The Lost Daughter (34 page)

He caught her eye for a moment, but she wouldn’t hold his gaze. “Up to now,” she said slowly, picking at her salad, “everyone would tell you I’ve been a great mother to Meghan. I love her. I’ve kept her safe. I’ve listened to her. But in the end, you know what? She scares me.”

“Scares you how?”

“She’s dreamy, like me. Stubborn like me. And I think, can I let her be like that? And what if I can’t stop her from being like that? I’m all thumbs, emotionally.”

“Brooke, she’s just a kid.”

“Who needs me. I know. And she doesn’t scare Sean. He doesn’t have a thing in the world to hide from her.”

“He seems like a good man.”

“Sean? He’s made of gold.”

“His voice is, at least.”

“Ah. You heard him sing.” She grinned. “Now there’s a calling for you.”

“He ever try it professionally?”

“I wish! But it would never occur to him. Where he comes from? You’d have to be a fruitcake. They talk that way, his family. Really,” she insisted, when she saw Alex’s face knot up.

“Sorry.” He polished off the steak. She had been pushing her food around her plate. “Look,” he said, tiptoeing into the question of Brooke’s marriage, “I know we couldn’t—or anyhow, we didn’t—end up together. But I was surprised to meet a guy like Sean.”
Brooke’s eyebrows went up, challenging him. He pressed on. “For me, Tomiko made sense. You’d have thought the same. You’d have found her…captivating.”

“Is there any chance that—”

“No.” He signaled for the check. The waitress stood pale and forlorn by the door to the kitchen. “Everything died, after Dylan. We even moved into a new house, figuring our old house was dead. We furnished it differently. We bought a new bed!” He chuckled. He twirled his wineglass, in the dim light. “Took just a few months for it to feel dead, too. Tomiko said she was looking for joy. I wished her luck finding it. She remarried last spring. Japanese guy with two kids.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Just so you know.” He gave the waitress his credit card without glancing at the bill. “I’m not doing this lightly. I’m not crazy. Something radical’s got to happen, or my life…” He didn’t know how to finish. His hands made a waving motion in the air, like a tide ebbing away.

Brooke regarded him with her chin on her knuckles. Then she glanced at her watch. “It’s two thirty,” she said. “If we head for the park now, we should catch them there.”

“What park?” he said. “Catch who?” But he knew already. She was not leaving him a choice.

T
he day was bright but cool, the afternoon sun at a weak angle. The park was deserted. Brooke strode ahead of Alex, a red scarf tied around her neck, its fringed end flapping in the breeze. A wild-goose chase, Alex kept telling himself as he turned up his collar. Still, he felt happy to be with her. The trees were half stripped of their bright leaves already, branches tangled against the sky. He looked down over the blighted landscape. He remembered—
misremembered, probably—some line from
The
Great Gatsby
, which he’d read in the required lit class at BU. A guy said to Gatsby that you couldn’t return to the past, and Gatsby looked astonished and said something like “My dear boy! Of course you can!” You were supposed to think he was an idiot, of course, a charming idiot. But Alex wondered if you weren’t basically fated to return to the past, one way or another. Either you turned around and walked deliberately back into it, with all its small-town gossip and strip malls and mistakes, or it dragged you back by the short hairs.

“Come on,” Brooke said, reversing her path and hooking her arm through his elbow. “They must be home. Too cold for them to be up here.”

“ ‘They’ being this girl…” Alex said as they tucked back into Brooke’s car.

“And Luisa. Her mother. The one who found her, after we—” Brooke shot a look at Alex. “You’ll recognize Luisa,” she said.

“What do you mean? Have I met these people?”

“I don’t mean you’ll recognize her particularly. You’ll recognize what she is.”

Alex did not pursue this. The more hints, the more answers, and the more this fantasy gained its bearings. They swooped down the hill, around a gas station, and onto the rutted roads of a trailer park. “This is insane,” Alex muttered under his breath.

“You want to get out, get out,” Brooke said.

“I love you,” Alex said.

Silence.

Brooke’s smile was indeterminate, as if he had done nothing but consent to whatever she said or did. She drove on. The trailer park meshed its way behind the gas station, a sad labyrinth of human containers. Alex had just begun to catch his breath, to work his way back from the declaration that had slipped through his lips like an
escaping bird, when the car slowed. In front of them stood a small knot of people, one in a wheelchair, next to a police car. “Oh dear,” Brooke said. Before Alex could stop her, she had put the car into park and rushed out, slamming the door behind her. Alex followed.

