The Lost Daughter Page 11

  “I always thought you and Brooke should have a kid.”

  His wineglass halfway to his lips, Alex felt his throat close up. He set the glass down.

  “The unmentionable Brooke,” Charlie continued. “We never talked about how attached I was to her, you know. That was long before Tomiko. We never talked about what happened with you guys.”

  “Is this your psych professor talking? Early childhood trauma.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic, big brother. That’s my job.”

  Alex shifted in his chair. In her teen years, Charlie had become an expert at annoying their mom this way—desanctifying every sacred cow, no adult subject off-limits to her callow wit. Over long-distance calls, after hearing his mother ignite into rage, he’d made her pass the phone and ordered Charlie to cool it. Now he was the one with a tinderbox sparking. “Brooke and I were children,” he said now, his lips tightening. “Younger than you. We did stupid stuff.”

  “I hear she’s in Hartford now. You should go see her. Rescue her from her life. That was what happened in all those stories she used to read me.”

  “What stories?”

  “Blond maiden locked in tower, handsome knight with magic lance.”

  “That’s phallic imagery, Charlie.”

  “Good boy.” Alex’s kid sister grinned at him, her mouth stained pink with the wine. “You’re not just a bean counter, after all.”

  It was easy to stay busy. The Mercator office in Boston controlled staffing in five dozen branches around the world. Alex spent days huddled with the IT guys, debating how to drive corporate traffic onto the web without diminishing service. Evenings went to predictive flowcharts, the imagined shape of corporate finance after the crash. A note on the bulletin board by the coffee machine advertised a soccer team—See Fabrice in Accounting. He jotted down the name for when he had more time. As summer mellowed into fall, he took a couple of Sunday hikes. In the leafy hills west of the city, he felt the loss of the high peaks in Japan where he’d summited with Tomiko, before sorrow piled on thick enough to force him down into the foothills of the past. He took calls from old buddies he’d last seen at his dad’s funeral—Brian, practicing law now in Rhode Island; Jake, still in Windermere. Sure, he said smoothly, I’m in the States for good now. We’ll catch up. Sure, sure. Balding, energetic Francisco, one of the IT guys at Mercator, threw a Labor Day picnic, and Alex woke the next morning from a vivid dream of Tomiko to a strangely white apartment and the sweetly curved hip of a disheveled market researcher next to him in the bed. He gave her a nostalgic kiss, as if she had already receded into a hazy past, and exited into the dry, windy day, his eyes blinking tears.

  The previous week, after a second meeting in Hartford, he had paced up and down Brooke’s street until some drunk accosted him and he walked rapidly away. She wasn’t returning his calls. On the cracked streets of that city—a tumbledown version of Boston, a jacked-up version of Scranton—he couldn’t get her out of his head. And not just Brooke but Windermere, the flat-roofed high school, the sloping soccer field, the cheap diners and motels strung out along Route 6. Two weeks later, leaving Mercator’s brick-front Hartford office, he thought he glimpsed another familiar face, wolf eyes in a gaunt frame that stared at him before turning and trotting swiftly to a low-slung Mazda. Someone from Windermere. Not a friend. Reece? Clyde? Clyde, that was it. Quickly he took a second look. Sure enough, it was the same guy. Of all people to turn up here. Clyde had been a thug in high school. He’d had a big-breasted, slow-witted girl—sophomore year? junior year?—whom he beat up; rumor was he pushed her down a flight of stairs so she would miscarry. By senior year he was gone from school, working in the coal mines to the west. Thinking of that sad, humiliated girl, Alex felt ready to turn back and take a swing at Clyde, for old times’ sake. But when he wheeled around, the bum had vanished.

  Hiking through the Massachusetts hills, he had mourned his marriage and his lovely lost son. Driving east from Hartford, he mourned further back—to Brooke, to the newborn whose eyes he had glimpsed only the one time. His fault, all his fault and always his fault. And for what? How did he ever find himself in that motel room, doing the things he did? It hadn’t been that uncommon, knocking up your girlfriend. For a couple like Alex and Brooke, it shouldn’t have been a disaster. If only Brooke hadn’t started on that stuff, that “tea,” that creepy brew mashed up by Isadora Bassett.

