The Lost Daughter (35 page)

The colorful trees whipped by. He heard again all about Isadora, about how the herbs had never been effective. “That’s what I’ve been saying,” he repeated, his hand worrying the latch on the glove box. “You delivered a child alive and I did something, I killed it.” He heard how Brooke had lain awake the past two nights in her mom’s condo, remembering and remembering until she remembered a naked baby breathing on her belly. She was sure it had been breathing. “Not then,” he said. “Or, I don’t know. Maybe a last breath. We weren’t doctors. Memory’s slippery, Brooke.”

“Then tell me,” she said vehemently as they turned into the driveway of a condo complex, the other side of the high school in the village, “why you trust yours so goddamn much. In the face of a girl who looks just like me. Who was found outside that Econo Lodge. In the face of
my
memory.”

“Because I know what I’m talking about! You weren’t even thinking about this before I showed up in Hartford last month. I’d been thinking about it for months. For years. I had a ton of time to get my memory straight.”

She shut off the ignition and stared out the windshield. “You don’t have to think about something,” she said, “to have it be there. It’s the things you don’t think about that do it.”

“Do what?” He felt driven crazy with her now in the old way, the
way she’d driven him crazy when they were young and she got off on one of her tangents. He knew what he had seen, in front of that sad mobile home. A girl who looked no more like Brooke than thousands of other fair-haired girls with irregular noses. A girl who looked more Polish than English, with her blunt cheekbones and the neck that widened to broad shoulders, not like Brooke’s delicate English collarbone in the least. Brooke had always loved to believe in miracles, in the coincidences that made for legends. Not Alex. “Do what?” he repeated.

“Change you. The things you don’t think about change your whole life. I told myself I was taking herbs to cause a miscarriage, and I had a miscarriage. End of story. So why didn’t I go to college? Why didn’t I become a scholar? Why didn’t I marry you and be happy?”

Her face was wet with tears, but Alex refused to feel sorry for her. “Where are we?” he asked, gesturing toward the condos.

“My mom’s place. She sold the house.”

“She believe in this—in your idea, here?”

“She doesn’t know about it yet. She’s not home. She was going to the gym.”

“She have any Scotch?”

Brooke slammed the car door. She moved by jerks, her arms tight to her side. In the condo, she rifled through the cupboards of the high-ceilinged sitting room until she found a bottle and a pair of tumblers. She sat on the edge of the couch, clutching the cushions, as if she were perched on a ledge and keeping her balance. She drained half the glass of Scotch and grimaced. Alex sat next to her, his leg crooked so that he faced her profile. “You didn’t marry me,” he began, “and you aren’t happy. And now you think this girl—”

“I didn’t do those things,” Brooke interrupted, “because I knew something was wrong with the story we told ourselves. I didn’t know what was wrong. I couldn’t look at it. But now I am looking at it. I’m owning it, whatever that means.”

“No!” Alex almost shouted. His hand gripped her thigh just above the knee. “
I’m
the one who’s owning it, Brooke! You’re right. It was no miscarriage. But my hands, what my hands did”—he set his Scotch on the coffee table and gripped her other thigh—“
that
is the thing that’s fucked everything up. Not some miracle rescue.”

“What is so miraculous about a damaged child?” Brooke turned to look at him, her eyes red-rimmed. Her hands let go of the cushions and cupped Alex’s jaw. He felt her cool fingers. “Maybe you squeezed too hard,” she said softly. “Or maybe we just didn’t do enough to get her breathing. What’s wrong with Najda—it has to do with not getting enough oxygen to the brain. I looked it up.” Her voice had gone hoarse. Her lips as she spoke were swollen. “There’s no way out of this,” she said, “without damage.”

“Of course there is!” He leaned forward and kissed her, quickly, as if to stop more such words from forming. “For you, there is,” he said. His face was close to hers; he could smell the salt of her tears. He seemed to swim in her eyes. “You believed you had a miscarriage. You never did anything wrong. I did a wrong thing, and I’m paying for it. The damage is done, long ago done. And none of it was your fault. You’re whole.”

“That’s the last thing I am.”

Her lips moved toward him then. A great wave of familiarity washed over him, as if he had moved among strangers for fifteen years and only now, in this instant, was seeing—was touching—one who knew him at the core. They kissed for a long while. Her tears kept running down, flowing between both their lips, so they both tasted salt and Scotch at once. His hands went under her knit top. They pushed up her bra, held her breasts, round and more lovely for being heavier since childbirth. “I want to go back,” he heard himself say. “Back to you. To what happened. Make it right.”

