The Lost Daughter (33 page)

“Dickinson,” says Brooke.

I fix her with my eyes. “Now,” I say. Then my words fail again. I manage only this much. “You…hmm…hmm…
help
me.”

And she nods.

W
as
she asking for this girl? Brooke felt the urge not to ask but to beg, to prostrate herself like an ancient sinner. Surely the only sane person in the little trailer was the mother, Luisa, who would have killed Brooke if she could. Look at the evidence! This warped and mangled child, flesh of Brooke’s flesh. How could she ever claim her, how could she say, “You are mine. I made you this way”? She couldn’t. At the same time she could not run, could not tear herself away. As if her eyes had been starved until now, she looked and looked. Her daughter, hers.

And then, after the humming, after touching her like a blind person, all at once the girl dropped her hands, and spoke poetry. Poetry!

Brooke slipped back onto the couch. She glanced at old Zukowsky. He had collapsed into an armchair, exhausted. His head dropped to one side. Then she realized. “Josef,” she said, “you’ve lost your oxygen.” She stepped to the tank, wheeled it close, reattached the two little spigots of air. His eyes were shut. “Can you hear me?” she asked.

She glanced at Najda. “Ziadek?” the girl said, and leaned to
where she could place her left hand on the old man’s knee. “Ziadek?” she repeated, and then she said something in Polish.

Josef lifted his head. He waved his hands slowly, as if dismissing them. “Are you all right?” Brooke asked him.

“Fine,” he croaked. “Fine.”

They sat quiet for a moment, watching and listening to him breathe. “I should go,” Brooke said.

“No,”
said Najda. The word came out like an explosion. Brooke picked up shards of the pretty, broken plate. She wiped up the spilled coffee with Kleenex. Then she gathered her pocketbook, waited. She felt she would wait forever. “I want,” Najda said after a series of hums, “I want…college.”

“Okay,” said Brooke. “We can get you there. I’ll help any way I can.”

“M-m-mmm. Money,” said Najda.

No one spoke. Brooke glanced at Josef. His eyes had opened and were watching her. She swallowed. She saw an opening here, something for her to do besides grovel. “It’s one of these schools”—she put her hand on the stack of brochures—“you want to go to?”

“Scoarding bool,” said Najda. She shook her head, as if to clear it. “Boarding,” she said.

Brooke smoothed the cover of the brochure. “And you need money.”

“Crosby School,” said Najda quickly. “Ask Ziadek.”

Brooke turned to him—to Josef, whom they called Ziadek. His eyes were on her, as if already conspiring with her. Brooke felt out of her depth. She rose. “I’ll work on the money,” she said. She reached a hand out, wanting to touch Najda’s head, her silky hair. But that would be too much, more than any of them were ready for. “I’ll work on it,” she repeated. “Najda, you should make things up with…with your…”

“With her mother,” Josef said.

“Right,” Brooke said. She managed to brush Najda’s stiff shoulder before the girl flinched away. “With your mom. She loves you so much.”

When she shook Josef’s hand, she placed both her palms around his fingers. They had gone cold. She held him like that for a long moment. Josef focused past her face, on his granddaughter. Then Brooke was out the door, into the startlingly cool air. She fished out her cell phone. As she made her way down the stone path, she tapped out the number. “You’re right, Alex,” she said when he picked up on the first ring. “We do have to talk.”

A
lex stared at the phone after he ended the call. His sister Charlie, leaning out his French windows into the cool breeze of the Back Bay, cocked her head back at him. She was dressed in warm fall colors, a deep green jersey with a loose russet vest belted at her waist. On her head she sported a floppy beret in crushed gold velvet. “Don’t tell me,” she called over to him. “The trip’s off.”

“I don’t know.” He felt suddenly light-headed, cold at the lips. He sat on the arm of his couch.

“You don’t need to hang with us the whole time,” Charlie said. “We can take the bus back. Or Pablo might drive up.”

“Who’s Pablo?”

“Guy I like. He gave that party, last weekend?” She peered into the small mirror by his bookshelf and adjusted her beret. “He doesn’t give a shit about me, though. So that’s a fantasy. But there’s the bus.”

Alex held up a hand. “Just give me a sec,” he said.

