The Lost Daughter (4 page)

“Eww!” cried Meghan. “It’s all nasty on your shoulder, Mommy!”

“Doesn’t matter,” Brooke said. “It washes out.
You
feel better, don’t you?” she said to the baby—whose face, truth be told, looked like that of a jowly old man contemplating a jar of pickles. She was about to set the baby on her hip when she found Gerry reaching for him. She handed him over and went to find a paper napkin for her shoulder.

The cumulus cloud had risen and darkened; the smell of ozone was in the air. The various components of the baggy family called the O’Connors—though there were Mulligans among them, and Peases and even a set of Wuertenbachers—picked up their toys, their platters, their sticky children. Brooke gracefully and efficiently put away the leftovers and stuffed the trash bins. Sean’s cousin Dominick—a source of pride for some in the clan, an irritant to others—stood arguing with Father Donnell about school choice. A civil rights lawyer in Philadelphia, Dominick was rumored to have political ambitions. He was beefy even for an O’Connor, with shoulders that hunched forward and small, keen eyes that missed nothing. “You people use that word
choice
at your convenience,” he was telling the red-nosed priest. “If it’s a woman wanting an abortion, you reject the word. If it’s a Catholic school wanting state funding, you own it.”

“So that seems right to you, does it?” said Father Donnell. “That a mother can choose to kill her unborn child, but she can’t choose to send her living children to a safe place where they’ll learn Catholic values?”

“They can get the Catholic values on Sunday. You make that twelve-year-old rape victim carry to term, she don’t get her life back.”

“She has her life. She’s a mother.”

“Okay, look.” Dominick pulled a jumbo shrimp off a platter just as Danny’s birdlike wife, Nora, swept it away. “I don’t mean to push your family-planning buttons. But when you’re talking state education coffers that are stretched to the max—when you’re talking special-needs kids who can’t get the funding for basic skills training—then I’m sorry, Father. I don’t see shelling out for weekday Bible class. Hey, Brooke, you packing up the cooler?”

“Rain’s coming,” said Brooke, nodding at the cloud.

“Brooke has an opinion,” Father Donnell said, waving his bottle in her direction. “She’s got one, but she’ll never share it. Will you, Mrs. O’Connor?” When Brooke didn’t answer, he said in a boozy stage whisper, “Calm as a lake. When Sean was a young hellion—”

“Sean,” interrupted Kate, “has to sing us a lullaby. One for the baby, anyway.” She held Derek against her midriff, facing out. His eyes were glazed with fatigue.

“Oh, now,” Sean said. He grazed the baby’s silky hair with a rough finger. “Everyone’s still talking.”

“They’re O’Connors, aren’t they?” said one of the Wuertenbacher cousins. “Nothing shuts ’em up.”

“The rain will, soon enough,” said Brooke. “Go on. A lullaby.”

She squeezed her husband’s arm. Everything Sean did, she knew, he did to perfection. Underappreciated things, like his singing, like the work he did on their home garden, where his thumb was greener than Brooke’s—things he advertised to no one but simply carried forward. “He has a kind of grace,” she had said once to her mom, back in central Pennsylvania. Her mom had laughed. Brooke hadn’t discussed Sean with her after that; she would avoid the subject when her mom came to visit. Father Donnell was right; she kept her opinions under wraps. But if she let herself loose, she would resort to a word even more old-fashioned than
grace
. She would say he kept his
troth. Like Gareth, she would say, the knight in
King Arthur
who comes disguised as a kitchen boy and takes all the abuse anyone can heave at him before he becomes a hero. But she would lose her mother—rolling her eyes at Sean’s freckles, his fading hair, his humdrum job—with the words
kitchen boy
.

Now Sean’s mother was pinching Brooke’s forearm. “Thinks he can sing,” Mum said. Whiskey laced her breath. Brooke tried to step away with her, but Mum’s aside had already carried across the lawn. “Asked for lessons, whole time he was growing up. Priest paid for a few, and what good is it?”

“He sings in that chorus, doesn’t he?” said Sean’s sister-in-law Nora, from the other side of the picnic table. “You know, the one with the symphony.”

“Couldn’t be bothered with the church choir,” said Mum. “Ungrateful.”

“Come on, Sean,” Dominick said. “Give us a tune.”

“I don’t know,” Sean said. Quickly he glanced toward his mother before his eyes sought out Brooke’s. “Had a ragged throat earlier, and this beer—”

“Sing, sweetheart,” Brooke said softly. “Before it rains.”

