The Lost Daughter (31 page)

“So,” he said as he entered the trailer, blinking in its sudden darkness. “What bogeyman has frightened the two of you?”

Najda had gone to the window, where she sat like a statue, looking out. Luisa hung over the kitchen table, her head in her arms. Ziadek drew himself a glass of water at the sink. He would rather have had the Quik Mart’s coffee, but he was in no mood to brew it for himself.

“So?” he repeated.

“She
saw
us,” Luisa said into her arms.

“Who, that fat cow, that Delores? What of it? What is the worst that can happen?”

Luisa was shaking her head, but it was Najda who answered. “No,” she said. Then, as if the word had broken a spell, she began to jerk her mouth the way she did when she had too many words in her head and no way to let them out.

“Who then?” Ziadek sat heavily at the table. Gently he shook his daughter’s shoulder. Luisa would not look up. “Najda, come to me,” he ordered.

The girl buzzed her wheelchair around. Her blue eyes were fierce, penetrating, the eyes of a lovely young hawk. To Ziadek’s surprise, when she came close, she leaned forward. She reached out with her good hand and stroked her mother’s shuddering head, stroked the short full hair down to the nape of the plump neck. She made cooing noises deep in her throat. Then she turned to Ziadek.

“Who approached you in the park, child?” he said.

“Me,” she said simply.

“Yes, you. Who spoke to you? Who frightened your mother?”

“Me,” she repeated. She licked her lips; she swallowed. “
Like
me,” she said. She held her hand out, the palm vertical and facing her, like a mirror. “She, like me,” she said, as clearly as Ziadek had ever heard her speak. She picked up a lock of her hair, pointed to her features one by one. “Hair. Eyes. Chose. Neeks.” She shook her head. “Nose,” she corrected. “Cheeks. This person”—she reached out
again to stroke Luisa, who had stopped shaking with tears and lay buried on the table, but she spoke directly to Ziadek—“This person…is…Najda…sister.”

Sister
, Ziadek thought. He let his breath out. Then a new realization swept over him. Just a short time ago he had looked over the highway toward the place that had been the motel. Fifteen years ago, guessing at the identity of the woman who had left an infant there for dead, he had pictured her as very young, too young to understand that there were places to leave such babies. Young enough to be mistaken, as Luisa sometimes was, for Najda’s sister. Fifteen years ago, Ziadek had thought this present moment possible, even likely. Over the years the likelihood had faded, grown impossible. But it was never impossible. Both Najda and Luisa could be making a complete and silly mistake. They could also be right. And if they were right, it was not her sister Najda had seen.

“Oh, my darlings,” he said. And he drew on his oxygen, needing all his strength.

B
rooke could have caught up to them. As she rounded the gas station, panting for breath, she had seen woman and wheelchair turn a corner between rows of trailer homes. But the panic etched on the woman’s face dissuaded her. If by some miracle—but it surely wasn’t—if an infant could have survived not only Isadora’s poison tea but also whatever Alex thought he had done, then Brooke had no right to interfere with whatever saint had rescued that child. But it wasn’t possible. Her eyes, after looking at those photos of herself as a kid, were deceiving her.

She had retreated up the hill, gathered the papers and photos from the overturned box, and driven back to her mother’s condo. The rest of the day, she revisited the search of the day before. She drove to Scranton and slid reels of microfilmed issues of the
Times-Tribune
through the reader. No dead babies reported. No live babies found. She stopped at the police station to ask for Jake, but he was off duty. She returned to her mom’s condo, where she managed to navigate the conversation around the shoals of her foundering
marriage and her lost potential. She kept her cell phone on silent, so she could check it and see the six missed calls from Alex without letting on. She called Sean and was grateful when he didn’t pick up. The weekend, she said to voice mail. She needed the weekend. She would bring home a present for Meghan, to make up for all the nights with no stories.

“You imagined it,” she said aloud to herself, more than once during the day. “You imagine things. You imagined it.”

Through the night, in her mother’s small spare room, she lay on her back, staring at the ceiling. She couldn’t shake the image of the girl’s face, those probing eyes, the bump in the bone of the nose. But what was she going to do? Barge in on a strange family in their sad trailer home? Say, “Let me have another look at you. Where were you born? When were you born? Is this woman your mother? Look at me. Am I your mother? Aren’t I your mother?”

