The Lost Daughter (44 page)

“Brian! Geez. You should’ve brought him. I remember him! He used to tickle me until I peed my pants.”

She was a little stoned. She also had about her the glow of a woman falling rapidly in love. Around them, in the living room, an assortment of Sarah Palins and various animals and even a guy in a banana suit danced to the Monster Mash. As he waltzed by in his pinstripes, Pablo leaned down to give Charlie a wet kiss. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand when he was over at the keg. “It was Windermere that started it, you know,” she said, turning back to Alex.

He pulled his kimono over his knees. Already he’d taken off the wig, which itched. “Our hometown’s a romantic place.”

“Not for you, apparently.” She gazed at his bruised face, and he wished he’d gone for the makeup. For a week the suits at the office had been ribbing him about bravado and knuckleheadedness. Everything he’d told them about the stitches that tattooed the shaved side of his head was true. He’d stopped to get Mickey D’s for an old cop buddy in his old hometown, had started down a side street, had heard a woman screaming and gone to her rescue. Knight in shining
armor, they each said, and each time he winced, thinking of Brooke. “You didn’t say you were leaving the hike,” his sister went on, “to be a hero.”

“Not my intention, exactly.”

“Don’t do it again.”

A smile twisted his mouth. “Did you get to interview those women?” he asked, to change the subject. “The ones protesting Planned Parenthood?”

She nodded. “Pablo came with me.”

“So you’re both joining Right to Life.”

“Don’t be stupid.” She batted at him with her lobsterish mitt. “Pablo was great. He argued with a couple of those women. He said, ‘What makes you think these babies even want to be born? If they’ve got souls, maybe they’re hovering in the ether somewhere having a fine old time. Life all by itself isn’t all that great, you know.’ ”

“Is that your argument? For your paper?” Alex felt the beat of the music as someone turned it up for a second round.
Spirit babies
, he thought.

“I think I’ll write about assisted suicide instead.” Charlie blew a bubble with her gum, then sucked it back. “More cheerful. Don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

She batted him with her glove again and stood up. “Cute kimono,” she said, swaying. “The boy with the dragon tattoo.” Then she turned away.

“I have a daughter,” Alex said, but Charlie didn’t hear him. Later in the evening, one of the grad students, a big-bosomed postmodernist dressed as Dow Jones—everything jaggedly plummeting, like a series of lightning streaks, across horizontal lines—shared her joint with Alex and they made out for a while on the rickety back balcony. Her hand slipped beneath the folds of his kimono. Still, he left
the wig behind and drove home alone. That night he dreamed, again, of Brooke. Waking, he made up his mind. He had to get away.

I
t took him four weeks to put in for a transfer. In early November, he met with a lawyer in downtown Boston and set up a trust for Luisa Zukowsky. Into it he deposited the fifteen thousand dollars he had socked away, mostly for Dylan, during his years in Japan. He arranged for an automatic transfer of a thousand dollars from his checking account every month. After his death, assuming she was of age, Najda Zukowsky would administer the trust. He sent the paperwork to her, care of Josef Zukowsky. When he got back to his apartment after sending all the documents, he pulled the ring box out of the drawer in his kitchen and sat for a long while, drinking Scotch and contemplating the curled lock of Najda’s baby hair.

When time began to hang heavy, he went to see Fabrice in accounting. About the soccer league, he explained. Fabrice was a Haitian guy, dreadlocked and muscular. When he heard Alex had played in college, he put him in at fullback. Every Sunday they played and went out for beers—a motley assortment of former jocks, some with bad knees and some with coke habits. Three times, Alex agreed to meet a couple of the single guys later in the evening, at a nightclub in Jamaica Plain. They swapped life stories—the second time, Alex told them about Dylan, and it was easier and better than he’d expected—and looked for women. The third time, he went home with a chunky composition teacher, but when he left in the morning he didn’t leave his phone number.

Brussels was the most likely place. Gray and potato-faced, known for chocolate and beer. Stodgy, one of the guys at the office said, but Amsterdam was two hours by train. When Alex told Charlie
about his plan, just before Thanksgiving, she called him an asshole. She was breaking up with Pablo by then and had taken to outlining her eyes in black liner, which ran when the tears spilled out. Not until after Christmas, he assured her, but she threw her napkin at him anyway and stormed from the restaurant.

