The Lost Daughter (3 page)

Inside, it was different.

Unlocking the car door, Alex paused for just a second. But no one needed him out here, that was the fact of it. He ducked his head inside the car and started rummaging around. He needed a tool. Something long and thin, but blunt. Baseball glove, Charlie’s dumb car games, a bunch of old magazines in the back. This was the junk car, his mom said. He moved the front seat, checked underneath. Windshield scraper, hockey puck, half an apple dried to a pucker. Then—under the magazines, when he got desperate and started just shoving stuff around—left over from the potluck she’d gone to a month back, the stainless steel serving spoon his mom had been looking for. It was coated with spinach gunk, a scrap of paper napkin stuck to the back.

“The ticket,” Alex said aloud.

He rode the elevator up with his eyes shut. Out into the universe, that was where he’d go if he could. Up and out, and tumbling gently over and over—no pain, no impossible tricks, only silence.

Back in the room, Brooke was already on the phone. “I don’t care about dinner,” she was saying, her voice high and light. “No, don’t keep it warm for me. We’ll probably get pizza. Yeah, a bunch of kids. Love you, too, Mom.”

Alex watched her hand tremble as she cradled the receiver. He stepped forward. “I got something,” he started to say. But Brooke was twisting back into the bed, her bare legs white. “Jesus,” Alex said. Below her the towels were dark red, swampy with blood.

“Something gushed.”

“Christ, this can’t be right. Jesus.” When he got near the bed he felt dizzy. He sank down on the other one. He’d heard of men fainting; he wasn’t going to do that. Just, there was so much of it. And the smell, like his uncle’s farm almost.

He thought of his coach, of that tone of voice he used at the half when they were down by three. “Here,” he said. He caught the blood up in the towels—there was a fair amount leaking through and over the sides—and when he’d run with them to the bathroom and thrown them in the tub, he came back with his Polartec jacket. “It washes out, right?” he said.

Brooke didn’t answer. Her hands were on her naked belly, pushing at it. Her skin looked glazed; her hair was a wild tangle from all the thrashing about on the pillow, and there was no grace left in her limbs. He’d never seen her so ugly—he’d never seen her ugly at all—and he’d never wanted her the way he did right then. This thing hurting her—he’d get rid of this thing.

“I’m not going away,” he said to Brooke. “Just to the bathroom, to get this spoon clean. You hearing me?”

He thought she nodded, though it might have been a tossing of her head. The bathroom was blue-white garish, the ceiling fan like a giant bee. He ran the water scalding; lathered the spoon up; scraped at the sticky bits with his thumbnail. Then the rinse, just as hot. No clean towels; he wiped it on three of the tissues that popped from a box in the wall.

“Now hold still,” he told her.

He took the shade off the bedside lamp and placed it on the rug beside the bed, to help him see. From outside came a slow roll of thunder, and a flash of lightning in the uncurtained window.

His right hand went in, as did the spoon held by his left. The spoon pushed and prodded at the blood-slicked rubbery walls.
When his fingers touched the round thing—
the head
, he made himself think it—he slid the bowl of the spoon around, like fitting a shoehorn around a heel. Pressing against the spoon, his fingers managed to grip and pull it. Pull and pull, Brooke screaming now, screaming, “Stop, Alex,” and it came, dragging its scrawny body behind it.

And there was—
yes
, Alex would admit it to himself, in the dark before dawn and much later—a moment where the spoon and the hand both squeezed too hard. Where the hard surface between them might have buckled just a little bit. But if it happened, when? On the way through the birth canal perhaps, exuberant that he had the thing now? Or perhaps just after, when he saw what must have been its face, and
yes
, there was a trace of life, not the kind of life he’d ever imagined but just the promise of it that he almost remembered from his own beginnings, before he was Alex or knew that he was anything. Over and over he would try to remember, to freeze the moment, but again it would pass, and only what followed would remain.

T
he afternoon of the christening party, the garden sparkled. It had rained the night before. Summer flowers rimmed the wet grass. The brick patio that Brooke had persuaded her boss, Lorenzo, to put in was large enough for the drinks table and a fair amount of milling around. The whole garden, in fact, had been Brooke’s project. The regular patrons of Lorenzo’s Nursery loved sitting in it. Drinking the iced tea the nursery provided, they would talk plants until they had persuaded themselves to try a new hosta or a wild geranium. The boost in sales since installing the garden was the main reason Brooke could co-opt the space for the christening. She and Sean had nothing like it to offer. Sean’s brother and sister-in-law, Gerry and Kate, whose son Derek was the focus of all the attention, lived in a crowded condo with a backyard the size of a shoebox. When Sean’s family got together, the event was bound to be boisterous. This time they were two dozen, not counting the children Sean’s family seemed to produce in droves. The garden at Lorenzo’s, even with soggy grass, was a godsend.

