The Lost Daughter Read online

  Luisa had left the special school program—she was learning nothing there anyway except to make change and read prices, as if they were all being trained to work the grocery checkout—and made Najda her life. For Najda when she was ready for school, it was different. Every day, the same blue van picked her up as used to pick up Luisa. They rolled the wheelchair onto the lift, and Ziadek put his arm around Luisa’s shoulders as the hoist operated, moving Najda up and away with the rest of the students, to be gone for seven hours. In the van rode the same sort of students as had ridden with Luisa: students with cerebral palsy, with autism, with what the administrators called cognitive deficits. At first glance Najda looked like the rest of them. The right side of her face had little expression. Her right arm and leg, even with all the water exercising, were withered. Now and then little tics assaulted her—she jerked and twitched and drooled a little, and sometimes she hummed to keep from emitting the growls and barks that wanted to come out. But where Luisa had gone placidly through the days learning to count the coins and solve the brightly colored puzzles, Najda finished all the puzzles and rolled her blue eyes when she had to do the coins for the dozenth time. By the time she was eight she was reciting—without the humming, with barely a hint of a stutter—poetry.

  “We mainstream them three times a week,” the teacher had told Katarina when Ziadek made her call. “She has all the opportunities available in the system.”

  The social worker, too, said Najda needed to stay where she was. “She is doing remarkably well,” this person said, pulling Najda’s charts from her file folder. She always looked at the charts when she visited them, Ziadek noticed; she never looked at Najda or Luisa, and at Ziadek only when he raised his voice. “Stability is the most important factor in her development.”

  But Najda was not interested in stability. She wanted to learn, and she wanted to do it in her own way. “Not…power,” she said the other day, her voice breathless with frustration. “Not…point power. Point. PowerPoint.” She nodded vigorously when she’d managed the phrase. “Fun,” she said. “Laugh.” But Ziadek and Luisa both knew she was not talking about having fun. Najda held her left hand up, as if it were a sign or screen held next to her face. “Chistory of Hess,” she said clearly. Ziadek nodded. He knew what she meant—knew it as easily as if she had said the syllables in their proper order, “History of Chess.” “Words,” she went on, nodding at her hand-screen. “Pictures. Teacher…teacher make speak Najda.” She flung a hand toward Ziadek, as if he were in the audience for her PowerPoint presentation. “Laugh,” she commanded him.

  “Well, fuck the PowerPoint,” Ziadek said in Polish. “Write him an essay, honey. Show him all you know about the history of chess. Show the bastard. He can’t let kids laugh at you like that.”

  But Najda had dissolved in tears, and Luisa was dabbing her face with tissues. “Hush, Ziadek, hush,” Luisa said to her father.

  Najda went to the new county library, two miles down Route 6, where she waited for her half hour turn on the computer and struggled to master this PowerPoint, which Ziadek understood was like a slide show only with words and decorations along with the pictures. Sequencing was the problem; also speaking. At night, Ziadek heard Najda repeating the names of games from Persia and China, the names of chess masters from the royal courts. The teacher gave them only five minutes for the presentation, and she had enough knowledge for an hour’s talk. Pages and pages of clumsy pictures she drew on lined paper, trying to squeeze it all into squares that could flash onto the computer screen with a little pointer to highlight. When the moment came and her words dissolved into a hum anyway, the class laughed just as Najda had predicted. She stopped halfway through. “Checkmate!” the kids called out now, when they saw her in the school corridor. Maybe they mean it in a friendly way, Katarina tried telling Najda, but Najda only shook her head miserably.

  Such things kept happening. The more Najda understood of what was expected in the mainstream classes, the more she couldn’t bear how little anyone expected of her. Where Luisa had been a sweet, docile calf who learned all she needed and stopped, Najda was like a fettered eagle, meant to soar to the clouds but held down by the holes in her speech and the muffled laughter of the other students. For three days now, when the blue bus stopped by the entrance to the trailer park, Najda sat in the room she shared with Luisa and refused to get out of bed and into the motorized wheelchair the Medicaid had bought for her last year. Before his surgery, Ziadek would have lifted her bodily, stripped the nightgown from her, wrestled her into clothes, and dropped her into the chair. Now he was too weak. Next week the social worker would come, and she would learn that Najda was not going to school.