“And I don’t.” She fought with him still, even as she pulled him
onto the stubbled fabric of the couch. “I want to do what we can to help her.”

“Help who?”

“Najda! You don’t believe me, do you? You don’t believe she’s our—oh, Christ.”

Her hand had slipped under his jeans. He felt her fingers against the skin of his buttocks. He went hard. With a groan, he pushed her top up, over her breasts; he unhooked the bra. “This is what you want,” he said. “It’s what you’ve been wanting.”

“Is it?” she said, wonderingly.

Her mouth had gone slack. Her body gave off a ripe, passive heat. He took off his glasses and set them on the coffee table. He leaned down and took her breasts into his mouth, felt the nipple harden against his tongue.

“I have loved you,” he murmured as he moved from one warm breast to the next. “I love you now.”

“Help me then,” Brooke said above him. Her hands feathered his back. “Help me help her.”

“Brooke”—he moved up to her neck, his hand against the stiff seam of her blue jeans—“I don’t believe in her.”

But she didn’t hear him. She went on, “They need money. Najda needs a better school. My mother is sitting on a trust fund from my grandfather. I’ve never wanted a share before, but I’m going after it now. And you have money— Oh.” She sucked in her breath as he bit softly at the thin, damp skin of her neck. “Kiss me,” she said.

And when he had, she pressed him down on the couch cushions. In the dying light, she studied him. Her gaze went through his clothes, through his skin. Were they going to make love? Could the world turn inside out, just like that? She stayed silent too long. Her hand lingered at his belt. “I’m facing my past,” he heard himself say—guessing, groping—“so I can live. You don’t have to face anything.”

Brooke’s index finger traced a line from his belt buckle to his throat. “Keeping all the guilt to yourself,” she said thoughtfully. “It’s selfish.”

The accusation hit him in the gut. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s all about you, this guilt. Forgive yourself, and suddenly you’re not so important. You don’t own all that history.”

“I can’t,” he said. The room had grown dim. He could hardly make out her features. Her fingers ran over his eyebrows, his nose, his ears. His erection had softened. It was too much like what he had heard from Tomiko, after they had lost Dylan.
It’s all about you.
“I love you,” he said for the third time, but his cock was giving up. He pulled her to him, their legs tangled. In his parents’ basement they had lain like this; on the beach; in the backseat of his car. And yet the last time his hand had touched between her legs—he remembered as Brooke’s heartbeat slowed—it had been to help her rid herself of a child. At that memory, what was left of his erection shrank like a sea anemone at human touch.

Brooke lifted her head. “But you don’t love me,” she said softly. “You love the idea of me, just like I love the idea of you. I wanted that idea back, for a while.”

“What about
us
back?”

Slowly she shook her head. She sat up and flicked on a floor lamp. In its harsh glow he studied her figure—the heavier breasts, hips that had carried a child to term. “Okay, but,” he said. He watched while she rehooked her bra. Desire was a liqueur at the back of his throat. “If you did not believe that this Najda was your daughter—”

“Ours.”

“Ours, okay. If you hadn’t met her, but had only talked to Isadora. If you had become convinced that what happened in that place—”

“That place is a paintball arcade now. You should see it.”

“Maybe I will. While we’re strolling down memory lane. But let’s
say”—he found his hand on her knee, the stiff jeans between them—“you didn’t have this evidence of a child who lived. Let’s say you only knew that you might have given birth to a living baby, and here I am telling you I pressed that baby’s skull too hard.” He frowned. “Don’t you want to kill me? Don’t you think
someone
should kill me?”

Brooke’s mouth twisted. “Maybe I’m not all that willing,” she said, “to share my own guilt.”

“You’re going to have to.”

“Am I?” Turning, her eyes challenged him. Invited him, again, into a world where the child had survived, had grown into the girl in the wheelchair. Feel guilty about
that
, her eyes demanded.

