The Lost Daughter (27 page)

“Sorry,” Brooke had mumbled. Her mother turned away, back to Letterman. Brooke had made her way upstairs. She’d wanted to shower again but hadn’t. Five times that night she changed pads. She kept the bloody ones tightly wrapped in a plastic bag under the bed. She found an Ace bandage and wrapped it around her breasts so they felt less pendulous and needy. Finally, sometime before dawn, she fell into a sleep so deep that she leaked through the sixth pad and into the sheets before her dad’s voice woke her. “Brooke, honey,” he was saying. He tapped three times very softly on the bedroom door. “Brooke honey.” Tap tap tap. “Brooke honey, are you ok-k-…ok-k-kay?” Her eyes snapped open to the red numerals on the clock: 12:48. Between her legs she felt the sore tissue and the sticky mess. Horror eclipsed relief.

“I don’t feel all that great,” she called back.

“Can I…c-c-c-can I enter?”

“Gimme sec.” She was wide awake, her heart racing, but she made her voice sound sleepy. Swiftly, silently, she threw off the covers. Hand between her legs, she tiptoed to the little bathroom she had all to herself, where she whipped off her nightgown and the drenched pad. With a damp washcloth she wiped off her legs before she found a new pad, new panties to secure it, a fresh nightie in the drawer. With no time to worry about sheets, she brought her biggest, fluffiest white towel back to the bed and laid it over the stain. She managed that much before her knees buckled. She eased herself onto the bed, pulled the thin coverlet over. Her father had started tapping again. “Brooke?”

“Yeah, Dad. Come on in.”

Only as he sat by the side of the bed, running his fingers through her hair, did she realize how clammy her skin was with sweat, how thirsty she felt. “Ice water,” she said when he asked what he could get her. “From the fridge.” While he was gone she stuffed the nightie,
the panties, the pad she’d thrown in the bathroom sink, all into the plastic bag under the bed. She loosed her breasts, which ached but less than before and smelled of sweat and salt. Then her dad was back, worry wrinkling his brow.

He said nothing about her supposed drinking, though she knew her mom had reported to him. He was all set to take Brooke to Cowanesque Lake, the big father-daughter outing before graduation. “Oh, Dad,” she said when he reminded her.

“Ssh. It’s okay. You’ve got a b-b-bug, Brook Trout.” He stroked her hair. That was his pet name for her, from when they used to go fishing. “Too much p-p-partying,” he said. “Those germs just fly around.”

“I feel like crap,” she said, which was at least true.

“You’ve been stressed all spring. Haven’t you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Our ambitious girl.” He reached his hand around to the back of her sweaty neck, and kneaded it. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses, his pale eyes drank her in. She could have told him, right then. But it was over, over, and his caring touch eased her muscles. As always when they were together for a while, his stutter vanished. “You’ve looked pale and puffy,” he said—not critically, the way her mom would have, but like someone who would love a pale, puffy Brooke if that was what Brooke wanted for herself. She could have told him, but she didn’t have to tell him. He would not make her tell him. What was there to tell now, anyway? “I wonder if we should get you to Dr. Harris.”

Panic knotted her gut. “I’m fine, Dad.”

“Not fine enough to go to the beach.”

“No.”

“Well, I’m staying home. I’ll fetch you some chicken soup. Your mom’s out for the day. We’ll just hang around in our slippers. Sleep and loaf.”

“Okay.” She had shut her eyes. The knot loosened. She felt herself drifting back to sleep. She heard her father take in a breath, as if to say something; then reconsider; then come out with it after all.

“Alex c-c-c-…phoned. Twice.”

She frowned. Alex had saved her. Alex was her life. Alex was, suddenly, impossible. “I don’t want to talk to him.”

Her mom would have asked, Did you break up with him again? Did you kids quarrel? What did Alex do?—as if, whatever Alex had done, Stacey Willcox was prepared to defend him against her daughter who was so lucky to have him as her steady guy. Brooke
was
lucky. For two years, the luckiest girl on the planet, never deserving Alex and certainly not now. No, she could not have Alex, or anyone. She was too stupid and foolish, she would only make a mess of it all again. But her dad didn’t say anything more about Alex. He said only, “Let’s get a fan in here. Move the air around a little.”

