The Lost Daughter (37 page)

She walked farther than she should have, and suddenly she was blocked by all the construction again, in front of the train station that wasn’t a train station. She didn’t know where to turn; she went up one street and down another, trying to find the right sign. The blocks were empty of people. Finally she asked an old black man walking his skinny dog, and he turned her around. After another block there it was, the golden arches and the bright signs. She was really hungry now. She ordered a Double Quarter Pounder Value Meal and paid for it with Ziadek’s money. She sat by the window, looking out on the street. Were they looking for her? They had to be. Najda was probably crying, she was so sorry, she missed her mom so bad. Luisa got a lump in her own throat just thinking how bad her daughter would be feeling. Who would help Najda in and out of the shower? Who would listen to her recite her sad poetry?

Luisa looked at the clock above the counter at McDonald’s. Five thirty, it read. What had the lady said about the bus? She pulled out the map she had given her.
6:30
was written and underlined in red right below where the lady had marked the streets. Outside, the light was falling; the sun slipped behind a gray cloud, making everything darker than it should be. Across from the McDonald’s was a white brick building, with
Times-Tribune
in fancy black script above a loading dock. The newspaper. Ziadek read it every day. Other newspapers had terrible stories, with big photographs, and people bought them from the rack in the Quik Mart every day. If anyone tried to stop Luisa—she decided, finishing her fries—she would tell the newspaper. She would tell how the lady who looked like Najda had thrown her baby away. True, it had been a boy Luisa had seen, leaving the little bundle in a crate behind the motel, but boys don’t have babies. This lady had had the baby, and the baby had become Najda—only that wasn’t what this lady had wanted, not back then. She had wanted the baby to die. Now, if the lady promised to go away forever, Luisa would not tell. Or no—the lady would have to give Luisa some money first, then go away. That was a better plan.

She would take the train to New York and then she would wait. That was one thing Luisa was really good at, waiting. She waited for Najda to be finished at the library; she waited for Martín at the Quik Mart to give her something to do; when Najda was little, she used to wait for her to finish sleeping so they could play with Najda’s toys. While Najda slept, Luisa would study her pursed mouth, the tiny scallops of her closed eyes, her shallow, regular breathing. Katarina liked to tell the story of how she found Luisa once lifting the baby’s eyelid because—according to Katarina—Luisa said she wanted to peek at Baby Najda’s dreams. But Luisa didn’t remember that. She knew dreams didn’t happen in the eyelids.

At five forty, a bunch of guys came into the McDonald’s. They
were loud and spread out all over the restaurant. One of them, a tall skinny white guy with a tattoo snaking up his arm, leaned over Luisa and nipped a French fry. “Hey!” she said, covering the tub.

“Got to watch the calories, beautiful,” he said.

She smiled at that, him calling her beautiful. It felt good to smile. But the man and his friends were being too loud. Two of them stood at the counter calling the serving girl names. “Come on, sugar! Give me a double bitch on a bun! How ’bout some sliders? Hey? Slide me some of that brown breast!” The girl got the manager, a fat young man with a walkie-talkie, who told them both they were drunk and had to leave. Then they stood outside the window, making monkey faces at their friends, until they gave up and skipped off into the night.

“So coked up,” said another who remained, two tables over from Luisa. This one had darker skin, long hair. “Fucking goons.”

Luisa crumpled up her food bag and stood. “Where you going, little puppy?” said a third guy. He had dark blond hair and a baby face, with small eyes buried deep, the upper lids like little pillows. His voice wasn’t mean. It was soft, like a warm towel.

“To the train station,” Luisa said, even though there was no train station. She wasn’t supposed to talk to them—they were strangers, and drunk—but it felt better to get words around the lump that had appeared, without warning, in her throat.

“Catch a train to the moo-oon,” said the skinny one. He flung out his arm. The tattoo was of two snakes, twisting their way up his muscles.

Luisa pushed out the door of the restaurant onto the street. The sky was darkening; a cool wind blew papers across the sidewalk. Streaks of sunset laced the
Times-Tribune
sign.

“What a surprise,” said the dark-skinned one, trotting after her from the restaurant. “That’s where we’re going, too.”

“That train must be late,” said the baby face in his warm-towel voice. He wore his hair long, too, all twisted into strands, falling over the collar of a dirty leather jacket that he was buttoning up, now.