“Poor little bugger’s exhausted,” Sean said. He nodded at baby Derek, still clad in Irish lace but drooling in his stroller, his big head dropped to his shoulder. “Not like our Meghan, here.”

“Don’t remind me,” said Brooke, spilling more chilled shrimp onto the platter.

“What’d I do?” Meghan, a bundle of six-year-old energy with hearing keen as a bat’s, cartwheeled between cousins across the wet grass toward her parents.

“Screamed bloody murder all through the cleansing away of your sin,” Sean said. He kissed Meghan’s red hair. “You’d have thought it was an exorcism.”

“What’s that, Mommy?” Meghan asked, taking a shrimp. She always asked Brooke about words, even the words her father used.

Brooke smiled wanly. “Exorcism’s taking the devil out of you,” she said.

“Doesn’t always work,” added Sean.

Meghan stuck her tongue out at him and cartwheeled away.

“D’ja see that?” Sean said to his brother Gerald. “Girl gives her father no respect.”

It was a joke, but Gerry and Kate exchanged a look. Gerry said, “Our first was like that. Then she got a sister to look after. Set her straight soon enough.”

Brooke felt her husband’s quick intake of breath. It had to come up. How could it not, at a family christening? Still, she gritted her teeth. Would they never let up? Sean had three brothers and a sister. Every one of them had produced multiple offspring except for the youngest brother, who was gay and lived on the West Coast. Though no one attended church regularly anymore, they all christened their kids and described themselves proudly as Irish Catholic. Once, when the mild allusions and teasing about Brooke and Sean’s only child had grown more insistent than usual, Brooke had turned to
one of her sisters-in-law and asked if she didn’t think ZPG was a good idea. “ZP who?” the sister-in-law had replied, and Brooke couldn’t bring herself to press the point. In any case, the population growth of the O’Connor clan was far from zero, and Brooke’s in-laws considered that the number one—meaning Meghan—didn’t really count.

Sean, Brooke saw as she brushed the back of his palm with her fingers, didn’t really count it either. No matter how much he loved his daughter, Meghan alone would never be enough for him. He stiffened and made smart cracks when his siblings teased him. He couldn’t defend the choice Brooke had made, and he wouldn’t simply remind them all it was none of their business. “So I didn’t tell you?” he said now to Gerald. “We’re sending Meghan to you for the summer. You can clean up her act, hey?”

Brooke slipped away from the men. She picked up a platter of chicken wings and wove her way through the crowd. Though she stood taller and blonder—WASPier—than the rest of the O’Connors and most of their friends, she managed to glide almost invisibly. She made small talk about the garden and the church ceremony. Though Father Donnell’s eyes ranged up and down her slim white pants and silk top, their conversation extended only to the climbing roses and the science of pruning. There might have been a time when Brooke seemed an object of mystery to many in the christening party. But it had been seven years, now, since she had come to Connecticut and married Sean. Her quiet accommodation struck most of those who took a barbecued wing from her platter as a little dull, nothing more.

Everywhere, children darted through legs and cultivated grass stains. Counting Derek, Kate had informed Brooke, there were seventeen kids present under the age of ten. The small plastic climbing structure on a patch of sand in the corner of the garden was swarmed,
but Meghan and her favorite cousins preferred the grass and a game of chase among the flowers. “Shouldn’t we get them out of there?” Kate asked when Brooke stopped by the bench where she was sitting with Sean and Gerry’s mother, Matilda, known to all as Mum. Not yet sixty, Mum sat with her hands folded in her lap, a half pint of whiskey in her bloodstream.

“They’re fine,” Brooke said. “Wing?” She extended the platter and a fistful of paper napkins. Kate shook her head. Gingerly, with a pale thumb and forefinger, Mum reached forward. The edge of bone she pinched slipped away, shot across the platter, and ended on the grass. Mum bent down to retrieve it.

“No, no, Mum. I’ll get you another. Here.” Quickly Kate plucked a chicken wing and a napkin and cupped them in her hands, prepared to feed her mother-in-law like a toddler if need be.

