The Lost Daughter Read online

  The only thing Alex had ever complained about in their relationship was Brooke’s diaphragm. It hurt him, he said. He didn’t understand why, if her mom was willing to take her to have a diaphragm fitted, she wouldn’t let her go on the Pill.

  “She doesn’t want me putting chemicals in my body,” Brooke had tried explaining. “She wants something I’ll take responsibility for.” She did not add, as her mom had, And if boys know you’re on the Pill they’ll think you’re loose.

  “You’d have to take responsibility for one of those tabs every morning,” Alex said.

  “I know. But she wants me to be conscious of what I’m doing. What we’re doing.”

  Strictly speaking, it had been the parental consent clause that sent her to Isadora. On a scrap of paper, during math class, she had scribbled herself a syllogism—they’d just learned syllogisms, in Humanities—A. You can’t get an ab— without telling your parents; B. If you tell your parents, they’ll refuse to sign; C. You can’t get an ab—. But in truth Brooke wasn’t sure about B. Her mother would probably sign eventually, vindication curling her lip as she read the clause aloud. Brooke thought less about the prospects of having a baby or giving it up or even marrying Alex (Alex! Whom she hardly knew! Even after two years!) than about how justified her mother would be when she learned that Brooke had neglected to wear the diaphragm.

  “But I did wear it!” she had told the nurse at the free clinic in Scranton. Confidential, the ad had said, and the place was tucked away in a seedy office building that made her think of drug dealing. The woman who examined her was dark-skinned but not African; something more exotic. She spoke with a lilt that turned each sentence into a question.

  “It was sized too small?” the woman said, moving her fingers around inside Brooke.

  “My mother’s gynecologist sized it. She’s been going to him for twenty-five years.”

  “But it was sized before you had engaged in intercourse?”

  “Well, we’d done it once—”

  “And a girl’s body stretches? You can feel this shifting around in here?” Brooke nodded, though the woman couldn’t see her head. “This may cause pain to your partner, also?”

  “He always says it hurts him. I thought it just was like that.”

  “In any case, not adequate protection? This is the explanation of your pregnancy?”

  The woman pulled the diaphragm out; Brooke felt, as always, the queer, damp explosion of the rubber coil. The woman asked if she knew about the parental consent clause; when Brooke nodded, she received a sheet of paper with boxes to check off. “You need only one signature?” the woman pointed out, her varnished fingernails tapping the paper. “The court may approve a grandparent?” The cost would be four hundred dollars, which Brooke knew she could get from Alex. Only once he had paid it, would he ever want to see her again? She wasn’t a safe bet anymore, as a girlfriend. She’d screwed up.

  Late at night, drinking Isadora’s tea, she told herself it could not be true. She did not screw up. This was not the sort of event that happened to her. The readings were false; this was a trick God was playing, testing her. Brooke often thought of God as a sort of club president, setting up initiation rites and watching from his tree house to see if you passed. Her parents were Presbyterians, who talked mostly about changes in the wording of the service, not about God.

  She had trouble taking the proper doses of the tea. You had to drink it on an empty stomach and not eat or drink anything else for at least an hour. “Get an immersing coil at the hardware store,” Isadora had instructed her, and that wasn’t hard—they cost a dollar sixty-nine and looked like a giant IUD—but even with brewing the stuff in her bedroom over that Christmas break, Brooke was always making excuses for not having a cup of eggnog or for running upstairs in the midst of stringing cranberries. You couldn’t even put honey in it, Isadora had cautioned, and if it steeped less than five minutes you didn’t get the right mix of reactions.

  “I don’t think the tea worked,” Brooke said in late January.

  Isadora looked her up and down, as if there would be a sign. Brooke’s pants were just a little tight around the waist, like everyone’s after Christmas. “You sure you drank it on an empty stomach?” Brooke nodded. “Three times a day?”

  “I set my alarm in the morning. Then I skipped lunch and steeped it in the girls’ room by the gym. Then late at night.”

  “You let it steep—”

  “Five minutes.” Brooke had started to get annoyed at Isadora’s questions. She’d always been a smart girl, good at following directions. She’d followed her mother’s directions with the diaphragm. “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” she said, in a voice that surprised her with its sternness. “I need to know how much longer I should wait.”

