The Lost Daughter (2 page)

There was an old box of Kleenex on the dash of his car. She’d shoved maybe a dozen tissues into her panties, and they were all soaked now, a warm wet load. At first she’d thought of telling Alex that sometimes nothing happened for a day or two after your water broke, but then the cramps had started, in the car, and she’d gritted her teeth and let him bring her here.

The room was on the third floor, toward the back. “I told them,” Alex said in a stage whisper as he steered her down the dim hallway, “that we wanted quiet.”

“Didn’t he think it was weird that we didn’t have luggage?”

“Sure. He thinks we’re here to screw.”

“Done that,” said Brooke feebly.

“Here,” said Alex when he’d gotten the card key to work. “Just lie down. We’ll figure this out.”

“I want a bath,” she said.

“Bath? Oh, right. Bath. Warm bath. Coming up.” He was going around the room, flicking on lights. In their unnatural light his face looked bleached, almost powdery. Brooke wondered if he was going to faint. She sank to the edge of the bed. It felt like period cramps, only coming and going. Reaching between her legs, she scooped out the wet wad of Kleenex. Immediately there was a new rush of water. She stepped quickly to the bathroom, where Alex was kneeling by the shallow tub. Dumping the wad in the toilet, she grabbed a towel.

“We’re going to make a mess,” she said, hearing her mother’s tone in her own voice.

“We can’t think about that. We can’t think about that,” said Alex.

“Why are you saying things twice?”

“Because I’m nervous, all right? Because I don’t know if we should even be here. We oughta call someone, or get you to a hospital—”

“Get me in the bath, first. Here, step out of the way.”

He stepped away. When she gave him a look, he stepped out of the bathroom altogether. But he didn’t shut the door behind him, and she didn’t shut it in his face. A new cramp came. She caught herself on the edge of the sink and bit her lip. Then quickly she slid out of the jean jacket and oversized T-shirt and leggings, and stepped into the bath. There was blood on her legs now, like first-day period. She grabbed a washcloth from the metal rack over the toilet and slid down. Cramp. One, she counted, two three four five six. Up to
twenty-five, then it slacked off. Gingerly she slid the washcloth between her legs, as if she were touching a wound. It felt the same, only the area above it lay heavier and lower than ever, a metal pot between her legs. Cramp. She shut her eyes, leaned back, counted.

“Brooke? You okay?”

“Yeah.” She sat up. She was in a sea of dark pink. God, oh God, the blood hadn’t stopped, the way it did when you had your period and took a bath.

“You want to stay here, or go?”

“Go where?” She pulled the plug and ran fresh water in.

“You know. The hospital.”

“Give me a minute, Lex.”

“Are you in labor?”

“A
minute
, I said.”

Fresh water, another cramp. He knocked on the door, but her teeth were gritted. Finally she saw his head, poking in. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he said.

“It’s what happens, Alex. I think.”

“Don’t you fucking
know
?”

“I thought it’d happen at three months, remember? When I’d finished drinking Isadora’s tea? She said it’d be like a big period.”

“You want a doctor?” He came and knelt by the side of the white tub. He looked so young, his face wide open. Brooke felt the sweetness of the first time his face had hovered so close and she had kissed his mouth, drenched with desire.

“I don’t know,” Brooke said. She began to weep. Overhead, the ceiling fan whirred; you couldn’t turn it off. She whispered, “Don’t cry, don’t cry,” aloud to herself, the way she did when she was alone.

“Look, Brooke. This is what I think, okay?”

“Okay. I’m listening.” She turned off the hot water and drew her knees up: another cramp.

“Remember what I was saying, in the diner?”

“Yeah. You wanted to go to your parents.”

“No, I mean before.”

“Look, Alex, could we not talk about that right now? I’m only six and a half months. This is a miscarriage I’m having, okay?”

“Okay. Yeah, I guess okay. But I guess, I’m voting to stay here, you know? Since you’ve waited all this time and now it’s coming out. Only— Only—”

Putting all her weight on her arms, Brooke lifted herself to standing. Her belly sagged between her hips. She grabbed two dinky towels and wrapped them around her waist and swollen breasts.

“Only I don’t know what to do,” he finished. “To help.”

“You can do just one thing,” Brooke said. She made him meet her eyes. “Don’t get angry with me,” she said. “No matter what happens, or what I do. Don’t get pissed at me.”

