The Lost Daughter (9 page)

There it was, number nineteen, just a few houses in from the next main street, where cars still rumbled by. The house was plainer than the others Alex had passed, built probably in the 1950s rather than the 1890s. Lights were on downstairs, the blinds drawn. An ugly chain-link fence surrounded the narrow property, though down the center walkway a riot of late-summer lilies rose into the light cast by the streetlamp, their petals closed against the summer night like demure skirts. As Alex stood at the corner post, a pair of dogs bounded over, while from the back a third sent up a bark. Alex shrank back into the shadow of a large oak tree. His heart hammered. From the back of the house he heard a little girl’s voice. “Bitsy! Mocha! Lex!” she trilled. The largest of the dogs, a mutt with a Lab snout and basset ears, gave a last, disgruntled bark and trotted after his companions. Alex heard a screen door slam shut.

His neck was damp with sweat.
Lex.
Ruefully he wondered: Which dog had his name? The big ugly one or the little yappy terrier? He waited a moment, then slipped along the side of the fence, toward the back of the house. The blinds were drawn everywhere except the kitchen, where he saw only the child trotting through, a
slight girl with reddish hair. Light from the second floor shone over the backyard. In its center was a small climbing structure and a sandbox. By the back fence, another garden. A trellis at the back porch supported a climbing vine rich with white blooms, open in the night. Moonflower, Alex remembered. Nostalgia muffled his agitation. He knew next to nothing about plants. But there had been a wall of moonflower mixed with morning glory by Brooke’s front porch, back in Windermere. He remembered sitting out there with her on August nights, the air already chilling at sunset. He shut his eyes, now, and drew in a deep breath. Yes, it was the same scent, a haunting mix of lemon and musk that made him think of nothing but Brooke, of her hair and her mouth and her breasts, Brooke on the porch in Windermere.

He sank to the ground. He hadn’t come looking for this sensation. It came at him on all cylinders, pressing him down. This errand was not about Brooke, he wanted to say to himself, not about Brooke and him. He was only renewing old acquaintance, settling into his new life, his American skin. But the scent of the moonflower plastered his tongue to the floor of his mouth.

The last time he had sat with her on that porch, the sun had been rising—the moonflowers were closing up, the morning glory beginning to unfurl. They had been out all night at a graduation party. She had seemed all right at the party; she had seemed happy and relieved and in love with Alex. There had been that canvas lounge chair, on her porch, and he had leaned back in it with Brooke tucked between his legs, her head on his chest where he could stroke her hair and let his hands wander down to her breasts. They had talked about the party—about his buddy Jake and Jake’s girlfriend, Karen, whom neither of them liked. But Jake would marry Karen anyway, Brooke had said, not because Karen had big tits or because Jake was blind to Karen’s meanness, but because the world after high school was
going to scare Jake too much. Brooke turned out to be right; she was usually right, when it came to their friends. In other things, she was thefanciful dreamer and Alex the hardheaded realist. “Idealist,” she used to correct him. Everything for him was black-and-white, while for her it was all shades of gray.

“Shades of pink, more,” he would tease her.

“Pink’s too ordinary,” she would say. “Mauve. Taupe. Dusty rose. Umm-ber.”

That night on the porch, though, with shades of dawn lightening the horizon, Brooke told him she had buried her dream. She was not going to Boston, which she and Alex had planned to discover together, he at Boston University and she at Tufts. She was not going to college at all. She was not going anywhere. Her fingers had stroked his thighs gently, he remembered, as she gave him this absurd news.

“Is it because of us?” he asked. “Is it because of what happened?”

She had shrugged. “I just think my days of magical thinking are over. No more witches for me, no more knights in armor, no more grails.”

“College isn’t a grail.”

“It’s not anything for me. Not anymore. I already told my parents. I want to work with my hands for a while. See if I can’t”—she sat up and clasped her hands together, as if she’d caught a firefly in them—“connect with something.”

“You connect with me.” He had started to get angry, but already, he could tell, she wasn’t there to receive the brunt of it. Physically, yes—she was there in his lap, on the porch, by the moonflowers—but her emotional self had flown off somewhere, out of his reach. “We were going to connect in Boston together, damn it, Brooke! I turned down Bucknell, remember? For BU? Just so we could be in the same city?”

She shook her head. “It’s too late, Alex.”

“Are you saying you don’t want to be with me anymore? Are you breaking up with me?”

