The Lost Daughter (38 page)

“I don’t think she likes it.”

He took a step forward. The flat of the guy’s hand pushed against his chest. “Back off, asshole.”

“I said she doesn’t like it.” Alex swung a fist and caught the guy on the jaw. He staggered back.

“Hey!” A second guy came out of the shadows. His hair cornrowed, his pants loose around his hips, he hulked over Alex. “What the fuck?”

“Get off her!” Alex grabbed the second guy’s shirt to shove him out of the way. Alex was sober and in good shape, but the cornrowed man swung an arm across, slamming his shoulder.

“Please,” came a high, weak voice from the corner. “Please, no, no. Help! Zia—” There came a slap and a grunt, cutting her off.

Alex pushed forward, moving the heavy man back toward a wall. He meant to slam his head. Then he would turn to the next one, the one on the girl.

“Bitch,” that one was saying, “bitch bitch bitch. Take it now, you little retard, you can take it—”

The heavy man stumbled back. Alex shoved him hard. Just as he got the guy to the wall, his head sang with pain. A sudden, sharp explosion, at the back of his skull. Sparks flew, a ray of white light,
a sword-stab of heat. Alex let go the cornrowed guy and wheeled around, just in time to see the first guy, the skinny guy, lift the brick again. Then he went down into darkness.

H
e opened his eyes to gray, the first light of morning. A damp mist. His head felt like a barrel of water, heavy and sloshing. Something sticky in his hair. He put his hand up and came away with a swipe of blood thick as jam. His arms and feet felt like ice. Slowly he pushed up on an elbow and peered around. One eye was swollen, the eyebrow pressing down on the lid, but he could see. He lay deep in an alley. In Scranton, yes. At the end, streetlights still shone dimly. A truck rumbled by. Alex pushed to his knees and vomited, a thin stinking gruel. Concussion, he thought. He touched his head. On the forehead, a tennis ball; at the back, a handball. As soon as he moved, blood seeped from the gash in his forehead. Slowly he stood. He’d been assaulted. He had to get out, back to the hotel, to his phone, to an emergency clinic, to the cops.

He had stumbled two steps when he heard the groan. With the low, lost sound, the night before flooded back. Quickly he stepped deeper into the alley, shoved aside the bags and boxes blocking his way. There she lay, the woman he’d tried to help. She was little more than a gray form, curled like a crescent moon against the concrete, a black plastic bag thrown over her hips and bare legs. Carefully he knelt by her side. “Miss?” he said. “Can you hear me? Miss?”

“Ungh,” came the reply.

Alex strained to see in the scant light. He touched the woman’s face. She flinched and turned away. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said.

He saw her swallow and lick her lips. “Ziadek,” she rasped.

He had heard that word before—where? What language was she
speaking? “Miss,” he said, leaning close, “I’m going for help. Stay quiet for just a minute. Okay? I’ll be back. No one will hurt you now. Miss?”

She turned her face toward him then, and there was enough dawn light to see the features clearly. Her eyes were bruised shut, with a dark lump at one temple. Her bottom lip was split open. She stank of semen and spit. But there was no doubting the identity of the face. And in recognizing her, Alex remembered where he had heard the word she used.
Ziadek.
He had seen this woman’s photo. This was the woman who had gone missing Saturday from Trails End Estates. This was the sister of Katarina, the daughter of Josef Zukowsky, whom they called Ziadek. This, Alex realized with a gasp of wonder at the twists of his life, was Najda’s mother, Luisa.

N
o matter how many times Ziadek waved her ahead, Katarina kept coming back for him, urging him along. “We’ll get a wheelchair,” she said, waving at a nurse.

“No,” Ziadek said emphatically. “Go ahead. I know the room number. Go on, now.”

Finally she hurried down the hospital corridor, her heels clacking. Ziadek hated the place. Even with oxygen filling his nostrils, he took in the ammonia, the bleach, the medicine smell. He would not end up here himself; he refused to. But at least Luisa was found.

