The Lost Daughter (15 page)

“I don’t get it. You wouldn’t come to Florida. How you gonna look in a swimsuit
now
?”

“The job doesn’t start till the Fourth. If I haven’t lost it by then, I’ll wear a T-shirt.”

“Brooke—honey—people look fat
afterward
. Jesus, I thought girls
noticed
stuff like that.”

“Well, my dad came home with the offer from a buddy of his, okay? Now how am I going to turn it down? ‘Sorry, Dad, I don’t feel like taking the cushiest job in central Pennsylvania this summer, thanks anyhow’?”

“I’m trying to get you to think, Brooke.”

“I can’t think when I’m with you. That’s why I wanted to steer clear.”

“Seems to me you can’t think
without
me. A job in a bikini!”

“Not a
bikini
. Lifeguard suit. I’ll wear a T-shirt.”

“You know what we are going to do now, Brooke Willcox? I am going to pay for this food, and then we’re going to drive back to Windermere. We’ll go to my house, sit my parents down, and tell them what’s happening.”

“You go. I’m not going.”

“Then you’ll sit here, and I’ll come back and fetch you.”

“I won’t be here when you get back.”

“What, you’ll run away?” She shrugged. He felt in charge, suddenly. This was all she had been waiting for, he was sure of it—for him to announce what they were doing about the problem, and then to do it. He pulled eight dollars out of his pocket and set it under the damp Coke glass. He stood up. “You’re coming with me.”

“Don’t boss me!”

“I said, you’re coming.” Reaching across the booth, he took hold of her upper arm. It was smoothly muscled—he had just time to notice, and to remember it was because she swam—and it worked hard to jerk away from him. But the hands he never used in his sport were strong anyhow, and he pulled her across the red vinyl seat to a standing position.

As she strode ahead of him out of the diner, he touched the back of her neck. Like a horse, she flicked him off. And then, after he’d unlocked his side of the car and slid in while she waited, and unlocked the door on her side, he saw a new expression on her face, a look of pure amazement. He pushed the passenger door open to follow her gaze down to the dusty parking lot, to the pool of water big as a plate between her feet.

T
he trailer complex lay five miles outside the upstate village of Windermere, a good hour west of Scranton. The state highway that rushed by it made a constant whooshing sound, not unlike the river by the Polish village where Josef Zukowsky had grown up, where he had married and seen two of his three daughters born. The third daughter, Luisa, had emerged here in Pennsylvania, and she was the slow one. So much, Josef used to joke bitterly with his Polish companions, for all the great advances in America. But in truth, he knew, Luisa would have been slow no matter where she had been born. In truth, the way she had remained like a child all her life had kept her dear to his heart.

No one called him Josef anymore. His wife, Marika, had passed on almost two decades ago. His eldest daughter had moved to San Francisco. He was Ziadek—Grandpa—to his remaining daughters and his son-in-law; Ziadek to the other struggling souls who lived in the trailer park; Ziadek, he supposed, to himself. Ten years ago, when he lost half a lung, he had finally stopped working at the quarry. He
stayed home. Across a garden and a walkway in the trailer park lived his second daughter, his husky Katarina with her hair dyed deep red and determination etched into her strong-boned face. She had a husband, Chet, whose English was even worse than Ziadek’s and who was gone most weeks, driving his rig as far as Nebraska. Back when Ziadek first retired, he kept an eye on Katarina’s two sons after school—but they were gone now, off raising hell in Binghamton or Brooklyn, he couldn’t keep track. Still, he had his Luisa for company. And he had Luisa’s beloved girl, Najda. To all of them, he was Ziadek.

These days, he was on oxygen, and with Katarina breathing down his neck about it, he had finally given up smoking. He spent his days crouched in the pocket garden between his house and Katarina’s, or making the rich soups they all loved, or playing chess with Najda. Except for the bawling truck horns that ruined the delusion of a river running nearby, and except for the wind that whistled through the trailer in the frigid upstate winters, it was not a bad life.

Najda, though—that was the problem. “Foundling,” her name meant, because Luisa had found her, in the pouring rain, that day Luisa tried to run from home. How long ago was it, now? They’d celebrated Najda’s fifteenth birthday in June. Fifteen years, then. Ziadek couldn’t remember why Luisa had run away that time, so long ago. She ran off a lot, after Marika died. Ziadek couldn’t blame her. Marika had cuddled her, protected her. Marika had blamed herself for Luisa’s being slow—she’d been too old when she gave birth to the girl; the doctors had warned her such a thing could happen. When Marika died, the others teased and tortured Luisa, and Ziadek—well, he was still at the quarry then, what could he do?