Sean set down his plastic cup. He stepped away from the table. A hush fell over the group. Sean’s shoulders squared. His arms hung to the elbow, where they crooked, the palms of his hands up as if he held a cloud in his forearms. His torso filled with breath. “Oh Derry boy,” he sang. “The pipes, the pipes are callin’. From glen to glen, and round the mountainside.” His clear tenor voice filled the warm air. Tears sprang to Brooke’s eyes. “The summer’s gone, and all the flowers are dyin’. ’Tis you, ’tis you must go and I must bide.”

Meghan tugged at her mother’s pants. Brooke leaned down. “The flowers
aren’t
dying,” Meghan said.

“Ssh, honey. I know. It’s a song.”

“Why are you crying?”

“Because it’s so pretty. Ssh.”

Sean’s voice had begun to soar. It was like spun sugar, Brooke thought, the sweetness of the held high note. She knew little about music—her father had liked Keith Jarrett, and Bach on rainy days—but on the first full weekend she’d spent with Sean, a decade ago, she’d woken to hear him singing Italian in the shower and had wanted him, suddenly and completely, back in bed. Now Kate had tears in her eyes, too; Father Donnell as well. “’Tis I’ll be there, in sunshine or in shadow. Oh Derry boy, oh Derry boy, I love you so.”

The air held stillness. A few of the children started to clap, but mothers stayed their hands. They motioned to baby Derek, who had dropped off to sleep in Kate’s arms and looked for once, as the sunlight slipped behind a cloud, like a lovely baby. Sean’s body relaxed. The smile that crossed his face was slightly rueful, as if he had gotten away with something. “Oh, Sean,” Nora finally said, and stepped forward to kiss him on the cheek.

“That’s my song, there, you stole,” Danny said when the other women had finished planting their lips on Brooke’s husband.

“It’s Derry’s now,” Sean said. “Passing to the next generation.”

People began packing up strollers and coolers. “That,” Brooke said, taking Sean’s hand in hers, “was a magic moment.”

“Tell that to her,” Sean said, jerking his head to where Mum was making her way down the gravel walk with Kate.

Mum, Brooke wanted to say, has a tin ear and a pole up her drunken backside. But she knew better than to start. “Why don’t you help me with the plates?” she said instead.

Soon the last of the stragglers were driving off, wives at the wheel, with another round of teary thanks from Kate to Brooke before a sleeping Derek was strapped into his seat and the parking lot emptied. Meghan executed another dozen cartwheels on the
flattened grass while Brooke and Sean folded tables and tucked them into the nursery shed.

The rain began as they drove home, lightning illuminating the sky and then fat drops fanning dust from the windshield. “So Kate’s quit her job, you know, with this one,” Sean said as he turned off the interstate into the west end of Hartford.

“Strange. She said they were buying a house. But I guess with four—”

“They can live in our house,” said Meghan from the back, kicking at Brooke’s seat.

“Be a bit crowded, don’t you think?” Brooke said.

“Nuh-uh. Baby Derry in my room. Auntie Kate and Uncle Gerry in the basement. Rosie and Sarah in Mommy’s study.”

Sean chuckled. “And Jimmy?”

Meghan frowned. “He can go stay with Aunt Fanny.”

“I don’t think they want to live in our house, honey,” Brooke said. “They want a house of their own.”

“But we’ve got lots of room. You could even have twins, Mommy, and they could have their very own room. They could have
my
room. I would go sleep in your study, and—”

“I am not having twins, sweet pea.” Brooke twisted in her seat. A flash of lightning lit Meghan’s face, pale with excitement and fatigue. “But we’ll see lots of baby Derek. When you’re a little older, you can babysit him.”

“I don’t
want
to babysit him.” A whine crept into Meghan’s voice, and she kicked the back of the seat again. “I want a baby of my
own
.”

“You mean of Mommy’s own,” Sean said. He pulled into their driveway and turned off the ignition. The rain was steady now, the blacktop slick.

“Well?” Meghan glanced from one of her parents to the other.

“Well, that’s a grown-up decision, Meghan, and we’ll just have to see.” Brooke’s voice was firm. She did not look at Sean. “Now it’s past your bedtime.”

B
y the time they got Meghan to bed, walked the dogs through the rain, and washed the party things, it was past midnight. “And a long day tomorrow,” said Brooke.

“I can pick up Meghan if you like.”

“Would you? I’ve got a coffee date.”

“Date?” Sean turned from where he was packing away the picnicware.

Brooke flapped her hand dismissively. “Old friend from high school, coming through town. Not the best timing, but I said we could meet.”