“Right,” said Alex, as if this were a real order that he could follow. He cupped the back of her head and drew her to his chest. Her arms slipped around his waist. For a moment they stood together in the bathroom, synchronizing their breaths.

Then they stripped the covers off one of the beds. Alex laid the remaining towels on it. Climbing on, Brooke picked up the phone. “It’s not working,” she said, waving the receiver as if Alex could see a broken part.

“Who cares?”

“Me, who’s supposed to be home by four, that’s who.”

“I think we need to give them a twenty-five-dollar deposit. I saw a sign.”

“That’s a rip!”

“They’re covering their butts. You get back what you don’t use.”

“Have you got twenty-five bucks?”

“I have thirty left over. We can call at four. If we’re still here.”

With a clatter, Brooke dropped the receiver. She drew her knees up. Alex hung up the phone. “Breathe,” he told Brooke, who was clamping on her lower lip with her teeth. “Don’t hold it in.”

“I’ve
got
to hold it in!” she exploded at him. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat up. There was a little blood on the towels, not much. “Have you any
idea
,” Brooke hissed, “how
loud
I could get?”

“Pretty loud, I figure.” Alex reached a hand out to stroke her hair. Brooke’s face was white, gaunt like an old woman’s. “I don’t know what’s happening to you,” he said. “You have to tell me.”

“I don’t have to tell you anything.”

“I’m the only one here!”

“So go away. Oh fuck.” She rolled back and moaned, deep in her throat. Alex wanted to grab her arm, yank her out of there. Stubborn little bitch, just like his sister Charlie, no sense. Then faintly, reading his mind, Brooke said, “You promised. Remember. Not to get pissed.”

“I’m not pissed!”

“Rub my back?”

“Okay. Okay.” He pulled off his outer shirt—it was too warm in the room—and moved over to the bed where Brooke lay. They’d given each other back rubs, the first couple of months they were going out. It was a way to explore a person’s body without screwing or threatening to screw. He used to sit on her ass while she lay with her top off, and he’d move his hands out from her spine under her shoulder blades and around to where her breasts spread sideways beneath her raised arms. He’d rub his thumbs against the delicate white flesh there, and after the first couple of times she lifted for him, so he could slide his hands underneath and catch a feel of her whole breasts.

Propped on her bed, trying to find a spot on her back under her
loose white shirt where he could dig his thumbs in and give her some relief, Alex wanted to remind Brooke of that time. The spring before this one, it was. Then she started moaning again, saying, “Not there, Lex, lower. Yes, that’s it—no, you’re too soft, rub harder—
harder
—”

“Jesus, baby, I’m trying.”

“I know, Alex, I know. Listen.” The cramp was gone now. She sat up. Her face and arms glowed with sweat. “I don’t think—remember, you promised not to be pissed—but I don’t think this is a normal miscarriage.”

“Yeah, Toto,” he said—you had to get funny, what else did you do in an Econo Lodge with your girlfriend opening the oven door?—“and we’re not in Kansas anymore, either.”

“If you stay here, you’ll miss your game.”

He shrugged. “Exhibition match. I’ll tell them I got a flat tire.”

“I’m not going to have a baby, though. You know that, right?” She put her fingers on his face. He turned away.

“If I thought you were going to have a baby,” he said slowly, “I’d have taken you to a hospital.”

B
ut he hadn’t taken her. She hadn’t let him, Brooke thought. From the start it had been like that—she had been pigheaded, not listening to Alex Frazier with his facts, with his sensible plans. Now, as the afternoon wore on, as the sun shot through the window, the idea of the hospital drifted further away, to another world. “I feel like I have to go to the bathroom,” she said for maybe the twentieth time.

“Okay. I’ll help you. Up,” Alex said.

She looked at him. He looked like her father, his right temple resting on the fingers of his right hand, his left hand hanging downward
in a gesture of defeat. “No,” she said. “No, not that way. I’ve got to do it on the bed. It’s the baby, I think. The fetus. I don’t know. I’ve got to push it
out
.”

“So push it,” he said. He turned, put his hands on her knees. “It’s time, that means. Jesus, Brooke, don’t hold back.”

It was a wave, this pushing, that crashed over her head and then moved down through her, expelling everything in its path. She held her breath as it grabbed what was in her abdomen and tried to pummel it through the opening.

“It’s gone, now,” she said when it had passed. “I’m not sure anything moved.”