“Got some time to kill, then,” said the first.

Walking faster, trying to keep ahead of them, Luisa had started to cry. She cried because no one had come after her—and they should know where she’d gone, they should know how much she liked McDonald’s, they should have found her by now. She cried because the drunk guys were all around her now, and she knew she was caught, she was like a fly in a spider’s web.

“Little hooch, honey?” said the tall one. He stuck a paper bag under her nose and Luisa smelled whiskey. She shook her head.

“No, thank you,” she said softly. She kept her eyes on the sidewalk. One crack, another, another.

“Come on, puppy, come on here,” said the baby-faced one. She liked his voice, and it scared her the most. She couldn’t make out his eyes. “Let’s take a little rest in here. Come on.”

Ahead of them was the construction, bright lights and jackhammer sounds far away at the end of the street. Babyface put his hand in the middle of Luisa’s back. He steered her toward an alley. “Little bitch,” said the tall one behind her. “Chasin’ cars, maybe you catch one.”

“Vroom,” said the one in the leather jacket.

A
lex drove east from Windermere as the sun lowered to the west. He had plugged the BlackBerry into the car charger, to keep it from running out of juice, but he had not heard from Brooke. Nor had he tried to call. He had spent the morning in his big-brother role, fixing pancakes with warm applesauce for all the young people. He had listened attentively to the kid, Pablo, who had indeed found
his way to Windermere in order to be with Charlie. That was the case, no matter what story Pablo was creating about heading west in his car, remembering Charlie’s phone number, deciding to stop off for the hell of it. An awkward kid with an eyebrow ring and slumping shoulders, Pablo spoke with the extended vowels of a pothead, but his soft brown eyes followed Charlie as she padded around the kitchen. “Whaddaya think?” Charlie had whispered to Alex as they packed a lunch for a morning hike into the Alleghenies. Alex had squeezed his sister’s shoulder, told her he thought Pablo was the real deal. And maybe he was. In any case, he wanted nothing more than to take Charlie and her friends on their camping trip and ferry them back to Boston. Alex was off the hook.

Last night he had dreamed, as he often did, of Dylan. In the dream Dylan was alive, not as he had been in his last few months, but younger—a true toddler, with that impish grin showing his pearly row of teeth and the fat dimple in his cheek. Only Alex had made a mistake, had thought Dylan had died, and so he had left Dylan behind somewhere and not taken care of him for days—no, weeks, months, for a span of time that stretched longer as the dream went on and Alex grew slowly aware of how long he had been considering his son to be dead, while all the time Dylan had been alive, his grin slowly fading while his gleaming dark hair waned thin and dull, while his body withered and grew faint, transparent. In the dream Alex was walking, then running, trying to get back to the place where he had left his son because he thought Dylan was dead. Whatever had possessed him, to think such a thing? And now Dylan lay in a coffin, ready to be buried, and he would die indeed, all because Alex had forgotten he was alive.
Is this what you wanted?
someone asked in the dream, and Alex cried out
No! No!
But as so often happens in dreams—and now he knew he was dreaming, and in the chair, but he had to get there, to Dylan, he couldn’t stop running
now—he made no sound. In his ear came Dylan’s laugh,
Da-addy, Da-addy
, like it was all a joke. But Dylan wasn’t joking now. Alex’s legs churned, unable to move through the thick air, and how could he think his son was dead, and so kill him?
No!
he had cried again, and woken up.

As he hiked Hearts Content after breakfast, Alex had done his best to dismiss the dream, to shrug off the crazy encounters of the day before. That family! Brooke would seize on them as a cause, at least until the pixie dust wore off and she realized it was a false coincidence. The trailer park happened to lie across the highway from the motel. The girl happened to have fair hair and an irregular nose. And the story—which could be manipulative—was that she had been found. And would it allay Brooke’s guilt, or her judgment of Alex, to invent this tale of a child crippled rather than a premature infant killed? Not in the end. Finally, when the family took her money and spent it however they pleased, Brooke would come to her senses.

By then, Alex realized as he trudged up the narrow trail, he, too, would have moved on. He was—maybe he had always been—a man in bad faith. He was never going to face Charlie’s shock and judgment, was never going to shame himself before his brittle, fragile mother. Maybe, with Brooke at his side, he would have had the strength. He would never know, now; he would keep his crime as his bedfellow regardless of what Brooke did or did not do.

