The Lost Daughter (32 page)

Noisily, Najda’s father sipped his coffee. “What you want, Miss O’Connor?” he asked.

Her throat was dry, the brew bitter. She pulled her gaze away from the objects in the room to the man. “I have no right,” she said, “to ask anything of you. So I should say at the very start that I put myself in your hands. If what I suspect is true, you could bring charges against me. You probably should.”

The old man searched her face, taking in the bone structure, the eyebrows, the nose. “What charges?”

“Charges of—I don’t know.” So many times she had accused herself, blamed herself, failed to forgive herself. But not to a stranger, and not for this particular crime. “Of—of abandonment, I guess.”

“What abandonment?”

“Let me back up. Mr. Zukowsky—”

“Please.” He waved his hand. “Call me Josef.”

“Josef, you don’t know me. I have no right to ask you any questions at all. But if you will not give me answers”—where else could she go? How could she rest?—“I think I will never know another night’s sleep.”

“Cut to chase,” Josef Zukowsky said. “You speak of my granddaughter.”

She straightened, startled. “I don’t—I don’t think I do…”

“In chair. My Najda. My Luisa’s Najda. Our Najda.” He licked spittle from his dry lips. Rising, he stepped over to the shelves, plucked a framed photo that Brooke had not noticed, and laid it on the table in front of Brooke. In the picture he stood, perhaps ten years younger, in front of a spindly Christmas tree, with two adult women and a man, two teenaged boys, and a small child in a chair. He did not need to point to Najda. Brooke nodded. Tears started to her eyes. “You come,” Josef Zukowsky said in a tight voice, “for her.”

Brooke pulled out a tissue. Slowly she wiped both her cheeks. It
was true. This man was telling her it was true. Only it had not been his wife who found the baby Alex had left for dead; it had been his daughter. His daughter with Down syndrome.
Our Najda.
She blew her nose, sipped from her mug. The coffee tasted like poison, like the brew she had once cooked up to rid herself of this very child. “Will you tell me,” she asked Josef, “how you saved her?”

He told her. Luisa, he explained in his halting English, had been rooting through the Dumpster across the state highway when a man had come out the back of the motel. As soon as he left the tiny infant, she snatched it up and it gave a weak cry. At first, he thought his poor child had given birth. So many things were wrong with the baby. Problems breathing, problems moving, problems feeding. So tiny. On a respirator at the hospital for two weeks. To the doctors they had lied about Luisa, because who else would love this baby? Not the ones who left it in the rain. And Josef had seen the people from Social Services; he knew where they would put the baby. How the heart of his Luisa, who had lost her mother only the year before, would break into pieces. And so the whole family had learned what to do. How to help the girl move her limbs. How to unscramble her sentences. How to find the money the state set aside for disabled children, for new wheelchairs and physical therapy. “We call her Najda,” he explained, “because it means, in Polish—I don’t know the English word—the one you find like this, with no mother, no father.”

“A foundling,” Brooke said. Her voice rasped with tears.

“And we say God bring her to us so we can love her. But what God? Not a smart God. A smart God bring us Najda before her brain lose oxygen.” He waggled one of the tubes running from his nose. “A smart God don’t make my Luisa suffer so much for this child.”

Brooke kept a fist to her mouth. Tears rained inside her chest. “Is Najda,” she tried asking, “is her brain…”

“Very, very intelligent.” For the first time, a sly smile crept across the old man’s face. “A genius, this girl. You play chess?” Brooke shook her head. “She beats me!” he said, swinging his fist in triumph. “Nine times from ten!”

“Can she—can she move the pieces herself?”

“What you think? She moves from her left side, okay! She has trouble talking, yes. But then she recites. You understand what I mean, recite?”

“Like poetry.”

“Yes! Shakespeare. Emily Dickinson. I don’t know all. When these things she recites, the words come easy.”

“I love poetry,” Brooke said. It pained her to smile but she couldn’t help it. Not when this man was bragging on his grandchild.

“At library, she goes on this computer. She knows all of it, all about this computer, what it can do.”

“But about school—”

“School,” Ziadek repeated. Then again, as if tasting the bitterness in his mouth, “
School.
That I cannot speak about.” Pushing himself up by the arms of his chair, he rose and stepped to the counter by the kitchen. He lifted the stack of colorful brochures and spread them in a fan over the coffee table. “These places,” he explained, still standing, “I will let her go. Not this school here, what they say she must. This school
kill
Najda.”

