The Lost Daughter (18 page)

Sean felt his face flush. He knew what Geoffrey meant. Betty taught at the Hartt School, a prestigious conservatory. Chuck had sung opera professionally when he was younger. And the Evangelist! The one who stood forth and announced the decree from Caesar, the shepherds in the fields, the angels, the birth. “You could ask that new guy,” he said. “I forget his name—the skinny guy from New Haven? I think he went to Yale for music.”

“He doesn’t have your voice.” Geoffrey clapped Sean on the shoulder. “Let me think how we can swing this,” he said. “Meanwhile, d’you mind studying the part?”

“No. No, not at all. I love the part.”

And so he had put away his CDs of
Bohème
and
Turandot
and spent his commuting time mastering the tricky intervals and precise cadenzas of the Bach. But if Geoffrey decided not to use him—if they thought he’d be an imposter, singing up there in front of the group—he did not want his family, especially not Mum, to hear how he’d gotten his hopes up.
Thinks he can sing, that one.

Finally there was Meghan, pushing through the double glass doors of West Elementary, leggy and distracted, carrying yet another art project too big for her. “Hey, Bug,” Sean said as she found the car.

“Daddy. Don’t call me that.”

“No one’s listening.”

“Granny heard you call me that, and then she called me that. Is she gone?”

“Left yesterday, don’t you remember?” She nodded as he opened the back door for the unwieldy cardboard. “What you got there?”

Meghan sighed. “Arithmetic project,” she said. “We had to make up a game.”

“Sounds like fun. Do we get to play it when we’re home?”

“No.” She climbed into the passenger seat and strapped herself in. “It’s a bad game,” she said. “Taisha made fun of it.”

They pulled out of the lot. He glanced over at his daughter. She wasn’t quite holding back tears, but her face looked burdened, for a six-year-old.
Tröstet uns
, he sang to himself,
comfort us and make us free
. “I bet Mrs. McIlvoy liked it, though.”

“She said she did. But she always says that.”

“Aw, just you wait. Some boy will act up, and she won’t like that.”

Meghan’s eyes widened. “Some boy
did
,” she said, as if her dad had ESP. She twisted in her seat to face him. “This boy Christopher?” she said. “He’s got really funny teeth—like this?” Sean glanced quickly to see his daughter clamp her upper teeth over her lower lip. He managed not to laugh. “And he asked this girl Ellen how come she had Chinese and her parents had American knees!” Meghan put her hand over her mouth and giggled.

“And the teacher didn’t think that was funny?”

Meghan bounced in her seat. “She made him go to the principal. And he had to write
I am sorry, Ellen
. He put just one
r
in
sorry
. I saw.”

“Did
you
think it was funny?”

“Da-ad.”

“I’m just asking.” He turned down their street. Fall was in the air, yellow leaves piled against the curb, but the air was still warm. If he met Gerry at the Half Door later they could sit in the back garden. Gerry was having his problems, too, with the baby colicky and Kate still not losing the pregnancy weight. She didn’t want to have sex with him and Gerry was starting to think that was fine; he had to picture other women anyhow—thin women, happy women—to perform. That problem, Sean thought, he didn’t have. He always wanted Brooke—even when she put up her
everything’s fine
front, even when she was lying to him.

He parked the car. Meghan was starting ahead, frowning. “What is it, Bug?”

“What are shy knees, Daddy?”

“Shy what? Oh. Chinese.”

“But it’s about
knees
.”

“It isn’t really. It’s about being mean to people who look different. We used to tell it this way.” He turned to her in the car. Her summer freckles were fading. At least she had Brooke’s mouth and jawline; she wasn’t all O’Connor. Sean took off his sunglasses and put his fingers at the edges of his eyes. “Chinese, Japanese,” he said, pulling them up then down. “American knees.” He put his hands on his knees. His daughter still looked confused. He felt both silly and embarrassed. “It’s because Chinese people have narrow eyes,” he said, “and Ellen’s parents aren’t Chinese.”

“Because she’s adopted.”

“That’s right.” He grabbed her art project as they stepped out of the car. From inside the house they could hear Bitsy yapping, the canaries singing. The new cat would need its medications. Meghan jumped down onto the gravel and slammed her door. “You know what adopted is, right?”

