The Lost Daughter (22 page)

I can’t
, she said to this voice. And the shell closed over her again.

Now Sean was drinking, and she was fleeing—not the booze itself, but the truths that the booze would eventually get to. She couldn’t bear the look of pure horror she imagined in Sean’s golden eyes.

He shifted in the bed; turned to her. His breath had the sour tinge of last night’s beer. “Hey,” he said. “You’re awake.”

“Can’t sleep.”

“Turn over.”

She obeyed and felt his warm hands on her shoulder muscles. One thumb pressed into a knot of muscle; as she felt it give way, a tide of well-being seemed to lap at the shores of her body. “Don’t you have to get up?” she asked.

“Ssh. Relax.”

She knew she wouldn’t fall back to sleep, but his hands felt good. She shut her eyes. “Lorenzo’s sick,” she said at last.

“Sick like a cold?”

“Sick like cancer. I think he wants me to start taking over.”

“That’s a big job.” His hands were straying, now, over her shoulder blades and around to her breasts. She started to tense again. If he brought up the idea of a second kid…“You want to run a nursery?”

“I think I would. I don’t want to think about Lorenzo, you know.”

“But he’s telling you to.”

She turned over. It was too dark to make out his features. “What do you want?” she said; and before he could answer “Another baby,” she added, “Do you want to keep working for Larry at the print shop?”

His finger pushed aside her bangs. They had not made love for more than a week. By evening he was testy, and she was distracted by the presence—in her head, even if she didn’t see him or return his calls—of Alex. Now she felt more than she saw his wistful smile. “I want to do music,” he said. His voice sounded a little dreamy, as if he weren’t awake enough yet to make sense. “I want to sing it. Teach it. Be better at it.”

“Then you should.”

“You know the Bach we’re doing.”

“You’ve been humming it.”

“Yeah, well.” He bent to kiss her neck, then her right nipple. From outside the door Brooke heard scratching—the dogs, their hearing too keen. Sean lifted up his head. He was hesitating. “Geoff—you know, the director—he’s wanting me…”

“What? Wanting you what? Sean, you’ve got to tell me.”

“Do I?” He was propped on his elbow now, his free hand cupping the back of her neck. An edge crept into his voice. “Because you don’t tell me a thing.”

The scratching at the door exploded. Behind it, Meghan’s piping voice. “Mo-o-m-m-y. You awake? Daddy?”

Before Brooke could answer, the handle turned. The dogs poured in. Bitsy jumped on the bed, a mass controlled by a wagging tail. Lex put his paws up, his wet nose at her shoulder. Meghan stood in the doorway, her blue pajamas ghostly in morning light.

“I had a bad dream,” she said.

His back to Brooke, Sean swung his legs free of the bed. The moment bled back into the night, and the day began.

R
iding the escalator to the bowels of the Boston MBTA, Alex felt himself in a farce. What was he doing, all dressed up like a banker? Floating downward in a phalanx of men and women in summer wool, into the hot, rubbery air of the Kenmore T station. As if his life, which ought to have been spent in a jail cell, had some connection to corporate portfolios or the Asian markets. As if there were some point to this daily exercise—the shave, the shoe polish, the brisk walk to the T, the crowded ride, the glass-walled building on Water Street. Days when he felt this way, his small office on the fifteenth floor, with its sliver of a harbor view, felt like a jail cell itself. And yet he got there every day on time, opened his briefcase, checked his BlackBerry for meetings.

The subway train felt primitive, squealing and bumping over the tracks. For six years Alex had taken the Yamanote Line from Ueno station down to Mercator’s charcoal slab of a building across from Tokyo’s Imperial Palace. Now he leaned against the cracked vinyl of his seat, shut his eyes, and tried to put himself back in the crowded
Tokyo car, with the departing melody from Ueno like a child’s finger exercise. Back to the house he and Tomiko had found in Asakusa, the old part of the city, near Tomiko’s parents and walking distance from the primary school where they dreamed of sending their children. No, not dreamed of; planned on. And Tomiko—she was so smart, with her Ph.D. from Stanford, her dissertation on multinationals, her postdoc at Hitsubashi—had begun cutting back her hours. She wanted time with Dylan; she wanted to write. A blog, she said, for women executives in Japan, and maybe it would be a book or maybe not, she didn’t know, she was experimenting. Three days a week they brought Dylan to the
hoikuen
, a day care place so spotless and calm Alex felt he was leaving his baby boy to be painted into a still life. Then they would ride the Yamanote Line together. As the commuters packed in, Tomiko’s body pressed against his. At the stop before his she got off for the America-Japan Society, the only place willing to give her flexible hours. Sometimes Alex got off with her. He walked by the shuttered bookstores in Kanda before submitting himself to the skyscrapers and the murmur of investment opportunities that it was his job to capture before they became shouts.