  Isadora had gone to her kitchen window. Thoughtfully she picked brown leaves from one of the many plants she kept on the sill. The low midwinter light and artificial heat weren’t doing them any good. In her winter turtleneck, her brown hair combed straight, she looked scarcely older than Brooke. “Not much longer,” she said.

  “But you said your friend. In her seventh month.”

  “She was an adult. She was ready to take on the consequences.”

  “Well, jeez, what consequences are you asking me to take? I mean, either my parents disown me or I end up an unwed mother! I thought this was a better option, that’s why I took it.”

  “Your parents won’t disown you, Brooke.”

  “You don’t know them.”

  “And maybe Alex would like to be a father. Have you asked him?”

  “Alex’s got a soccer scholarship to Boston University.” Isadora had no answer to this. She was looking out the window, her face pale; she might have been crying. “Will you get me more?” Brooke asked.

  “Of the herbs? No.”

  “I’m willing to wait. But I have to be sure.”

  Isadora had shrugged; she had turned from the plants and come to stand next to Brooke. “This is an old, old recipe,” she had said. “I’ve never known anyone to take it and bear a child. But I’m not a doctor. I can’t make you guarantees. You’re scaring me, Brooke.”

  “Scaring you,” Brooke had said, with a twist of her mouth.

  Now, in the park, she waved at another dog walker, an older fellow she often saw there with a pair of basset hounds. He tipped his hat to her and smiled, pleased at a young woman’s attention. She wasn’t far, she realized with a start, from the age Isadora Bassett had been when she gave Brooke those herbs. At the thought of handing a seventeen-year-old a recipe to rid herself of a baby, Brooke shuddered. How weak Isadora had been! Wearing the same fashions as the high school girls, talking about drugs as though they were cool. Well, it was a long time ago. Except Alex was back now; she had seen him, the old question still lurking in his eyes.

  She had told him only because of the diaphragm. They had been at his house one Friday that February, babysitting his sister Charlie. How old had Charlie been, then? Six, maybe seven. First grade. Alex’s mom had tried for years to conceive a second child, and when she had given up, Charlie at last came along. Mrs. Frazier seemed to resent the whole thing, as if Charlie had played a trick on her, like a kid who will hide and hide until the adults are exhausted, and then spring out. But Alex was crazy about her. He was so protective, Charlie called him Alexander the Great. When he and Brooke babysat Charlie, they all played Chutes and Ladders, which Charlie loved, and sometimes Brooke read to Charlie from the edition of King Arthur tales illustrated by Arthur Rackham that Alex’s mom kept on a top shelf of their den. At age seven, Charlie had a whole family tree in her head, starting with Uther Pendragon.

  Brooke had read to her that night about the birth of Galahad. Charlie had already learned of Lancelot and Guinevere and sat with her pale eyes gleaming as Brooke explained why it was necessary to bewitch Lancelot into becoming Galahad’s father. She left Charlie turning the pages of the book, her brow furrowed, determined to read the book for herself.


  My God, Brooke thought as she pulled the dogs around the rose garden. The details that came back! Later, in the basement, she and Alex had watched The Fisher King on videotape, with Robin Williams playing the medieval history prof who goes mad. Alex had had a cold and sniffled all through the movie. When it was over, she’d made him play out the scene where Robin Williams tells Amanda Plummer he has a hard-on for her the size of Florida but he doesn’t want just one night. She’d unzipped Alex’s pants. “You’ll catch my cold,” he whispered huskily as she slid beneath him—her own pants off, her sweater hiked up, the scratchy weave of the basement couch against her back.

  “Colds don’t get communicated down there.” She giggled, though it hadn’t been a funny movie. When he still didn’t reach for her she said, “It’ll make you better. Blow your nose.”