“Da-ad.”

“Just checking.” They started toward the house. He put his hand on her shoulder; she was up to his rib cage now. “You learned about it from Mommy.”

“I don’t know.”

“You and Mommy getting along better now? Now that she let you quit ballet?”

Meghan shrugged. “I think I want to do ballet again.”

“But you’re getting along okay.”

Meghan twisted her head to look up at him, obviously confused. He stopped at the front door and leaned the artwork against the siding. All the dogs were barking now. He knelt in front of his little girl. He took both her hands. “I’m worried about Mommy,” he said.

Meghan’s face went grave, then slowly lit up. “Is she—is she gonna have a baby?”

He chuckled ruefully. “I wish, Bug. I think she’s…” He didn’t know how to go on. Guilt caught in his throat. He was using Meghan. But he pressed on. “I wonder if you can keep a secret. Not a big one. Just to be nice to Mommy.” Meghan nodded, her mouth pursed and sober. “Don’t tell her I’m asking you, okay?”

“What are you asking me?”

“Where did she—” he started to ask. Then he realized Meghan couldn’t know where Brooke had gone last night; she’d taken the walk after Meghan was in bed. “Does Mommy have any new friends?” he asked instead.

“I don’t think so.” Putting her finger to her chin, Meghan affected a thoughtful expression. “Mommy,” she said, “is not that friendly a person. Jackie’s mommy has lots of friends over. They play Scrabble.”

“Does she talk on the phone a lot? When I’m not home?”

“I don’t know.” She twisted the second hand free of his and started for the door. As he straightened up she said, not looking at him, “Sometimes the phone rings and she won’t answer it. I tell her it’s ringing. She says it’s a junk call. Yesterday I went to answer it and she wouldn’t let me. She pulled my hand away, Daddy!”

Meghan’s voice had gone quivery and melodramatic. She was a little girl who liked attention, Sean thought. He shouldn’t push this anymore. “Well, Mommy is under a lot of pressure at work,” he said as he pulled out his keys. “You should do what she says and not give her grief. If you think she’s upset about something, you just come tell me. Okay?”

“Is she ever gonna have a baby, Daddy?”

“Course she is,” he said without thinking. “So long as we don’t bother her about it. Now let’s play that arithmetic game you made up.”

B
rooke shouldn’t have been surprised, she supposed, when Alex came by the Simsbury location of Lorenzo’s Nursery. “You always were persistent,” she told him as he helped her lug a spruce into place.

“Tell me to get lost,” he said, shaking clumps of dirt from his raincoat, “and I’ll be a disappearing act.”

“I thought I did tell you. Fifteen years ago.”

“That was different. I’m not trying to sleep with you now.”

“You’re not, huh?” Brooke grunted as she ripped open a sack of peat moss. She straightened and brushed her hair from her eyes. It had been two weeks since her mom’s visit. Though Sean’s testiness had not abated, their lives had returned to the rhythms of autumn in Hartford. He rose before dawn and minded the animals; she got Meghan up an hour later and took her to school—real school now, first grade. Then to the nursery, the only change being this new location and Lorenzo’s handing her, every day, more responsibility. A fat raise, he’d hinted, was on its way. Her life’s roots were in the soil
here, now. Still, she had not completely shaken the ghosts that seemed to haunt her whenever she connected the wires that led her back to Windermere. She eyed Alex. “What are you trying to do, then?”

He grinned and looked out over the river that ran by the nursery site. “Renew old acquaintance?”

“I live a hundred miles from you.”

“Near one of our branches.”

“Alex.” She straightened the tree, her glove sticky with sap. “We don’t qualify as acquaintances.”

He pulled off his glasses and wiped mist from the lenses. All day the fog had been trying to lift. “I’ve been seeing a lot of my sister, did I tell you?”

“Charlie?”

He nodded. “She’s really great, you know? Scary great, though. She hasn’t got any internal filter. My parents were so old when she came along. And the second she became a teenager, I disappeared on her.” He shook his head. “She never wants kids. She wishes you and I had had a baby. She thinks I should beg Tomiko to come to Boston. What the hell am I supposed to do with that?”

“Charlie thinks we should have had a baby? Really?”

He shot a glance at her before replacing the glasses. “I’d say she was fishing, but she’s not that clairvoyant.”