  March, he thought as he drove east. The month of March had tipped the scales. Over that spring break, Brooke had been supposed to come to Florida with Alex’s family, but she wouldn’t. Because nobody knew yet, she’d said. Not that Alex had wanted anyone to know—Christ, he hadn’t wanted it to go on that long, had wanted to go down to Planned Parenthood right away, but there was the consent clause. She had been stuck on it, the consent clause. The bit about her mom, who’d had Brooke when she was eighteen and was always thanking God for her little girl—she would never sign. “You can’t be positive of that,” he’d said, taking Brooke’s hands in the cold car, the night before he left with his family. “She could surprise you. Remember how she surprised you when she let us go camping alone last summer?”

  “That didn’t really surprise me, Lex. I just didn’t want you counting on it.”

  “How about when she pierced a second hole in her ear? Hmm? Didn’t that freak you, just a little?”

  “That was fashion.”

  “So, abortion is fashion, these days.”

  Their breath had come steaming out of their mouths. For a second, while she hesitated, looking out of the cloudy windshield, he’d wanted to kiss her mouth, the way he used to, lips barely open and the cold teeth between. He remembered how they’d acted out that stupid scene from The Fisher King. I don’t want just one night. They were parked on the hill just above her house, where the subdivision was going up. “I can’t tell my mom you feel fat in a bathing suit,” Alex said. “She’ll just want you to come more. Plus she’ll want you to keep Charlotte company.”

  “Spunky little Charlotte,” said Brooke. Three days before, Charlie had broken both her arms trying to fly from midway up the huge spruce in the park. Who were the guys? Alex had kept asking her while she sat sniffling, her egg-shaped eyes staring guiltily at him, waiting for the plaster on her arms to dry. Who were the guys who said they’d catch you? They tried, Charlie had said. She’d been seven that year, a wild child.

  “You think Clyde and those assholes did it?” he asked Brooke.

  “Jeez, Alex, I don’t know.”

  Brooke ran her tongue across her upper teeth, under her lip. Moonlight caught the curve of her cheek—a little fuller by then, nothing noticeable. Under her big sweaters and leggings, the difference was invisible. Still, by that point, he didn’t like to have sex with her unless she pushed for it. Not that he didn’t want her—in fact, it was weird how much he liked doing it with her body changing, blooming—but she kept telling him not to think about the pregnancy, and it was hard not to think about a thing when it was under your hand.

  “I’m going to tell my parents,” he said, shifting in the cold car seat.

  “No, you’re not.” There was a new tone to Brooke’s voice, as if she knew the future. You couldn’t argue with her. Sometimes he thought she was making fun of him.

  “They’re different from your parents. They don’t have an anti-abortion thing. My mom could talk to your mom, Brooke.”

  “Lex, Lex.” She moved the back of a finger up and down his jacket sleeve; for an instant, he hated her. “You keep talking about an operation that I’m not going to have. I don’t need an abortion, Alex.”

  “Dead babies don’t keep getting bigger!”

  “Sure they do. It’s just a vegetable I’m growing in there, Lex. It hasn’t got a brain. When it comes out, you’ll see.”

  “Well, if that’s true, then let’s just get it out. Let’s see now.”

  Brooke shook her head. He’d never imagined she could be so stubborn. Surely it was the hormones working. Her brain a
nd the baby’s, they were both turned to mush by that stuff Isadora made her drink.

  Down in Florida, he managed mostly to forget about it. His parents had decided he and Brooke were breaking up. They couldn’t avoid talking about Brooke’s grandfather, old Albrecht; Alex’s dad’s accounting business had just picked up a notch with the Albrecht account. But they avoided Brooke’s name. Disney World had a huge soccer expo. Pulling Charlotte in, one day, Alex played Virtual Foosball against Romário and won five rematches. He was still high as an escaped balloon when they got back to the condo.

  “I can’t wait to get on college varsity,” he said, knocking a Hacky Sack around the sand-colored living room. “Blast those guys from Tufts off the field. That guy at the interview, Tom Hays? He was telling me Tufts got five out of the last six.”

