The Lost Daughter (43 page)

Back in the kitchen, she made Meghan’s school lunch while Meghan peppered her with news. They were going to do a Christmas show in ballet, and Meghan was to be an elf. Last night at Taisha’s they had had ice cream right before bed, and Taisha’s mom said it was fine if you brushed your teeth after. Last Friday Daddy stayed home from work and fixed the swing set in the backyard. And Jackie brought Josefina to school and she was wearing the outfit Meghan gave her and everyone said it was really cute.

She did not ask any more about why Brooke had been gone, or what might have changed. As Brooke drove her to school, she felt herself slipping back into the skin she’d inhabited before. The trip to Windermere—Najda, Ziadek, the Zukowskys, the truth, even the meeting with Dom—appeared the way her past always had, as a disturbing dream, details you banished as you made your way through the day. Why should Meghan’s life receive such a curve ball?

“Don’t be sad, Mommy,” Meghan said, leaning across for a kiss before she let herself out of the car. “I’m not mad at you anymore.”

Because, Brooke decided as she pulled out of the lot, balls curved.

She continued down Asylum from the school toward downtown. She had left Sean a note,
Gone to see Lorenzo, back before noon.

The hospital florist had just opened. No autumn flowers—she should have stopped by the nursery—but she chose a vase with sweet-smelling Adonis and dark pink cockscomb. The names alone would make Lorenzo smile. She found his floor just as visiting hours began. “Hey, friend,” she said softly as she entered.

Lorenzo shifted his gaze from the television, which hung from the ceiling. His skin was yellow, his eyes cavernous, with dry, crescent-shaped bags beneath. Could it have been only ten days since she had seen him at the nursery? Even his silvery hair seemed to have thinned. “Thought you’d be here last week,” he said reproachfully. His voice had a bronchial rasp.

“I know. I’m sorry. I was out of town. I should have called. Here’s my apology, but it’s not enough.” She set the flowers on his bedside table and pulled away the tissue paper.

“Dream on, girl,” he said, cracking a grin at the arrangement. “Those are for the stud next door.”

“No. They are for you.” She pulled up a chair.

“And my Chianti?”

She put her hand to her chest. “Oh dear, I forgot. Later today. Promise. When they’ve put you through your paces for the day.”

“We’re all done.” Lorenzo fingered the white sheet drawn up to his chest. He was wearing striped silk pajamas, not hospital issue. “I’ll be all done, myself, in six months or so.”

“What are you talking about?” Brooke said. Panic seized her at the bone.

“It’s not a surprise, really. The statistics were there all along. But
denial’s a big thing, you know.” Lorenzo’s eyes, as he managed to meet Brooke’s alarmed gaze, were shallow pools. “I’m afraid of the pain,” he said. He reached for the glass on his stand and sucked water through a straw. “They say they give you enough drugs so you don’t feel it. But I tend to scream a lot.”

“Isn’t there something they can do? Chemo, radiation…would they try surgery?” As Lorenzo silently shook his head, Brooke stood up and took a turn around the private room, with all its cards and flowers, sat again. “Where is the pancreas anyway?” she said. “Do you really need it? Can’t they cut it out?”

“It helps digest food,” said Lorenzo patiently, “and no. It’s metastasized, my dear. I should have come in months ago, when I first felt a little achy. We’re too late now, I’m afraid.” He reached out his hand, with its elegant fingers, and patted Brooke’s arm. “They can do a thing called palliative chemotherapy,” he said, “but I’d lose my hair and die anyhow.”

“Oh, Lorenzo.” Brooke began to weep. Of all that had happened in the previous twenty-four hours, this news was the least expected, the one blow that toppled her emotional house of sticks. “I can’t accept it,” she said. “I cannot sit here and talk to you and accept this.”

“You don’t have to. It’s only me who has to accept.”

“Anything you need—anything you want me to do—”

“There is a thing, actually.” Lorenzo’s voice went raspy. He sucked more water through the straw. “Had my lawyer in on Friday. He drew up some papers. I told him I was sure you’d be by. I mean, the nursery’s falling apart without you.”

“That can’t be true.” She tried to smile, but the tears wouldn’t let her.

“They’re probably planting marijuana in the greenhouse. I don’t know. I’m stuck here. Take a look at that file, there. On the windowsill.”