And then he had come home from the grocery one night, in the rain, one of those deluges that break a long drought, and there was Luisa in the tiny sitting room of the trailer, with a tiny infant sucking at her nipple.

Ziadek had screamed at the sight. It shamed him now, to think back, but he had screamed, and dropped his bag, and the cans had rolled over the floor. It all flashed through his head. Someone had raped his Luisa, his poor simple slow Luisa, a child really though she had all her women’s parts, and now this infant had come out of her with no one around to help, and surely, surely the girl would lose what little mind she had in the first place. Luisa had jumped, at the scream, and the baby had made a gargling noise and fallen away from the nipple. That was when Ziadek had seen the truth. Luisa’s nipple was wet with the baby’s spit, but not with milk. It was not plump, the way a woman’s breasts are when they nurse. Luisa stood up, quick with fury, and he saw her blouse was soaked from the rain, but she was not tired in the least, and her legs and hips moved as they always did. This was not a girl who had just given birth to a child while her father was off at the grocery.

“You scared her!” Luisa had said, clutching the infant tight.

Ziadek saw then that the baby was wrapped in bloody towels, and its flesh was dark, almost purple. He stepped close, and his daughter stepped away. “Ssh, ssh,” Ziadek said. “She scared me. I won’t hurt her, darling. Let me have a look. Let me see what you found.”

Slowly, suspiciously, Luisa tipped her arms and showed him. Ziadek gasped. The baby was tiny, wrinkled, its eyes still shut, its little mouth working. Its skin was covered in blood and the cream of birth. It breathed in tiny gasps, its throat clotted. From its belly ran the still-blue stump of an umbilical cord. This was a newborn.

Swiftly Ziadek lifted the little thing from Luisa’s arms, held it up by its wormy legs, and slapped its back. Mucus gushed from the tiny mouth. The baby gave a cry—not a lusty cry, more like the peep of a bird, but a cry nonetheless—and when he cradled its head and flipped it up, it took in a great yawn of air. “Papa!” Luisa cried, and
tried to get the infant back from him, but he was too quick for her. He stepped to the galley kitchen, pulled two dish towels from the hooks, and quickly wrapped the little thing in them. The color was better now; it seemed to be breathing normally. Tiny, though—it was too small, really, to be born. He frowned and looked at Luisa again.

“Did this come from you?” he said.

Luisa looked confused. She twisted her hands in front of her. They were bloody from the towels, which now lay in a heap on the floor.

“Did this thing come,” Ziadek repeated, “from your body, daughter?”

Biting her lower lip, Luisa shook her head. She had the small round head and small chin that others like her shared—
mongoloid
, the ones who teased called her—and her face bent toward her half-exposed chest. “Found her,” she answered. “In the trash.”

“Where? What trash?”

Luisa pointed toward the door. He knew where she meant. Across the road from the trailer park, the motel run by Pakistanis. Luisa had a bad habit of rummaging in their trash, coming home with stuff the transients had left in their rooms: broken Barbies and packs of cigarettes and once a hypodermic that got her a good tongue-lashing from Ziadek. She knew she was not to go over there, not to climb up to the Dumpster or rummage around.

“Come with me,” he ordered her.

“No.” Luisa hung her head. She began blubbering. “’S mine,” she said at last. “I found her.”

Ziadek was panicked. He was a citizen of this country, though he had forgotten most of the English he’d learned to pass the test. But Katarina had never married her husband in a church. Chet was a hard worker without ambition; he got by from one work visa to the
next. Ziadek was not sure if his grandchildren were even legal. He was in no position to draw attention.

Still. A baby was a baby, however shriveled and looking to die. “You can hold her,” he told Luisa. Then he marched Luisa out the door, carrying the barely breathing thing, through the pouring rain to the car.