“It’s a fine party,” Mum said to Brooke, ignoring the food. “But you should be giving it for your own, you know.”

“Mum!” said Kate. She glanced apologetically at Brooke.

“It’s okay,” said Brooke.

“Five I had, and look how they all turned out. Good young men.”

“Fanny’s a sweetheart, too,” said Brooke.

“So have you got another in the belly yet, Miss Brooke?”

“Mum, please,” said Kate.

“You want to shut me up, get me another drink.”

“In a minute. Eat your chicken.”

Mum took the wing and nibbled. Watching her, Brooke missed her own mother, who had promised to visit before the end of summer. Not that she was close to her mom—the ties that bound them were, in their own way, as tangled as Sean’s to Mum—but at the very least her mom would have no words of advice about family size. The kids were crowding around, begging for chicken wings. Brooke crouched and let them grab, then called after them to toss bones in
the garbage cans, wipe hands on napkins. When she glanced up, Kate was looking thoughtfully at her.

“We couldn’t have done this without you,” Kate said.

“I’m happy to share the space.”

“Not just the space. You planned everything.” Kate sighed. “I thought I could manage with four. Now I’m not so sure. This fellow’s the last, I’ll tell you that.” She leaned toward Brooke. Narrow-shouldered and snub-nosed, Kate had been a bouncy cheerleader when she married Gerry. Childbearing had widened her hips and burdened her breasts. She colored her hair a deep auburn. “They tied my tubes, when they took Derek out,” she confessed in a low voice. “I didn’t tell Gerry till after. We can’t afford another. We’ve got to get a house.”

“I think you’re fine with four. Two of each,” Brooke said.

“I wouldn’t have had the courage to do it if this one hadn’t been a boy. Feminism’s a dirty word with this clan.”

“I’m not sure it’s a word they can pronounce,” Brooke said, smiling.

“Still, you know. Mum’s got a point.” Kate glanced around. Mum had risen and was making her way purposefully toward the drinks table. “If you wait much longer, Meghan’ll be halfway through elementary school. Look how mine play together.” She gestured toward the climbing structure, where her two oldest—both girls, their ages sandwiching Meghan’s—chased each other around the slide. “More than six years apart, you’ll never get that pleasure. There’ll be other pleasures, of course,” she hastened to add. “I don’t mean that, if you’re having trouble, you should stop—”

“I appreciate your concern, Kate. Really, I do.” Brooke had straightened up. She liked Kate, she reminded herself. Kate had helped her learn the ins and outs of the O’Connors; had protected her from them. Her platter almost empty, she was already moving away. “We’re just taking our time,” she said.

She set the handful of wings down with the rest of the food, which looked fairly scavenged. Two of Sean’s cousins were combining platters, tucking the empty ones away. Cumulus clouds crept over the horizon; the air was growing heavy. Several stands of late iris and daylilies had been trampled, Brooke noticed. She’d have to get to work early tomorrow, cut away the ruined blooms, prop up the injured stalks. Sean’s younger brother Danny was tossing up chunks of watermelon and catching them in his mouth, to the delight of a gaggle of nieces and nephews who tried the same and were littering the grass with juicy pink blobs that would draw bees. By the begonias sat a human layer cake: Gerry with Meghan on his lap and baby Derek, now awake, on hers. Derek’s lacy christening gown trailed over Meghan’s knees. With her uncle’s arms cupping them both, Meghan was giving the baby a bottle. “Look at me, Mommy!” she cried when she saw Brooke. The bottle immediately dipped; the baby’s arms flailed. “I’m nursing!”

“Good girl,” Brooke said. “Keep the bottom up high, okay? Don’t want Derek to suck air.”

“Here you go, Derry. Here you go.” Meghan turned her attention back.

“She’s a natural,” Gerry said.

“She loves your little guy,” Brooke said. Though Gerry didn’t reply, she heard his remark in her head:
She’d love one of yours better.
They never let up, even when they were silent. Even Neal, the gay one, when he visited from San Francisco, asked what was in Brooke’s oven.

“Uh-oh,” said Meghan. Derek had twisted away from the bottle and begun to fuss.

“It’s okay, honey,” Gerry was saying. He tried to lift the baby, get the bottle, and slide Meghan down at the same time. Brooke stepped in and picked up Derek. As she put him to her shoulder, she saw
Gerry’s eyes widen, as if her knowing how to burp a baby was a miracle. She turned away so that he couldn’t see the aggrieved look on her face. Derek gave a hiccup and a belch.