The Lost Daughter (7 page)

Aside from her gardening skills, the dozen employees at Lorenzo’s knew only two things, really, about Brooke, and they were the same things they came to know within days of meeting her. She was pretty, and she was kind. When they asked her if she grew up in Hartford, she shook her head and said, “But I’ve been here a while.” When they asked if she’d studied horticulture, she said, “It’s just
something I fell into.” When talk turned to politics or current events, she used worn phrases like, “It’s a shame” or “What can you do?” As Rob, the guy who oversaw the commercial accounts said, you would think her stupid if you hadn’t seen what a genius she was. This description was passed on to Brooke by Shanita Brown, who worked in the garden shop and was closer to her than anyone else at Lorenzo’s.

“Which is not,” Shanita had added just a few days ago, “saying much.”

“You know everything about me worth knowing, Shanita,” Brooke had said, and flashed her a smile.

“Uh-huh.” Shanita was clipping away at the box hedge around the perennials. Tiny and fierce, her dreadlocks pulled back in a scarf and her skin turned dark coffee by midsummer, she had started at Lorenzo’s when she came out of rehab and her two kids were in foster care. That was four years ago. After a year, Brooke had persuaded Lorenzo to let the kids play in the garden after day care, and Shanita had come full time. She still had boyfriend problems, but she was on birth control and sticking to it. “One thing you do learn from hustling,” Shanita said, her clippers fast as hummingbirds, “is how to read people. The folks that are hiding something? You don’t push them. You let them come to you.” She dropped her right arm and straightened. She wiped a hand across her sweating brow. “Far as anyone round here knows,” she said, gesturing to the five acres of Lorenzo’s south Hartford estate, “Brooke O’Connor got no past before she walked in here first time. I know different, and you know I know different. One of these days, when you need to, you going to trust me with it.”

“You bet I am. How’s Dillon’s arm?”

“Oh, he broke it right enough. Damn fool, climbing trees.” Shanita went back to clipping. Brooke’s muscles relaxed. Shanita had
seen most of the underbelly of human nature. Nothing Brooke could tell her would cut the tie forged when Brooke found a way to bring her kids to Lorenzo’s. But what was the point of sharing old sins that made no difference now? Sometimes Brooke thought fondly of the woman she might have become—sprightly and funny and smart, oh so smart, with as many kids as she wanted—as if that woman were someone she’d known and hoped wistfully to meet again. Meanwhile the weight of her past kept her steady, moving forward, glad for the light of each day that brought no retribution for what was five years past; then ten; then fifteen. Only recently, with Sean begging incessantly for a second child, had she felt each step like a sinking into quicksand.

Today, though, she thought maybe she’d found a solution. Late in the morning she was cleaning up the last of the damage done to Lorenzo’s Garden while Shanita’s kids tumbled around the climbing structure. Suddenly there were a couple of new kids, giggling as they swooped down the slide. “Are they okay here for a sec?” a woman asked as Brooke turned away from the dahlias.

“So long as they don’t leave this area,” Brooke said. She glanced at the children—Asian girls, both of them, looking like twins but also looking nothing like their freckled mother. “Sweet,” she said.

“Aren’t they? We planned to adopt just one, but these two were inseparable, even as toddlers.”

“Aren’t they sisters?”

The woman smiled. “Now they are,” she said. “I’ll be just a sec.”

Brooke loved children. She loved Meghan past all reason. When Sean asked if she didn’t want a second child, if she didn’t want to jump on that merry-go-round again, she felt her capacity for love like an ache. But she dreaded giving birth. She could not explain to Sean why the idea terrified her. Every time she thought of another pregnancy, she felt a tornado moving straight at her, fast and relentless.
Sometimes she had to watch her breathing, to stave off what might be seen as a panic attack. She ought to see someone about it, she counseled herself, and by “someone” she knew she meant a shrink. But she couldn’t see a shrink. Shrinks were like the gardeners of history. They delved into your past with words as their spades. So tell me, the shrinks would say—raking, digging—why you’re meeting this man today? Alex? Any connection to these thoughts of pregnancy?

Get out of my garden, she would tell them.

