The Lost Daughter (17 page)

“Were
you
ever grateful?” Ziadek asked him.

“I didn’t get plucked out of a Dumpster by a family that had enough to take care of without rescuing some—some slut’s…”
Abortion
, Chet wanted to say. He had said it before. But Ziadek’s look forbade the word. “Somebody else’s mistake,” he said.

Ziadek cut a sharp glance at Najda. She had found the remote, turned her TV show on again, and was increasing the volume. Luisa had taken heavily to her hands and knees, picking up pieces of the game. “Stop it,” Katarina ordered her. “You didn’t spill it. You shouldn’t clean it.”

“She
can’t
,” Luisa spat out. She looked pleadingly at Ziadek. She meant that Najda could not get around on hands and knees, he understood; but she meant more. She meant that Najda couldn’t be any way
except what she was. Everything her older sister did, from rushing to Luisa’s side when she thought Najda took advantage of her, to turning her head away in embarrassment when Najda struggled with words, said that Katarina considered the girl still, after fifteen years, a refugee, one who should be grateful each day for the garbage hound who had rescued her and the family who lied to keep her out of the hands of the state. But Najda was not grateful. She was determined, ambitious, and frustrated. She played Candy Land with Luisa because she loved Luisa. But she did not consider that she owed any of them a damned thing.

“Najda,” Ziadek said. Oh, how he missed Marika! She had been a frail woman while the quarry had built up his arms and legs, made his belly a rock. But she was the stronger one when it came to the girls. “We will find a new school for you. There are other schools besides the high school in Windermere.”

“Private school?” said Katarina.

Ziadek shrugged. “There are places. They can understand what Najda needs. This is America.”

“But, Ziadek, the money—” Katarina began.

He held up a warning hand, cutting her off. “We will find the way to pay for it. A scholarship.”

“Charity,” Chet spat.

Ziadek ignored him. He spoke to Najda. “But you must search it out. At your library. At the computers there. You find what will make you happy. You bring it home. We are a family. Do you understand me? Turn that thing off.”

A handsome doctor on the television was staring, bewildered, at a patient’s chart. Najda flicked the remote and wheeled her chair to face Ziadek. Her eyes were wet. She looked from one member of her family to the next. Single words were her specialty, and she uttered just one of them.

“College,” she said.

S
chool started, with Meghan in first grade. Sean took pictures of her in her new clothes with her bright pink backpack and sparkly sneakers. By October, Brooke’s schedule would loosen up, and she could take Meghan to and from West Elementary. Until then, Sean stayed on pickup duty. He didn’t want Meghan riding the bus. He’d ridden the Hartford school bus and knew what kind of bullies were on it. Not that getting away from work was easy, with almost a third of the staff laid off and Larry eyeing production levels. But Sean punched in a quarter hour before he was due and kept his men moving. Each day that first week, he left at two forty-five, loaded Bach’s Christmas Oratorio into the car player, and sang his way to the school. In the car, his voice soared. He held the high A neck and neck with the soloist. He rejoiced in the news of birth and miracles, and he left the print shop far behind.

Then he pulled into the parking lot and shut off the engine. The arias looped through his head as he stepped out, but the only music on the lot was Top 40 and hip-hop from the waiting cars. The
waiting moms looked at him sad-eyed. He didn’t care. So they thought he was unemployed, so what? All the babies gurgling in their car seats, on the other hand, bothered him; the toddlers on the grass rankled. What had started as a point of pride—O’Connors didn’t pop just one offspring—had become a hunger. The arias faded in his throat, and silence descended.

Sometimes Sean dreamed about the kid they didn’t have, with his fat cheeks or her chunky growing muscles. He woke up bereft. Brooke, meanwhile, had kept talking adoption. Subtly and not so subtly she left brochures on the coffee table, flyers on the mail table, numbers by the phone. As if to demonstrate the process, she’d taken in another cat, a stray with health problems who got more attention than Sean. Adoption, he wanted to shout at her, is not the point. How dumb, he wanted to ask her, do you think I am?

Then Brooke’s mom came to visit and put a lid on the adoption talk.