He had left Pablo and Charlie and their giggling friends at the Hearts Content trailhead, poring over maps. By now the four of them were probably at the New York border. He pictured them laughing at a hikers’ bar. Maybe tonight, camping in a tent, his sister would make love with Pablo. The thought brought a smile to Alex’s face. He had grabbed lunch, driven back to Windermere, sat for a while with his mother as she did the Sunday crossword, and
then told her he was heading back to Boston, he had a full workday tomorrow. This was a lie—he had put in, already, for two personal days, planning on his great confession—but being with his mom made him antsy. The year after his father died, she had stopped coloring her hair, which had quickly paled to an ivory white. Blessed with a soft prettiness—Alex had his full cheeks from her—she seemed to have aged three years for every year that had passed since then. She had never worked. These days she left the house only to volunteer at the Presbyterian church or to play card games with older women at the assisted-living place.

“You are my great success,” she had said to Alex when she hugged him good-bye.

“I’m hardly that, Mom. I’ve got a decent job. The rest of my life’s fallen apart.”

“That was sad. She should have stuck with you. For all they say about Asian women—”

“Mom. Don’t start on Tomiko.”

“Well.” She had pressed a small, soft hand against his cheek. “You’re so young, so smart, so handsome. You’ll start it all over again. Won’t you?”

She had not, to his relief, mentioned Brooke. Nancy Frazier had loved Brooke and felt betrayed by her. And for all her softness, Alex’s mom never forgave a slight.

When he pulled off the highway into downtown Scranton, he felt momentarily disoriented. Growing up in Windermere, he almost never went to Scranton. It used to have the station for the train to New York, and the old iron furnaces where the high school brought field trips. Otherwise it was a baggy-pants city—its factories boarded up, its grand bank buildings defaced or up for lease. The area where Jake was overseeing construction had to be in front of the defunct station, now turned into a ritzy hotel for whoever could find a reason
to come to Scranton. A few blocks shy of the construction, Alex turned off Lackawanna, the main drag, onto a side street. Straight ahead he spotted a brightly lit McDonald’s. He’d bring Jake a couple of hamburgers and a large Coke, keep the guy awake.

“Hear they’re doing construction down by the old station,” he said to the plump black girl who slid the bag across to him.

The girl shrugged. “They got lights on down there,” she said. “You can’t drive through.”

“I know. Buddy of mine’s helping oversee. Should I just hoof it, then, if I want to catch him?” The girl looked at him strangely. “Walk, I mean,” he said. “Should I walk over there, or drive?”

“Walk,” the girl said. She pointed toward the side door of the restaurant. “Right here, then left. You’ll see lights.”

He pushed out the door with his two bags. The sidewalk smelled of cigarette butts and stale beer. He would ask Jake if he’d learned anything about that missing girl. He’d explain away the encounter at the trailer park. Brooke was on a mission, he’d say. No, they weren’t an item again. They had both happened to be in town for the weekend. Brooke had gotten to know the family when she lived alone—or no, maybe through Brooke’s mom, the disability program at the school. Oh hell, he didn’t know how he would explain it. He didn’t care.

A block past the McDonald’s, he heard voices. Rough, slurred. A muffled cry. The street was poorly lit, the brick buildings dark. He drew close. There, in an alley—he couldn’t see them clearly, but behind a set of trash cans he made out a jumble of movement and a hoarse laugh. “She’s like a little otter, in’t she?” said one voice. And another, “C’mon, honey, speak Mongol to us, c’mon, hold still.”

He set the bag on top of a trash can. He sprinted into the alley. “Hey,” he said. His hands were already balling into fists. “What’re you guys doing?”

“Minding our own business!” said a skinny guy who pulled away from the corner where a dark struggle was going on. Alex heard the grunt of sex, a feeble wail from whatever girl they’d gotten their mitts on.

“Get off her,” Alex said. He reached in his pocket to call 911, but the phone was back in the car, charging. Damn.

“Go on dude, get outta here.” The skinny guy came up to him. Alex could just make out his features, a rubbery face with a squared-off nose and big cheekbones. He stank of booze. “She likes it, we like it, we don’t need extras.”