The Lost Daughter (30 page)

The photos surprised her—she’d forgotten about Alex’s taking them, with his new camera, one Saturday that first summer when they drove to a remote lake and went skinny-dipping. Shading her eyes in the bright sun, she studied the faded prints. There she stood, a tall, smooth-muscled girl with sun-kissed hair falling over her shoulders and onto the tops of her high, plump breasts. Her waist tucked in effortlessly and fanned out to broad, bony hips and thighs built up from volleyball and swimming. Her belly was flat as a board. Most of all, as the camera came in for close-ups, Brooke saw her own trusting eyes, the unguarded smile directed at the photographer. Her nose already had that pronounced bump in it—her father’s nose, looking almost as if it had been broken once and failed to heal properly—that had embarrassed her until Alex ran his finger down its ridge and pronounced it distinctive. She had no shame, being naked before him. He had been naked, too, those sturdy legs and lean torso, the nest of hair between his pectorals. Behind the naked girl—herself—lay a red checkered tablecloth spread on the sand, a picnic hamper, a broad cloth hat about to blow away in the wind. She remembered, suddenly, its blowing away; she had turned and run after it. Sure enough, when she picked up the next photo, there she was, long legs flying, buttocks white in the sun. When she had come back they had made love, there under the midday sun on the tiny, deserted beach.

Tears streamed down her cheeks. Here in these images, their color fading, was the love of her life. She couldn’t go on denying it, couldn’t go back to a union with a nice man whose frustration with her drove him to drink. Whatever the end of her marriage might bring, these photos told her to end it. She wiped her tears with the rough sleeve of her jacket and put the photos back. About to close the box, her hands touched a torn edge of paper—a letter, ripped in half. As she pulled it out, a hiccup of embarrassed laughter interrupted her weeping. Here it was, the letter to Dr. James, at Tufts University. She thought she had burned it. But something in her had wanted its fantasy preserved.

She pieced the letter together. Funny. She could almost remember flicking the Bic lighter, catching the corner of the envelope, seeing her own reflection in the window at night as the thing burned, the shadow pointing above her head, her face lit gold. But she had torn the thing and saved it.
I am with child
, she read on one of the scraps.
I have taken a potion
—here the page was torn. The next scrap held the end of the sentence—
but my face will surely bear the mark of my sorrow. I trust you to treat my fragile self, not with pity, but
—here it was torn again. She looked through the wooden box. The rest was missing. The envelope lay there, though, with the address she had neatly composed.

Shutting her eyes in the October sun, Brooke remembered the stone buildings of the university, the accent of the professor. She and her dad had eaten lunch in the campus bistro; he had smiled gently, patiently, as she told him how she would learn Middle English, Old English, how she would study
Beowulf
. They had stayed over in Boston and driven home early the next day for her volleyball practice.

Volleyball. Brooke placed a hand on her belly, remembering. The season had been mostly winter, but in spring they practiced outside, to finish out the season. They wore loose T-shirts over spandex
shorts. Even that May, no one had noticed her belly. Not that there had been much to notice—not compared to years later, when she’d been carrying Meghan and put on thirty pounds in the first five months. That was one bit of evidence she clung to, even now: Only eighteen pounds she’d gained that time, slight enough that you could have called it a lazy waist. If someone had noticed, things might have gone differently. But the fact that there was too little gain to be noticed kept her thinking there had been nothing in there, or nothing that could be called a baby.

That was the last time she’d played volleyball, that spring. She remembered the sand court behind the high school, the sun high overhead but the air still cool. She’d worked on her serve that season. She was never a power server, like her friend Lacey, but she was tall and a good spiker; she’d call, “Outside!” and someone would set it up for her, and she’d leap to meet the ball and punch it deep into the other team’s court. But everyone had to serve. That last day of her volleyball life, the coach had had her in position and was barking at her. “Don’t toss it, Willcox! Set it up and catch it on the heel of your palm!”

Her serves had kept going deep that day, or low into the net. Her balance had been off. She couldn’t seem to set the ball up straight. The sun bore down on her bare head—had the others been wearing baseball caps? Probably—and made her dizzy. “I’ve got to take a break,” she told the coach after she’d lost her third round at service.