But it came again, a matter of seconds later. “Push,” Alex was saying now, only there was pain like a thick blanket between her and him so she could hear but without understanding. She clenched her teeth, squeezed her eyes, and bore down. Then it passed again. Then again—the wave, the pressure, the squeeze, oh my God the pain, the pain, the thing down there going nowhere, and then it passed.

Again and again.

At some point—had it been five minutes? two days?—she glanced over at the bedside clock, but the numbers swam.

“What time is it?” she asked. Coming out of a dream.

“Six fifteen. You’ve been pushing since three.”

“Oh Jesus, I forgot to call home. Jesus. Here it comes again.” And it did, but she couldn’t give it her attention, the wave of pushing and pain.

“You’re worn out, Brooke.” He had his cap off; his T-shirt was soaked in sweat. Stepping to the bathroom, he filled a plastic cup with water and drank it down; he motioned to her, but she shook her head. Filling it anyway, he brought it to the nightstand. “Worn out,” he repeated.

“Don’t talk about going to the hospital, Lex. Not now. Get the phone to work. Okay?” she said, and she started to cry. She was just so fucking tired.

“I think I should reach up. That’s what they do on
ER
. Reach up and see if you’ve got enough room, or whatever.”

“That’s TV, Alex.”

“They have doctors consulting.”

She didn’t move, not even when the next wave hit. She could hear him in the narrow bathroom, washing his hands. Nothing was right. Nothing ever had been right. Then he was back. His hand went up into her, a dull pressure. He kept the other hand on her knee, to steady himself. “I can feel something, up there,” he said at last. “It’s—like—protruding out of the main place, but it’s awful squeezed in here. And there’s a bone—your bone, I mean—that’s kind of in the way. I can’t get a grip on anything.”

“We’ve got to get it out, Alex. I can’t push anymore.”

“At the hospital—”

“You want the hospital?”

“I’m saying for you,” said Alex.

Brooke moaned again. He held her slippery hand. “I’ve got to rest,” she said when it passed. Her eyes were shut. “Let me rest. Go downstairs, okay? Pay for the phone? I’ll try again in a little bit.”

Alex flew out the door, escaping. He took the stairs down. The lobby was carpeted in deep red, with shrimplike curlicues in royal blue swimming through the plush. Music you couldn’t blame for anything piped through the stale air. “Here,” he said to the same clerk who’d checked them in. “We’d like to make a couple phone calls.”

“We don’t tolerate parties,” the clerk said. He had an oily mustache and a strange growth behind his left jaw—not a mole, more like scar tissue. He spoke with an accent.

“No, no. We’re not calling friends. Just some—some relatives. In the area.”

“We can monitor. Go over the limit, we switch you off.”

“Local calls,” said Alex. He unrolled the money and placed it on the polished counter. There was blood on the back of one hand. “Can I get a receipt for that?”

“What a world.” The clerk shook his dark head. “You’re an entrepreneur now.”

“I just want to make sure—you know, when we check out—”

“Yah, yah, you can have this piece of paper.”

While the clerk turned to find a receipt, Alex swiped his hand on his jeans. He gazed out the picture window. Out on Route 6, cars churned by. Upstairs Brooke would be moaning again, thrashing uselessly. It wasn’t alive in there; she was right. The thing he’d touched—it had been like a warm, wet rubber ball caught in a chute. You couldn’t get it out in one piece. And she couldn’t push it out. It was dead matter, that was all. At the hospital, they’d call it a miscarriage—or no, a stillbirth—and there would be Brooke’s mother looking at him like he’d raped her daughter, and his own dad lecturing him about whether he was ready to go off to college and run the risk of knocking up strange girls. Right now there was none of that; they knew nothing. Even Isadora, who’d given Brooke the abortion remedy five months ago, could think they’d just taken care of it themselves.

“Never mind about the receipt,” he said to the clerk.

“No, you take it! You take it, now you made me run it out!” The lump under the clerk’s left ear had gone reddish. He yanked the perforated sheet from the printer and thrust it across the counter at Alex. Alex crumpled it into his pocket, pushed out the glass doors, and sprinted across the parking lot.

A breeze had kicked up, the way it had been doing in late
afternoon—clouds on the horizon threatening, but they never delivered. This was what people on the outside were wondering: Would it rain this time, or would the drought go on forever? What about the reservoir? They hummed along, going home from work or heading for the game Alex was going to miss, and they thought about weather.