“She’s in college now?”

“Graduating this year. She wants me to take her to Windermere over her fall break.”

“When’s that?”

“In three weeks, I think. She’s at Tufts.”

Tufts. A strange, skittering electrical charge went through Brooke. It had been just this time of year when she visited Tufts with her father. She’d chosen it for the medieval studies professor
she’d met. She could still picture him, a slender man who had probably looked too young for a professor until he was past forty and then was suddenly wearing wire-rimmed bifocals and walking with the suggestion of a stoop. “Must be great for her, to have you nearby.”

“Everything she talks about feels coded, to me,” Alex said. He crouched next to Brooke. “Here, let me help with that.”

Together they packed peat and soil around the newly planted tree. When the rest were in, they would make an elegant hedge along the road and give the grounds privacy. On the other side of the lot Shanita was working with the two landscape guys Lorenzo had taken on for the project. Around them, the fog was coalescing into mist, a few droplets here and there. Nervously Brooke imagined Sean coming by and finding Alex here. Not that Sean ever stopped in unannounced, much less that he would know she was up in Simsbury. But the jealousy that steamed off him made her feel guilty. When she’d gone on long walks at night, trying to shake off the unease that had settled like lint on her marriage, her mind followed twisting byways to truths she could never share with her husband, and that did no good. And Alex was one of those byways. “What do you mean, coded?” she asked.

“Well, take abortion.”

Brooke straightened up. “Take it where, exactly?”

“Charlie’s in this moral philosophy class, right? And she wants to talk it out with her big brother. So she jabbers about the slippery slope of the argument—how the only difference between infanticide and an IUD is the passage of time. She wants me to help her sort this out. Me!” He flung up his hands.

“So be—what is it called? Socratic. Just hold the argument out here.” Brooke thrust out her arm, her mud-caked gloves.

“Is that what you do?”

“I don’t have a sister. And Meghan’s not at the stage yet.”

While she fetched the wheelbarrow, Alex’s cell phone rang. Holding up a finger, he stepped away. With half an ear she heard him talk about streamlining, about market pressures. She slipped the next spruce into the hole they’d dug, and poured in more peat.

Tufts, she thought again. Of all places. With a boy’s smile, that professor—what was his name?—had listened to her describe how she’d loved
The Mists of Avalon
. Then he’d drawn out a sheet of ruled paper and in small, spiky handwriting had made up a list for her, filled with authors she had never heard of. “I want you,” he had said, “to start thinking of the Middle Ages as a
problem
.” She hadn’t understood him, and she never went to the library to find any of the books. Still, she couldn’t wait to sit in his classes, where he would turn to her as if they were very old acquaintances and ask her what she thought of this problem.

It was mostly the knights she had cared about. Not the ladies with their high pointed hats, their pasty faces and tight unsmiling lips, but Galahad with his flowing blond hair, his helmet cradled in his arm and his boyish neck looking so vulnerable. Or William Wallace on the crag, the sword on which he was leaning backlit by the setting sun, a cross of gold. He would endure a horrible death; they all would—the black knight’s sword in their throat, or bleeding to death like Arthur, or disemboweled like Percival. What did they want with those pencil-hatted ladies? She would endure with them—would stand the trials of pain and fearful visions, would drink the poisoned mead.

As she straightened from her planting, the ghost of a smile crossed her face. Alex was still on the phone. Glancing at him, she remembered the letter. She had sat down to write it a week after receiving her acceptance from Tufts. Longhand, of course, and on new stationery she had bought at the store in the village where no one shopped except for graduation gifts. The sheets had been beige,
with an almost invisible print under the surface of gold and lavender flowers exploding into one another, like a crowded tapestry. The same print, in full color, lined the envelope and made her think of the heavy curtains that hid the dying Gawain in
Mists of Avalon
.

Dear Dr. James
, she wrote—that had been his name, James, she could see it now on the stationery.
I am looking forward to being in your Chaucer class next year, if I can get through Freshman Comp. I want you to know something before we meet again. I am with child. I have taken a potion
—
potion
, she remembered, took a long time to arrive at—
but my face will surely bear the mark of my sorrow. I trust you to treat my fragile self, not with pity, but with honor.