“Period, huh?” said the coach. What had been her name? McQuilken, that was it, a wiry bleached blonde who chewed her nails through every game they played.

“Yeah,” Brooke had said without thinking. And then she had not been able to sit there, on the cool bench, with the heaviness lower in her pelvis than before, forcing her legs slightly apart. “I’m fine,” she had said after a minute, and McQuilken pulled a girl out of the net line on the other side and let her back in.

That was when she had seen Alex, muscular in his soccer gear, heading out with the others from the side door of the gym. Had seen him pause to watch her as she took the position she was more comfortable with, not serving but up front and to the right. He had waved his buddies on as the serve went over, then came back deep to Brooke’s side, and one of the Bowmans saved it to a sophomore in the center, and Brooke was screaming, “Outside! Outside!” and the ball arced high up, descending straight down toward her.
Baby
, she had thought, and she was wicked, wicked; she jumped high and slammed the thing sharply down, so that sand flew up where it hit.

That had been the night, yes, when she tore the letter up. Not burned it; tore it and put it away. It hadn’t happened after the night at the motel, but before. She had known her future could no longer go where she had been aiming, at mystical texts and romantic debates with consumptive professors. Her job was to get rid of the mistake inside her and then trudge on.

She crumpled the pieces of the old letter, rose, and went to pitch them into a metal trash bin on the path behind the bench. As she crossed the limestone path, she stepped around a short woman pushing a girl in a wheelchair up the slope. “Excuse me,” she started to say. The girl’s blond hair caught her eye. “Wait,” Brooke said. The crumpled paper in her hand, she stepped back. The tilt of the girl’s head drew her attention.

“We’re walking,” said the woman. But Brooke, ignoring her, was leaning down, to see the girl’s face straight on. The teenager’s eyes met hers. Her nose was narrow, with a pronounced bump just below the bridge, the same bump that used to make Brooke self-conscious as a teenager. Brooke gasped. She was looking into a mirror—not a mirror of herself, but a mirror of the girl she had just seen in the photos in the box, a mirror of the girl she had been.

“Do I know you?” she said to the girl in the wheelchair.

Something was wrong with the girl, with this breathing image of Brooke herself. Her head jerked up from where it had been lolling slightly to the right. Her bright blue eyes fixed on Brooke with the intensity of an eagle. Her mouth began to work, a series of quick hums and clicks. “I,” she managed to get out. “You. Where…have…you…”

Brooke reached out to touch her. She had to touch her, this girl. But the woman behind the chair barked, “Go away!” Her voice was high and sharp. Before Brooke’s fingers could touch the girl’s face, the woman had whipped the wheelchair around and was running down the hill, pushing the heavy thing, bumping over the lumps in the path. A moan floated from the girl. Brooke stood stunned.

Automatically she stepped to the waste bin and dropped in the crumpled letter. She stood as the wheelchair rattled down the path to the gas station below and disappeared. Then, seized with a realization of the impossible—impossible!—made possible, she started after it. She left the box, from which the breeze scooped out photos and scattered them over the meager lawn. She stretched her legs and flew down the hill.

W
alk, the doctor had said. Exercise the lungs. Lower your stress level. After lunch, Ziadek put the dishes away. He set his baseball cap on his head and tied on his shoes. Gripping his oxygen cart like a stroller he maneuvered one-handed, he headed out the door. The day was still glorious. He stepped clear away from Katarina’s house—encounters with his older daughter did not lower his stress—and toward the Quik Mart. The asphalt of the narrow road was crumbling; the wheels of the oxygen cart bumped and caught in the crevices. Ziadek stopped every hundred paces and waved to a neighbor or took in the look of the neighborhood, fêted
with bright leaves. Next month the leaf blowers would be out making their racket. For a moment, though, the place did not look like a skewed collection of cattle cars into which human beings had crawled for their last refuge. From the bright plastic bouquets washed clean by yesterday’s rain to the real-life pots of mums planted next to some of the white gravel walkways, the trailer park felt more like one of those doll villages the girls had played with when they were little, with miniature picket fences and houses with shutters and tiny vegetable gardens. It seemed, in other words, a community.