“It doesn’t feel like that.”

“Well, what does it feel like, then?”

She had started to cry. “It feels like I’m in love with you. But I can’t—after what we did, after how I botched everything—I can’t put it behind me. Not with you. We’ll never put it behind us, Lex.”

He could have told her then. He could have told her what he’d done, with his hands. He could have lifted her guilt from her with the leverage of his greater guilt. But he felt none of that, then. They had made a mistake—Brooke, in her dreaminess, had misjudged her pregnancy, and he’d let her fantasy go on too long, and then they’d ended it, and it was over. That was how he’d seen things, then. So he hadn’t told her, because to him there was nothing to tell. “We are putting it behind us right now,” he had said instead. “Look, we graduated, you were salutatorian, we went to the party, we had a great time—”

“It’s always there. Always, for me. But I have to go on with my life somehow. And the only way I can think to do it is to make a different future. Not to be always looking in your eyes and seeing…seeing it.”

“You’re not seeing it, you’re seeing
me
.” He had almost shouted this. A light had gone on in Brooke’s house. Rather than stay and confront Mrs. Willcox, he had whispered fiercely, “Honey, we are going to talk about this when we’ve gotten some sleep. Not sleeping makes us crazy. I’ll call you later. Okay? Okay?”

Later, she had not changed her mind. Stubborn, he had called her. You, too, she had said. She had signed up for classes at the community college in Scranton; she showed him the forms. Then Mrs. Willcox had called him. She wanted to know what he had said, what
he had done to change her daughter. He liked Brooke’s mom better than his own, but he could not come up with an answer to satisfy her. He and Brooke had made love one last time, late that August, before he went off to Boston on a soccer scholarship. It had been in his bedroom, with his parents out at a party and him babysitting his kid sister Charlie, who was seven that year and hooked on Jodie Sweetin; they just had to sit her in front of a
Full House
videotape and her eyes would be glued to the screen for an hour. Brooke had clung to him with the ferocity of a drowning person. She had wanted to use her tongue all over him, not just his penis but his ass, his feet, the back of his neck, as if she were storing the taste of him somewhere in her mouth. When he’d finally come inside her—no diaphragm anymore, she’d insisted to her mother that she needed to be on the Pill—he felt as if his soul had burst. He wept like a baby.

Then he went to Boston, and she stopped returning his phone calls. He told himself she would snap out of it. They would get back on track. They had been through too much together to break up the way a normal high school couple did when college drew them apart. At the same time, he was busy. There were soccer practices and econ classes; there was a whole new world to find his way in, a world he had once thought he would explore with the girl he loved. How they used to lie on the couch in his basement and picture it! He would be on one side of the Charles River, she on the other. They would make new circles of friends; they would bring their circles together. Freedom and commitment at once. Now that dream had drifted away like morning mist.

The first couple of times he drove home, speeding west on the Mass Pike and the interstate, he saw Charlie and his parents, and Jake, who was at the hardware store then. Brooke’s mom called the house a couple of times, but he never wanted to talk to her. It was Mrs. Willcox’s fault, too—that was how he thought—for not knowing
her daughter better, for not guessing what was wrong and doing something to right it. So he avoided Brooke’s mom. When he ran into her dad coming out of the town library once, he shook the guy’s hand and they stood awkwardly, making useless small talk about Boston until Alex couldn’t take it and said he had to run.

Once, visiting home, he went to see Isadora Bassett, the young mother of twins Brooke had babysat all through high school. He was no fan of Isadora, but whatever he thought of her advice, Brooke had relied on it and might have been relying on it still. Isadora had only shaken her head sadly and said that Brooke had left the community college after a few months. She was living far to the north, in the Adirondacks, working with some landscape firm.

Funny, he thought as he sat on damp grass outside the chain-link fence by Brooke’s home in Hartford, how thinking of Brooke had become a series of memories within memories, like a series of refracting mirrors. In the tiniest distant mirror, Isadora appeared as a cool, hip young mom, with an open mind and solutions that challenged their own parents’ narrow ways. Only in the closer mirrors could you tell that she wasn’t the wise mentor Brooke had taken her for, but a lost hungry soul who fed off Brooke’s need for easy answers. When he’d asked her, that day in the snow—his sophomore year in college? Junior year? He couldn’t be sure—for Brooke’s address or phone number, she had looked frightened. She didn’t have either of them, she said. She thought Brooke was mad at her. Though she had tried, really she had, to get Brooke to talk to her own parents. As she’d spoken, she’d taken hold of both Alex’s hands, as if she were pleading with him. He had thought,
You bitch
, but he had said nothing. What was the point? As he’d left, he’d asked Isadora to let Brooke know he was happy for her to call or write or come to Boston…but he knew the message would never reach his girl.