Next day, instead of seeing Jake, she drove out to Trails End Estates. She stopped at the Quik Mart. A cup of coffee—that would help. Clear her head. Put her back on the track she was aiming for: to prove that her distant miscarriage could not have been helped. To steer Alex away from his mission of confession and toward…well, toward a future. That was it. A future unburdened by the guilt that was Brooke’s alone.

“Are you not the lady flying by,” the fellow behind the Quik Mart counter asked her, “yesterday noontime?”

Brooke kept her eyes averted. The place was brightly lit and smelled of disinfectant. Two rickety round tables were set up by the ice cream freezer, filled by a quartet of oldsters. Though the place was a chain store with no sign of hominess, it seemed to have taken the place of a neighborhood gathering spot. The old people whispered among themselves and glanced at Brooke. “That was a misunderstanding,” she said softly.

“You the new social worker?”

Brooke risked a direct look at the fellow. He was dark-skinned, Indian looking—South American, she thought. “Social worker for—” she began.

“Our leetle Najda. I tell old Zukowsky, I tell him, ‘They will find out.’ But you cannot tell that girl a thing. She don’ want go to school, she don’ go.” Leaning across the counter, he beckoned Brooke. She bent toward him, her coffee steaming. “That girl?” he said. His breath smelled of tobacco and spearmint. She nodded. “She ees one fucking
genius
.”

“How do you—” Brooke began.

“She come in here, yes? By herself, in that chair. Bzz, bzz.” He gestured with his hands, to show a wheelchair rolling around. “She peek up the
New York Times
. She don’ buy the thing. Okay. She jus’ flip open, yes? To the crossword puzzle. And she seets there, making the words with her mouth. Like thees.” He mimed what looked to Brooke like the onset of an asthmatic attack, his lips curling and twisting. “So one day I tell her, okay, I buy thees paper for you. You give me the words, I write them in.”

“ ’Cept I had to spell ’em for you, Martín!” called one of the oldsters from the table.

Martín shot them a look, but kept talking in an undertone, as if he and Brooke were having a secret conversation. “She finish the fucking thing,” he said, tapping the glass counter with a scarred finger, “in twenty minutes. And eet was the Sunday paper!”

Brooke was having trouble processing what this man was telling her.
Najda
, she repeated to herself.
Zukowsky.
“That’s impressive,” she said.

“So I tell you, Mrs. Social Worker,” he said, standing straight. “Whatever you do, you don’ put that creepled beauty in with retards.”

“Thank you for the tip,” Brooke said. She paid for the coffee. She wanted to ask how old the girl was, how long the family had lived at Trails End. But a social worker would know such facts. “I’ll try to do right by her,” she said.

In the parking lot, she called up information on her cell phone and got the address. Zukowsky, 561 Trails End Court. Anticipation squeezed her heart. Slowly she drove around the complex, noting the faded plastic flowers and crooked awnings, the busted pickups strewn like a giant’s neglected toys in the back lots. Before long she found it, the number 561 in brass numerals nailed into a post on the porch. The trailer itself was yellow with green shutters, well maintained. Its shades were drawn. She sat with the engine idling, just looking at the place. Then a stocky red-haired woman banged out the back of the next trailer and crossed the yard to number 561. She stared at Brooke, her brows knit together. Quickly Brooke put the car in gear and drove away. What was she thinking? In their eyes she would be a nutcase, this woman arriving out of nowhere, wanting another look at their disabled daughter.

“I’ll be home after the weekend,” she told Meghan when they talked that evening on the phone. “Did you go to school with Taisha today? Is that working okay?”

“Unh-uh,” said Meghan. “Daddy took me. Daddy’s on vacation.”

“Can I talk to Daddy?”

When Sean took the line, his voice was low and almost intimate, the way he used to sound when they lay in bed together after a long day apart. “I took some days,” he said. “Business is slow.”

“Really.”

“Brooke, I haven’t touched the stuff. Not that I’m not tempted.”

She softened. He sounded so tired, and so careful. “I’ll be home soon.”

“Where are you?”

“Just—checking some stuff out.”

“He came by.”

“Who?” Brooke asked, though she knew.

“Your old friend.”

“He’s not—”

“I told him I didn’t know where you were. I said I’d let him know if I found out. But I won’t if you don’t want me to.”

“Just give me a couple more days, Sean.”

“Meghan misses you.”