To her relief, Sean didn’t ask more. The two canaries caged above the sink chirped irritably. Pulling off her silk blouse with the spit-up stain, Brooke dropped it into cold water to soak. The dogs—two Lab mutts and an excitable terrier, all rescued from the Hartford pound—milled anxiously before they settled in the mudroom.

Upstairs Brooke sensed her husband’s eyes on her as she ran a washcloth over her face and arms. He hadn’t asked about her date, she realized, because he was still thinking Meghan’s thought,
a baby of my own
. She felt a knot of panic in her chest. But he needed to be up at six for work. Not enough time or energy for a tussle about family size. Pulling off his T-shirt, Sean came to stand behind her in the bathroom. As he wrapped his arms around her waist, their eyes met in the mirror. Sean stood almost an inch shorter than Brooke. Against the small of her back she felt his belly, which was not fat but solid, a “tire” as the O’Connors said. Recently he had grown a neat goatee to camouflage his delicate chin and make up
for the hairline working its way back from his forehead. The forearms circling Brooke’s rib cage were fleshy but muscled, with stiff reddish arm hair that crept onto the backs of his hands. He rested his chin on his wife’s shoulder. Against her backside she felt his penis rise. “They are right, you know,” he said softly, holding her gaze in his bright golden eyes. “If not for our sake, for Meghan’s. You saw how she was with that baby.”

Brooke let her breath out around the panic knot. “She’s got lots of cousins.”

“Not the same.” Sean’s hands moved up, began massaging Brooke’s breasts under her light robe. “Maybe you should wean off the Pill,” he said.

“My boobs’d shrink.”

“I don’t love you for your boobs. We’ve got plenty of savings. Gerry says—”

Brooke twisted to face him. “Gerry wasn’t put on bed rest for any of his kids,” she said. “Neither was Kate.”

“I know, I know.” Sean studied her collarbone, her jaw, her ears. Sometimes, Brooke thought, her husband was memorizing her. “But it all came out fine. You said it was the most worthwhile eight weeks of your life. And the doctor said it didn’t mean a second time—”

“Plus I can’t cut back on work,” Brooke interrupted him. “Lorenzo’s counting on me to set up this landscaping contract with Aetna. We’ve got the new location in Simsbury. And with Jessica leaving for nursing school—”

“Ssh. Ssh.” Sean put a finger to her lips. The plain, solid lines of his face betrayed a sadness he didn’t like to indulge. Sean’s Irish temper sent its sparks not outward but inward, where they smoldered and built up ash. Worse, Brooke’s excuses bewildered him. His love for her harbored no doubts, and he had seen the joy she took in Meghan. Every time they talked about another pregnancy it went
this way, but he loved her too much to stop. Sean possessed what Brooke’s father—who read and quoted philosophers as if they were his best friends—called the sign of true love, a constant disposition to promote the other’s good. “I’ve heard it all before,” he said now, lifting his finger, trying to lighten his voice. “Sometimes I think I’ll just have to replace those little pink pills with fakes, what-do-you-call-’ems—”

“Placebos.”

“Right. And when you see it’s all working out, Lorenzo isn’t falling apart without you and resting in bed isn’t such an awful thing, you’ll be grateful to me. You’ll say, ‘That Sean, he’s not exactly a prize, but he knows how to love me.’ ”

He kissed her—lightly, playfully, desperately—on the lips. Brooke pulled away. “I can’t joke about this,” she said. “The way your family puts pressure on—it amounts to harassment. I’m not the only woman in the world choosing to have just one child, you know.”

Sean would not let go of her hand. “You’re the only one who’s married to me,” he managed to say.

“Please, honey. We’re tired. We’ll end up fighting. Let’s just go to bed.”

Brooke shrugged off her robe and slid between the covers. Sean stood for a minute silhouetted in the bathroom door. Then he flicked off the light and joined her. Lightly she stroked his back. She had good reasons—well, perhaps not good to anyone else, but like bedrock to her. Reasons that were impossible, impossible to spell out. She might as well have twisted Sean’s sunlit singing voice into a glass-breaking screech. Silent, stroking his shoulder blades, she felt his pain, his daily uncertainty. The wide bed on which they lay breathing could have been a boat tossed in a storm. Deep inside the cabin, she knew, beat her heart. Its hatches had long since been
battened down—not against Sean, but against a mutiny from her own troubled past. When Sean reached around and pulled her arm across his ribs, she felt a pull on those hatches.
Let go
, she thought. But she couldn’t, or they would all be out in the storm.