He had first learned she was gone when he came home from Dr. Sanford. Katarina had given him the news in the driveway. He had felt so tired then, wrung out like a rag doll brought in from the rain, he could do nothing but allow Katarina to fix them all soup. Najda was uncharacteristically quiet. She had wheeled herself out to the neighborhood—to the park, he imagined, checking all their old haunts for her vanished mother—then returned to play solitaire and stare out the window as night fell. That first night, Saturday night,
he had sat up by the phone. When he felt Katarina tuck the blanket around his shoulders, he had drifted into an uneasy, guilt-riddled sleep. Yesterday he had insisted that Katarina and Chet take him to Mass. He almost never went; he didn’t know the new priest. But he bowed his head, the nibs of plastic from the oxygen digging into his nostrils, and he prayed for his girl. That afternoon the police officer came by again. He answered all the man’s questions. But he left out the part about Brooke, and he noticed that Najda offered nothing—not that the policeman asked. He just kept looking at Najda funny, the way people did when they couldn’t figure out how smart she was. He asked about Ziadek’s chess set, and Ziadek showed him. Two thousand dollars missing, from the little drawer you pulled out at the bottom. He had squirreled it away, five and ten dollars at a time, for Najda’s schooling.

Last night he had let the others tuck him into bed, but he had woken every hour or so and listened hard to the night. Nothing but the usual sounds, the refrigerator compressor, an owl, distant chatter of a television before an open window. He had pulled himself from bed and dragged his oxygen cart with him four times to the toilet, each time forcing out a thin, reluctant thread of urine. Finally he fell into a muddy sleep, broken by the sharp ring of the telephone. Katarina was already bustling around the house, sweeping out cobwebs and complaining to herself. She grabbed the receiver before Ziadek could pull himself upright. She shrieked with joy, then wept. “Yes, yes,” she kept saying. “We’re coming right away. Of course I have the insurance information. Just tell me she’s all right. Can I talk—? All right then. Yes. Right now.”

Katarina would not bring Najda. “You’re an ungrateful girl,” she said when Najda pulled herself out of bed and buzzed her wheelchair into the living room, her hair mussed and her face drawn tight with worry.

“Where is she?” Najda said, her words cut crisp as carrot slices.

“At the hospital, no thanks to you. Robbed and—and assaulted. Think about that, next time you drop a bombshell on your mother.”

“Katarina,” Ziadek warned. He had buttoned on a fresh shirt and swished his mouth with Listerine. He stood by the door. “No time for blame right now.”

Katarina looked angrily at him. He knew what stuck in her craw—not Najda’s treatment of Luisa, but her own boys’ treatment of her, how they had gobbled up her love like a good meal and then flung themselves into the world without so much as a glance back at her. “I don’t want her coming,” she said.

“Najda will stay home for now,” he said. So long as he could stand on his own, speak on his own, he held the authority of the house. He looked at the girl. “You keep the door locked,” he said. “If you go out, you take your key.”

Najda wheeled over to him. She placed her good hand on his wrist. “Sorry,” she said. Her fingers stroked his skin, pleading forgiveness. Her eyes had filled with tears that he had not seen on her face since she was a little girl—tears not of anger or frustration, but of pity and sorrow. It was then that Katarina’s words sank in.
Robbed. And assaulted.
Feebly he patted Najda’s arm. Then they left and came here, to the hospital.

He reached the room, DH-422. Katarina had gone in already. Outside in the corridor waited a young black cop. Next to him sat a white man, also young, but with the lined face and stiff bearing of one much older. His head was swaddled in white bandages, and a purple bruise forced one eye closed. They rose—the injured man with stiff pain—as Ziadek approached. The cop shook his hand, introduced himself as Officer Simpson, said that Luisa had been examined by emergency staff and could he ask a few questions.

“I will see my daughter first,” Ziadek said. He was surprised to
find himself winded. He had walked slowly. But Dr. Sanford had given him bad news, not the least of which was that he should expect to feel increasingly fatigued. He nodded at the injured man. “This is not—” he began.

“Mr. Frazier found your daughter,” the cop explained. “He says the same men who attacked her knocked him unconscious. He’s not suspected of anything. We’ve asked him to stick around. The hospital people are doing some—ah—tests.”

Tests, Ziadek thought. They meant sperm, they meant whatever had been forced onto his child while they held her down. He met Mr. Frazier’s eye, the one that could open. Something felt familiar, though he had never seen the man before and his features were battered. He supposed he should thank him; without him, what would they have done? Killed Luisa? She lay a few feet away, in that room, hurt beyond repair. He was not in a mood to thank anyone. “Excuse me,” he said, and stepped between the two of them, to where Luisa lay.

She would not look at him at first. The money, she mumbled into the white pillow, she’d taken all the money. Ziadek noticed the purple splotches on her neck, on the shoulder that peeked out from the flimsy gown they’d given her, on her temple that bulged out from her round head. Heavily he sat in the little chair they kept by the side of the bed. Across from Luisa, an old woman slept, with tubes going in and out of her. He would not be like that woman, Ziadek told himself. He would find another way.