Finishing up her task, she kept half an eye on the girls, who were quickly bossing Dillon and his brother, Charles. Shooing away the invisible shrinks, she thought: Adoption. Of
course
. Plenty of people adopted. They didn’t even have to look as far as China. There were babies in Central America looking for a home, babies in eastern Europe. Sean’s family had its share of bigots, but Sean wasn’t among them. It would make sense to anyone who asked. Brooke had had trouble with her first pregnancy; people would understand that she had reason to be concerned.

But this man you’re meeting, the shrinks would begin. Shoo, she would tell them.

“The other day,” she said to Shanita over lunch, “I was picking up Meghan, right? And this Jewish dad picked up his daughter who looked—I don’t know, Mayan or something. Straight hair, black eyes. He scooped her into a bear hug. She was his daughter, plain and simple. Shanita?”

She snapped her fingers in front of her friend’s glazed eyes. Shanita’s head jerked up. “That’s my name.”

“What do you think?”

“About what?”

“Adoption.”

Shanita gave her a long look. “You mean like Madonna, swooping
down on Africa to get her toys?” she said at last. “I think that is disgusting.”

“No, I mean normal adoption. Like of a Chinese girl, or—or I don’t know, a baby needing a family. You think parents feel the same way toward their adopted kids?”

“Brooke, baby, you asking the wrong person. Fought tooth and nail to
keep
my kids from being adopted. Why you ask?”

“I’m thinking about it. How it might work. For Sean and me.”

Shanita packed up her sandwich. Her face had darkened to pitch. She leaned across the table and repeated, “You’re thinking about it.”

“Sure. Lots of people make a family that way, Shanita.”

“You thinking up
here
.” Shanita pressed her finger suddenly into Brooke’s temple. Brooke’s eyes teared up with shock. “But ain’t nothing happening
here
.” She removed the finger and grabbed at Brooke’s rib cage, just under her left breast. Brooke pulled away. A fat tear rolled, uninvited, down her cheek. She felt the imprint of Shanita’s hand on her heart.

“What are you doing?” she gasped.

“You got any idea what is involved in bringing up a child that got someone else’s genes? Someone else’s moodiness or asthma or I don’t know what all?”

“I’m sure it’s not the same. But it’s still wonderful.” Brooke dabbed at her eyes. “Or it…it can be.”

“That decision lies at the top of a
mountain
. I mean, if you are not planning to be like Madonna.”

“Who said anything about Madonna? Those girls who were just here—”

Shanita cut her off by grabbing her wrist. Her eyes smoldered. “I owe you a lot, Brooke,” she said in a low voice. “And most of all I owe you this little nugget. You cannot solve a problem in here”—she
pressed Brooke’s trembling hand to her own neatly rounded breast—“with the tools you got up here.” She pulled the hand up to her temple.

Then Shanita let her go. She stood and tossed her crumpled bag across the back patio into the wire bin, a perfect swish. Turning back to Brooke, she said, “And I don’t care how good those tools are. Might as well try to fix a car engine with a dentist drill.” Brushing crumbs from her T-shirt, she walked away, muttering, “
Adoption.
Shit.”

Brooke felt rattled. For the rest of the afternoon, she stayed clear of her friend. At three she checked in with Lorenzo, who was doing inventory on a shipment of baby chrysanthemums. “I’m ducking out in a minute,” she said, “to take Meghan to dance class. Then I’ve got—well, some errands. Back in a couple hours.”

“Thought your hubby did all that,” said Lorenzo, winking at her. Lorenzo’s winks didn’t mean anything. They were his way of bridging the divide between boss and employee, of staking a claim to intimacy with Brooke. Lorenzo was close to seventy, by Brooke’s estimate—a short, dapper man with a white mustache and a permanent tan, pale only in the spray of crow’s feet around his dark eyes. He was a widower of sorts. The year Brooke arrived, his partner Angelo had died of AIDS and he wore a mask of suffering. Customers at the nursery claimed Brooke had brought him back to life, but she brushed such comments off.

“Sean’s got some stuff at work,” she said now. “And Meghan’s angling to quit her lessons. I don’t want her twisting him round her finger.”

“Tough love, baby,” Shanita called from where she was picking at leaves, checking for bugs. “Only way to go.”

“You’ll be back, though, right?” Lorenzo asked. He stepped over to where Brooke was gathering her pocketbook. “I was thinking we
could talk about your hours. Maybe shift you to take charge of the new location this fall. Get it all set up to open early spring.”