Brooke pulled a tissue from the box by the bed and blew her nose. She brought the folder over. It was thick, filled with neatly fastened copies of a contract. The label on the tab read
Lorenzo’s Nursery Trust
. She handed it to Lorenzo, but he pushed it away. “Open it,” he said. “Read.”

From the first page, she knew. The trust had already been established. During Lorenzo’s lifetime, she was named as its executor. Upon his death, when probate was complete, she became its beneficiary. There were no outstanding liens on the Hartford location; the Simsbury site carried a mortgage that would be settled with the sale of certain investments upon Lorenzo’s demise. He was giving Brooke the nursery. “You can’t do this,” she breathed.

He had pushed himself up in the bed. A flush of color had come into his cheeks. “Only way to stop me,” he said, “is refuse to sign. Then you don’t get invited to my funeral.”

“But this is so…I’m not even a member of your family, Lorenzo.”

“Sure you are. You’re my girl.” He leaned forward then, and wiped a tear from her cheek with his thumb. “You oughta know by now,” he said, “we got blood between us. Christ. You’re about the only family I got.”

S
he brought a copy of the trust home. Sean was in the backyard, ripping out weeds. “You’ve got a better eye than I do,” she said.

He stood and dusted off his pants. “A man needs work,” he said.

“We might both have as much of that as we can handle,” she said.

She got an old blanket and they sat on the grass while she showed him what Lorenzo had written. Sean lifted the pages by the corner, not to get them dirty. He hummed and nodded. “Poor fellow,” he said.

“Six months, they’re giving him.”

“They gave my father nine, and he took five. But that was the drinking.” He handed the deed of trust back to Brooke. “Would you ever have guessed,” he said, “that my father wanted to be a musician? That he gave it up for Mum, and for us?”

“He was a depressed man. You always said that.”

He nodded. “And Mum knew it. She feels guilty about it to this day.”

“Well then, why does she—”

“Exactly. She was always afraid I’d try, and then be kept from trying. I told her that you—” He broke off. His hand strayed past the blanket to the grass, where he gripped a large dandelion and got it up by the root. When he returned his gaze to Brooke, she could feel the heat coming off him. “I want to go back to school,” he said, “for music. I want to make my life with you and Meghan, and as a musician. A teacher of music, a singer. And I won’t bother you about a second child, and I’ll never drink again.”

“Oh, Sean,” she said. “Sean.” She cupped his face in her hands. Gradually she managed to lift him up, to bring him next to her. She curled her long legs against him. She bent her forehead against his. “You started to say this,” she said, “before. Then we got off track.”

“Are we on track now?”

She kissed his smooth chin, where the goatee had been. “You know what I have,” she said.

He sighed. “Secrets, probably.”

“I have a CD—no, I’ll say it all. A constant disposition.” She kissed the chin again. “To promote.” The nose. “Your good.” She brushed his lips.

“We won’t have much money.”

“We’ll have the nursery.”

He nodded. She could feel his pride rising within him, could see
him wrestling it down. Reaching past her, he pulled another dandelion, its white root like a bone. She took a deep breath. “Yesterday,” she began, “I went to see your cousin Dominick.”

“In Philadelphia?” His eyebrows went up.

“It was on the way back from Windermere.” She held a beat. “Where I learned that I have a daughter. Who survived everything that I threw at her.”

It was the third time she had told the story in as many days. She had almost grown comfortable with it. She was able to create a character of herself, the foolish seventeen-year-old girl who believed a supposedly hip older woman about a remedy for a condition she was too ashamed to admit. As before, when she came to the moment in the Econo Lodge, she insisted that she did not feel the baby move, or breathe; that its color had been gray, its limbs lifeless. Yet as she repeated the memory, the baby seemed to come gradually to life, and her awareness—not now, but back then, as the girl in the motel room—grew. The horrible thought crossed her mind that she had known, that she had let Alex take the baby from her not because it was dead but because it was alive and she wished it dead.

She shuddered. That way lay madness. She swallowed hard; she moved the story forward, to Alex’s reappearance in Hartford and her trip to Windermere, to Luisa and Josef Zukowsky, to Najda’s condition and Najda’s dreams.

All the while she was speaking, Sean sat cross-legged on the blanket. Now and then his hand strayed to another weed, or to stroke Lex’s ebony head. Whenever she paused, he nodded. “And then?” he asked three or four times.