The Pakistanis wanted nothing to do with it. Someone must have driven by, they swore. You never knew what people would toss in a Dumpster. Ziadek saw the older one shoot his brother a glance, and soon after the brother glided out of the office and up the stairs. When he came back, his brown face was overlaid with a chalky look. Still the one at the reception insisted: They would not phone the police. The girl was lying to Ziadek; if he examined her he would see. She had given birth on her own and needed to admit it. But the towels, Ziadek said, the towels were motel towels. Plenty of motels in the area, the man said—did he think he could get them on the towels?

Luisa was tugging at Ziadek’s shirt by then. He glanced down. The tiny one’s mouth was working again. It was hungry. Already its little life was fading away. “We’ll be back,” he said to the Pakistanis, and drove away in the rain, to the supermarket a mile down the road, to fetch formula.

T
hey never went back. That first night, Ziadek faced down Katarina and her brawny, tattooed husband Chet. “Yes,” he had said to them, “we can report the baby. We can give the baby to the state, and the state will find a place for her. And we know where she will grow up, what kind of place she will grow up in if she grows up at all. And our Luisa here—your sister Luisa, look at her—she will go on sucking her thumb and being lonely as a tree in a desert. Or we can let them care for each other.”

“But they both need care! Look at this dying thing! And
she
”—Katarina pointed at Luisa—“needs her own babysitter!”

“Did I not buy your home?” Ziadek asked her. “Did your mother not watch your children until she drew her last breath? Are we not with this one already”—he nodded at Luisa—“from the moment she gets off from the bus until the moment she boards it the next day? Do you talk to me about babysitting? Look at your sister!”

They had looked. They had seen the glow on Luisa’s face. “But what if someone comes to find—” Katarina began.

“They won’t come,” Chet said. He loosened the lock of his tattooed arms. “They left her for dead. Ziadek is right. She’s ours or no one’s.”

And so, that night, Katarina had prepared Luisa. As luck would have it, she was having her monthly time. Katarina had gently penetrated her, had broken her hymen. Next day they took the baby to the crowded emergency room. Katarina, who spoke perfect English, explained that it was Luisa’s child. She did not know who had made her sister pregnant, no. Luisa had gone off, Katarina said, and returned carrying the child. The doctor looked from Luisa—her round face, her almond-shaped eyes, her blank forehead—to Ziadek. These things happened, the doctor said. It was tragic. He did not want to bring infant neglect charges against Luisa. He sent Luisa away—for dilation and curettage, he said, to be sure everything was out. He sent the infant to the ICU. Ziadek and Katarina sat in the waiting room, looking at each other, breathing. When they were allowed into the recovery room, they found Luisa sitting up, her face pale as plaster.

Had the hospital been less crowded, Ziadek thought sometimes, or had they produced better insurance, someone might have looked more carefully, might have suspected Luisa’s story. As it was, the doctor came back with a pediatrician, a stern man with heavy black
glasses, who had examined Najda. The pediatrician said they could tie Luisa’s tubes. No, no, Katarina said; that would not be necessary. But about neglect, the first doctor said. The baby was more than twenty-four hours old already, a four-and-a-half-pound preemie with no medical care. She would need at least a week in the ICU, probably more.

The doctors were good men. They looked sadly at the little family sitting around Luisa’s cot. He would have to contact child services, the pediatrician said. Luisa must never be left alone with the child. If she would get her tubes tied, he said, nodding at Luisa, it would go easier for them all. Luisa was not much at comprehending; when others began talking above her head, she usually went off somewhere, into whatever dreamland slow people inhabited. This time, though, she had not gone off. She met the doctors’ eyes. She nodded.

Every night, that first month, Ziadek watched the local news. He waited to hear about a lost babe, a premature infant someone had impulsively abandoned and now missed. Or a pregnant woman found dead somewhere, the child inside her gone. All that came was the usual violence down in Scranton—rapes, drive-by shootings, arson. Luisa devoted herself to the baby. Katarina named her Najda. Before work in the early morning, Ziadek drove Luisa to the hospital, where she sat for an hour by the respirator. She no longer tried to run away, no longer descended into tantrums. When Najda came home from the ICU, Katarina instructed her sister on infant care, and Luisa did everything to the letter. She sang the baby to sleep, she sat up when the baby had colic, she minded her diaper rash. While the baby slept—and the tiny one slept long and profoundly, gathering its little bit of strength to live—Luisa knitted sweaters and booties, more than they could ever use, and soon Katarina began taking the extra ones to the summer craft fairs, and they sold, and Luisa was proud to think she was earning Najda’s way.