  “Do you understand what that means?” Ziadek said to Luisa as she helped Najda into the chair, an hour after the school bus had gone. “It means they will find you incompetent to be her mother. It means they will take her away. Do you understand that?” he repeated, this second time directly to Najda. The girl gave him a piercing, agonized look. She was growing, he realized, into a beautiful young woman, confined as she was and with half her body useless.

  “It’s okay,” Luisa said, stroking Najda’s blond hair. “He’s not mad at you, really. We’ll get ice cream later. It’s okay.”

  “I am not giving you money for ice cream,” said Ziadek.

  But as they left, Luisa pushing Najda through the yellow leaves that had begun drifting from the poplars around the trailer park, he relented. Calling Luisa back, he gave her a crumpled five-dollar bill. Luisa would push her girl the two miles to the flat-roofed library, where Najda would read books and spend hours on the computer, clicking keys to find out all the things she hungered to know. She was dyslexic, the social worker had said, as well as aphasic. Learning of any kind would take her longer than others. But she was not stupid. Listening to the social worker, Ziadek had worked not to laugh. Stupid! No fifteen-year-old who could outplay him in chess could be called stupid. That much he knew.

  Katarina came over, the third night after Najda started refusing to attend school, to confront her sister. Luisa and Najda were playing Candy Land, Luisa’s favorite game. Behind Luisa, the television played Najda’s favorite series, one of those medical dramas where all the nurses looked like movie stars and the doctors made smart-ass remarks. While Luisa studied her next move, Najda sneaked peeks at the TV. When had she first outrun her mother? Ziadek could not say. It was so easy for outsiders to take the teenaged girl to be as slow as the woman who watched after her, simply because Najda got her words mixed up and made curious sounds. But he guessed that for five years at least, Najda had been indulging her mother. If Luisa wanted to play Candy Land, they played and Najda satisfied her restless mind by watching the medical show. If Luisa wanted to watch cartoons, they watched while Najda did Sudoku. The rest of the family did the same, one way or another.

  All, that is, except Katarina when she was angry, which she was that evening. She banged into Ziadek’s home like a tornado. She was a big, handsome woman, Katarina—forty-one years old now, her two boys grown and gone already. She had mothered Luisa from the moment their own mother took sick twenty years back. She was still wearing her Wal-Mart vest; her hair, dyed red to disguise the early gray, fluffed out from her head and curled against her neck like a mushroom cap. Out in the back, Chet was shouting into his cell phone. He’d come over to Ziadek’s place with her, but he didn’t want much to do with family matters. “Am I to understand,” Katarina said in Polish, “that you’re just letting her play hooky?”

  Luisa looked at her older sister, a frightened smile on her pumpkin face. “She might go tomorrow,” she said.

  “No,” said Najda in English. She moved her blue plastic child-piece to a yellow square. “Library school me.” Her head began to jerk toward the right side, always a sign that she was agitated. “Your move,” she said to Luisa.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Katarina marched around the two players and flicked off the TV. She turned directly to Najda. “We
all had to put up with it,” she said, leaning on the table where the game was set up. “I put up with it when I couldn’t even speak English. Chet, too. Luisa put up with it when kids called her names. You can put up with a little boredom and teasing. In a year you can leave school.”

  “I’m here,” came a voice from outside. Chet appeared in the doorway. His muscles going to fat from the years in the truck cab, he still presented a formidable challenge. “And I’m sick of my wife having to worry about this shit.”

  “If you want them to take you out of here and give you to a bunch of strangers, missy—” Katarina was saying to Najda.

  “Talk to me,” said Luisa. She looked regretfully at her Candy Land marker, then turned resolutely toward her sister. “She’s mine. You should talk to me. Shouldn’t Katarina talk to me, Ziadek?”