Later he said, “I’m just downstairs, okay? Or in the back garden. Just puttering around. You just shout and I’m here.”

She slept. Changed the pad again. Slept. While her dad was weeding the ivy by the back fence, she stole downstairs with the nightie and the sheets and mattress pad and threw them into the washing machine on cold. By evening she was running a fever, and when she woke at night there was her dad with more ice water and a couple of aspirin. His skin was dry and freckled from too much sun at the quarry; his lips were thin, the skin of his neck and eyelids already gone to rice paper. But for those two days, he tended Brooke with energy that never flagged and care that refused curiosity. Later that summer—after Brooke had turned down Tufts, while her mom raged and stormed about wasted years, wasted talent—he took her deep into the Alleghenies, where they camped overnight and cooked the fish they caught from the shore of a deep, cold lake.

Now, in her mom’s pale condo, she wondered again, as she had
wondered that summer. Had he guessed? Her dad’s trademark forbearance had grown increasingly resigned, even defeatist, as Brooke matured. He would never have said he regretted the one summer’s dalliance with the bright, coquettish junior librarian that had resulted in his marriage and his child, because he loved the child and he could stand the marriage. He would not regret it, because a truly happy life was never his to live. Increasingly, Brooke’s dad seemed to know ahead of time what happened to hope or ambition: It died, either quietly or noisily. For himself, he preferred quietly. Hadn’t he hoped to finish his doctorate, to travel in the intertwined groves of academe that stretched around the world, to write books that would work in those groves like roots, setting forth new ideas to blossom? Of course he had, and of course he never did those things, because Stacey got pregnant and a part-time stint at Scranton Community College wouldn’t cut it and Lester Albrecht had connections in the local insurance agency. He hoped just as strongly—Brooke came to realize this only after she left home, when she could look back and see everything so much more clearly—that the unlikely romance, the accidental pregnancy, the sudden marriage would lead to happiness. Surely it had seemed to him, in his optimistic forties, that with all the love he had to give and all the determination he could muster, happiness had at least a fighting chance.

But by the time Brooke was getting ready to leave Windermere, her dad understood that he would never make his wife happy. He would never enjoy selling insurance. He would never write anything. He would find joy in his book collection, in the mountains, and most of all in Brooke. That Brooke’s own dreams would turn to dust he seemed regretfully certain, even as he told her over and over how pleased he was by the little successes that made her happy—the school prizes, the high SAT marks, having and keeping a boyfriend.

So yes, he might have guessed that Brooke was pregnant. He might even have guessed that she had miscarried, or aborted. Guessing, he would have felt huge anxiety, even pain, for his daughter and at the same time despaired of affecting the turn of events. Waiting, tending, being patient—these things he could do. Take her fishing. When Brooke announced, a week after graduation, that she had turned down the offer from Tufts, her dad put every ounce of his energy into diverting her mom’s furious disappointment. Never once did he speak to Brooke directly about what she was choosing, or why. He only looked at her with the deep sadness of his pale eyes behind his glasses, the sadness that said it was tragic for her to turn away college, but that college would have brought its own tragedy. Not because it was college, but because life itself, in the end, was a tragic journey.

In the hills, though—there, they were happy. Tucked into the ledges of a great granite boulder in the sun, overlooking a pine-rich valley, both of them with their noses stuck in books; or standing knee-deep in waders, casting their flies through a fine-needled rain. There and then, with her dad, Brooke felt more than at any other time that life would turn out all right, somehow. Now she ran a finger across the spines of his books and smiled at the irony of it. How she missed him! The sun he loved had gotten him, in the end: Melanoma, the doctors said, metastasized to the brain. He had been gone in six months, putting up what everyone knew was only a token fight. His last words to Brooke, when she took a week off to stay with him in hospice, were “Now don’t
you
give up before you start.” He had gripped her hand as he said it, a grip stronger than any she remembered from her childhood, though his face had sunk into its bones and his eyes had focused on nothing.

Her cell phone chimed, a message. Sean. Guilt scored her heart.
Meghan off to school
, he had written.
Very sad very sorry. Do what you
need come home when your ready. CDPYG
. She smiled through an ache of ready tears at the acronym. Constant Disposition to Promote Your Good. If she had no good for him to promote, what then?

