The Lost Daughter (8 page)

From the quartet of bright blue doors at the entrance to the school the kids poured out, bearing their kites and lanyards and
still-sticky collages. A towheaded boy in a Spider-Man T-shirt flung himself against Tad’s car and got in without a word. “Well, hello to you too,” Tad said. He turned to Brooke. “See you here again.”

“Not often. My husband’s usually the pickup guy.”

“Have I—?” Tad paused, his hand on his chin. Then he opened his door. “Of course!” he said. “Sean O’Connor. Don’t know why I didn’t put it together, Meghan gets into his car.
Duh.
” He pulled a goofy face. “I guess I had a mental image,” he said, “and I—”

And you didn’t figure I’d be with him, Brooke finished silently. She saw Meghan at the blue door and waved. “So you know Sean.”

“He prints our pool brochures. I don’t know, maybe I thought you were divorced, I don’t know.”

“Sean’ll be back tomorrow. Hi, Bug,” Brooke said to Meghan, who was dragging her bag of artwork. Recently she had been focused on kittens—kitten pictures, collages of kitten photos from magazines, a fluffy kitten resembling a sheep, made of glued cotton balls stuck to cardboard.

Meghan glanced at the boy in Tad’s car. “Mommy,” she hissed, her eyes darting back and forth.

The adults exchanged smiles. “You got a cute clone there, Mrs. O’Connor,” Tad said.

“She gets it all from her dad,” Brooke retorted, shutting down the flirtation. When the Mazda had driven off, she tucked herself into the car and nodded at Meghan to do her belt. “You took your time,” she said.

“Mommy, that boy Jason is
smelly
.”

“Really? I didn’t smell him. How was your day?”

“I don’t want to go to dance class. I hate dance class.”

“That was your day? Hating dance class?”

“Mommy.”
Meghan emitted a great, grown-up sigh as they exited the parking lot and headed toward the dance studio. Did Brooke
sigh like that? She glanced sidelong at her daughter. Tad Horgan had called her Brooke’s clone, but Brooke had looked different as a child—paler, longer in the face, with a bumpy nose she was glad not to have passed on to Meghan. It wasn’t as if, were they to adopt, there would be one who matched and one who didn’t. Would there?

A
half hour later she found a parking spot right outside Starbucks. “Here goes,” she said softly to herself. All day, she had been not-thinking about this encounter. She had not-thought about it while she set up the chrysanthemum display, she had not-thought about it while she’d argued with Shanita, she had silenced the shrinks, she had not-thought during the exchange with Tad Horgan. No, that wasn’t true. On no other day would she have told a man she’d just met that his legs looked like a soccer player’s. Unable to resist, she pulled down the visor and flipped open the little mirror. Deliberately, she had left no time to change clothes or put on makeup. If he wanted to see her, he’d have to see her as she was—grimy, disheveled, no hiding the crow’s feet. She pulled away the elastic holding her ponytail, finger-combed her hair, and shook it loose. There. That would do.

Inside, she blinked in the sudden dimness before she made out his posture, the familiar tilt of the head, shoulders back, knees akimbo. “Alex,” she said as she wove her way around the espresso line.

He stood. His hair was shorter, still dark, the same cowlick over his left eyebrow. As he stepped around the tiny table for a hug, he seemed both heavier and smaller than she remembered—only a couple of inches over her own height, and heavier not from weight gain but as if gravity pulled on him more. “You really came,” he said. He put his arms around her in a hug made clumsier by the chair-cluttered space. Quickly she pulled away, sat.

“Was I late?”

“No! I just—all those years, you wouldn’t see me. So I was ready to be stood up. Can I get you something?”

“No, no. Just sit.”

“And let you sip at mine?” He grinned slyly at her. Here came the past, trailing anecdotes. She never used to order fries or dessert, but would pick at his shamelessly until it became their joke.

“I see you got a venti,” she said lightly, “so I figured you were ready to share.”

He sat. What was so different about his face? “Glasses,” she said. “You never wore those.”

He took off the wire-rims. “Six years now. I have astigmatism. Doctor in Japan nailed it, my first year there.”

“And now you’re back.”

He nodded. “For now, yeah,” he said. Brooke felt as if she could hear her own voice, could hear Alex, and all the voices around them in the Starbucks—and he was only two feet from her, this well-dressed, muscular man who held an entire past world inside him, like one of those Christmas globes—but she wanted it all to slow way down, until she understood what was going on. Pay attention, she ordered herself. “They offered a transfer to Boston,” Alex was saying, “and I’d gotten divorced, and I thought maybe I heard my own country calling to me for a change.”