“I’ve got something to say to you both,” she said when they had finished their first meal together. Brooke had prepared it, lamb chops and arugula salad, but her mom—Stacey, Sean was supposed to call her, not
Mother
the way you would in his tribe—would shop and fix the rest of the week’s meals. They would come straight out of the cookbooks she brought and would leave behind, fancy hardcovers with pictures of shrimp tails arching up like ballerina legs out of some delicate mush. For weeks after, a slightly rotten spice odor would linger in the kitchen. Nothing would arrive on Sean’s plate by itself. They had taught Meghan not to wrinkle her nose and to say “I don’t care for any” rather than “I hate that icky stuff.”

“Can I be excused?” Meghan asked, and Sean nodded at her. She skipped out to the back with the dogs. Evenings were still warm, though dying into that blue twilight that Sean remembered from childhood, when he and his brothers would go out looking for their dad.

“My daughter,” Stacey continued, leveling her gaze at Sean, “has always lived in her imagination.”

In Brooke’s mother Sean could spot the square jaw and wide mouth of his wife, and Stacey’s way of tilting her head while she listened was also familiar. From her dad, he supposed, Brooke had her distinctive nose and pale hair—Stacey’s was tinted, now, but clearly she had always been brunette—as well as her height. Over her firm, compact body Stacey had complete control. She wasn’t exactly graceful, but she could have been one of those tai chi instructors you heard about. Every movement was intentional, nothing wasted.

“And so,” she went on, “when she told me you two were thinking of adoption, I knew she was making up another story.”

“Mom, please,” Brooke said. Her forearms lay on the table, as if she would reach for Sean’s hand, but of course he was at the other end, Stacey in between.

“The story of a foundling, or some such nonsense,” Stacey went on. “And the problem with stories is, they are not life.”

“And your story,” Brooke put in, “is I’m still twelve years old.”

“If we have another child,” Sean said firmly, “Brooke and I will decide together what the best road is. Same as we did for Meghan. Right, honey?”

Brooke nodded. His tone of voice brooked no disagreement, and she certainly wasn’t going to argue in front of her mother. From the start, Stacey had treated Sean as a paltry stand-in for the husband Brooke was meant to have. No need to throw gas on coals that still glowed, a little, with disapproval. Quickly, Stacey glanced from one of them to the other. She had barely nipped at her chop—which, Sean assumed, she would judge as too well done. He wanted to pick his up by the bone, but he’d wait until he was in the kitchen, cleaning up.

“Margaret Mead said one or three,” Stacey said, pointing her fork at Brooke.

“One or three what?”

“Kids. She thought odd numbers were better. With two, you just get butting heads all the time.”

“Margaret Mead faked her research,” said Brooke. Cutting a glance at Sean, she mouthed
CD Pyg
. They were, for a moment, on the same team.

“Five in my family,” said Sean, “and there was plenty of head-butting.”

“Well, that’s a full litter,” said Stacey.

Meaning, Sean knew, that his mother had spawned children without thought; that he came from a class that didn’t know any better. Best to leave the room before his own stoked coals fanned into flames. He began clearing plates. When Brooke rose, he motioned her to sit. In the kitchen, he cracked another beer and drained half of it at one pull, like a teenager boozing on the sly. As he rinsed pots, he heard the women in the other room. Two of Brooke’s old friends in Windermere had new babies. One had just gotten divorced.

“Then there’s Alex, you know, back in the country,” Stacey said. Sean turned down the hot water he was running. “So sad,” she went on. “He lost that little boy they had, and then I guess his marriage just dissolved.”

“I know, Mom,” Brooke said. “Alex caught up with me the other day.”

“
Did
he now.”

“Don’t look like that, Mom.”

How did she look? Eyebrows lifted by a breeze of hope? That her daughter could leave this shanty Irish and go back to the high school dreamboat? Sean’s heartbeat thrummed in his ears. He didn’t catch Stacey’s words, but Brooke went on. “His company’s got a branch in Hartford. We acted like, you know, old friends.” Then, after Seanhad creaked open the dishwasher door, she said, “I wouldn’t say
never, Mom. I’d say unlikely. I’m not going to drive to Boston to have a drink with my high school boyfriend. Sure, yeah, it’s sad. But I’m just saying.”

He couldn’t stand it. He peeled the rubber gloves from his hands and stuck his head back into the dining room. “Say, love,” he interjected, putting a bubble of brightness into his voice. “Why don’t we have this old boyfriend of yours over for dinner? Sounds like a lonely guy.”

If there was nothing to it, she would say sure; she’d ask Alex; didn’t know when he’d be back in town but why not; how good of Sean to think of it.