A scraping sound—Dum was attacking the bars of the cage, always a sign that he was anxious. “Poor buddy, poor buddy,” she said. She reached her finger in for him to pinch. Time to get moving. First stop, Isadora Bassett. As she dressed, she considered calling her. She knew Isadora lived in the same house, the faded Victorian farmhouse overtaken by the town, on a side road just past the cluster of stores labeled the Mall. But a phone call meant niceties, evasions. Brooke wanted to get to the point. As a girl, she had grabbed at Isadora’s solution and asked few questions. Now she could remember the names of only a couple of the herbs that had gone into that ghastly tea. Tansy, for instance. They sold a little tansy back at Lorenzo’s Nursery. People liked its prim, cheerful yellow blooms; one customer used snippets of the leaves in salad. They sold pennyroyal, too, for ground cover and insect repellent. Up to now she had managed to look at the herb labels and not remember the tea, or not often.

After last night’s long drive, the thought of getting back into the car nauseated her. She locked up her mom’s condo and set out on foot. Whether the tansy and the pennyroyal—and what were the other herbs? Cohosh? Black or blue cohosh?—would really have terminated her pregnancy: That was the question. If the answer was yes, she could take it back to Alex. So there, she would tell him. We’re no more guilty than we ever were. If the answer was no—well, then it had been her fault anyway, hadn’t it? For believing Isadora? She thought of Alex’s hands, so blunt and strong, pressing on a tiny head. Then she made herself think of something else.

Already, in this part of the state, the air was brisk, the leaves fluttering in golden waves from the poplars lining the drive of the high
school. Brooke hugged her thin jacket around her. The route she took went by her old house, which lay past the two-block village center and the green with its old-fashioned bandstand. The sidewalks and storefronts were as familiar to Brooke as the contours of her own body. People always claimed that an old neighborhood seemed smaller, that the change coming over everything familiar was a shock. For Brooke, it was not the change from Foster’s Drugstore to CVS or the new glass-front building in place of the old dentist’s office that astonished, but the fact that her feet still knew where the cracks lay in the sidewalk; that the October sun struck the brick side of the post office with the same heartbreakingly frail heat she recalled from childhood autumns. As if her childhood had been a dream from which she had awakened, washed by blood, in a cheap motel, she marveled at how brave the little village seemed, its tattered kiosk brightened with mums and its unemployed citizens waving affably from their smoking circle as she passed the bandstand.

She had returned before, since her dad’s death. But always with Sean and Meghan in tow, and never on a mission to dig up the past; quite the opposite. Meghan was happy seeing her Grandma in the neat little condo, happy in the new playground behind the elementary school; she wasn’t old enough to ask about Mommy’s past. This trip was different. Brooke meant to prove Alex wrong and so head off his useless confession. Then, maybe, they could both put the past behind; they could both heal.

She smiled incongruously at that word in her head,
both
. She was not picturing herself with Alex; not yet. But such words and phrases kept rising to her tongue.
Both. We. Together.
She felt again the blunt tips of his fingers, in the bar. She shoved her bare hands into her pockets; the air was brisk.

Past the town soccer field and the gas station, she turned down the little street that must once have been a drive leading up to Isadora’s
farmhouse. The house was painted light blue; had it been blue, before? She remembered white, with green shutters. In the drive now sat a bright red Jeep. Surely someone else had bought the house. Isadora had an allowance from an ex-husband somewhere, but she was always driving a battered VW or an ancient Saab. Brooke should have checked the phone book. But here she was. She took the newly laid flagstone path to the door.

“Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes!” The door opened before Brooke could press the familiar bell. The sun shone on Isadora’s white track suit and wide expectant face. She had gained weight since Brooke saw her last. Her hair was dyed a streaky strawberry blond. In a crowd, Brooke might have recognized the round, inquiring eyes and the jaunty slouch—weight resting on right leg, hip tilted out—but she would not have pegged her immediately as Isadora. Isadora had been a free spirit, a disciple of organic foods and nubby earth-colored cotton skirts that flowed from her narrow waist. Now she looked like an advertisement for Slim Fast. “Why, Brooke Willcox. Come in from the cold,” Isadora, said, pushing open the storm door. “It’s been a hundred years!”