  That got a laugh out of him. He shoved his jeans to his knees. He was plenty hard. They had to be very quiet; his house was new construction, thin walls. Suddenly he turned her over, so she was kneeling on the scratchy cushions. His knees shoved between hers, pushing hers apart. She spoke his name, but he didn’t answer; he was in her, at once and deep. He thrust, and in her head she heard the violins from the movie, then the drums. Then he brought his hand around her hip. He kept moving in her, but his hand, his hand— “Oh!” she cried. The tingle rushed to her lips.

  “Ssh. You’ll wake Charlie up. What is it?”

  “I…I came.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, I think. I must have. God, Lex.” Tears started unbidden to her eyes. She swallowed; she reached back to touch his naked hip, to keep him moving. “It was so sudden.”

  “I’m proud of you, you fox.”

  “Oh, Alex. I liked it.”

  “I thought you always liked it.”

  “I did, but—you know—I didn’t, like that. Oh, Lex, I love you.”

  “Brookey, Brooke.”

  He was moving faster already. Then it was over, his belt buckle slapping the back of her thigh. The tears wouldn’t stop leaking from her eyes. They sank to the couch. He brushed her cheek with the back of his index finger. Then his eyes widened. “It didn’t hurt,” he said.

  “What didn’t hurt?”

  “Your diaphragm.”

  “I didn’t wear it.”

  His eyes widened further. “But my God, Brooke, that’s—”

  She put her finger to his lips. They were full pursed lips, a rosebud of a boy’s mouth. “I’ve been pregnant,” she confessed. Her heart thudded in her chest.

  “What d’you mean, you’ve been…are you pregnant now? Brooke, this is the first time—” His head pulled back. His hand hovered over the tiny curve of her belly, as if measuring it. For a moment, his face filled with a soft wonder.

  “I don’t think I am, anymore. I’m waiting.”

  It all spilled out then. She told him about the bad fitting of the diaphragm, the parental consent clause, her visit to Isadora, the tea. “That’s why I didn’t have anything to eat at your parents’ holiday party. I felt so rude, but—”

  “You’re saying you’re going to miscarry?”

  She nodded. She felt his muscles tensing. The wonder was gone from his face, and his stare frightened her. “That’s what Isadora promised.”

  “Isadora’s a dreaming hippie.” He rose. He pulled on his T-shirt, his shorts. When he sat in the chair opposite her, fully clothed in front of her nakedness, his face had rearranged itself into hard, practical lines. “You can’t be ridiculous, Brooke,” he said. “You have to get an abortion.”

  The dogs were whining. Brooke looked down. Lex’s leash was tangled with Bitsy’s, and Mocha’s rear leg was trapped in her leash so she limped. Lex had just laid a poop in a bed of black-eyed Susans. Quickly Brooke glanced at her watch. Eleven o’clock already. “Christ,” she muttered. She disentangled the dogs, swept up the mess in a bag, and jogged back through the park’s rose garden to the tree-lined street. She would be late for work, even if Meghan cooperated. What, oh, what did Alex want with her?

  Chapter 7

  It was funny, Alex’s sister Charlotte said to him over coffee at Lalla Rookh, how people looked at them and thought she was dating this cute older guy.

  “Do girls at Tufts do that?” he asked her. “Date their professors?”

  “I don’t know.” Charlie picked at her pilaf. “I think it’s against the rules these days. There’s this one psych professor you hear about. But I think he’s gross.”

  “Well, you tell him hands off you. Big brother’s back in town.”

  “You sure about that?” Gingerly she lifted her wine. She was twenty-two now, legal, but on both the occasions when Alex had taken her out, she had studied the clear glass globe and its rich red elixir as if the wine had magic tricks to perform. Yesterday had been her birthday; she’d gone out with friends from Tufts. Today, Alex’s turn; he’d picked this restaurant, a bejeweled little Persian place, because it was named after some nineteenth-century poem by Byron or one of those guys. Charlotte was majoring in literature. “I mean, are you really going to settle here? Seems so boring, after Tokyo.”

  Alex’s mouth twisted. “Every big city’s basically the same, Charlie.”

  “Nuh-uh. Those kids we saw out in the Ginza District? You’d never find them here. That was like sci-fi. Blade Runner. Haruki Murakami.”