“She’ll forgive you,” Brooke said when they finally met. Alex had stopped calling her by then. He was never going to give her what she wanted. He was never going to say to her, Yes, Najda is our child, and I did this to her, I almost destroyed her. He had seen, in that alley in Scranton, what such honesty led to—a runaway mother, a violent end. Trying to repair the damage of the past was like wishing on the monkey’s paw: Your last wish would be to put the damage back exactly where it had been.

But on Thanksgiving weekend the phone had chimed and it was Brooke’s number, and he hadn’t stopped to think before picking up. They met at the nursery she was creating, in Simsbury. Two months earlier, the place had been a mud zone, with mountains of mulch looming over spindly trees and paths discernible only by the lengths of wood laid zigzag from a small cracked parking lot. Now, though the place was bedding down for the winter, it looked ready to bloom. Sean had made the difference, Brooke said. Lorenzo had hired him, for now, while he prepared for the Hartt School, the conservatory. Today Sean was interviewing with the graduate committee; next week, he would audition. Meanwhile he had built the greenhouse and rejiggered the website. Alex sat with Brooke in a heated building that would house retail gardening supplies at one end and a florist at the other. It smelled of sawdust and caulk, but shelves were already up around the walls, a C-shaped counter at the front. They sat in a pair of folding chairs, drinking cheap wine from plastic cups.

“If Charlie forgives me,” Alex said, “it’s because I’m her only
brother. That doesn’t make it right to keep putting oceans between us.”

Brooke chuckled. She was freer, more energetic—
bubbly
was the word Alex would have used had it not been impossible to apply to Brooke. “You’re not as powerful as you think, Lex,” she said. She reached out a foot to tap his ankle. “Charlie’s twenty-two. When she was seven, maybe, you were God. Now you’re a free lunch and a shoulder to cry on.”

“I’d like to be that shoulder, though.”

“Then don’t go.” When he didn’t answer, she leaned forward. Here it comes, he thought. “You know who she is, Alex. I feel like I can’t even say her name in front of you. Even when having her in our lives is the great, most fantastic surprise—and all because you—”

Alex put his hand up. “Look, they got my DNA,” he said.

“What do you mean? Who got it?”

“Scranton police. They were just doing their job,” he said when Brooke rolled her eyes. “My point is, if you or the Zukowskys or anyone wants to know if I am that incredible girl’s father, you are welcome to the information.”

Brooke shook her head. She contemplated her wine. Then she looked up, her eyes questioning. “Don’t
you
want to know?”

He shrugged. “Knowing wouldn’t change anything,” he said. “It wouldn’t change my responsibility for whatever happened to a baby that I know—that I knew—was alive at the moment I pulled her from between your legs. It wouldn’t change the composition of her family. Her mother is still Luisa Zukowsky.”

“Who cannot help her.”

“You’d be wrong about that.” He rose, toured a set of empty shelves, and sat down again. He had avoided looking at Brooke directly, but now he made himself. She had cut her hair. With the cooler weather, and no more need to dig holes, she wore a sea-green
cashmere V-neck that lay softly across her collarbone. He watched the vein beat in the hollow of her neck. “I’m not doing nothing,” he said. “I’m not running away.”

Brooke turned to look out the window. The trees were bare, a tangle of limbs against a gray sky. “I remember it all differently now,” she said after a long silence. “I remember movement. Sometimes I even remember her breathing. Her tiny belly against my chest.”

“Memory plays tricks, Brooke. I used to think I went abroad straight from BU, that I never saw my dad in those months before he drove off the cliff. But there’s a photo in my mom’s house, me and him. My suitcase is by the car. The tiger lilies behind us are in bloom. I’m holding the Japanese flag. I saw my dad that very month, and I still can’t remember a thing about it.”

“Your dad,” Brooke said, still looking out the window, “committed suicide.”

“Yes, he did.”

“Because of the accounts. Because he’d done something to set the quarry up for bankruptcy.”

“He felt too guilty to live, that much I’m sure of.”

“Guilt,” Brooke repeated. “It’s a killer.”

She turned back to Alex. Between her eyes—luminous now, with a spark he’d thought extinguished—ran a furrow of doubt. Why not tell her about the trust fund he had set up, for Najda’s mother? She would fling her arms around him then, welcome him to the club of believers. They would keep talking, meeting, planning together; and he could not bear it. So no, he would not tell her, not until he lived far away and in a new life. “Her name is Najda,” he said slowly. “And she will be as okay as anyone in her situation can be. And I will learn to live with what I did to her. But at least, this way, I cannot harm her more.”