The word
kill
was like a dagger to Brooke’s heart. She let go the glossy brochure she had been about to open. Josef sat heavily. The joyful pride had fled; his face had gone cloudy with anger. She bit her lip. Shame drained the blood from her face. The old man laid his big hands flat on the table between them, like a cat about to spring. “Now you tell me,” he said, soft and low, “why you try that, yourself.”

“Try what?”

“To kill her. To kill our Najda.”

“I didn’t know.” She spoke around her hand. Her tears had started to fall again. He did not offer her a tissue. “I thought she was dead already. Dead in me.”

“What about doctor?”

“I was in the motel. It’s not a motel anymore, it’s—”

“Yes, yes.” His voice had gone testy, impatient. Brooke felt naked in front of him. Nothing she could offer about what she had done would make any sense. “But the baby,” he went on, his voice steady and pitiless. “It is breathing. No? It has heartbeat.”

“No, it didn’t. Or—I don’t know. It looked all blue. I didn’t feel it breathing. As for a heartbeat—Jesus. I don’t remember. I must’ve held her for a few seconds, that was all.”

“But you throw her out in rain—”

“I didn’t throw her out! My boyfriend was there! He said she was dead. We
both
thought she was dead. Instead we crippled her. Put her in this wheelchair”—she picked up the photo—“and did God knows what to her poor brain.”

“I tell you. Najda is genius.” He snatched the photo from her. He waved his hand at the photo. “Not enough oxygen to little brain. Speech is hard. Movement is hard. Thinking is fine.”

Brooke pinched the bridge of her nose. She could not bear to speak to him. She had no right. “All our fault,” she said aloud. “It’s worse than what Alex thought.”

Suddenly Josef gripped her arm at the wrist. For all his weak state, his grip made her gasp. “You would prefer,” he said, and he squeezed the arm brutally, “she is dead? That you have killed her?”

“No. No. I don’t mean that, I…” She left her arm limply in his, as if he were arresting her. “We were very young,” she pleaded.

He tossed the forearm away, as if it were useless. He gathered up the brochures on the table. “You were young,” he echoed her bitterly,
“and now you know. Najda is safe. She is healthy. You go now. You be happy.”

She looked up, startled. “I can’t just go,” she said. “Najda is my daughter.”

“She is Luisa’s daughter.”

“But I can help her. I can help all of you. I have to help you.”

“No. Is nothing you have to do.”

She bent to the stack of brochures and lifted one.
CROSBY
, it said in spaced white capitals across the top of the cover. Below shone a photo of a white frame building against a backdrop of rolling hills, with teachers and students—two in wheelchairs, the others not—gathered on a lawn. “You don’t understand,” she said, not looking up. “I ask nothing of you.”

“You ask,” Josef said bluntly, “for our Najda.”

I
know as soon as I see the car, with its Connecticut license plate. All day my mood’s been black. Last night that fat witch social worker, Delores, barged into the house. She claimed I had to go back to school or face the truant officer. I rolled into my room and shut the door. Let them scream themselves stupid was what I thought. But this morning it was Ziadek, not Luisa, who switched on my light and ordered me—in Polish, which you know is serious—to move my skinny fanny before he paddled it. So I went to music class, practical skills class, that god-awful regular history class with Mr. Monroe the sadist, and math—my only saving grace—where Mrs. Grenier let me work differential equations while the rest studied slope. No one talked to me.

Now I’m off the short bus and back on the trailer farm. Luisa took me for an ice cream when she saw my face, but I didn’t want ice cream. “What’s that car?” she asks as we draw near the house.

I don’t answer. No one expects me to answer. On the rare occasions when I do, my mom seems more annoyed than pleased. Sometimes
I think Luisa would rather have a mute buddy than a breathing, quarreling daughter. Like a dog, maybe, or a robot. I roll up the ramp while she takes the steps, and I reach for the door ahead of her. Right then my black mood slips off, like a heavy blanket falling to the floor. Here, in the familiar trailer, waits my past, or maybe my future.

I roll through and into the living room. I catch my breath. Sure enough, there she sits, the woman from the park day before yesterday, on the couch opposite Ziadek. She’s come—at last—for me. But everything feels wrong. First there’s Ziadek. His face is white; his big nostrils pull at his oxygen. He looks ready to lay hands on the woman. And the woman herself is puffy with weeping. Photographs of our family on the table, on top of the school brochures. There’s no joy here. It all feels sad and angry. “Ziadek,” I manage to say.

