The Lost Daughter (11 page)

Since then, Sean had heard, Suzanne had tried a couple of times, on her own, to get pregnant, and when that hadn’t worked out, had begun taking in foster children. Now, as he finished setting up the chairs, she pulled out a sweater she was knitting, in blues and grays. “Christmas present?” he ventured as he passed her row. He nodded at the knit sleeve.

“Hi, Sean,” Suzanne said. She smiled, her lips still plump. She held up her handiwork. “For a six-year-old boy,” she said. “Do you think it’ll do?”

“He’ll count himself lucky.”

“I don’t know. They’d probably rather have sweatshirts. With a Patriots logo or something.”

“Nonsense. You’re doing a great thing, Suzanne.”

She raised and lowered an eyebrow—skeptical, for all her sweetness. She glanced around the room. “So are you,” she said.

“Oh, sure. Chairs,” Sean said. He chuckled, self-deprecating, and moved on. It wouldn’t do to get deep in conversation. But he felt Suzanne’s eyes on him, while the rest of the chorus trickled in, and he stood a little taller, sang a little clearer.

As he drove home, his mood had lifted. He pulled into the driveway with his windows open; after he’d shut the engine he sat for a moment. He listened to the August crickets, breathed in Brooke’s moonflower. From inside the house came Bitsy’s yapping; upstairs, Meghan’s bedroom light was on. Bach still played in his head—the opening chorus,
Jauchzet frohlocket
, cheer and glory. And he loved this neighborhood. True, their house lay at the south end of the block, too close to Farmington Avenue with its fast-food stores and gas stations. But he’d come up in the world from the duplex in East Hartford. The neighborhood school would be fine for Meghan through fifth grade, then maybe they’d move farther out, to one of the suburbs. Of course Brooke never noticed how they’d managed to hold their own in the West End. To her, this was just normal.

He entered the house quietly. The dogs milled around him, Bitsy scrabbling at his pants leg, Lex licking his hand. From the front hall he heard Brooke upstairs, telling Meghan one of her endless stories. “The Lady of the Lake was like a gypsy,” she was saying as Sean tiptoed upstairs. “She could be good or evil. She lived in the woods and
was very mysterious. It was from Merlin that she learned all her magic.”

“Merlin,” Meghan chimed in, her voice high and thin, “was Arthur’s wizard.”

“And a great wizard, too. He taught the Lady everything she knew, and she became more powerful than he was. Girls do that, you know.”

Meghan giggled. Sean peeked in the door. Just the nightlight was on, but he saw Meghan making finger-shapes in the glow it cast.

“So when the Lady saw that King Arthur had trouble in battle,” Brooke was saying, sitting on the edge of the bed, “she determined to give him the sword Excalibur.”

“He pulled it from the stone!”

“That was his first sword. Excalibur was his grown-up sword, his magic sword. But it really belonged to the Lady of the Lake, and she had to have it back one day.”

Sean drifted away. Downstairs, he felt thirsty. He popped open a beer. These were the things that touched his wife’s heart, he thought. An old boyfriend named Alex. Gypsies, and running away, and mysterious deadly women in lakes. Not family. Not an out-of-shape, ordinary printer and an impulsive, freckled daughter. He felt the joy of singing Bach drain out of him. He was back to real life and its discordances. Passing through the kitchen and family room, he covered the canaries, who looked at him quizzically. He let the dogs out to pee. Then he stood at the picture window in the living room, gazing out on the street, until he felt a hand on his back. “Hey,” said Brooke.

“She’s asleep?”

“Like an angel. And last night she was a devil.”

“You really think those help? Those stories of yours?”

“She loves them. Not as much as your singing, but—”

“I think,” Sean interrupted, “they get her riled up. Thinking about swords in lakes, people trapped in trees. I don’t know why you fill her head with that garbage.”

His arms were crossed over his chest. Brooke pressed against his side; she tipped her head, trying for eye contact. “They’re old, old stories,” she said. “I loved them as a child. They’re the only stories I know, really.”

“What, you don’t know Goldilocks and the Three Bears?”

She chuckled. “Meghan outgrew that one maybe three years ago. Why are you so grumpy? Do you want something to eat?”

“I’m not hungry,” Sean said—though, suddenly, his stomach felt like an empty cavern. He drank his beer.

“Well, you should be. How was your rehearsal?”

“It was hard. It’s hard music. I’m tired. And now Meghan’ll have nightmares, and I’ll be up half the night.”