How long had that golden season lasted? Three months—Alex counted them now on the Boston T, October November December, the fall Dylan turned two—before Dylan’s health and Tomiko’s job collided and she threw herself into caring for him full time. By December they knew there would be no kindergarten for their son. No more
hoikuen
, no more romps in Ueno Park with Tomiko’s dogged father chasing the laughing boy under cherry blossoms.

Still Alex had ridden the train, into the heart of the city at eight, back by nine P.M. if he was lucky. Had jogged home from the station; wrapped his slender, brittle, indomitable wife in his arms; sat by the bed of the sleeping child, sipping red wine and listening to Dylan breathe.

You don’t feel it like I do, Tomiko had said, after it was over.

What do you mean? I feel like I’ve died myself.

Not like I do. I watched him every minute. I saw it take a piece of him every minute. Like sand through an hourglass, and you can’t tip it back up. You didn’t feel him fighting, like I did, and your insides torn out bit by bit. You didn’t feel that.

All right, have it your way. I didn’t.

The T squealed into Copley Square. Loud commuters boarded, swinging their briefcases and cracking jokes. Alex gave up his seat. That life was gone, he reminded himself. Gone no matter what. Dylan’s fight had been fixed from the start. Here in this corner, ladies and gents, we have a dark-eyed mischievous toddler with a crooked smile and his mother’s heart-shaped face. And here, in this corner, we have Death.

But there had been another fight, like a shadow behind Dylan’s. And in it, Alex himself had been Death, and his opponent had not yet uttered his first cry. That truth had frozen him. While Dylan struggled and Tomiko suffered, Alex had ridden the train, back and forth, and sat in his son’s room and lain next to his wife and listened to her weep, and the horror of it all had pinned him down so that Tomiko thought his heart was stone. Now he had lost both of them, Dylan to a tiny coffin in the ground and Tomiko to a set of suitcases by the door. All because he could not own up to what he had done fifteen years ago.

As they pulled out of Boylston, others rose and crowded by the exit doors. In Tokyo, they would have been standing already, the seats folded up for the commuter rush, the odor of sweat and men’s cologne thick in the air. When the doors opened at Tokyo Central, a swarm of dark suits would explode from the train like contents under pressure. Now Alex reclaimed his seat, his hands clasped over his briefcase. He tried to shake his mind into clarity. He had no wife
anymore, he reminded himself, no child to be responsible to. The time had come to address the great, squatting monster of his guilt, to do penance.

Downtown Crossing, and Alex chose the stairs over the escalator. He climbed into the dry crisp air of early fall. Around him, men who looked like him checked their cell phones. He pulled out his BlackBerry, then tucked it back. He felt a cold sweat on his belly. What if Brooke said no? What if she said, simply, “Don’t go back to Windermere”? What if she said, “Don’t go. I love you”? If she said, “If you don’t go, I love you. If you go, I love you not.” If she said any of these things, would he still take next week off, drive to central Pennsylvania, and find someone to whom he could confess a fifteen-year-old crime? The last time he went to Hartford, he had told himself it would not matter what Brooke said; she had only to know his resolution, and then he would be on his way to the authorities, whoever they were. But as soon as he saw her, he felt a pull on his resolve. And so he had brought it up—had said
I did something. I killed him
—but when she dismissed his guilt as just that, the phantom guilt people feel when something bad has happened, he hadn’t pressed on.