She wrinkled her nose, from below the bridge to its tip. “It’d be awkward,” she said. “Too much water under the bridge.”

He couldn’t give up. “I’d like to meet this mysterious guy.”

“He’s busy getting settled in Boston. I don’t see him coming to Hartford anytime soon.”

Sensitive as a tuning fork, Stacey picked up the jangling music in the room. “I don’t imagine
you
bring your old flames around,” she said to Sean.

“I don’t meet them for coffee, either.”

“It was just the once,” Brooke said—too quickly, and as she blinked her eyes rapidly at him, Sean knew she was lying. “We’ll save the rest for our high school reunions. Right, honey?”

Sean retreated to the kitchen, where he finished the beer. For the rest of Stacey’s visit, the name
Alex
and the word
adoption
went off limits. Still, over the next three days, every time he stepped onto the back porch where Brooke and her mom were talking and they stopped, he felt a secret hovering in the air. At night, Brooke stretched out against him and sighed. It was so exhausting to have her mom there, she said. Her mom never met a daughterly decision
she couldn’t criticize. Her mom had started this new job with the schools back in Pennsylvania, and now she had opinions on schools. Her mom needed a boyfriend, someone to listen to her. Then Brooke kissed him and stroked his body lightly, and thanked him for being patient with Stacey, and they counted the days until Stacey left.

Still, the next morning, as he came into the kitchen, mother and daughter exchanged a glance, like a plot hatching. They were theteam, now. And last night, after Stacey had finally left—with a grandmotherly hug for Meghan and promises all around to spend one of the holidays in Windermere—Brooke went off on a walk. A long walk, hours after Meghan was in bed. She didn’t ask if Sean wanted to go. She didn’t even take the dogs, who whined and moped till she came home. “Where’d you go?” he asked when she slipped past midnight into bed.

“Around the park,” she said. “Through the neighborhood.” Her voice was too nervous, too tired for him to press for more.

Waiting for Meghan to come out of the school, he remembered how he had loved the enigma of Brooke. That Mona Lisa smile of hers—well, she showed her Chiclets teeth, but you could practically hear the stories murmuring behind those curved lips—had been seductive once. Now he could do with a little less mystery and a lot more straight talk.

He was keeping one secret of his own. Not to do with their family; he would never do that. It was about the Bach. Last Monday, at the chorale rehearsal, during the break, Geoffrey had sidled up to him. How was he liking the music? Magnificent, Sean had said, pausing over one of the brownies the sopranos always brought. That Bach, he knew a thing or two. And did he feel comfortable with the German? Geoffrey asked. Well, sure—he thought he did. Years ago Sean had picked up one of those courses on tape, real Germans after whom you repeated:
Wieviel Uhr ist es? Wieviel. Uhr. Ist es. Danke
schön. Bitte schön.
He thought he’d gotten pretty good; when they went over diction in the chorale, he usually had it dead to rights.

But Geoffrey, as it turned out, wasn’t asking in order to criticize Sean’s German. The symphony, as everyone knew, had been cutting costs. The oratorio required four soloists, among whom the tenor—the Evangelist—carried most of the weight. The best the symphony could do was to bring professionals in for the three performances and the dress rehearsal. To prepare the thing right, they needed someone internal to sing the parts at the tech rehearsal. “To tell the truth,” Geoff said, leaning close to Sean, “it’s something I’ve been pushing with our board for a while. You know, we should have understudies ready. And ringers for this group.” He glanced around the big square church kitchen where they served snacks. “To keep some of the oldsters on the beat.”

“Good idea,” Sean agreed, not wanting to report Ed, who always sat to his left, a retired chemistry teacher with a tendency to scoop notes.

“How much training have you got, Sean?”

“Training? You mean music?”

“No, I mean for the long jump. Of course I mean music. You ever get your master’s?”

“Geoff, I went to Central. Majored in graphics technology.”

“But you trained your voice.”

“In the shower.”

Geoffrey looked nonplussed. “Well,” he said hesitantly, “I’d still like you to do this—”

“Do what?”

“Learn the part. The Evangelist. We couldn’t pay anything this year, but when people see what a big help it is, having a soloist for those last rehearsals…” He shook his head. “The problem is your authority with the membership. I hadn’t realized. I’ve approached Betty in the sopranos, Chuck in the bass section—”