The Quik Mart was new—well, five years old—built as they finished turning the huge mound of landfill abutting the trailer park into a recreational park. People driving from Windermere to Scranton stopped there to pump gas, as did families bringing their kids to the new swings and baseball fields on the high plateau of the park. Ziadek couldn’t drive anymore or smoke anymore, so he had no use for the gas or the cigarettes, but he liked the Guatemalan couple who ran the place. They let him refill his coffee free and they told crazy stories of the drunks who drove through at night, and when he walked home from the Quik Mart he generally felt like a happy and fortunate man. Plus, they had taken on Luisa, hiring her to take out the trash and clean the place up, two hours every day at minimum wage. She could walk there by herself and walk home, and she had not yet begun complaining of anyone’s meanness.

On his way across the parking lot, Ziadek paused to exchange greetings with a handsome heavyset woman who was pulling a shopping cart with one hand and managing a wiry little dog with the other. Her name was Olga. She was a busybody, but she had been Marika’s friend, and for that Ziadek always stopped.

“Saw your girls go by, poor things,” Olga said in cheerful Polish. She always called them his
girls
and
poor things
.

“To the park,” he said. “Such a beautiful day.”

“Hard for the slow one to find work these days, I guess.”

“Haven’t you seen her here? She keeps the place shining for the rest of us,” Ziadek said evenly, as if twelve hours a week made for a salary. He forced a smile to his lips. Smiling, the doctor had said, would reduce his stress. Sure enough, as he curled his mouth, the oxygen seemed to flow more freely; his lungs expanded.

“Shouldn’t that younger one be in the special school? I see the bus coming.”

“She should, yes.” Ziadek nodded. Better to agree with Olga, not to argue or give her a story. The story would spread around the trailer park like a vine. “We are working on that.”

“Josef, it’s none of my business. But if the authorities find that poor girl wandering about—”

“It will be a problem, yes. Good to see you, Olga.” Ziadek tipped his baseball cap. He skirted the wiry little dog, who growled. He rounded a pair of trucks parked in back of the Quik Mart. From here he could see across the highway to the motel the Pakistanis used to run, where Luisa had first found Najda. It had changed its name many times and now was not even a motel any longer but some sort of amusement place for boys with money burning their pockets. Paintball, they called it. Seeing the façade nonetheless brought a wave of nostalgia—for those early, dangerous days with the infant; for the renewed life Ziadek had found, then, after losing his Marika. From here, too, he could see up the winding road to the plateau of the new park, with its spindly trees and scruffy grass. And from there, racing down the incline as if pursued by demons, came his daughter Luisa pushing the wheelchair, Najda’s pale hair flying in the breeze.

Ziadek unhooked his nose from the oxygen. Leaving the canister in the lot, he hurried toward his girls. Behind him he heard the wiry
dog yapping. On the highway, trucks honked as they zoomed past the Quik Mart. What could his child be thinking, racing the incline, when the wheels of the chair could suddenly catch and Najda tumble? Had they fought again? “Stop!” he cried as he ran. “Luisa, stop!”

She did not stop. He caught up at the bottom of the hill, where a light and a crosswalk protected them from the traffic coming off the busy road for the park or the gas pumps. Ziadek was out of breath, his head light. But Luisa scarcely paused for him even as he grabbed her arm. Her round face was white as powder, her lips drained. “She’ll find us! She’ll find us!” she cried as she hurried across the walk and the parking lot of the Quik Mart.

Ziadek stumbled after. “Who will find you?” he managed to gasp. “Is Delores up there? We will talk to her. You cannot run from her, child.”

“Not her. Not her. I gotta go,” Luisa called over her shoulder.

Ziadek made it as far as his oxygen, and there he had to stop or he would faint. Fitting the plastic back into his nostrils, he watched as Luisa jerked the wheelchair over the crumbling asphalt back toward their house. Najda, he noticed, had not uttered a sound. Her face had looked even stranger than Luisa’s—not so terrified, but more in awe, as if she had seen a spirit. When he had gathered his strength, he turned toward the house. To Olga, who stood by the side of the road open-mouthed, he nodded in a dark way that he knew would put a lid on anything the meddling woman might be tempted to say. Fittingly, a small cloud had drifted in from nowhere and blocked the sun, chilling the air as he made his way carefully home. He was an old man, he thought to himself. He could not keep up with this drama forever.