  Ziadek drew on his oxygen. It came into his nostrils by way of two clear plastic nibs connected to tubes that pinched his mustache, circled his head, and snaked down to the tank they kept on a special dolly. The oxygen was always cool. It left a slightly metallic taste at the back of his throat. He wondered sometimes if they put drugs into the gas in the tank; when he breathed deep, he seemed to pull back from the world around him and view it as if it were one of the girls’ television shows. He turned to Luisa. “You must decide, then,” he said gently. “Will you make her go to school? Or will you take this risk?”

  “Make her go?” said Luisa. Confused, she looked Najda up and down. Najda gave a little giggle. She knew what her mother was thinking—that Najda was too big for her to carry or force.

  “You punish her,” said Katarina. “She’ll go to school right enough when you take away her chess. When you won’t push her to that tin-can library.”

  Najda stuck out her tongue at her aunt. She started to speak for herself, but came out with what usually emerged, when she was overwrought—a kind of “muh-myeh-gah-dyeh” nonsense that grew slowly louder as she tried to shape it into words.

  Chet stepped into the trailer with his big hands on his thick hips. “What do you want her doing?” he said—first to Luisa, then to Ziadek. “Spending her days with a moron and an old man? She needs to be with young people! Look at her. If she won’t go to school—”

  “She likes the library.” Luisa had begun to cry. “She likes me. You can’t call me a moron. Ziadek, tell them.”

  “You. You.” Najda pinched her lips together until she could get the words right inside her mouth. Then she burst out, “Robby smokes pot!” Ziadek smiled. Robby was Katarina’s older boy, a pile of trouble whom Chet had thrown out only a month before. Najda was cutting the legs out from under Katarina’s argument by shifting the focus to her own kid. A smart girl, he thought. A strategist.

  “Robby”—Katarina leaned over the table and forced Najda to meet her eyes—“is not the point. My sister”—she pointed to the weeping Luisa—“has loved you since you were born. Is your pride so important that you’d risk her losing you? Hmm? And where do you think they would take you, Miss Najda? To the library?”

  With her good arm, Najda swept the Candy Land pieces and cards from the table. Luisa doubled her wails. “Christ!” shouted Chet, who had moved to Ziadek’s side. “Will she ever be grateful?”

  “Were you ever grateful?” Ziadek asked him.

  “I didn’t get plucked out of a Dumpster by a family that had enough to take care of without rescuing some—some slut’s…” Abortion, Chet wanted to say. He had said it before. But Ziadek’s look forbade the word. “Somebody else’s mistake,” he said.

  Ziadek cut a sharp glance at Najda. She had found the remote, turned her TV show on again, and was increasing the volume. Luisa had taken heavily to her hands and knees, picking up pieces of the game. “Stop it,” Katarina ordered her. “You didn’t spill it. You shouldn’t clean it.”

  “She can’t,” Luisa spat out. She looked pleadingly at Ziadek. She meant that Najda could not get around on hands and knees, he understood; but she meant more. She meant that Najda couldn’t be any way except what she was. Everything her older sister did, from rushing to Luisa’s side when she thought Najda took advantage of her, to turning her head away in embarrassment when Najda struggled with words, said that Katarina considered the girl still, after fifteen years, a refugee, one who should be grateful each day for the garbage hound who had rescued her and the family who lied to keep her out of the hands of the state. But Najda was not grateful. She was determined, ambitious, and frustrated. She played Candy Land with Luisa because she loved Luisa. But she did not consider that she owed any of them a damned thing.

  “Najda,” Ziadek said. Oh, how he missed Marika! She had been a frail woman while the quarry had built up his arms and legs, made his belly a rock. But she was the stronger one when it came to the girls. “We will find a new school for you. There are other schools besides the high school in Windermere.”

  “Private school?” said Katarina.

  Ziadek shrugged. “There are places. They can understand what Najda needs. This is America.”

  “But, Ziadek, the money—” Katarina began.

  He held up a warning hand, cutting her off. “We will find the way to pay for it. A scholarship.”

  “Charity,” Chet spat.

