The Lost Daughter (21 page)

“Don’t you keep me from her.” He turned. He felt his legs sway a little under him. “Meghan wants to take ballet,” he said.

Brooke sighed audibly. She had taken the seat across from him at the table and lit a pair of candles; soft light fell across the plane of her cheek. “We talked about that last month. She made a choice, now she should stick to it. She’s got soccer this fall—”

“I will pay,” he said, “for the lessons. I will not have her mother hold her back.”

“Listen to you talk,” she said. But he was already out of the room. All the dogs got up and started to follow him—but when they saw he wasn’t going outside, they returned to Brooke. They were her dogs, after all. From their cage, Dum and Dee twittered mindlessly. He finished the beer in one swig and set the empty bottle on a bookshelf. Holding on to the railing, he pulled himself up the steps. Meghan was in her room, her bedside light on. On her bed, the cardboard she had brought home lay open. Humming tunelessly, she moved plastic toys around the board.

“Hey, Bug,” he said. He lifted the chair from the hallway and set it beside her bed.

She looked at him and made a face. “Ew, Daddy. You stink.”

“Grown-up smell, honey. You winning your game?”

“It’s not a winning game.” She took her playing piece—some pink princess figure from a Happy Meal box—and moved it over the crooked squares. The squares had stickers pasted into them with sums: 2 + 3, 5 + 9, 3 + 7. Around the board Meghan had drawn kitten faces in little clusters of three and four and eight. She held her piece over the square with 6 + 7 glued down.

“Thirteen,” Sean said. Meghan frowned. She had not drawn thirteen more squares. “Walk it backward,” he said, sweeping a hand over the board. “Who cares?”

“I care.” Meghan’s voice trembled.

“The phone ring for Mommy today? While I was gone?”

“I don’t know, Daddy.” Suddenly she picked up the pink princess and flung it across the room, hitting the cat Blackie, who yowled and ran out. “I hate arithmetic! I hate Taisha!”

“Everything okay up there?” Brooke called from below.

“What’s not to be okay?” he called back.

“Meghan should be in bed!”

“Is that a fact?”

A short pause followed, then the inevitable. “I’m going for a walk. Night night, Meghan!”

Meghan had pushed out her lower lip. She looked tired. “Night, Mommy,” she said, but not loud enough for her mother to hear. Sean did not say anything. He looked out from Meghan’s window to watch Brooke turn down the sidewalk, her shoulders hunched, hugging herself.

I
t was awful, this agitation. Leaves began drifting down from the trees; in the nursery, they were cutting back hours, putting everything to bed for the winter. Yet Brooke felt her heart like March, when the ground thaws and streams begin running everywhere, when last year’s living things rise out of the mud, stinking and fertile.

For years she had told herself she could not have loved Alex. They had been too young for love. Her own carelessness had hurt them too much. In any case, she had reasoned, he would not have loved her for long. He was better looking than she, more at ease; girls flocked to him. She, by contrast, was a little odd—pretty enough in a gawky, artless way, but easily flustered, her very passions making her ill at ease with carefree young people.

And it was all so long ago! Fifteen years! Unprompted, she would not have recognized Alex in the pained face, with its hollow cheeks and dress-up eyeglasses, that had stood with her in the mist. Six years ago, in a last bit of wistful news, her mother had told her Alex
was married and living in Japan, half a world away. Now, each time she thought of him in a Boston apartment, back within her range, she ordered her heart to slow, her lungs to expel the breath they held so tight.

Almost two weeks after he came to find her at the nursery, she drove the truck back from Simsbury to the main site in Hartford to find her boss waiting for her. Shanita had gone home early for a sick kid. Lorenzo sat on one of the benches by the greenhouse, a crisp straw hat shielding his face from the lowering sun and his hands on the knees of the jeans that he always kept mysteriously pressed to a sharp crease. He looked old, Brooke thought, and frail, like an old Italian winemaker who should be napping away the afternoons on a terrace outside Naples. “Don’t you trust me to lock up?” she said as she stepped down from the cab.

Lorenzo smiled, his lips thin. “I was waiting for you,” he said. “It is time for us to talk.”

“Funny,” said Brooke—though it was not funny, nothing these days was funny—“you’re the second guy this month to tell me that.”

