The Lost Daughter (45 page)

Dinner in an hour. From my dorm window I can see the E. J. Crosby building, where my folks are getting some kind of discussion, a slide show, an upbeat talk. My mom won’t be able to follow much, but I noticed she bought a new coat and new shoes to come here; she really wants to look like a mom. Ziadek will fall asleep; that’s the meds. And Katarina will ask weird questions, like: What if we fall off one of the horses? Or: Are we learning how to make change?

I’m learning to make change, Aunt Katarina. You bet.

I love my family. I’m trying to get used to the idea that Ziadek’s going to die, but it doesn’t work. I need him to tell me, again, that it’s okay. That he feels lucky. I told Katarina I want to come home in his last week. I want to hold his hand. She says she can’t guarantee anything, that he could go anytime. If I insist, I’ll have to come home right now. And I won’t do that.

I push the window open a little—they overheat this place—and hear my favorite horse, Squeaky, whinny from the field where grass is just starting to push up out of the mud. The horses are mostly for the autistic kids, so they can develop empathy, but I ride Squeaky to learn balance. Afterward, I brush her coat, and her flesh shivers a little as I pass the brush across her hindquarters. It makes me think about being stroked like that, about being touched. Maybe one day.

The books on my shelf are full of romance. Brooke sent them, with a note. She said she had loved these books when she was my age. They belonged, she wrote, to my grandfather. They’re all vintage hardcovers, with beautiful pictures on the front, flowing watercolors of women in long sheer dresses and men in armor or vests
embroidered with crosses. Myths, basically, about chivalry and quests for holy objects that have no use unless you believe in magic. Visions appear in the air. Women cast spells. Wizards age backward. Knights throw each other off horses and are trampled.

I’m not going to insult Brooke, but I have no use for these tales. My grandfather is Ziadek, and he told me stories about the old country, about the war. If Brooke comes to see me here, I’ll blow the dust off the books and thank her, but I won’t read them.

For so long, I think as I look out on the twilight, the lights in the Crosby building, I waited for my mother. Then she came, and I still miss her. I miss her like a part of me that I might have known once, but I’ve forgotten. Or like a twin who was always there during my childhood—running through long grass with her tall blond mother, listening to her romantic tales at night, hearing her songs—and now she’s gone forever, dead or simply run off. No matter how well I come to know Brooke, I will always miss my mother in this way.

And I will always belong to my mom, to Luisa. There she is now, pushing Ziadek’s wheelchair as they leave the building. She looks up toward my window and I wave, but she doesn’t see me. Last time she was here, she brought me a chess set, a beautiful wooden one. It cost almost all her earnings from the Quik Mart, I think. You can play with your teachers, she said. They’re smart. And I said no, I wanted to play with her. Ziadek didn’t come that time; he was too sick with the chemo. Today, before they leave, maybe we’ll have a game. Luisa can move Ziadek’s pieces for him. She’ll like that, counting to bishop four or queen two. Her hands on the smooth wood of the rooks with their crenellated tops, the queen with her little button of a head. Her hands with their close-clipped nails, the straight crease across the inside of the palm. They saved me, those hands. And here they are, the knock on my door. I push myself upright, clutch the bookcase for balance, take one step. Then another.

L
orenzo lingered for almost six months. Every time Brooke went to see him he claimed he was at rest, he was ready. But even the hospice nurse said he had fight in him. The day before he died, Brooke found him propped in bed, staring down at his legs, which had developed a tremble that wouldn’t quit. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he said in the high, feeble voice brought on by the morphine.

“What don’t you know?” Brooke asked.

“What I’m supposed to do.”

She took his thin hand. “I don’t think you have to do anything,” she said.

Ziadek, back in Windermere—she thought of him as Ziadek now, everyone called him that—was holding up better, though Brooke suspected that he, too, would be gone by summer. At least he had hung on long enough to see Najda settled at the Crosby School, and Luisa beginning to heal.