“Why would she have nightmares?”

“From that claptrap you tell her. You want her to sleep peacefully, tell her something that ends happily ever after.” He shook his head, drained the beer. “You don’t know how to go from point A to point B.”

“Really.” Brooke moved around him, her hands on his torso. She leaned against the picture window. “Like for instance.”

“Like we want another child, let’s have another child. Is that just too straightforward for you?”

He felt her stiffen. “Sean, I told you. Meghan’s birth wasn’t exactly straightforward.”

“It was straightforward enough.” He turned away from her, moved to the couch. “Except for someone who doesn’t want to have her own husband’s children.”

“Sean, don’t.” Brooke followed him. On the couch, she tucked her legs underneath her. They were sleek and tanned, the calves
scratched by thorns but smoothly muscled, the arches of her feet high as a dancer’s. She wore a white tank top and beige shorts, her summer uniform. In the light of the streetlamp just outside their house, he could see the outline of her nipples. “I surfed the web a little before I went to work today,” she said. “I’m getting info from a bunch of agencies. Some of them are obviously scams, but—”

“I don’t want to adopt a kid, Brooke.”

She looked down. She picked at an invisible bit of lint on her shorts. “Well, I don’t feel safe having one. And it’s my body.”

“Brooke, that is
bullshit
.” He hissed the word. Despite the beer, his mouth felt dry. She looked at him with those wide blue eyes, eyes that were clear as a lake and hard as steel. When he sat forward they blinked, as if she feared he would hit her. “You loved being pregnant,” he said, slapping his index finger against his open palm. “You loved nursing.” He slapped the middle finger against the palm. “You loved what your body could do.” He slapped the ring finger. “Don’t give me this feminist crap.”

“It’s not crap.”

“If you don’t think my kids are
smart
enough and
beautiful
enough to come out of your
smart
and
beautiful
body”—he was spitting the
b
’s now; a fleck of saliva flew onto Brooke’s cheek—“then you should get yourself some gorgeous brilliant seed and have his babies. You can have Alex’s babies, how’s that?”

He turned to her. Her face had gone chalk white. Like a statue she sat there on the leather couch, before the fireplace that gathered them together in the winter, in the small square living room whose walls she had painted a garnet red and hung with prints of abstract art that Sean couldn’t understand but found vaguely pleasing. It was all perfect, the life they’d made full of love and laughter. It was all about to go up in smoke. The blood had drained from Brooke’s face because he’d stamped the truth on it. “I will love his kids,” he said,
soft but fierce. “I will treat them like my own. If, that is, you will let me.”

“Sean, this isn’t about Alex. It isn’t even about you.”

“It is
exactly
about me!”

He picked up a small glass figurine of a cat curled into itself, its back rounded and sleek. He’d bought it for Brooke at some stupid outdoor craft show in the Adirondacks, when he used to drive back there to see her. He’d said it reminded him of her, that she was lovely and contented, but mysterious inside, and he loved her not for the beauty but for the mystery. Now he lifted the piece of glass and made as if to hurl it into the corner of the room. Two of the dogs shrank into a corner, their tails curled into frightened commas. Brooke said, “Sean. You’ll wake Meghan.”

He finished the throw, like a pitcher loosening his arm. He set the cat back onto the coffee table. “I’m going out,” he announced.

H
is steps crunched down the drive. He felt he was being watched. Good, he thought. Let her watch me. For a wild moment he had a thought of taking the car, of driving over to East Hartford where Suzanne lived, if she still lived in that apartment, with her foster kid or three, and plowing himself into her shapeless, willing body, her muddy alto voice. But he’d left his keys on the kitchen counter. At the sidewalk he turned first right, then left, down Farmington, a ten-minute walk to the Half Door on Sisson Street. On Wednesday nights, Paddy O’Rourke performed his fiddle here, and when Sean was younger he used to put down a few and join in the singing.

But tonight was Monday; the place was pretty quiet. A soccer game played behind the bar. Sean took a pint from the barman, Tommy, a stocky guy who knew when and when not to talk. He
watched the game. Bach still played in his head, but only the messy parts now, the fugue he could never learn.
Alex
, he thought. One of those names that could be a boy or a girl. Stupid. After a while a couple of guys came in complaining about their wives. He ordered everyone pints.