It was impossible, of course, what Brooke had told him. That the dead could be brought back to life. Aside from that lost night at the motel, Brooke had not seen a person go from life to death. When
Dylan died, he had been in the room. He had felt the blood stop its coursing, the lungs flatten. How quickly the meat of the small arms cooled. The skin went rubbery. Wake up, you wanted to shout, stop this and wake up. But as soon as the body was cold you knew. Life was not a thing that left and might be retrieved. It was an event, and the event was over. You could no more fill the lungs with breath than journey across time.

But Brooke, Brooke. She couldn’t bear the truth of what he’d done, and now she had gone to Windermere and found some crazy story she was bent on telling.

When Charlie touched his shoulder, the muscles gave a myoclonic jerk, as if he were on the brink of a dream. “Who died?” his sister asked.

“No one,” he said. He tried to focus on her. They were supposed to be leaving his apartment, driving up to Tufts to pick up two of Charlie’s offbeat friends, then out to Windermere. They’d stay overnight at home—the second major reason Charlie had asked him to come along, after his provision of a car, was that he would keep their mom calm about having a house full of college kids—and then drive into the Appalachians tomorrow, for the leaves. “At least,” he said, his mouth twisting painfully as he made the bitter joke, “no one who wasn’t dead already.”

“Are you cool to come with us? Because I could borrow your car, and whatever that call was about—”

“No, no. It’s fine. We should get going.” He rose from the arm of the couch. He glanced at his watch. Five P.M. Dinner on the road; they’d pull into Windermere late. Charlie planted herself in front of him. She tipped her head. Lightly she rested her index fingers on his shoulders. “What?” he said.

“Your traps are way tight, Alexander the Great. You should be doing yoga.”

“I should, huh? Will it make me rich and happy?”

“It might,” she said. She was half serious. Such a puppy, Alex thought when he looked at her puckered face, all dressed in her leaf-peeping clothes. But she wasn’t a puppy. She was a young woman who needed him to be calm, solid, the big brother. Pablo—there was some guy named Pablo; maybe he could hand her off. For now he went to get his fleece, his hiking boots. The traffic would catch them, but no matter; it would give him time to think.

He should have known. Brooke wasn’t going to hear the truth from him and just ponder it in her heart, like the Virgin Mary. She was going to strap on her armor and ride out. Now she had found a story tailor-made for her romantic ideas. A poor immigrant family, a grown childless daughter like the princess who rescued Moses, a rescue in the nick of time. Not only had Alex not killed the fetus, so long ago; there had been no death for the fetus, who was more than a fetus, who was a brave living baby disguised as a dead fetus, and so they had made this simple error. They had left it out in the rain. Now all would be well. Only all, in Alex’s experience, was rarely well, just as surprises were rarely pleasant.

Charlie’s friends were loud, funny, and, by the time they flew past Scranton, fairly stoned. One was a big square girl in overalls and a leather jacket who brayed at every witticism. The other, boasting multiple piercings that glowed in the refracted lights of the highway, ran out of breath as she talked, as if her lungs could hold about a tablespoon of oxygen. One was named Amber, the other Ashley. Happy misfits, like Charlie. Pablo’s name kept coming up, and beside him, his pug-nosed sister blushed.

“You going to get that?” Charlie asked at one point as the BlackBerry buzzed and glowed from Alex’s shirt pocket. They were winding around the Susquehanna by then, the sky inky, full moon to the west. He pulled out the BlackBerry. Brooke’s number.

“No,” he said. “Don’t want to get arrested.”

“I can steer. You put in your Bluetooth.”

“It’s nothing important.”

“You liar.”

He reached across the gearshift and pretended to swipe Charlie’s nose. Tucking the phone back into his pocket, he remembered his promise to Brooke’s husband. If he heard anything from Brooke, he would let Sean know. Now he had heard. But he was letting no one know. He was going to Windermere with his sister, to marvel at the leaves. If he saw Brooke—
if
, he repeated to himself—he would talk sense into her. Then he could let Sean know where his wife had gone. Though by then, perhaps, there would be no reason to let him know anything.

Or every reason. But that thought he left on the road, tossed behind the car like a crushed can, a quick clatter and then it was gone.

W
as it the fall leaves that were already—before her call—bringing him to Windermere? Brooke posed the question to Alex when they met on the village green. Or had he planned to come turn himself in for a crime he hadn’t committed?