“Divorced,” said Brooke. “Wow.” She took a sip of Alex’s latte. It was lukewarm; he had been here a little while. “I hadn’t known you were married.”

“Six years.”

Quickly she did the calculation. Like her, Alex was thirty-three. She knew he had gone to the Far East after college; from her mother she’d heard he was back in the States, at Stanford, for an MBA. But after seven years of Brooke’s saying, “I don’t want to know,” her
mother had stopped reporting on Alex Frazier’s whereabouts. So he must have met his wife in business school and then gone away again, to Japan. And lived there, thinking it would be forever. Alex waved a hand in front of her face. “Sorry,” she said. She had been staring at him, her mouth hanging open like the village idiot. “I just—we’re getting so old.”

“Are we?”

“Feels that way. Sean and I’ve been married for seven years. We have a daughter.”

“Yes, I heard her in the background when I called. Meghan, right?”

“Yeah.” She stole another sip of his coffee. She wanted her own cup, now, but she didn’t want to stay long, to let the conversation range too far. Then she heard herself say, “Sean wants us to have another.”

“And you don’t.”

“I—can’t.”

“Hmm.” He expelled a breath of surprise. “Can’t? Or won’t?”

“Won’t, can’t. You know.”

Did he know? She watched him run his hand over his cheeks and chin. He had shaved close, and she recalled his thick stubble. His neck was darkly tanned; soccer, still? “I hadn’t thought,” he said slowly, “I could bear having even one.”

“But then you did?” Surprise struck her like a slap. But why shouldn’t he have had a child? Of course.

He nodded. “Dylan,” he said. “Had heart problems from the start. He died just after his second birthday.”

“Oh, Lex, I am so sorry.”

He shrugged. “Apparently a majority of marriages end in divorce after a child dies.”

“That’s why you’re here. In the States, I mean.”

“No. Maybe.” When he frowned, his mouth looked exactly as it had fifteen years ago. A son, Brooke thought. Like her, he had gone on, and he had fathered a son, and now the son was gone. “Once Tomiko and I broke up,” he said, “it felt like I was just running away.”

“It didn’t feel that way before?”

“No, Brooke. It didn’t.” There was the old harshness to his voice, the same she’d heard the last time they met face to face, when he came back from Boston University and she’d moved out, had moved to the Adirondacks and was living alone, and she’d come to his dad’s funeral and heard his last plea. “Look, I really did have business, here, in Hartford, I mean.”

“I guess so. Look at your threads.” She indicated the loosened tie, the tailored shirt. How funny the two of them must appear, the gardener and the businessman.

“We’ve got a small branch office here. HR wants to close it. So much happens over the Internet, now. But I said I’d have a look, see what their foot traffic’s like.”

“And?”

He scratched his head. “We really ought to close it.”

She eyed his watch. Just shy of five. “And I really ought to get back.”

“I don’t think I’ll recommend closing it just yet, though.”

“Why not?”

He gazed steadily at her. Heat rose into her face. On the phone Alex had been lighthearted, just passing through, operating on a hunch that she was still at the address her mom had mentioned on an old Christmas card. Surely, she had thought, a decade and a half was long enough. “I’d like to see you from time to time,” he said at last. “If that’s okay. I’m not going to, you know, invade your life or anything. But you’ve been in my head since I moved back.”
He shifted his gaze to the coffee cup, which she had drained. An ironic smile played on his mouth. “I’d like the connection, Brooke.”

“Well, that’s fine,” she said. Her tongue felt dry. “And you could meet Sean at some point. And Meghan.”

“Sure,” he said, nodding.

Though he wouldn’t do that for a while, Brooke thought as she drove back to Lorenzo’s. She wouldn’t ask him to. Not only that. She wasn’t going to tell Sean whom she’d met, or why. Once she started, there would be no stopping, not with Sean so watchful of her these days, so eager to know why she wouldn’t go off the Pill, what was up with her.

When she had rolled into the familiar gravel lot at Lorenzo’s and turned off the ignition, she fished out her cell phone. Her heart, where Shanita had pressed her hand, felt swollen. Think, she told herself. Whatever Shanita said, it was better to lift away from the heart, into the head, where you could think.

“When I get home,” she said to Sean after they’d discussed their mercurial daughter, “let’s talk. Okay?”