“Jesus, Brooke,” he said. He rose from the couch, took the two empty tumblers to the kitchen, rinsed them and filled one with cold water. When he’d slaked his dry throat, he looked across the wide space to where Brooke stood by the window next to the cupboard, the Scotch tucked away. Desire lay heavy in his veins. They weren’t going to make love, not now, not ever. But it wasn’t just an idea he’d wanted. It was her. To thrust himself inside her, to drown in the sea of her. He refilled the glass and brought it out. Brooke was gazing westward, at a long orange sunset.

“By your lights,” she said, after she had taken a deep drink from the glass, “you have lost both your children.”

“I guess I have, yeah.”

“Do you have a picture of Dylan?”

He reached into his pocket. “Hang on,” he said. He flicked on the light. Retrieving his glasses, he found his wallet on the floor by the couch. From it he drew out the snapshot he’d kept behind his credit cards for three years. “That was just before he went into the hospital for the last time,” he explained. “He was never a strong kid.”

She held it to the light. He watched as her eyes searched the photo. With pain he remembered the setting—Tomiko and himself
on the window seat, the shade lowered behind them to reduce the backlighting, Dylan propped between them with his favorite stuffed monkey. “Beautiful, though,” she said.

“He was a stunner.”

“And your wife also.”

Brooke handed back the photo, but he didn’t look at it. He tucked the wallet into his back pocket. They stood quite close; he smelled the slight tang of her sweat, the Scotch on her breath. Past mixed with present—what a cocktail, he thought, what a drug. He lifted his jacket from the floor. “I should go,” he said.

“I guess the leaf peepers’ll be back by now.”

“We’ll talk tomorrow,” he said. He squeezed the tips of her fingers, and she nodded. But as he headed out on foot, he thought they would not talk—not tomorrow, not the next day, perhaps not for a long while. He could not turn himself in, not now. Brooke would have this other story to tell. And what of his mother, when it all came out? What, for Christ’s sake, of his sister?

Rapidly he strode out of the condo complex, around the old soccer field, the high school; across the village green; and into the neighborhood that rose up a long, low hill above the village. The lights were on in the Victorian farmhouse where he had grown up. His car sat in the drive: the girls, back from their mountain adventure. And sure enough, a second car behind his. A old green Dodge Dart, with
TUFTS UNIVERSITY
on the back windshield, the backseat strewn with clothes. Pablo, he thought. For his sister’s sake, he smiled as he opened the front door to their chatter and good cheer.

I
think it’s time,” Brooke’s mother said, pouring her a second cup of coffee, “you told me what your visit here is really about.”

Brooke chuckled drily. Her mom had returned home yesterday maybe ten minutes after Alex left. Had she wanted Stacey to come upon them like that, making out in the living room? All night she had shifted positions in the pullout, trying to ignore the metal bar that cut across her lower back and trying to figure out what she’d been doing, what she expected. Alex, she concluded, wanted his guilt straight, like his Scotch. A distant action, a lost baby. The cocktail that was Najda and Ziadek and the slurry of the present would not go down with him. And now Luisa had vanished, another consequence. “The purpose of my visit,” she said to her mother, “changes on an hourly basis.”

“Start from now, then. I’m a quick study.”

She was, Brooke thought. However blunt Stacey Willcox’s constitution, she had always been able to turn on a dime and get things done. Now she sat on a bar stool across from Brooke at the white
counter framing her kitchen. The sun poured through the glass doors from the patio, where pots of bright mums lined the steps. Over crisply pressed pants, Stacey wore a scoop-neck silk tank that hugged her neat torso. It was Sunday, but still she had risen early, pulled herself together. Brooke had not yet combed her hair. She touched a finger to the hot surface of the coffee, then licked it: strong, laced with hazelnut. She met her mom’s disquieted eyes. Here, she thought, was as good a place as any to begin a new life.

“I have a daughter,” she said. She took a sip of the coffee. “Not Meghan, but another. She’s fifteen years old.” She heard rather than saw her mother’s quick intake of breath. Brooke kept her eyes on the coffee mug—cyan blue porcelain, with a rim of red. Steam rose in genie-like swirls. “Najda is severely disabled, but she is not retarded. I did not know until four days ago that she was even alive. She lives with a Polish family, in a—a development. On the way to Scranton. She needs help. She needs to be at a better school. But I don’t know what to do.” Now she raised her eyes to meet her mother’s. Stacey’s brown irises had gone wide. She stared at Brooke as if seeing her for the first time in a decade. “I can’t afford a mistake here,” Brooke said. “I’ve only got the one chance.”