  “Who says you’ll make varsity?” his father asked from the card table, where he was letting Charlotte win at checkers.

  “I’ve got a freaking scholarship, Dad.”

  “Don’t say ‘freaking,’ ” his mother called from the kitchen.

  “You’ll be a freshman nonetheless. There’s a junior varsity, you know.”

  “Huh,” said Alex.

  “He’ll make whatever he makes,” said his mom. She was old for a mother, Alex thought as she came into the living room, wiping her hands on a cloth. She’d waited a long time to have him. Brooke’s mom was young. His gut locked; he let the Hacky Sack drop from his foot. “He’s happy, that’s the point,” his mother said with a glance toward the card table. His dad pursed his lips. Charlotte, oblivious, was trying to reach a finger inside her cast. “Stop that, honey,” Alex’s mom said. Her voice changed abruptly, and when Charlotte didn’t stop, she stepped over and gave her hand a quick, hard slap.

  “Your mother said stop,” Alex’s dad put in when Charlie’s eyes filled.

  “Why don’t you go out to the beach, Alex,” his mother said, her voice honeyed again. “There’s an hour of light left.”

  “Pretty girls,” said his dad.

  “Jesus, can’t you people hear the difference!” Flicking the Hacky Sack from the rug to his hand, Alex shook it at his parents. From the kitchen drifted radio music, something from the sixties but orchestrated. They looked at him as if he’d just shaken them from sleep for no reason. “The way—” he started, but he didn’t go on; he’d pointed it out before, how they barked at Charlotte. But they never took it in. “Never mind,” he said. “I’m going out.”

  On the beach a group of flat-chested preteen girls jumped in the crawling waves and giggled. Beyond them, various human shapes spread over the sand. Barbecuing, Brooke called it. Lifeguarding all summer, she still kept her creamy skin; she disdained people with nothing better to do than splay themselves out under the sun. He ached, right then, with missing her. When he heard footsteps behind him, he turned, imagining for a split second that it was Brooke, not pregnant anymore and come to find him down in Florida. But it was his sister, in her T-shirt and cutoffs, her arms hanging heavy from her thin shoulders. “Charlie,” he said, and his heart swelled and sank. At least his kid sister did his bidding, scamp though she was.

  He couldn’t account, now, for how so much time had passed between that trip to Florida and the last week of high school. All he remembered was graduation looming around the corner and Brooke staying clear of him. Those had been her actual words—“I want to stay clear of you for a while”—but they hadn’t broken up, because she wasn’t returning anything to him or seeing anyone else. See anyone else—how could she, the way she was? It wasn’t until the last day of school that he had determined to cut through her fog. Then as now, he liked things to be resolved. Either Brooke was his girlfriend or she wasn’t; either she was going to have a baby or she wasn’t.

  He had waited for her after school. Coming out of the double doors, she didn’t look that different—a tall willowy girl in a loose dress. They had a few hours till he was due at an exhibition game, varsity versus alumni, the Old Guard weekend. He couldn’t believe how happy he was to have her in the car with him again. He kept risking an accident because he wanted so much to turn and look at her. The cool planes of her cheeks; the tiny wave in the bone of her nose; her small ears, the wires she threaded through the lobes. “I have to say something,” he said. It was the first line he’d delivered since Come on at the parking lot.

  “Okay. Say something.”

  “If it comes out okay—I mean, grant me this, there’s a possibility—if it’s alive and well and all that, then we’ll just get married and live with my parents, and I’ll go to Penn State.”

  “None of that is going to happen, Alex.”

  “I’m just saying. And if it’s—you know, dead—then I’ll help when it comes out. And if it’s alive but not okay…” He slid his eyes up to meet hers. She was almost smiling, like he was amusing. “If it’s alive but not okay—if that stuff, you know, fucked up its brain or whatever…”

  “Who’ve you been talking to, Alex?”

  “Nobody! Nobody. That’s just the problem. The days go by, and you’re still—you know—and we don’t talk to anybody about it.”