  Alex knew better than to ask her who Haruki Murakami was. He loved listening to his kid sister show off. When she had come to visit him and Tomiko, the summer before her senior year in high school, she had learned enough Japanese to get around on the subway, and she insisted on going off by herself and then meeting them hours later, exactly on time, draping her parcels over her forearm exactly as she’d seen the Tokyo girls do. Tomiko, eight months pregnant then, had loved her. A half dozen times, during the week she visited, he’d found his sister and his wife bending their heads together, whispering and then giggling about something. When he’d asked what the joke was, they had both wiped their hands across their smiling lips—like sisters—and said it was nothing very funny.

  “So?” Charlie insisted. “Don’t you think you’ll move back there?”

  “That chapter’s over, Charlie. I can’t keep living somewhere just because you like to visit.”

  “Well, I did. But it’s not that. It’s…you know. Tomiko.”

  He met her gaze. She’d always been a robust kid, loaded with baby-of-the-family pranks. While he was away at school or later in Japan, he would get e-mails from his parents wringing their hands over Charlie’s suddenly purple hair, her high school crush on another girl (who was, true to form, a Very Bad Influence), the popcorn balls that set the kitchen on fire. If she hadn’t been so smart, so alert—he could swear her ears pricked up, like a fox’s, at a new idea—she might have spun off into real trouble. As it was she studied Milton and wrote biting satires. Before she left Windermere, she had founded a children’s theater program and directed a Christmas farce that scandalized the town. Any guilt Alex had felt for being absent so much of his sister’s life was assuaged when he saw how completely she threw herself into that life. “You can visit Tomiko anytime you want,” he said. “She really likes you.”

  “I never even met Dylan.” She took a large bit of lamb stew and talked around the meat. “I wish you guys could have gotten over it. Had another. Pushed on. I mean, it was awful. But shit happens.”

  “Not that simple, Charlie.”

  “You sent two Christmas cards with his picture. I saw what kind of kid he was. He would have wanted you to stay together.”

  “You’re right about that.” He drained his glass and refilled them both from the bottle he’d bought. He didn’t want to talk about Tomiko anymore. “But then I wouldn’t be here, taking you out for birthday dinner.”

  “It’s weird having you in town.”

  “I love you, too, Charlie.”

  “No, I mean…I’m used to e-mailing you, Facebooking you.”

  He looked around. “And now w
e come here and some stranger thinks you’ve got a sugar daddy,” he whispered conspiratorially. “What’s with your own boyfriend?”

  “What boyfriend?”

  “My point.”

  She wrinkled her nose. She was not, he thought, a conventionally pretty girl. Her features were too strong—a prominent chin, heavy eyebrows—and she had cut her dark hair into ragged locks that she finger-combed back from her face. She would look great astride a horse, and in fact he remembered tales of her brief adolescent obsession with riding, though he was gone from Windermere by then.

  “There was a guy,” she admitted, “last year. But he graduated, and you could tell it wasn’t going to work. He wanted, you know, something more domestic.”

  “You mean he wanted you to move in.”

  “More than that. He was going to want a wife. He’d started talking about kids!”

  “You don’t want kids?”

  “Alex, I’m only twenty-two.” She met his eyes and then focused on her wineglass. How grown-up she was, Alex thought, and still the same scamp who had gobbled up all his devotion two decades ago. “But no, I don’t think I’ll want children. I hope that’s not horrible.” She drained the glass. “I’m ambitious,” she said bluntly. “And I don’t care what those old feminists claim; a kid is like a ball and chain for a woman trying to make it.”

  “Make it as what?”

  “Anything. I don’t know yet. As a lawyer, maybe. Maybe a playwright. Let me get through my Chaucer seminar first.”

  “Okay.”

  “But you. You should still have them.”

  “Have what?”

  “Kids, silly.”

  Alex regarded his sister fondly. He felt the temptation, after more than three decades, to unburden himself to a sibling—to someone who could absorb all his pain, all his mistakes, like a sponge, and who would still be, after it was all told, his sister, his brother. Charlie had that, because she had him, and he…but no. She was still a kid, with that bounce in her step. He wasn’t going to filch it from her. “Not a lucky part of my life so far,” he said.