He stood, pressing hands to knees, to help himself up. Lorenzo wasn’t seventy yet, and he had always been vigorous. Dreading and denying, Brooke knew what was coming. “Have a glass of wine with me,” he said.

“Second one to ask that, too.”

The invitation itself wasn’t unusual. How many times had they finished a busy day in Lorenzo’s small air-conditioned office, clinking glasses of Chianti? Of all people in Hartford, Lorenzo was the one to whom Brooke had come closest to revealing her past. Just last spring, when they had finished setting up for Easter and had retired to the office to toast the holiday and talk about Lorenzo’s baroque faith in the whole Christ-child story, she had blurted out, “You know, I gave birth once. Once before Meghan, I mean. A stillbirth.”

And Lorenzo had put his dry, warm hand over hers and squeezed the back of the palm. “Not with your husband,” he had guessed.

“No,” she had said. Then she had wept, quietly but for what had felt like a long time, while her boss just kept his hand on hers and now and then patted it, saying, “Go on. Go on, dear. Go on.”

Now she looked at her watch. “I can’t, Lorenzo,” she said. “I’ve got to pick Meghan up.”

“I thought your husband did that.”

“Not this week.” She met his brown eyes. She had told no one, not even Shanita, of the unsettled weather at home. Ever since her mother visited—and that was the easiest, to blame her mom, who trailed anxiety behind her like perfume. But her mom wasn’t at fault, she was. She had to focus on her life now, to push the past back into its box and seal it up tight. The effects jangled all around her. Sean was drinking one more beer after dinner, then two, now three. Meghan had started acting out. This morning she had refused to dress herself; and when Brooke caved and played along, pulling Meghan’s Cinderella underpants over her long legs and bunching a Hello Kitty T-shirt to pop over her head, Meghan waited until the whole exercise was through before she stripped everything off and demanded an outfit with no pictures on it. Only a call to Sean at work had gotten Meghan to knock it off.

And yet just this morning, clutching her bottom lip in her teeth, she had answered Alex’s persistent calls with a text message. They could have a drink, she wrote, on Monday night. She didn’t mention that was Sean’s night at choral practice. She had felt, pressing Send, like a sneak. She would invite Alex over, she had told herself many times; once he met Sean and Meghan, everything would fit back into its place. Only that wasn’t so. Because if Sean were to meet Alex, he would have to learn what Brooke had done with Alex, what she had kept hidden all these years.

Funny, she thought now, standing in the nursery parking lot, how she could tell Lorenzo about a lost child, and not her husband whom she loved.

Lorenzo had removed his straw hat. A cool breeze lifted his hair. “You run along then,” he said. “Next week we can—well, actually, next week I’m going into the hospital.”

Blood drained from Brooke’s face. She had sensed this, sensed he was terribly ill. But she did not want to hear it. She searched his tanned face. “Can you tell me?”

“They think I’ve got a year. Maybe a bit more, if I do all the nonsense they’ve got lined up for me.”

“My God, Lorenzo. No.”

“I’m afraid yes, my dear. It’s not something you can quarrel with.”

“Cancer?”

He nodded. “Pancreas. They never catch it in time. That’s what they told me. So I have to make some plans, Brooke. And they are going to involve you. Like it or not.”

“I don’t know what to say.” She looked at her watch again, as if the hands would have moved backward. “I’ve got to go. Can I take you to the hospital? Can we talk tomorrow? Over the weekend?”

“No, no.” He took her arm. Gently he steered her toward her car. “Weekend’s for your family. They’re keeping me overnight, I think. You can come see me.”

“St. Francis Hospital?”

He nodded. He opened the door of Brooke’s car for her. Then he took hold of Brooke’s temples, bent her down, and kissed her forehead. His lips were barely moist. “Sneak me in a glass of wine,” he said. “They will claim it will kill me, but they will be wrong about that.”

Awful, she thought, awful. She loved Lorenzo like a father, her
own having died a year after she came to Hartford. Once home, she wanted to tell Sean, but he spent the evening practicing his music, letting the distance between them grow, and she said nothing. She put six beer bottles into the recycle bin.