T
he sky over Hartford was the deep blue of summer evening as Alex emerged from Max Oyster Bar. It had been an awkward business dinner. Restructuring, they called it, and Alex knew when he accepted the transfer from Mercator Investments that he would be the fall guy for a number of these closings in the Northeast. The guys who had taken Alex to dinner couched their desperation in grim jokes. A bear market was an eighteen-month period when your wife got no jewelry and you got no sex. Well, no one would lower the boom on the Hartford office right away. They were too close to all the insurance companies the town boasted, with their own financial network. Alex would recommend a half dozen staff cuts and a performance review of the guy who’d downed three vodka tonics. From here he’d go to Albany and repeat the drill. For now he needed to stretch his legs. He left his car in the lot and walked west.

Maybe, he thought as he headed toward the lowering sun, Brooke had married an insurance guy. He should have asked. So much of her life he couldn’t know. What did he want from her?
Friendship, he told himself. He’d lost track, after all, of the others they’d known from those days. It wasn’t as if they had done each other any wrong, however Brooke had reacted in those years. She seemed fine, now. Maybe, if he made enough trips to Hartford over the months, if they shared more lattes—he smiled as he thought of her sipping at his; old habits die hard—he would find a way to tell her the truth. What he’d done, those years ago. What had happened to the baby, what he had done with his own hands.

That old adage, the truth will set you free. A few well-dressed strangers hurried past him on their way to the train station. Were they free? You couldn’t tell. Who would have claimed, two years ago, watching Alex stride into Shinjo Station on his way to the Tokyo office of Mercator Investments, that he was bound up in the chains of a lie? It wasn’t as though he had felt the lie pressing on him, year upon year. He had gone on—with his job, with Tomiko, with Dylan. If he hadn’t seen Brooke this afternoon, he might not have thought of that long-ago night for months, or years.

Long shadows fell across the street in the slow August twilight. If he walked far enough, Alex thought, and then drove the two hours back to Boston, he might get a night’s sleep for a change. With Tomiko’s hands massaging him, he used to nod off in less than a minute. But he would never feel those hands again. He had spoken to her the day he left Japan. Good luck, she had said over the phone. He had not seen her for three months. He had not been naked with her for two years. Time got wobbly. How many weeks had it been since he landed at Logan, since he took the apartment, since he first keyed Brooke’s number into his cell phone? Insomnia made you lose track.

He fingered the little ring box in his pants pocket. He had brought it to show Brooke, then backed off. He had not come here to bring her pain. She was still sensitive as a tuning fork, he thought.
If not for her mom, he never would have gotten her phone or address. Mrs. Willcox had always liked him, always been perplexed by the breakup, and always wished he would come back and knock some sense into Brooke. That feeling, he inferred, had not changed when Brooke decided to marry this Sean O’Connor from Hartford. Mrs. Willcox had sent Alex’s parents the wedding announcement with a handwritten note in the margins to the effect that she’d have liked one name to be different. Alex’s mother had sent the announcement to Alex in California. He’d tucked it away with old mementos, and taken the job with Mercator far away, in Tokyo.

He walked by the train station and up the hill past the Hartford Insurance Company. Traffic was thin. Not much of a night scene in Hartford. Lit along the street as he walked westward were stones with plaques bearing lines by the poet Wallace Stevens. Must have been from Hartford, he surmised. Had Brooke read this fellow, back in the day?
I was of three minds / Like a tree / On which there are three blackbirds
, read one plaque. Another:
A man and a woman / Are one. / A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one.
Alex squatted and read the words; read them again. Brooke would know what these things meant. She would know why the guy was writing about blackbirds, what it meant to say a man and a woman and a blackbird could be one. For the moment, it freaked him out, as if the poet’s lines were speaking to him in a code he couldn’t decipher.
I was of three minds.
A nervous shudder went through his body.

The city fell away behind him. He realized he was hearing August crickets. Under a streetlamp he consulted his BlackBerry and turned left just before a park to find himself in a neighborhood of shade trees and modest Victorian houses—densely packed, but otherwise not unlike the Windermere neighborhood Brooke had grown up in. As a couple headed his way on the sidewalk, their golden retriever pulling on a leash, he caught his breath. It had not
occurred to him that he might bump into her, with her husband, out for a stroll on a summer evening. But no—they were older, the woman shorter, laughing at something the man had just said with a laugh that bore no resemblance to Brooke’s. They greeted him and moved on. Still, he began to move more stealthily. He wished he’d worn a baseball cap. If she saw him here, after their innocuous rendezvous, she would never meet him again. But it came to him that this was where he’d been headed since he left the restaurant. To see where Brooke lived, the life she’d made for herself. He would just have a peek, then he would walk back to the car—the August air, still warm but with a hint of fall’s tang, was clearing his head already—and drive the hundred miles to Boston.