Then, he didn’t know. Maybe he joined in the complaining. A poisonous feeling filled the warm space of the Half Door, and you had to order more just to douse the poison, so he did. The beams lining the ceiling of the bar were hung with incongruous mementos—a couple of miniature harps, dried sprigs of holly, soccer cleats, Paddy’s Day lime-green plastic hats. In the corner a couple of slutty-looking girls were downing puke-green apple martinis that the guys coming in would buy for them. After a while one of the girls went out with one of the guys, and some minutes later the other girl shuffled out by herself. Sean noticed these things, but he couldn’t say how much time lapsed between them. Kids, he remembered saying at one point, and one of the other drinkers misunderstood him.

Yah, the guy said, the wife pops ’em and lets her body go to shit. Best birth control in the world, makes you not want to touch the bitch again.

No, no, Sean said, that wasn’t what I meant. Or maybe he didn’t say it but just got quiet, sipping his pint, light-years away from Bach. When Tommy said he was closing, he paid up with a credit card, crumpling the beer-soaked receipt into his back pocket.

Walking home, he almost bumped into a guy on the sidewalk, right in front of his own house. One of those professional-type guys, not real tall but muscled, good-looking, in need of a haircut, dressed in chinos and a polo shirt. Sean felt like throwing up on him but he only asked what was he doing there, was he coming to bang his wife?

Sorry, the guy said, just walking. Was that Farmington in front of him? Sean didn’t answer. He pushed past the intruder, through his gate, up the walk. Brooke had left the light on, and he got his key in the lock on the third or fourth try. Inside, everything was still, alert. Lex trotted over and sniffed his hand. The other dogs just stood there, wagging their tails slowly like they were fanning themselves. The cat’s eyes glowed like coins from the dark corner. Sean pulled himself upstairs by the railing. By the bathroom nightlight he brushed his teeth, then pressed one hand against the wall to steady himself while he took a three-minute piss. He didn’t flush. In the bed, only a white sheet pulled up to her bare shoulders, Brooke was pretending to sleep. He let her pretend. He could remember scarcely a note of the Bach; it was all a jangle. Tomorrow, he thought, as he dropped his head on the pillow and the room spun above him. Tomorrow he’d set things straight.

W
ith summer camp over, Meghan was spending the late August days watching cartoons and chalking the sidewalks and driveways with Jackie and Taisha, the only two neighborhood kids who hadn’t left on family vacation. These two weeks before school started were the hardest. Brooke couldn’t get away from the nursery at what was still high season. Babysitters were impossible to find. Usually Brooke and Sean handled late August on a day-to-day basis, trading off child care with neighbors and moving their work hours around. But Sean had been acting wounded ever since Brooke brought up the idea of adoption. So she tiptoed around him; she tried to make things work without messing up his day. Today, Meghan would simply have to come with Brooke to the nursery. She got bored there, but too bad. Shanita’s kids had played there for hours without complaint.

At nine forty-five, the call came—fifteen minutes later than yesterday. Brooke watched the lit numbers pulse on the phone as the rings sounded, four of them before the machine picked up. “Brooke,
it’s Alex again. I’m still going to be in Hartford tomorrow. Meeting’s been changed to afternoon, so maybe we could do lunch? So much I wish we’d said before. Here’s my cell.” After he left the number he paused, as if he wanted to go on, maybe just to remind her that this was his third call. Then he hung up. Brooke pressed Repeat on the machine, listened to the message once more, then erased it.

Her coffee drained, she rinsed the mug. “Bitsy!” she called. “Mocha! Lex!” The dogs trotted over. Lex licked her hand; Bitsy panted. She leashed them and banged out the screen door. The girls were in Jackie’s wide driveway, across the street, circling their bikes in slow motion like pink moths. “I’m taking the dogs for a walk!” she called to her daughter. “When I come back, we need to go to my work. Okay?”

“No!” Meghan called back. She kept circling her bike, the streamers wafting in the hot air. Brooke sighed. No point in reasoning. She pulled on the leashes and headed up to the park with the dogs.

If only Sean weren’t acting so jealous, she would call Alex back. She’d change the plan, invite him for dinner. An old friend, why not? But even as she rehearsed these thoughts, she felt Shanita’s hand gripping her heart, telling her she was making this stuff up out of her head, telling her she wasn’t feeling the thing she was saying. Just like with the notion of adopting. Well, what was she supposed to do? If she let her heart do the thinking, she’d have gone out of her mind the last time she saw Alex Frazier, a dozen years ago.