The week before Christmas, Brooke had brought Sean and Meghan to Windermere. With trepidation she had arranged for them
to meet Ziadek, Najda, and Katarina at the T.G.I. Friday’s on Route 6. Luisa had refused to come. Meghan had just lost two teeth within a week, and insisted on bringing them both along to show her grandmother and her new “cousins.” The meeting had been awkward. Najda was due to start at the Crosby School after the holidays. Katarina alternately quashed any excitement about this development and struggled to present her family as a self-sufficient unit, allergic to charity. Quickly she targeted Sean as a possible ally against relations between the two families. But Sean had the gift of geniality—he was delighted to meet her, to meet Najda, to have the privilege of knowing Ziadek, of whom he’d heard so much. Now and then, Brooke had felt the warm pressure of her husband’s hand in the center of her back, like a support on which she could lie back and float if she needed to. And Meghan, luckily, had regained her chatty self. She insisted on climbing into the wheelchair, on Najda’s showing her how all the controls worked; if she noticed that her new cousin moved strangely or had trouble with words, she let that go in favor of novelty.

Ziadek had lost his hair to the chemo by then, and scarcely ate. But he took Brooke’s hands in his own, once the meal was blessedly over, and said in a rasp, “He has done this thing. Your lawyer. We need to pay him.”

“No,” said Brooke. “You don’t.”

“Luisa. She—she is not ready.” He pinched the transparent clamp that held the tube of oxygen to his nostrils. Already Brooke could trace the plates of his skull, the hollows for his pale eyes. He attempted a smile. “She is liking this coach you send, this Jennifer.”

“I didn’t send Jennifer, Ziadek.”

“No, no, I mean the boy sent her. The boy who save Luisa.”

“Alex?”

“Alex.” Ziadek managed the smile, showing his long teeth. “Good boy, Alex. He watch for her, for Luisa.”

“Are you sure it was Alex? He paid for a coach? What kind of coach?”

“Life coach.” He humphed; the rice paper of his eyelids fluttered. “Funny word,
coach
. He pay for many things, your Alex. Luisa sends him pictures. A good boy,” he repeated. He squeezed Brooke’s hand.

I am not running away
, Alex had said. And maybe, Brooke thought, he wasn’t.

Najda herself was different—more reserved, more watchful. When she spoke of the Crosby School, her eyes shone. “I swim,” she said of the visit she’d had there. “Say they walk maybe. Me, I mean. Walk!” She admired Meghan’s teeth. She shook Sean’s hand. She allowed Brooke to fit an early Christmas present, a red wool coat specially made for wheelchair users, around her shoulders. But there were no hugs. She did not call Brooke
Mother
. She did not mention Alex. Luisa’s ordeal had obviously shaken Najda, had changed her outlook. Perhaps, Brooke thought, Najda had come to think differently about this long-awaited mother who had returned to put her together like Humpty-Dumpty.

“It does no good to press her,” Sean had said on their way back to Hartford from Windermere.

“I’m afraid she’ll start hating me.”

“Not if you don’t start hating yourself.”

“I know. I know.”

Back and forth, that winter, they went over the familiar ground: what Brooke could and could not forgive herself for; why she refused to blame Alex for anything; what she wanted for Najda, what she wanted from Najda. “I’ve got to stop burdening you with all this,” Brooke said more than once, when their talk had gone past midnight and Sean stayed up after to study music theory.

“She ain’t heavy,” he would croon, cornily, each time. “She’s my lov-err.”

Their days arranged themselves differently, now. The daffodils were up. The Simsbury location was opening in two weeks. Sean had dived into a full load of classes and spent thirty hours a week at the nursery. Besides the website, he had designed a new logo for Lorenzo’s, plus the banners and brochures that announced the new site and management. He had helped Brooke compose a page commemorating Lorenzo; already, Brooke had received a half dozen e-mails from his relatives as distant as Italy, thanking her for the photos and memorial. Meghan was back to ballet and also playing spring soccer. Brooke liked to pick her up after a day of greenhouse work. They would vie for who was muddier.

Today at Lorenzo’s they were putting out the first boxes of pansies. The indoor shop was filled with bell-shaped lilies and purple tulips for Easter. Five days of steady warmth had melted the last of April’s snow, and cars splashed through great puddles in the parking lot. As Brooke stepped out from the greenhouse where she was incubating the starter vegetables, a loud blast of hip-hop veered into the drive. Shanita had called from the Simsbury location a half hour ago, and here she was already, to pick up pansy reinforcements.

“Hey, Boss Lady,” she greeted Brooke as she stepped down from the truck. Her boys crowded the passenger seat, worrying their PlayStation Portables.

