The Lost Daughter (42 page)

“I know,” I say. That was the name she used on her cell phone, last week. Alex. We don’t say anything for a long time. He didn’t expect to find me here. He didn’t plan to lay eyes on me again. It’s awkward. Too bad.

“You know who I am,” he says at last.

I nod.

“I left you”—he looks around, at the rusted cans, broken bottles, the weedy field—“here. When you were just born.”

I nod again. The picture in my head starts to change. Not just a girl giving birth. A girl and a boy. Someone to cut the cord. This boy.

He looks away. He yanks up a weed. He talks as if to himself. He says, “I thought you weren’t alive. I swear to almighty God, that’s what I thought.”

Again I nod. What is there to say, to ask? What if you had murdered me? Would you know it, in your deepest heart? How deep is your heart?

“I used to dare myself,” he says, “to come back here. See if you were still here.” He swallows hard. “Plenty of nightmares brought me here. That’s for sure.” He studies his fingernails. “No one was at your trailer,” he says when he looks up, “so I came over. An idle thought, you know. And here you are. Christ. All along, you’ve been right where I left you.”

“Almost,” I say.

Mostly I hate him. He’s like one of those teenaged boys who just quit this place. Careless, cruel. But part of me, not hating him, feels surprise. Not at him, but at myself. All these years I’ve thought about my real mother, dreamed of her, called for her. I’ve never thought about my dad. Maybe because I’ve only had Luisa. But also because when I’ve thought about what must have happened, it’s only made sense to me with a woman giving birth alone. I’d have guessed that the guy who knocked her up never even knew she was pregnant. But now that Brooke’s sat in our living room and told her story, I realize that makes no sense, her being alone. If she really thought her baby wasn’t alive, she never could have taken me outside in time for Luisa to find me. There must have been someone else.

“You,” I manage to get out, and I indicate the wheelchair, my right arm, “This. To me.”

“I did that to you, yeah.” He presses his lips together and looks at the ground. His upper lip’s split and swollen on one side. From under the white bandage, you can make out a purple lump. Somebody got him, and good. His left hand hangs limp from where he rests his arms on his knees. He isn’t wearing a wedding band. “I didn’t know you.”
I don’t want to know you
, I feel him thinking, as if I can read his mind. “I didn’t understand what I was doing. But I
was going to confess it, you know?” He holds his hands in front of him, empty. “I don’t know how to confess this,” he says.

“Don’t,” I say.

“Well.” He gives an acerbic chuckle. “I didn’t commit murder.”
Maybe it would’ve been better if I had.

So this is it. This is having a father. I’ve never known I wanted one, and now, just as I feel longing bloom inside me, I hear a siren whine down the highway. I think of my mom again, of Luisa. And the father crouched in front of me seems like an accident, like one of those footnotes in a book that you can skip and still get all the main ideas. I struggle to get a word out. Finally it comes. “What,” I say, “do you want?”

He looks startled. “Nothing,” he says. “What do
you
want?”

The words jam up in my throat. We stare at each other. I see my eyebrows. My jaw. Clearing his throat, he reaches into his pants pocket and pulls out a little box, like for a ring. He opens the top. “I was going to leave this here, but…,” he says. He shuts it, hands it to me. I open it with my good hand. Inside curls a tiny lock of dark hair.

“Not mine,” I say. I lift my own wheat-color hank to show him.

“Babies are born with dark hair,” he says calmly. He looks right at me. “Then it changes.”

I could keep this thing. I could look at it and think of this guy, my father, of how he must have cut a bit of me away before he left me to die. I could do that, and get so mad that everything else stops dead. Or I could give it back.

He hasn’t said he wants to be a father to me, or even to see me or hear my story or understand me. Well, okay. At the same time, forgiveness is not what I want to give him. I snap the box shut. I hold it out, pinched between thumb and forefinger. Finally he takes the thing and puts it in his pocket.

He stands up. In the dense twilight he paces up and down the back lot of what used to be a motel. He cups his sharp chin in his hands the way Katarina says I do. I wonder how he got hurt, but then I don’t care. I guess he’s a handsome man—a lot handsomer, anyway, than Chet or Ziadek. There are handsome boys at the high school but they look right through me. When my real mother was my age, she had this cute boyfriend, because she wasn’t in a wheelchair, she wasn’t spastic and dyslexic like me. He stops pacing and comes back to me. He pushes his bandage back where it’s hunched over his eyes. He takes my right hand in his and turns it one way and the other, like a fortune teller. “I’m not staying,” he says. “I’d just make things worse.”