  This was not completely true. The week before he’d gone to his best friend, Jake. He had lied about the details, said Brooke was just barely knocked up and they’d probably get the abortion before graduation. Jake said that all the chicks in Windermere ought to either get abortions or move away. That would send a message to the assholes in the health department. You know, Jake had said, what they do in China? They just put them down a well. Newborns. They don’t feel anything, right at that point. That way society doesn’t got to pay for ’em, and you don’t get a life of suffering. It’s like throwing a pot and it won’t fire up right, you junk it. You start a new pot.

  “I talked to Isadora,” Brooke was saying.

  “And she said, what, ‘Oops, sorry for the bad advice’?”

  “She took a look, if you must know. She pressed around. She put her ear to my belly.”

  “What, she’s a nurse now?”

  “Said something seemed off in our calculations. It ought to have kicked by now, if I was more than six months.”

  “So, fine. You just missed for a few months, and then we really knocked you up, and now you can have the operation.”

  “No, Alex. I told her I was sure.”

  “What the fuck does either of you know!” Alex banged the steering wheel, which gave out a halfhearted honk. “We live in a town crawling with doctors—”

  “She picked up the phone to call my parents.”

  “Yeah? Okay,” said Alex. His foot pushed the pedal a little harder. He was ready to forgive Isadora Bassett, if only.

  “And I just looked at her while she started to dial. So she put it down. I’m not the only one afraid of my mom, Lex.”

  “I’m not afraid of your mom! That bitch,” Alex said, and he meant Isadora, but he didn’t care how Brooke took it.

  The diner had a bright yellow sign, Daisy’s Kitchen, and one pickup parked outside. The lot was dusty. There had been a drought all that spring; the farmers around Windermere were worried. Alex steered Brooke in, the way he’d seen kidnappers do in movies, just enough pressure to be sure the person doesn’t bolt. “If it’s not okay,” he started again when they were in the booth, “I think we ought to be prepared—”

  “God, Alex.” She rolled her eyes. “You think the weirdest thoughts.”

  “Are they so weird? Huh? Aren’t those the three possibilities? No baby. Baby. Monster-baby.” He sat back in the booth, arms over his chest. The waitress came over, her face like a scared bird’s, to ask if they were ready to order. He got a Coke and fries for himself; Brooke ordered a slice of blueberry pie, which he would probably eat most of. They’d taken the last booth. Reaching across, Brooke touched her hand to the yellow bruise above Alex’s left eye, where he’d taken a header at the last soccer game.

  “I want,” she said, after she had caressed the spot for a few seconds, her cool fingers
lifting the pain out, “to be your girl.”

  Panic seized his vocal cords. His lips could hardly move. “You are my girl.”

  “I mean I don’t want to be a weight on you. Not ever. I’ve seen that happen.”

  “You’re not a weight on me. But this—this thing is. This pregnancy thing.”

  There, it was out. He’d named his stake in what Brooke did. The food came. He poured ketchup over the fries. As she always did, Brooke sneaked one long ketchup-free fry out from the rest and nibbled it, like a carrot. She showed no interest in her triangle of pie. She was blinking a lot, and it took Alex too long to figure out that what she was blinking away were tears.

  “I’ve never made a mistake before,” she said abruptly. She had to say it twice for Alex to understand; the French fry got in the way.

  “No pain, no gain,” he said, stupidly. He was trying to unscramble the tears. Why did girls decide to cry when they did? Why’d they decide to do anything when they did?

  “But it’s not fair to have to take the consequences of someone else’s screwup.”

  “The doctor who fitted you, you mean.” She nodded. “Well, you wouldn’t’ve had to, four months ago.”

  “Don’t start on me with that, Lex. I’m trying to say something to you.”

  “Okay. Okay, baby.” Don’t fuck it up, he’d ordered himself, waiting at the school exit. He couldn’t bring himself even to think the word love. “I’m listening. I’m not talking, I’m just listening.”

  “Because…because I’ve never made any mistakes—any real mistakes, I mean—I don’t know how to ask for help. Do you follow me? Asking for help—well, in my family, that means you’re in the ooze, or go back three spaces.”

  “You lost me there, babe.”

  “Candy Land,” she said, as if he should have known.

  He smiled in spite of himself. “Charlie likes Chutes and Ladders.”