“Told you not to call me that,” Brooke warned.

Shanita inspected the pansies. “I used to tell Lorenzo,” she said, “I don’t know why folks call queer men pansies. They look nothing like these little faces, here.”

“You never said that.”

“You not the only one with an inside track.”

It was still taking some adjustment, this new relationship since Lorenzo’s death. Brooke had said nothing about it beforehand, and in the first week Shanita had threatened at least five times to quit
before she’d take orders from her old buddy. Now they handled it with these dumb jokes and subtle digs. Brooke pulled on her gloves and helped carry flats of pansies to the truck bed. She wore wading boots every day in the slush, and still came home with mud on her jeans.

“Hey, boss,” Shanita said as they loaded the last set. “You’re wobbly.”

“I’ve been on my feet all day, Shan.”

“I don’t mean that.” Hands on hips, she stepped back and stared at Brooke’s belly. “You got a little passenger in there, don’t you?”

The air was still cool, but Brooke’s face flamed. “I can’t believe it shows.”

“I’ve got a practiced eye. How far along?”

“Just a couple months. I’ve only put on six pounds!”

“Well, that’s a sack of potatoes, and they’re all in one spot. Guess you don’t have to raid Africa for your baby now, huh?”

“Shanita.” Brooke set the pansies in place. “It was never about that. It was just about me, about…old fears.”

“But you don’t tell me you’re with child. I need to guess at it. Now you’re the Boss Lady, where’s my friend at?”

Brooke faced her old confidante. What a cyclone the last six months had been! But she couldn’t allow the swirl of her life to leave Shanita in the dust. What had she claimed, to Dominick, back in October? She was
done with keeping it a secret
. “Let’s knock off early today,” she said. “Let the guys close up. I’ll buy you a glass of wine.”

“I got to get the kids home,” Shanita said—sulking, a little, not wanting Brooke to take her for granted. And she was right, Brooke thought.

“How about I come over then?” she said. “I’ll bring the wine. I’d like to see your new place.”

“If you don’t mind boxes,” Shanita said.

One by one, Brooke thought, one by one, she was unstitching the shroud of her past self. There remained tight stitches to undo, strong seams resisting, risks to run.

Shanita drove off to Simsbury. Brooke moved through the greenhouse, misting. People always came looking for herbs and lettuce before the season was well enough advanced. One element she hoped to add, once Shanita had the Simsbury operation up and running, was a tasting room. If the nursery forced some of the plants a bit early, they could offer a spread of pesto from their own basil and garlic, a small cup of sliced strawberries, a salad of fresh arugula drizzled with cold-pressed olive oil, which they could also offer as an impulse buy. Last fall, tossing their lives in the air like a deck of cards, she and Sean had talked about his career—what he could do, realistically, in music; what made him happy. In the end, he had turned to her. “When we met, you were working with plants,” he said, his amber eyes warm on hers. “You said they were easy to talk to. I think maybe they didn’t ask you any questions.”

“True enough,” Brooke had confessed. “And I could get the job without going to college.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Miss what?”

“College. The life of the mind. All those clever things you’d have been so good at, the way your friend Alex is good at them.”

She couldn’t help the small thud in her heart. “Don’t go getting jealous of Alex again,” she said quickly.

“Don’t go getting defensive.” They had been in bed; he pulled her close and kissed her earlobe. “What does Brooke want, now that she’s not in hiding anymore?”

She had lain quiet a long while. Finally she said, “I love the nursery. Maybe I wouldn’t have chosen it, if things had gone differently for me. But I can’t imagine other work, another career. I make
things grow. I help people find a kind of beauty they can care for. Lorenzo’s leaving us a gift and a challenge. I want what we have, Sean.” She laced her fingers through his chest hair. “Isn’t that funny?”

A rap at the greenhouse door interrupted her thoughts—Eddie, one of the ponytailed guys who’d resurfaced for the spring season. He and his buddy Jasper were strong and steady, but they knew no more about plants now than when they started a year ago. “Customer, Brooke,” Eddie said. “Guy wants a whole garden’s worth.”

The man standing with his son on the damp mulch looked familiar. “I’m Brooke,” Brooke said, striding toward him in her waders. “We’ve just got plants out that can take a frost right now. Don’t be fooled by three days of sun.”