T
hree things he managed to gather right away: that the red-haired woman with the cigarette voice wanted him and Brooke to get lost; that the overweight black woman was a social worker; and that the woman Luisa, whom Brooke had mentioned, had gone missing. The blond girl in the wheelchair—she had to be the one Brooke was fixated on—kept gesturing, sort of humming and grunting at once, trying to say stuff. Alex hovered at the edge. While the cop wrote down whatever he could decipher, the red-haired woman came around the circle to Alex. She wore chinos and a loud sweater knit with pictures of autumn leaves, gold and orange. Her hair, yanked angrily back from her temples and clipped with a pair of barrettes, flared from her head.

“And what do you have to do with this?” she asked.

“Nothing,” said Alex. He had been leaning against the door of the squad car, one foot up on a slat of a broken wood fence that attempted to frame a front yard. He held up his hands, presumption of innocence. “I’m with her,” he said, “and she knows your—your family.”

“Holy shit,” said the cop. He dropped his notepad and lifted the brim of his cap. “Alex? Alex Frazier?”

Immediately Alex wanted to flee. How in hell had he let Brooke bring him here? “Jake,” he said. There it was under the police cap, the meaty frame and square face of his high school buddy.
Keep it cool,
he thought. “Didn’t recognize you in the uniform.”

“Jesus, Brooke. You didn’t tell me he was coming. What’re you
doing here, man? Hold on, let me finish getting this report. We were just talking about you the other day.”

Brooke and Alex exchanged a quick glance. “I do know the family,” Brooke said.

“Do you now?” said the redhead. “Then maybe you can tell us where Luisa’s gone.”

The black woman had come around the squad car to shake Alex’s hand. Her grip was firm and moist. She nicked a glance at the vinyl-sided trailer, with its loose plastic shutters, then turned back to Alex. “I’m Delores,” she said. “I’m the social worker for these folks. Hauled out here on a Saturday. It’s one thing after another.”

“I have nothing to do with it,” Alex said. He felt himself—as Brooke shot a look at him, then turned back to the foursome on the uneven brick walk—to be like Pontius Pilate, washing his hands of the very thing for which he professed responsibility. But his claim was true. The misshapen blond girl in the wheelchair—he had no connection to her. She looked like any pretty blond teenager, not especially like Brooke, whose features at seventeen were still seared into his memory. Her handicap was tragic. The left side of her body seemed strong, animate, the face pretty; the right side atrophied and lifeless, like an unfinished sculpture. He turned from Delores to hear the girl trying to form sentences that Jake would listen to, would understand.

“Bus stop,” the girl said. She choked the words out as if her vocal cords seized up at every sound. “Good-bye kiss. Money. Hmmm. Ziadek money. Luisa bus.” She jerked her head sideways to address the red-haired woman. “Luisa,” she said after a series of attempts, “not…not…baby.” At the word
baby
, Alex’s gut seemed to seize. She meant that this Luisa wasn’t a baby, he told himself; nothing more.

“Gimme sec,” Jake called over to Alex. “I got to figure this little mystery out. Want to catch up with you, man.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Alex.

“Ziadek,” Jake said, turning back to the women. “Who’s that?”

“Her grandfather,” Brooke said quickly. The red-haired woman stared at her, but she kept her eyes on Jake. “Luisa must have taken Ziadek’s stash of money,” she said, “and left on the bus.”

“How in Jesus’ name you know that?” said Delores. Taking a step back, she planted herself between Brooke and the rest of the group. Her glare swept from Jake to Brooke. Brooke nodded toward the girl in the wheelchair.

“Najda just said so,” she said.

“Who is Ziadek?” repeated Jake.

“You’ll leave my father out of this,” said the red-haired woman stepping up to him. “He’s not well.”

“And you are—” Jake looked up from his scribbling. He looked every bit the cop: sober, jowly, his midriff straining at his belt. At the same time, he bore the familiar mystified look Alex remembered from high school, when Jake always seemed behind the curve.

“Katarina.” The woman crossed her brawny arms. “Her aunt.” She nodded at the wheelchair behind her. “Luisa’s sister.”

“And where is”—Jake checked his notes—“Ziadek?”

“My husband’s taken him to the lung doctor. I want these people cleared out before he gets back. I won’t let you give him a heart attack.”