They rose and walked the perimeter of the nursery. They talked of lighter things. In the darkening afternoon, they lingered by Alex’s car. “What about happiness?” Brooke asked.

“That’s a funny question for you to ask me.”

“I would never have made you happy, Lex. I was too”—she unfolded her arm and waved a hand feebly—“whiffly.”

“No, you weren’t. You were too afraid. You didn’t trust me.” His words sounded harsh, and he regretted them. He reached a hand to the back of Brooke’s neck and pulled her head to his chest. “You trust Sean now, though. Don’t you?” He felt her nod. “So that’s new. And I’ll be new, one of these days. I’ve just got to work on it.”

She lifted her face. Tears moistened her cheeks. “Far away,” she said.

“It’s easier,” he said.

The next day, at the soccer scrimmage, a cold wind blew across the field, bringing the first stray flakes of snow. Alex felt his skin flush; ricocheting off his hip, the ball stung. Cold sweat gathered in the small of his back, and smacking the ground felt like hitting rock. When he scored, his teammates slapped him on the back and the butt. Just like high school, one of them said at halftime. Another said, Except for the knees. And Fabrice, the Haitian guy, chimed in—it wasn’t the knees so much as the shit they were all working out. Right here, on this field. Amen, they all said. Then they trotted back to the field and tried to win.

M
y legs hurt, from the walking. Alison, the PT here at Crosby, says it’s a good hurt, even if the pain keeps me up at night. She massages the muscles above and below the knees. I get exercises to do, leg lifts with weights and pulleys. The left side’s coming along fine, of course—it’s the right, where all the muscles are smaller and don’t cooperate. In the water, I’m fine. Even my right arm moves, though I can’t keep the fingers together to make a real stroke. I love the pool here. Light floods in the picture window facing south, and the water bounces it to make blue waves on the walls and ceiling. Sounds echo. Some of the kids here are what they call multiply disabled, which means they are genuinely retarded along with everything else, and in the water they are so happy. There’s this one kid, Spicer, whose head stays in a brace on land, but with his teacher holding him so he can float on his back, he waggles it around. You can just imagine how that feels, the cool water at the base of his skull after it’s been in a clamp all day.

I walk with braces, for balance, along a track between two rails to keep me oriented. This morning I demonstrated for my family. They’re
here for Family Day, which happens every March. I thought Katarina was going to start crying when she saw me. She grabbed Luisa’s hand and sort of squealed. Ziadek just sat in his chair and nodded, like he knew I could do this all along. And my mom—well, she looked confused. It’s hard. I know that now. Luisa had it all worked out, that she took care of me, and then I go making new rules, taking care of myself. She loves me and it’s hard for her. And not to be condescending, but I’m proud of her that she came today. I thought she wouldn’t. I was afraid she wouldn’t. I’m going to lose Ziadek. I don’t want to lose my mom.

Alex, my counselor, says my disabilities won’t keep me back, but my temper might. Funny that he has the same name as my supposed dad. He’s completely different—chubby, bearded, full of nervous tics like the way he keeps knocking that kinetic-motion thing on his desk into action. What little I saw of my supposed dad suggested he was the still, watchful type. I call him that,
supposed
, because there’s no proof. Last fall, when Jennifer first came to help my mom start to manage by herself, everyone was pretty grateful to that other Alex. Katarina told me he had taken a DNA test. If I wanted to get my DNA, they could tell for sure if he was my dad.

He’s not my dad, I told her. No matter about the DNA. He wants to help Luisa, great. But I don’t need him, I don’t need to know if I’ve got his genes.

As far as my temper goes, Alex—Alex of Crosby—is right. I’m impatient. People here talk about wanting to be normal. I don’t want to be normal. I want to be amazing. Last week they showed a couple of episodes from that English TV series with Stephen Hawking. Now, he is amazing. But how did he get so curious about black holes and quasars, things we’ll never experience? Me, I want to unlock the brain. My brain, specifically. That’s the narcissism of youth, Alex-of-Crosby says. But then other brains, brains in general. What does it mean to damage them? Where do they heal with scars,
like scalded flesh, and where do they not grow back, like an amputated arm? Neuroscience—that’s what I’ll study, in college. Which means a lot of science now, bio and chemistry, and it makes my head ache, all the words scrambling in front of me. I can do it, though. I’ll bet Stephen Hawking gets headaches, too.