. The Labrador licked his hand as he sat down. “And now you’re back.”

“I live in Boston now.” Alex tried to keep his heart from dropping a beat. “I looked Brooke up, sure. Lots to chew over. Decade and a half, you know.”

“I don’t know.” Brooke’s husband smiled mysteriously. He rubbed the stubble on his chin. He assessed Alex. “Brooke never mentioned you until last month. A guy I fired, not too long ago, said she ditched you way back when.”

“She did.” The beat went missing; he couldn’t help it. “Probably the best decision she ever made. But I—well, I was just sort of renewing acquaintance and then she—she called me. No, I called her. Late at night, and she was on the road somewhere. She hasn’t returned my calls since. So I thought, you know, I’d stop by.”

He heard himself stammer, felt the blood rise through his neck. He had worn out the buttons on his BlackBerry calling Brooke over and over, to no avail since that moment she told him she was driving. Driving where, and why? Twice he had almost called Charlie, but when he thought of the crazy tale he had for his sister, he set the BlackBerry back on the side table. He had made it to his appointment in Springfield, his head spinning not with the profit-loss spread, but with questions about Brooke. Where had she been, where was she going, what judgment had she passed on him? At the end of the Springfield sessions, he had swallowed hard and called Brooke’s home. Sean’s voice on the phone had been tight as a snare drum. Yes, he had said, Alex could come by tomorrow. He had taken the day off, he said.

Brooke’s husband, Alex noticed, had a face that seemed molded from clay, the tawny eyes thumbed deep and the cheeks plumped into rough fullness. Now that he was seated next to the man, Alex could begin imagining Brooke with him. Downcast as Sean O’Connor seemed to be—and here he was in the middle of a weekday, shuffling around his house in a stained T-shirt and pair of jeans, with two mugs of cold, half-consumed coffee lined up on the coffee table—he carried himself with a tensile strength and sense of dignity that acted like a magnet.

“So I thought you might be willing to tell me”—Alex found himself glancing around the warm-tinted living room, its burnished floor and deep-cushioned chairs—“where Brooke’s gone. If she’s okay. I don’t know if your daughter—”

“Meghan’s with me.”

“I see.” Heat rose to Alex’s face. In fact, he did not see at all; he did not know what Sean O’Connor meant when he said his daughter was with him. That she wasn’t with Brooke? That he wasn’t? Sean was looking at him. “Meghan’s at school?” he tried.

“Out since three. She’s at a friend’s house.” Sean leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “I’m not trying to keep you in the dark, Mr.—”

“Just Alex.”

“You know, Alex, I get the feeling you could tell me more about my own wife than I could tell you.”

“If you mean—”

“I don’t know what I mean. Sometimes, to be honest with you, I don’t know why Brooke married me. It’s not something she wants now. Maybe she wants you.”

Alex’s face cracked into a smile, not what he was feeling, but nerves had gotten the better of him. “If she wanted me,” he said, “she’d have answered at least one of the five hundred phone messages I’ve left.”

From the back of the house came an insistent whining. “Got to let the dogs out,” Sean said.

When he left the room, Alex rose. The shelves lining either side of the fireplace held a motley assortment of books, a hefty strand of musical scores, and a couple dozen framed photos. Quickly he glanced at the photo of a young Brooke, her hair a curtain across her face, nursing a baby. The family on a boat in Long Island Sound. A big group photo, a marriage; he leaned close to see that the slender, surprised-looking bride was indeed Brooke, and the beaming guy to her left, his red hair lifted by a breeze, was Sean. In another, two dogs and a cat waited attendance on a comical baby. Had the photos been food and Alex a starving man, he would have salivated. As it was, he heard Sean’s steps in the hallway from the kitchen and sprang back from the shelves as if he had been caught red-handed.

“So,” said Sean. Deliberately, he sat in a ladderback chair. Alex returned to the couch. A small black cat perched on the opposite arm, blinking at him. Sean looked him up and down. Alex knew his
eyes had the hollow, bloodshot mark of insomnia. His shoulders curled forward, tension locking the joints. Compared to Sean, he was dressed for a business day, but to no greater purpose. “Tell me something,” Sean said slowly.

“Sure.”

“Why’d Brooke dump you?”

The couch felt uncomfortable. Alex shifted; swung his left shin onto his right knee; cleared his throat. Why answer such a question? Why not? “We were kids,” he said. “Things change quickly, when you’re young.”

“Brooke doesn’t change quickly. I may not know her as well as I’d like, but I know that much.” Sean lifted one of the cold coffees off the table and sniffed at it. From the kitchen, an insistent scratching. Sean rose from his chair and went to let the dogs back in. Alex didn’t leave the couch. When they returned, the Lab licked his land. Sean stayed standing, leaning against the ladderback.