Then he’d come home that last summer, after graduation. Not
because he wanted to be in Windermere, but because his father had inexplicably driven his new Mercedes over a guardrail and into the Susquehanna River. He left no note, only the insurance papers on the kitchen counter. He hadn’t been drunk. Only he had increased the insurance payout six months earlier, and Alex’s mom reported that he’d gotten more isolated than usual, neglecting his accounting clients, heading out alone to go snowshoeing in the state forest, leaving her and Charlie by themselves.

An accident, Alex’s mom told everyone. But Alex soon learned about claims pending against his dad, some kind of sleight of hand with the accounting. The investors poised to buy the quarry from old Albrecht, for instance, had suddenly withdrawn. Alex’s father had driven into the river, and two weeks later the quarry was put up at auction, its crew laid off. The last business to disappear from Windermere.

Brooke had come to the funeral. At that point he hadn’t seen her in—what?—three years? She’d said she was living in a New York hamlet called Eagle Bay, where she sold flowers and shrubbery to the New Yorkers at their so-called camps. She had looked thinner, tougher, her eyes larger in her smooth face. They had stood in the vestibule of the church, their conversation interrupted every few seconds by one or another neighbor bearing condolences. After the service he had asked her to stay, to go for a walk with him, a beer, anything. She shook her head, her pale hair pulled back tight from her temples. She had smelled like the mountains, like spruce and laurel. “I’m going away,” he’d said at last, before she escaped. “I’m going to the other side of the world. If you came with me, you’d be a different person. We’d both be different. If you didn’t like it you could come back.”

“I like it where I am, Lex,” she’d said.

“No, you don’t. You’re only half yourself. Admit it,” he’d said
after the next interruption—desperate, now, pulling out his last cards, not believing in his own hand. He leaned so close his lips touched the whorls of her exposed ear. “You haven’t wanted anyone the way you want me. And you won’t. Ever.”

“I know,” she had said.

Then she was gone.

And Alex was off, to Japan, where he taught English for a year and interned at Citigroup until he grasped most of the angles on the Asian markets. Then to Stanford for his MBA. Finally back to Asia with Mercator. Then Tomiko, and their home in the Asakusa District, and Dylan, and friends, commitments, the trappings of a life. Visits home became every six months, then once a year at Christmas, with invitations to his mom and Charlie that they never acted on.

A year later, Dylan was born; two years more, and he died. It had been a genetic abnormality, a heart with a hole in it. Try as they might, the doctors could never close the hole, and so the muscle finally gave way in the little body. But the apartment in Tokyo yawned empty. Two pregnancies ended in miscarriage. Tomiko grew thin and gray-faced, and looked at Alex as though he brought death into the room with him. Finally one day he had come home from his spacious office to a note and all her things gone. She was sorry, Tomiko had written. She needed to start her life again. She was going back to her parents.

He had worked and mourned. He had found a certain kind of comfort in women’s beds, women kind enough to bring him inside their warm, urgent bodies and either independent or hesitant enough not to pursue him when he stopped returning their calls. But Tokyo had become a noisy, ugly city, a place where things died. He put in for a transfer while the markets were still surging, a lucky bit of timing. Instead of being laid off in the Far East, he had become
part of the restructuring team on America’s East Coast. In Boston, where he had roots of sorts—college friends, familiarity with Brookline. For almost two months now, he had felt himself looking toward the future and not toward the past. And then old images had crept close enough to start haunting him again. The lofting of a soccer ball on the green field outside Windermere. Brooke with her shining face, her pale hair. The moonflowers. The nights in the low hills, where the stars came at them thick as champagne bubbles. The smell of Charlie’s silky hair as she laid her head on his belly and he laid his on Brooke’s, the three of them making a U shape on the old quilt they used for picnics. Brooke and her stories, Morgan le Fay and Merlin emerging from a tree. The two of them jumping from the edge of the old quarry through the blue air, into water so cold they came up gasping. Coming into Brooke, the sharp edge of her diaphragm deep inside.