“Luisa, honey, you’ve got to give some description of these bad guys,” Katarina was saying. Her voice—for Katarina—was unusually gentle. “They did bad things to you, honey. It wasn’t your fault. The police need to know—”

Ziadek touched Katarina’s arm. When she turned, he shook his head at her. She crossed her arms and stepped away from the hospital
bed, toward the window. Glad to find that his chair had wheels, Ziadek drew it closer. He reached out a hand and stroked Luisa’s hair. It was still baby-fine, the same type of hair she’d had when she was a laughing toddler. For the first time, he was glad Marika was not alive, glad she did not have to see Luisa this way. This had been her nightmare, that her hapless child would meet with violence. He would keep Luisa safe, he had promised her. This was America but they were still a family; they would stay close to one another, a net of safety. Now Luisa had broken through the net. All the little speeches Ziadek had run through his head as they tore down here in Katarina’s car seemed to go silent. “What do you want, Luisa?” he asked. He could hear the quaver in his voice, an old man’s voice.

Slowly Luisa turned her head on the pillow. She kept most of her face mashed into it, but one almond eye opened and blinked at him. “They took all the money,” she said to the pillow.

“I know they did. They took something far more precious than that. What do you want to happen?”

He was ready for her to say that Najda must not go away. It was the only desire she had expressed, and to Luisa it must have seemed a small demand. Ziadek did not know what he would say. He felt powerless, like a little boy suddenly put in charge. But he felt it in his gut that Luisa did not need to be told anything; she needed to be asked. No one had asked her—not Najda, not Katarina or Chet, not this Brooke who had brought more trouble, not Ziadek himself, not the animals who had held her down and done such things to her. No one had asked Luisa what she wanted.

“She doesn’t love me,” Luisa said. Normally such a statement would set off a round of wailing accusations, but her tone was flat, matter-of-fact.

“She isn’t very good at showing it,” Ziadek admitted. “And she isn’t very happy. Do you want her to be happy?”

“Course I do. I’m her mother.”

“When our children are happy,” Ziadek said, leaning forward, as if he were sharing a secret, “then nothing else matters. Does it?”

The one eye, blinking, looked suspicious. “I don’t know.”

“Not loneliness, or sickness, or needing money. That’s why we have them. Isn’t it? So they will be happy?”

“Ziadek.” Luisa took his hand. She turned her head toward him, on the pillow. The skin around her right eye had gone puffy and purple. The temple bulged outward, pulling on her ear. He wanted to weep at the sight. “I’m scared.”

“Of those thugs? They won’t hurt you again, dumpling. The police will get them.”

“Not them. I don’t care about them. I’m scared for her.”

He nodded. She was so hurt, so fragile, his innocent child; he couldn’t argue with her. “That’s the hardest thing we do, isn’t it?” he heard himself say in his old man’s voice. “Live with our fear?”

“I don’t want to.” She had separated Ziadek’s fingers and was stroking them one by one, the way she had done as a child.

“Neither do I,” he admitted. “We’ll help each other then. We’ll be scared for Najda together. It won’t be so frightening then. Do you think?”

Behind him, a throat cleared. A young Jamaican nurse stood at the foot of the bed. She held a tray of instruments and salves. “I’m fine,” Luisa said to her. “Go away.”

“We got to check your vitals, honey,” the nurse said. Her smile was warm but firm. “Got to heal you up good as we can.”

Slowly, Ziadek rose. He patted Luisa’s arm. “I’ll be right outside,” he said.

“Ziadek, don’t go!”

He fought, in himself, the pleasure that came from her needing him. “Katarina can stay,” he said. He nodded to the Jamaican nurse
and stepped, with as much dignity as the oxygen tank would allow, from the room. “I am ready for you now,” he said to Officer Simpson.

The cop asked him plenty of stupid questions. Did Luisa know anyone in Scranton? Did she have reason to know the young men she claimed to have assaulted her? Was she a competent witness? Was there anyone Mr. Zukowsky would suggest they question? Ziadek focused on the English. Sometimes he asked the cop to repeat the question. A beefy, caramel-skinned fellow with a freckled nose, Simpson took notes in a crabbed script on a small pad of lined paper. When he was done, the nurse had still not exited the room. Ziadek leaned back against the wall and shut his eyes. His oxygen had begun to taste medicinal; he supposed it was the hospital air. When the other man, the one who had found Luisa, moved to sit next to him, he felt the air move around him.