Brooke’s eyes widened. However much responsibility Lorenzo had slowly given her over the years, the Simsbury location was his darling. For the past year he had talked about nothing but how eager he was to lord it over his newly acquired suburban kingdom. He loved putting on his Italian charm whenever one of these country-club women came into the nursery; he wanted nothing more than to dwell among them and hear them laugh at his jokes. “You mean just for a week or two?” she asked.

Lorenzo shrugged. “You understand that clientele,” he said, winking again. “You’re my best girl. Can’t keep you locked up on Park Street. And I am not going to be around forever. “

“Of course you are.” Brooke tried winking back, though it felt more like a tic than a wink. Lorenzo’s hair, Brooke noticed, looked thinner; the sun shone through the frosty strands onto his leathery scalp. Perhaps he was ill. She wanted to touch his arm, remind him in some corny way of how they were all a family, here at the nursery he’d built. But he held himself apart, in his courtly way. So she didn’t ask what was wrong, why he was giving her the new location he’d dreamed of for himself. Instead she pressed him a bit, as if probing for his backbone. “Well, if I set up the Simsbury branch,” she said, “I’ll need Shanita to help me.”

Lorenzo shook his head and waved a hand in the air. “You girls figure it out,” he said. “Now go on, run your errands. I need staffing for spring, that’s all I know.”

B
rooke cut through the West End to the grade school near Elizabeth Park. In the semicircle of waiting cars, she found herself paying attention to the complexion and hair of the kids getting
picked up. She stepped out of the car into the sunshine. There was another Asian girl, her blond mother waiting with an infant strapped to her back whose features Brooke couldn’t make out. Shanita, she thought, could talk all she liked about what she felt and didn’t feel. Shanita didn’t know what happened when Brooke thought about giving birth again.

She had Meghan, she reminded herself. Nothing bad was going to happen to Meghan. But Sean wanted another. Her family—just hers, no one else’s—needed another. And they could have a child without triggering the fears that rose like a tsunami from Brooke’s past and washed her away. She studied the children jumping into their mothers’ arms, the ones whose features didn’t match but whose expressions did. Shanita’s case had been different, she told herself. It had been about foster homes, older kids who needed their birth mom. Her advice didn’t extend to Brooke’s case. It couldn’t.

“Looks like you’re not sure which one’s yours,” said the man standing by the Mazda next to her car.

Brooke blushed. “Oh, she’ll make herself known when she comes out. I don’t worry about that.”

The man stepped out of his car and stretched. He was an inch or two taller than Brooke, and not much older; gray hair was just making its appearance at his temples. The shorts he wore revealed the muscled calves of a soccer player. “Quite a rain last night,” he said.

“Broke the humidity, I guess.”

“True enough. Not so great for my business, though.” He squinted at the sky.

“And what business would that be? Air conditioning?”

“Pools.” He extended his hand. “Tad Horgan. Jason’s dad. I think our kids are in the same group here.”

Tad’s handshake was warm and firm. Brooke hadn’t noticed him before, but her circle of fellow parents was confined to the ones
whose daughters played with hers. “If you say so,” she said. “Meghan’s still at the boys-have-cooties stage.”

“And Jason definitely has cooties. Got them from me, I’m afraid.”

“I doubt that.” He was flirting with her, Brooke thought. She glanced at her watch. She was due at Starbucks in a half hour. “How did you know Meghan’s in his group?”

“Jason is not at the girls-have-cooties stage. Causes him some problems with the other boys. But I think he likes your daughter. Your clone, I should say.” He winked. “Didn’t take rocket science to figure who you were, but I still don’t know your name.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Brooke O’Connor.” She wanted to steer the subject away from kids before they got to the “How many others?” question. “So, pools,” she said. “Backyard pools? Country-club pools?”

“Just those kidney-bean things. I run a little franchise out in Manchester.”

“You’re not a swimmer, though.”

“A shower’s about as much water as I need, personally. How’d you know?”

Brooke cracked a smile. “An old boyfriend was a soccer player. He had your legs.”

“I’ll be damned.” Tad looked down at his calves. “Wonder how he’s managing without them.”

Brooke chuckled. “I’m meeting him for coffee. I’ll ask.”

“Ah.” Tad’s eyebrows lifted.

“Not like that. Old times. You know.”

“If you say so. Anyhow, you’re right. I kick the ball around, most Saturdays. Buncha Jamaican guys and two palefaces. Look, here they come.”