“I miss her, too.”
And you
, she almost added, but she didn’t know if that was true. All her heart had room for right now, it seemed, was the face she had glimpsed in the park, before the girl and the woman took off.
Zukowsky. Najda Zukowsky.

It took another day to screw up her courage. First she had to have lunch and a beer with Jake, Alex’s best buddy from high school, who frowned when she told him she wanted access to the police department’s cold-case file. “You don’t want to tell me why,” he said—leaning across the table, his chin resting on his knuckles. Jake looked the same as in high school but with padding—fuller face, thicker neck, broader chest, bigger gut. He had married Karen, his childhood sweetheart. Three kids already. Already Jake had asked if Brooke wouldn’t come for supper, and Brooke had concocted excuses—her mom’s health, family stuff, she only had a day or two before heading back to Connecticut.

“I can’t tell you yet,” she said, meeting his small, round eyes.

“Hmm.” His jaw tightened. They had talked about Alex, how Alex had come to see his mother for just one day, before settling into his new place in Boston. He hadn’t called Jake, hadn’t stopped to catch up with anyone. That boy was flying too high, Jake had said, and Brooke had hastily agreed. “Well,” he said now, “cold cases are
in the public record, down in Scranton. All on the computer these days, I think. Show ID and you can have at them.”

Thus she had burned Friday afternoon, scrolling through pictures of missing waitresses, victims of drive-by shootings. The cold facts were depressing. One six-year-old girl had been fished out of the Susquehanna River. Three dead infants had been found, but none of them near Windermere, and all in years other than 1993. Still, Brooke found herself squinting at the smudged photos on the screen, trying to remember what she had felt a decade and a half ago, whether a tiny heart had beat against her chest before Alex took it away.

Finally, late in the day, she went back to the trailer park. A cold wind had blown up, the way she remembered from Octobers of her childhood, the advance guard of winter. With trepidation she approached the yellow trailer. Before she could knock on the door, it opened. A slope-shouldered elderly man stood there, a pair of slender transparent tubes running from his hooked nose to an oxygen tank parked at his side. His gaze flitted to Brooke’s face and then dropped. “Leave us alone,” he said before she could speak.

“Are you Mr. Zukowsky?”

“Not interested. Go away.” He spoke with an accent—
Go avey.
But he had opened the door, Brooke noted; he must have been waiting for her, watching for her. He did not shut it. He stood there, withered from the bulk he might once have presented, the cool oxygen snaking into his nostrils.

Brooke gathered her courage. “I’m Brooke O’Connor,” she began. “May I come in?”

“What you want?”

“I—I’m not sure.” She twisted her hands together. In a matter of seconds, he would shut the door. “I’d like to talk to you, Mr. Zukowsky,” she said. “About—about your daughter, I think.”

“My daughter is okay.”

“Please. Just five minutes.”

He let her in. She followed into the small living room, blinking in the dimness. The TV was on with no sound, cartoons playing. A pass-through to the galley kitchen was piled high with brochures. A corner set of shelves held photographs and painted vases. “Coffee?” Mr. Zukowsky said.

So he was not going to dismiss her, to toss her out. “That would be lovely.”

She followed him to the kitchen doorway. He poured two mugs from a cold pot and put them into the microwave. He kept his broad back to her while they heated. He had been a strong man once, she thought. A worker with a worker’s disease—lung cancer, or asbestosis. A widower, probably, and with daughters, at least one disabled. Did he think she was the new social worker? No. He would not have asked what she wanted; he would have known. The microwave dinged. He reached into a small fridge and held up a quart of milk. “Just black,” she said. “Thanks.”

He motioned her back to the living room, and they sat. Light poured in the dusty window, motes caught in the rays. Surreptitiously Brooke glanced at the photos on the shelves. There was Zukowsky, decades younger, with a wife and three daughters, one of them clearly the woman from the park. Her flat features and teardrop eyes, Brooke suddenly realized, spelled Down syndrome. There the woman was again, as a plump teenager, holding a baby. And there—Brooke dared not let her eyes linger—was the girl in the wheelchair. Najda Zukowsky. She was still a child. She sat outside the trailer in the wheelchair, beaming. Her hair shone like flax. The chair looked brand new, almost too big for her. Brooke pulled her eyes away. On the coffee table next to the brochures sat a chess set with gleaming ivory pieces. On the tired beige rug, grooves worn by wheels.