Tired though he was, Alex felt his blood quicken at the sight of her. She sat disheveled and windblown by the old gazebo, on one of the benches they used to crowd when some garage band from Wilkes-Barre would perform on a summer night. Mums bloomed at her feet. Her hair was pulled roughly back by a barrette, the collar of her thin jacket turned up. There hovered in her movements, and in her eyes, the oddly frantic dreaminess he used to detect when she would get excited about one of her medieval books. “I must have called you a dozen times,” he said, perching on the edge of the bench. “I didn’t know you were here. I figured you had rendered a guilty verdict.”

“So who have you confessed to, then?” Brooke asked. She tipped her head. “Your mother? Charlie? You called, Lex, but you didn’t leave a message. You didn’t warn me.”

He looked down at his nails, the jagged cuticles. Charlie and her sweet, feckless friends were in the mountains now. She had lost her temper at him—really lost it, not just in jest—when he wouldn’t come along. Yes, she was dramatic, maybe spoiled as well. But her father was dead and her mother well past sixty, and she had spent most of her adolescence hankering after her absent brother. Now he was here and yet not here. Go on back to Tokyo, then, she’d said with a caustic laugh as she pulled her velvet beret over her bangs and swaggered out the door. “I can’t tell Charlie,” he said to Brooke. “It’s stopped me in my tracks. They could throw me in jail for forty years, fine, I don’t care. But you know Charlie. Everything’s black-and-white, to her. If I tell her, I’ll lose her. If I lose her—well, she might be lost.”

“Lex, I know you don’t believe this,” Brooke said, “but you have to come with me. You’ll see Najda for yourself. Then you’ll know.”

He shook his head. “I won’t know anything I don’t already. Listen.” He reached for one of her hands, which she had shoved deep into the jacket’s pockets. He rubbed his thumb across the back of her palm. “If there is one memory I will carry with me to my grave,” he said, “it is of that little face and that warm body. I know what I did—Brooke, honey. Don’t shrug me off. It’s hard to face it. It was a terrible thing. But it happened. You seeing some blond girl in a wheelchair—”

“She wasn’t just some blond girl! Lex, she could have been my
clone
. And they found her—they told me where. And when.”

“Oh, come on. Did they give you a date? Did they say June tenth?”

“Well, it’s not like we got out a calendar—”

“Did they describe exactly where they found this breathing infant?”

Brooke had to hesitate. Her hand fidgeted between his palms. “In a wooden crate.”

Doubt, like a black crow’s wing, sliced across the clear sky of Alex’s
mind. Then it was gone. He had told her about the crate, surely. He let go of her hand. “Let’s get some lunch,” he said. “I’m starving.”

“Your mom didn’t feed you this morning?”

His grin felt lopsided. “She fed Charlie and her pals. I was too edgy.”

“All that girl-noise must’ve overwhelmed your mom.”

“She likes calm these days, that’s for sure. And there might be some guy arriving, if Charlie gets her wish. Anyhow, she didn’t notice whether I ate. I told her I was seeing Jake for lunch.” He stood. “You’ve got a car?”

They drove east of the village, to a Ponderosa Steakhouse along the highway. Alex glanced around the restaurant and felt relieved to see strangers, leaf-peepers. What he intended to do would soon enough slap his name onto the front page of the
Times-Tribune
. And yet, until he could step into Windermere’s sleepy police station and make his report, he dreaded running into anyone who might know him.

To his surprise, over hanger steak and a flabby Merlot, he found himself talking to Brooke as if they had everything else in common—her daughter Meghan, her husband Sean with his astonishing voice, the Red Sox, his bereaved mother—except a botched stillbirth fifteen years ago. Brooke’s eyes shone when they got onto the subject of Meghan. “She’s the toughest kid,” she said. “She’s got this cousin who’s a big bully, likes to boss the other cousins around. So at this wedding two years ago—Meghan’s maybe four then?—her cousin’s going around collecting all the favors the kids got, snatching these little plastic bags out of their hands. Well, Meghan not only won’t hand hers over but she blocks his access to a two-year-old. Tells the big bully to get lost or she’ll kick his shins to pieces. Then she started kicking.”

“She looked like she could be determined,” Alex said.

“You saw her? When?”

He told her about going to the house, about the awkward meeting
with Sean. “I promised him I’d let him know if I tracked you down.”

“But you haven’t.”

“Not yet.”

He didn’t tell her about Sean’s unshaven face, or Sean’s cold certainty that Brooke was leaving him for Alex. “I think your daughter’s confused,” he said gently. “She seemed suspicious of me.”