“And then,” she finished, “I managed to reach Dominick. He’s a lifesaver, Sean. I think he can really do something for Najda. And whatever I might want—like time traveling, to fix the whole thing—my focus has got to be on doing something. Doing it now.”

She had expected fury from her husband, or disbelief, or even the kind of shock that only whiskey would sort out. She had not expected what his face displayed, which was pure relief. “Come here,” he said after a long silence. “To me.”

He rose onto his knees and lifted her to hers. His arms went around her back, warmed by the midmorning sun. They rocked back and forth. Above their heads a mockingbird called. Sean gave off traces of the Irish Spring soap he always used, mixed with fresh dirt and grass; he gave off the scent of his own skin, as unique to Brooke’s sense of smell as she had heard a mother’s milk was to her baby. As she let her head sink onto his shoulder, her eyes released tears that dampened his neck and collar. They sank onto the blanket. Long and deep, they kissed—a kiss different from last night’s, a kiss that asked nothing. One of Sean’s hands slipped under Brooke’s jersey and cupped her breast. “Forgive me,” she said.

“Nothing to forgive.”

“I cheated you. Seven years and more. I’ve been half a woman to you. I was just so afraid—”

He cut her off with another kiss. Then he murmured against her cheek, “Being afraid isn’t anything to forgive.”

“But if I hadn’t been such a fool. If I’d faced what I did squarely.”

“Then you’d be with Alex,” Sean said, “and not with me.”

She twisted her torso, squinting against the sunlight to gaze at him. Her face, she knew, betrayed the truth he’d hit on. “I was with Alex a little,” she said, “in Windermere. Not—you know. But almost.”

She saw the jealousy rise like smoke inside him; saw him work to snuff it out. “I wasn’t really asking about that,” he said.

“But I had to tell you.”

His eyebrows lifted and lowered; he nodded. He projected an odd, surefooted calm. “What I was really asking,” he said, “was if you want to be with me, now.”

“Of course. But I haven’t…it hasn’t been the way you deserve.”

“I’m not asking about the old Brooke. I’m asking about the new one.” With his ring finger he traced an invisible line on her forehead. “You’ve got plans, you’ve found this daughter, you don’t have to hold anything back anymore—”

“I want to have another child with you.”

Sean dropped his head back onto the blanket. He looked up at the deep blue of the autumn sky. He smiled ruefully. These, Brooke knew, were the sweet words he had hungered to hear. But he had borne losing her once already. “If you want our life,” he said, reaching up to touch her hair, “if you really want our life together, you’ll do more than just tell me all this stuff.” He paused. She waited. The mockingbird dove; one of the dogs snapped at it and grabbed air. “You’ll bring me to this daughter of yours,” Sean said. “To these people who’ve cared for her. Whatever there is to do, we’ll decide to do it. You and I. Not just you. Us.”

Brooke held her lower lip in her upper teeth. She gazed at him a long while. Then, gravely, she nodded.

T
he week Alex got back to Boston, Charlie begged him to come to her Halloween party. “There’ll be other old farts there,” she said. “My roommate Amber—you remember her, she came to Windermere—she’s dating this grad student in physics, he’s like thirty, and he’s bringing his roommates. I want you to see my costume.”

“Do I have to wear a costume?”

“Don’t be a stick. Of course. And you can’t dress up as a banker.”

He went as a Japanese
oyama
, with a kimono he’d bought in Kyoto and an obi Tomiko had given him on their honeymoon. The kimono was dark blue with a golden dragon snaking up the center back and twin dragons on each side of the chest. When he first went to Japan, he wore it around his apartment and felt very tall and cool and pseudo-Asian. The obi, black with occasional gold threads, had belonged to Tomiko’s grandfather. He hadn’t touched either in years. He thought momentarily of chalking his face, but abandoned the idea. Over his half-shaved head he dropped a black Kabuki wig
he picked up at a costume shop in Somerville. He wore his old cloth
tabi
on his feet, which froze as he walked from his car to his sister’s apartment.

Pablo was there, too, dressed as a Yankees player, while Charlie wore Red Sox. From time to time, as the party heated up, they pretended to wrestle each other. Alex thought his sister looked fetching in a baseball uniform. She wore a pink baseball glove on her left hand, making it look vaguely like a lobster claw.

“Good thing Brian’s not here, though,” he said as Charlie staggered from a bout of staged fighting to the ragged couch where he sat. “He’d go after your boyfriend with a baseball bat, just for being on the wrong team.”