“Damn straight,” I say. It comes right out.

“But maybe I can—I don’t know.” He holds my hand. He’s got an idea. “You can’t be looking out for your mom forever. For Luisa, I mean,” he says, though I knew what he meant.

“Why not?” I say.

His eyebrows rise. “You’ve got your own life,” he says. “College.”

The tears have me again now. I can feel the words in my head all breaking up. There’s no point trying to say anything.

“I’ve got some money,” Alex says. “I’ll talk to your grandfather. To Ziadek. Okay? Is this okay? We’ll set up a fund. A trust. For Luisa. So she’s always got someone to help her.”

“Ziadek—” I start to say, and I want to tell him I think Ziadek’s going to die, but the words are in pieces.

“Ziadek doesn’t have to worry. And your sister—your aunt, I mean—”

“Katarina.”

“Katarina, right. She doesn’t have to quit her job. You can go to a school that—that can help you.” He doesn’t know how to say it, a school for crips, gimps, whatever I am, but he’s glowing now. He has a plan.

But I shake my head. I try to say I don’t care about school anymore, but I think it comes out something like “School give up” or maybe even “Gool skiv up.” Either way it gets across because he takes the hand he’s been turning over and laces his big fingers in between my thin ones.

“You are not giving up,” he says, looking into my eyes. That’s all I can make out of his features now, the light shining off his swollen eyes under the bandage. “You’ve got your mom’s stubborn streak. That’s how I finally recognized you, you know. Not the nose.” He touches mine with the index finger of his free hand. “The pigheadedness.”

At this I manage to smile. It’s not the first time someone’s called me pigheaded.

Alex wants to drive me back across the highway, and I let him. He’s awkward helping me into his car, and he doesn’t believe me when I tell him I can get the seat belt okay. Banging around with the wheelchair, he gets it folded and into the trunk. As we drive through Trails End, I panic, thinking everyone will be home and angry with me for being gone. But Katarina’s car is still not there, and only the outdoor light’s lit on our house. Alex parks. He says something else about Luisa. Later I’ll learn he was the one who found her, in the alley in Scranton. I’ll learn that’s how he got beat up.

“Phone,” I finally manage to say as he follows my gaze to the house. I haven’t heard it ring, but it might. He gets my drift and goes to pull the chair from the trunk. When he opens the door on the passenger side, he crouches to look straight at me.

“I don’t live all that far away,” he says, taking my hand again. “I don’t know what Brooke’s going to do. But if you need me—I mean me, not just my money—all you have to do is holler.” Reaching into his back pocket, he pulls out his wallet and from it takes a business
card. This he tucks into my shirt pocket. As he does so, I see a tear gather in the well of his eye and drop over the lower lid. “Forgive me,” he says, his voice cracking.

As I swing my legs free of the car, he puts his strong hands under my arms and hoists me up. His arms go around my back. Lifting me off the ground, he hugs me. I smell his salty skin, his man-odor, some kind of medical cream. We breathe together. I cling to his neck. I don’t want him to let me go. But he does, finally, settling me into my chair. I tell him I’ll make it up the walk myself. But once I’m at the front door, I turn and he’s still standing there. We both stay like that a long time. When he gets into his car and drives away, I feel the way a mountain must feel when an avalanche shears off from its side and the sound slowly dies into silence.

I
n the early light Brooke left him sleeping—the deepest Sean had slept since they had married. She uncovered the birds that Sean had put to bed last night. She fed the cats, who gave in and purred madly, rubbing against her legs. She walked the dogs to the park. The air was warmer than in Windermere, the leaves still golden on the trees. Later she would visit Lorenzo in the hospital and bring him an autumn bouquet, orange cannas and Chinese bellflower. Only as she turned back from the park did she dare to check her cell phone. Besides the six missed calls, there was one text message.
Luisa found. Call me. Lex.
The news was a relief, though puzzling that Alex should know, or care. He had denied any relationship with Najda or the Zukowskys. She returned the phone to her pocket. She pulled the dogs with her away from their usual track, across the street, where she rang the bell.