  Ziadek ignored him. He spoke to Najda. “But you must search it out. At your library. At the computers there. You find what will make you happy. You bring it home. We are a family. Do you understand me? Turn that thing off.”

  A handsome doctor on the television was staring, bewildered, at a patient’s chart. Najda flicked the remote and wheeled her chair to face Ziadek. Her eyes were wet. She looked from one member of her family to the next. Single words were her specialty, and she uttered just one of them.

  “College,” she said.

  Chapter 9

  School started, with Meghan in first grade. Sean took pictures of her in her new clothes with her bright pink backpack and sparkly sneakers. By October, Brooke’s schedule would loosen up, and she could take Meghan to and from West Elementary. Until then, Sean stayed on pickup duty. He didn’t want Meghan riding the bus. He’d ridden the Hartford school bus and knew what kind of bullies were on it. Not that getting away from work was easy, with almost a third of the staff laid off and Larry eyeing production levels. But Sean punched in a quarter hour before he was due and kept his men moving. Each day that first week, he left at two forty-five, loaded Bach’s Christmas Oratorio into the car player, and sang his way to the school. In the car, his voice soared. He held the high A neck and neck with the soloist. He rejoiced in the news of birth and miracles, and he left the print shop far behind.

  Then he pulled into the parking lot and shut off the engine. The arias looped through his head as he stepped out, but the only music on the lot was Top 40 and hip-hop from the waiting cars. The waiting moms looked at him sad-eyed. He didn’t care. So they thought he was unemployed, so what? All the babies gurgling in their car seats, on the other hand, bothered him; the toddlers on the grass rankled. What had started as a point of pride—O’Connors didn’t pop just one offspring—had become a hunger. The arias faded in his throat, and silence descended.

  Sometimes Sean dreamed about the kid they didn’t have, with his fat cheeks or her chunky growing muscles. He woke up bereft. Brooke, meanwhile, had kept talking adoption. Subtly and not so subtly she left brochures on the coffee table, flyers on the mail table, numbers by the phone. As if to demonstrate the process, she’d taken in another cat, a stray with health problems who got more attention than Sean. Adoption, he wanted to shout at her, is not the point. How dumb, he wanted to ask her, do you think I am?

  Then Brooke’s mom came to visit and put a lid on the adoption talk.

  “I’ve got something to say to you both,” she said when they had finished their first meal together. Brooke had prepared it, lamb chops and arugula salad, but her mom—Stacey, Sean was supposed to call her, not Mother the way you would in his tribe—would shop and fix the rest of the week’s meals. They would co
me straight out of the cookbooks she brought and would leave behind, fancy hardcovers with pictures of shrimp tails arching up like ballerina legs out of some delicate mush. For weeks after, a slightly rotten spice odor would linger in the kitchen. Nothing would arrive on Sean’s plate by itself. They had taught Meghan not to wrinkle her nose and to say “I don’t care for any” rather than “I hate that icky stuff.”

  “Can I be excused?” Meghan asked, and Sean nodded at her. She skipped out to the back with the dogs. Evenings were still warm, though dying into that blue twilight that Sean remembered from childhood, when he and his brothers would go out looking for their dad.

  “My daughter,” Stacey continued, leveling her gaze at Sean, “has always lived in her imagination.”

  In Brooke’s mother Sean could spot the square jaw and wide mouth of his wife, and Stacey’s way of tilting her head while she listened was also familiar. From her dad, he supposed, Brooke had her distinctive nose and pale hair—Stacey’s was tinted, now, but clearly she had always been brunette—as well as her height. Over her firm, compact body Stacey had complete control. She wasn’t exactly graceful, but she could have been one of those tai chi instructors you heard about. Every movement was intentional, nothing wasted.

  “And so,” she went on, “when she told me you two were thinking of adoption, I knew she was making up another story.”

  “Mom, please,” Brooke said. Her forearms lay on the table, as if she would reach for Sean’s hand, but of course he was at the other end, Stacey in between.

  “The story of a foundling, or some such nonsense,” Stacey went on. “And the problem with stories is, they are not life.”