“Does he keep cash in the house?”

“Chess set, chess set,” said the blond girl. She barked the words, like a command. “Ha. Ha. Ha.” She gave up for a moment, then licked her lips and tried again. “Hollow.”

“Najda,” said Brooke. Stepping forward, she knelt beside the wheelchair. She put her gloved hands over the girl’s bare ones, on the armrests. The sun pierced the thin trees of the trailer park and lit them both, their pale hair and skin. The girl’s nose had that protuberance, like
Brooke’s. But her jaw was narrower, her eyes set deeper. Nothing, Alex thought, that added up to family resemblance. Not in his book. “Do you think Luisa’s run off? Is it because of what happened yesterday?”

“Look, lady,” said Katarina. She had pivoted from the squad car and loomed over them. “I don’t know who you are or what you’ve got to do with my niece. But you’re not helping here. Can you make her leave?” she asked Jake.

“In a minute,” said Jake. He winked at Alex.
Winked
, as if they were back in high school, pulling a prank together. Jesus, Alex thought. “Have you got a photo of your missing sister?” Jake asked Katarina.

“Right here,” she said. “In my pocketbook. I think you’ll find,” she said as she fished around, “that this little troublemaker had something to do with her running off.” She nodded at the wheelchair as she produced the photograph. She addressed Delores. “She’s trying to play hooky from school,” she said. “Wants to go to a fancy-ass place. It’s driven poor Luisa nuts.”

Alex approached the group almost on tiptoe, invisible. As Katarina handed the photo over to Jake, he caught a glimpse. He drew in a sharp breath. “Down’s,” he heard himself murmur. So this was the missing Luisa—the one, according to Brooke, who had discovered an infant nearly dead behind the Econo Lodge fifteen years ago and had brought it up as her own.

No. Nothing would make him believe it. Either the child Brooke had been carrying was alive or it was dead. For years, he believed it had been born dead. Then the past had somehow come scratching at him like a dog at the door, demanding to be let in, and he had had to revisit the events in the motel room and see them for what they were: a live child pushing its way out of Brooke, his hand on the spoon, his hands squeezing, the eyes staring, lifeless. Nothing could bring that child back to life now, least of all the moon-faced woman in the picture.

“Well, this girl cannot take care of herself,” Jake was saying, tipping
the photo toward Alex. “Isn’t that right, my friend?” He started to hand the photo off, but Alex shook his head.

“I wouldn’t know,” he said. He met the challenge in Katarina’s eyes. He could feel the girl’s eyes, Najda’s eyes, on him as well, but it was no good giving the poor kid hope. Brooke might have said crazy things to her, might have told her she had a father coming to claim her. But Alex was not playing. “We have no business here,” he said to Brooke. “I’m leaving.”

“Yes, we do,” she said, still crouched in front of the wheelchair, “and I’m not.”

“Then I’ll call a cab.”

“Hey, Alex, catch me later. Traffic control, big water main project in Scranton. I’ll be in front of the old station most of the weekend,” Jake said.

Alex turned on his heel. Behind him, he heard Katarina’s voice. “You want to know where I think she’s gone?” she was saying. “I think she’s gone to New York City. We took a trip there when she was ten. She couldn’t stop talking about Lady Liberty, how you could bring her your poor and your homeless, all that.”

“She got enough money for a trip like that?”

“Hey, I don’t want to talk about my family’s private stuff anymore with her here. You got me, Little Miss I’m-a-Mother all of a sudden?”

“All I know’s this girl needs to be in school,” came Delores’s loud voice. “And if her guardian’s took off—”

A steady high-pitched cry rose. Alex had reached the intersection of one pitted asphalt road with another when he glanced back. The girl in the wheelchair had tipped back her head and was emitting sound—a pure wail, steady as a car alarm. He smiled despite himself. Whoever’s kid she was, she had a stubborn streak in her and no patience for fools.

He kept walking. He pulled out his BlackBerry. Just as he was
getting a taxi number, he heard tires crunch behind him. Brooke pulled alongside, buzzing the window down.

“You may think I’m crazy,” she said, “but I’m sane enough to leave when I’m not wanted.” She nodded at the passenger door. “Get in, won’t you?”

“Am I wanted?” he said.

“I wouldn’t stop if you weren’t.”

He shut his phone and slipped in beside her, his heart slamming in his chest.