“Mommy!” Meghan cried out. Brooke could just see her from the short hallway, through the high-ceilinged dining room into the kitchen, where she sat at a round table with Taisha, both of them
digging into Cheerios. Meghan dropped her spoon, slid down from her chair, and raced to Brooke, who lifted her for a hug. “Mommy Mommy Mommy,” Meghan said, patting Brooke’s cheeks. Her hands were slightly sticky; her breath smelled of milk and sugar. From outside the screen door, the dogs whined. Meghan frowned. “Don’t you ever do that again,” she said.

“Go away, you mean?”

“Not ever. I hated you, Mommy.”

“But I’m back now.”

Meghan dropped her head onto Brooke’s shoulder. From the doorway to the kitchen, Brenda watched with a skeptical smile on her face, Taisha wound around her knees. “It was a family emergency,” Brooke said to her. “Thank you so much.”

“I hope everyone’s all right.”

“We’ll be fine. Thanks to you, too, Taisha.”

“Is Meghan coming to school with me?”

Against her shoulder, Brooke felt Meghan shake her head. “I think we’ll take her today, honey. But thanks.”

“You can tell Sean,” Brenda said as she handed Brooke Meghan’s overnight bag, “she was dry all night.”

Back home, Brooke crouched in the kitchen, holding her daughter’s hands. “Were you having accidents?” she said.

“Nuh-uh.” Meghan swayed, avoiding her gaze. “Not very much.” She looked toward the stairs. “Did Daddy go away?”

“No, sweetheart. He’s just sleeping.”

“Sleeping? Is he sick?”

Brooke couldn’t stop smiling—at her daughter’s freckles, her pudgy hands, the way she pushed Mocha away with her hip. Bed-wetting, she thought. She would have to pay attention. “Course not,” she said. “He’s just tired.”

“Show him to me,” Meghan said. Determined, she pulled Brooke
out of the room, up the stairs. Quietly they pushed open the door of the master bedroom. For a moment Brooke imagined, like Meghan, that the room would be empty, another parent decamped. But Sean lay on his side, his head in the crook of his arm, his mouth slack, his chin pale where he’d taken off the goatee, his chest rising and falling in the steady breath of sleep. Even as she pulled Meghan from the room, Brooke felt the imprint of Sean’s body on her heart.

Last night, he had come home just as she was hanging the birds from their usual hook in the kitchen, where they twittered their confusion. The dogs had milled around then like water in a vortex, anxiously seeking a safe depth. Sean had moved into their stream and wrapped his firm arms around her. His goatee was gone, leaving his face artless and vulnerable. His kiss had left her dizzy. She had expected recriminations. Instead his hands pressed against her back, her buttocks—later, as they sat on the couch, her arms, her thighs, the lobe of her ear. One after the other, he touched places that Alex had touched, only three days ago. The first caresses forgave whatever it was she had done. The later ones stirred up the desires that had gotten knotted up with Alex and let them unfurl. They had spoken remarkably little. I’ve been fired, he had said at one point, and Brooke had said, Oh, baby. He hadn’t called to tell her, he said, because he knew she wouldn’t want him now. He had fixed her with his eyes, the warm color of harvest. She had brought two apples from the kitchen, Macouns, just coming ripe. As they’d talked, they’d bitten into the crisp flesh. The apples had smelled of afternoon sun and honey. Sean had gotten some severance. I’m not broke yet, he had said between bites, and Brooke had corrected him: We’re not broke.

He had kissed her again, many times, their mouths tart with apple, as warmly and naturally as if no doubts had lain between them. Then harder, more urgently. As Brooke’s head went light, she
had heard the tinny ring of her cell phone, but she had ignored it. She had news for him, Sean had suggested when they came up for air. He could taste it. And still Brooke’s doubts hovered at the edge of the room, where the cell phone’s rings had died away. It could wait, she had said.

“This,” she had said, touching his lower lip with her thumb—“can’t.”

He had lifted her, carried her up the stairs, the dogs following like shadows. With Meghan asleep across the street, they had made full-throated love. Her own hunger astonished her. It was as if that moment with Alex had given her permission not to pick up where they’d left off but to leave them, Brooke and Alex, at last in a story that was finished. With her husband she hungered for everything—his mouth on her nipples, the nest of hair at his sternum, his belly, his ass. All the rest, she thought as he thrust deep inside her, all the rest could wait.