That night her dream came back, for the first time in years. She called it the Warehouse Dream. In the predawn she woke unsettled. Beside her, Sean breathed noisily from the beer. She remembered the first time she’d had the dream, when she still lived safe in her parents’ home, no one suspecting what had gone on in a motel room five miles from town. In it, she was roaming a large warehouse, or an underground catacomb. She was both looking for someone and fleeing someone. They were strangers, both the one she sought and the one she fled, but she had killed one of them and the other was seeking her out. She used to wake with her heart banging in her chest. When she would go out in the daylight, following a night with one of these dreams, she had felt the sting of accusation from everyone she saw. It was the Warehouse Dream that had first made her feel she could not bear to look at Alex. He had said he loved her. Only love could have led him to tolerate her murderous foolishness, to stay with her, to spare her. But the day would come when he, too, turned and accused her.

This time the Warehouse Dream was set not in a warehouse, but in the new nursery in Simsbury, with its arbors and hanging roses and a greenhouse filled with shards of glass. She kept thinking Lorenzo would come take charge, set things to rights, but he never came; and then she was running, running to find what she had killed, to flee what would kill her. She woke sweating, in darkness. She lay breathing while light gradually filtered through the Venetian blinds, bringing Saturday with it.

Always, she thought as Sean turned and she fit herself around the bend of his strong back, she had known her past would catch up
to her. For months and even years, she had thought someone would find the remains of the fetus. They would charge her with a crime, though she didn’t know what crime. Had she miscarried? Aborted? Or had she, in her young and dreamy foolishness, killed a child? She had said only, “It’s dead, isn’t it?” and Alex had nodded, and she had turned her face away. She had been weak with loss of blood, dizzy, her vision blurred. She could not say, now, why she was so certain it had been a girl. Need for her baby had flooded her like the need to breathe. But she could not have her baby; there was no baby. Alex had left the motel room with the bloody bundle under his jacket. When he returned there was no bundle, and she had asked no questions.

When she had moved away from Windermere, the Warehouse Dream had followed her. For a time she thought no one would touch her again. She would spend her caresses on animals, on lame and discarded and flawed creatures. She would bend her passions to plants. Flowers and dogs, bushes and birds, she thought, had no moral code. They never, even silently, accused.

Then she had met Sean. She had never known anyone—anything—like him. He seemed made, almost literally, of honey—his sandy hair, the sun-kissed skin, amber eyes. His voice pulled on the cords of her heart. And he did not frighten her, the way everything else human had since that wretched night in the motel. In his arms, she almost believed she could emerge from the cocoon she’d spun around herself. The dream didn’t stop, but it came less frequently; she woke with her nerves intact. If she could be careful, she told herself, and steady, if she kept her head down, if she made no more hideous mistakes, there might still be a life for her.

Seven years ago, when Sean lay beside her and talked about having a kid, Brooke felt she had found her redemption. Until then, she had been a girl who, blessed with a baby, had poisoned it and let her
boyfriend dispose of its tiny human remains. With Sean she was being given a window of grace, a chance to do something right. Bringing Meghan into the world concluded that strange pact she had made with the ghost of the stillborn child.
I will love you this time
, she found herself whispering to the baby.

Two weeks ago, with Alex, was the first time she had ever told anyone about this crazy idea of the spirit children. And even then, she hadn’t admitted how they still scared her. Every time Sean pushed for a second child, she pictured the soul of the one she had destroyed. Out of pity, it had allowed her to have Meghan. If she indulged herself in a second child, if she acted, truly, as if nothing in her past could cripple her, it would have its way. It would show her different. And so she had retreated to lame excuses to postpone a second pregnancy: the bed rest for Meghan, her work. Sean hadn’t bought the excuses. He had come to hate her for her stubbornness. And so, on her long walks alone through the park, Brooke had chipped away at her own shell. When she pictured a second child and the nightmare images began—it would be deformed, she would stumble and drop it in the street, they would all perish in a car crash, Meghan would fall ill and die—she shut her eyes, even as she walked, and let her breath out, and breathed in slow. The past was the past, she told herself. Her risk was no greater than any other woman’s. Wasn’t Meghan proof enough? She had done her penance.
No, you have not
, a little voice said when she strayed off the asphalt path onto the grass and her eyes snapped open.
You have not told Sean.