Then my mom pushes in. I’ve never seen her like this. She doesn’t wheedle. She doesn’t stonewall. She doesn’t even sing out “Ziadek!” like she always does. She just goes after them. “Why’s she here?” she asks—and before Ziadek can answer, “Get her out. Get her out, Ziadek! You! Get out! We don’t want you! Fucking bitch!”

“Luisa, calm down,” Ziadek says in Polish.

“I won’t! Make her leave! It’s not fair, Ziadek!” This in Polish, too. Then Luisa switches back to English. “You! Get out of here!”

“That is no way to treat a visitor,” Ziadek says, still in Polish. Heavily he rises. He starts toward us. I keep my eyes on the woman on the couch. Her bright hair, barely touched with gray. The small bones of her wrist. Her trembling mouth.

“Cunt,” my mom’s saying. “Bitch. Whore.” She grabs hold of the back of my wheelchair. Quickly I lock the wheels. “Go,” she says. “Go, Najda. Let’s go.”

But I won’t let the wheelchair move. The woman’s stood up. She’s
got her pocketbook over her shoulder. Luisa lets go of the wheelchair. “Oh, I hate you, hate you, hate you!” she sputters in Polish—to all of us, to no one. Before Ziadek can reach her, she lowers her head, like a small bull, and butts it into the woman’s belly.

“Oof,” says the woman. She falls onto the couch. Ziadek reaches for Luisa, but she darts around back of the couch. Then Luisa says it again, this time to me and in English: “I
hate
you.” She flings herself from the room into the kitchen. I see her grab a plate from the open shelf—the china plate, the one with grape leaves, that’s the last of the set my grandmother brought from the old country—and pitches it across the living room at the couch. The woman’s still getting back her breath, but she doesn’t flinch. The plate misses, hits the bookshelf, and shatters. A large shard flies onto the coffee table, knocks over Ziadek’s mug. Then my mom stomps down the hallway and slams the door to her room. Everything’s silent. Then muffled sobs, the sound of shoes against the door.

I let the brake off my chair. I wheel over to the woman on the couch. My heart is beating faster than when I have to speak in school, so hard that you’d think it would block out all the words. But the word I’ve kept inside leaps like a fish from a lake. “Mother,” I say in English.

The woman on the couch nods. She pushes herself from the couch and crouches before my wheelchair. She searches my eyes, as if there’s something inside them she’s been looking for. “I am…so happy…to see you,” she whispers. “To see you”—her voice breaks, but she pushes the word through—“alive.”

Now my words get blocked. Only by shutting my lips can I open my throat. “Mmm,” I manage. I want to say it again, to say
Mother
. “Mmm. Hmm.”

“Najda,” Ziadek’s saying behind me.

The woman swallows hard. She touches my hand, on the arm of
the wheelchair. “I haven’t been…any kind…of mother. To you,” she says. She jerks her head toward the bedroom. “She is your real mother.”

Oh, she doesn’t understand! How can she? I’ve left all that behind, that whole pretense that I am the child and Luisa is the adult and that I have anything,
anything
, to learn from my mom—how can this woman understand? She doesn’t know how I’ve waited for her, prayed for her. How I’ve readied myself to prove I’m not some retard that you throw away, but that I can do things, that I deserve a real mother. She doesn’t understand any of it. “You,” I manage to say. “You.”

“Why don’t you just call me Brooke? That’s my name. And I’ll call you Najda. Such a pretty name, Najda.”

Brooke
, I think. I reach out with my good hand. Like a blind person I stroke Brooke’s hair, like mine only coarser. I tip Brooke’s chin up with my index finger. I run my thumb over the broad cheeks, the jawbone. I pull gently at an ear. My index finger trails up and across her pale eyebrows. My thumb traces the eyes, which she closes so I can feel the lids and the shape of the eyeball. Finally I run my finger down her nose, pausing at the bone, like my own funny bump. Brooke remains silent and still, a statue waiting. Suddenly I remember how to unblock the words. I can use the other words, whole sentences that wait in my head. “ ‘The gentlest mother,’ ” I begin. It works best not looking at her. I look into the middle distance, somewhere between the couch and the sliding door to the deck. “ ‘Impatient of no child, the feeblest or the waywardest, her admonition mild.’ ”