Brooke would hold him responsible eventually. Of that he felt sure. She hadn’t escaped the past, after all, any more than he. Like a kaleidoscope her face had changed while he’d taken that phone call—from a colorless loveliness that betrayed no feelings to a collage of set-aside ambitions, sparks of intelligence, fierce passions. Everything she had chosen—
everything
, he realized with a strange quickness at his heart—had stemmed from the fear and shame brought on by what happened to her when she was a girl of seventeen. Her botched solution to an accidental pregnancy had led her to give up college, to take a job tending mute plants, to harbor dumb animals, to marry a man she thought she could never
disappoint—in short, to bury in some remote place everything that had made Brooke Brooke. There was the daughter—but even when it came to children, Brooke wouldn’t let herself off some invisible hook. Spirit children, she’d called them, the ghosts haunting her.

He would take her blame onto himself, he thought as he swung through the revolving doors into the Mercator building. He could at least do that. Doing what he needed to do, he would make at least one person whole.

Meetings all day. The markets were tanking. Alex’s boss, Peter Lloyd, had a world map on his wall, with colored pushpins for the Mercator offices that offered diversified investments, the branches that handled only corporate accounts, the storefronts that presented a quirky alternative to Schwab or Fidelity. In Japan, Alex had calibrated capital and cash flow so as to package mutual funds that would rise in the Morningstar ratings. Here, he looked at the patterns on the map and calibrated strategy. Which colors meant survival, which would bring destruction? “At least,” Peter said as they wrapped up, “we stayed out of the mortgage mess.”

“Not in Asia, we didn’t,” admitted Alex.

“That’s why the Asian offices have gone”—Peter gestured toward the map—“from green to blue. And why you’re here.”

He was supposed to feel grateful, Alex knew. He had salvaged what he could of the Tokyo base. But business success, right now, tasted like chalk. “I’ve got Hartford again on Monday,” he said.

Peter Lloyd regarded him from under flaring white eyebrows. “And I expect a report on my desk,” he said, “by Wednesday.”

“Springfield as well,” Alex said—though Wednesday was a lifetime away, and Springfield just another pushpin on a map—“That’ll be Tuesday, though. Separate trip.”

“Going to the Sox game tonight?”

“Buddy of mine’s got a couple of box tickets,” Alex said.

Peter whistled. “Well, aren’t you the lucky youngster.”

The buddy was Brian Whiting, his old high school classmate, who had been calling Alex ever since he landed in Boston. Alex hadn’t planned to get in touch with anyone from Windermere—well, Brooke, though that had been less a plan than an instinct—but Brian had heard from his family, who had heard from Alex’s mom, and there had finally been no avoiding him. The Sox, fresh off last year’s Series, were up against the Yankees, and Brian had made it clear he was offering Alex pure gold. He should be grateful, Alex thought as he packed up for the weekend. Along with Jake, who was still back in Windermere, Brian was his oldest friend. He was an attorney now in Providence, private practice, criminal defense, a success story. He wanted to get Alex settled in Beantown, find him a girlfriend, a new life.

He dropped his briefcase at the flat he’d rented on Bay State and changed to jeans. The night was cool, breezy, leaves beginning to drift from the trees. As he exited the building, his phone rang: Charlie. “Hey, big brother,” she said.

“Hey, kiddo. You having fun this weekend?”

“Maybe. There’s this new guy, Pablo, he’s having a party. Or we could take off for Windermere.”

“So soon? I thought you were talking fall break.”

“Mom says the leaves are changing already. You want to go?”

His stomach clenched. “Not yet,” he said.

“Why not? Do you have to, like,
prepare
for a trip to Windermere?”

She laughed, and he tried to join in. “No, I mean I’ve got stuff to do this weekend. Fall break’ll be fine. I’ll take a few days.”

“Good, because I want to do research there. For my moral phil paper.”

He chuckled. “What, on the moral qualities of autumn leaves?”

“Funny man. There’s one of those big Christian groups out there, picketing Planned Parenthood. I thought I’d interview them. Hear their side. Look at their cute photos of unborn babies. I am a college student. My mind is open.”

He had to stop. He leaned against an iron railing at the corner. Choking, he kept his voice light. “Well, just be sure it’s not so open that your brains fall out,” he said.

Charlie, Charlie
, he thought when he could let himself breathe again. He had been the upstanding one, she the pile of mischief. Yet by the time he was her age, he had already been marked, branded, guilty. What would she think of him, when she came to know?
If
, he tried correcting himself, but the word came back,
when
.

Brian was waiting at the Cask’n Flagon, right across from Fenway. “Christ,” Alex said when he had woven his way past the Sox fans to the lean guy waving his hand. “You’re bald.”