The Lost Daughter Read online

  Together they packed peat and soil around the newly planted tree. When the rest were in, they would make an elegant hedge along the road and give the grounds privacy. On the other side of the lot Shanita was working with the two landscape guys Lorenzo had taken on for the project. Around them, the fog was coalescing into mist, a few droplets here and there. Nervously Brooke imagined Sean coming by and finding Alex here. Not that Sean ever stopped in unannounced, much less that he would know she was up in Simsbury. But the jealousy that steamed off him made her feel guilty. When she’d gone on long walks at night, trying to shake off the unease that had settled like lint on her marriage, her mind followed twisting byways to truths she could never share with her husband, and that did no good. And Alex was one of those byways. “What do you mean, coded?” she asked.

  “Well, take abortion.”

  Brooke straightened up. “Take it where, exactly?”

  “Charlie’s in this moral philosophy class, right? And she wants to talk it out with her big brother. So she jabbers about the slippery slope of the argument—how the only difference between infanticide and an IUD is the passage of time. She wants me to help her sort this out. Me!” He flung up his hands.

  “So be—what is it called? Socratic. Just hold the argument out here.” Brooke thrust out her arm, her mud-caked gloves.

  “Is that what you do?”

  “I don’t have a sister. And Meghan’s not at the stage yet.”

  While she fetched the wheelbarrow, Alex’s cell phone rang. Holding up a finger, he stepped away. With half an ear she heard him talk about streamlining, about market pressures. She slipped the next spruce into the hole they’d dug, and poured in more peat.

  Tufts, she thought again. Of all places. With a boy’s smile, that professor—what was his name?—had listened to her describe how she’d loved The Mists of Avalon. Then he’d drawn out a sheet of ruled paper and in small, spiky handwriting had made up a list for her, filled with authors she had never heard of. “I want you,” he had said, “to start thinking of the Middle Ages as a problem.” She hadn’t understood him, and she never went to the library to find any of the books. Still, she couldn’t wait to sit in his classes, where he would turn to her as if they were very old acquaintances and ask her what she thought of this problem.

  It was mostly the knights she had cared about. Not the ladies with their high pointed hats, their pasty faces and tight unsmiling lips, but Galahad with his flowing blond hair, his helmet cradled in his arm and his boyish neck looking so vulnerable. Or William Wallace on the crag, the sword on which he was leaning backlit by the setting sun, a cross of gold. He would endure a horrible death; they all would—the black knight’s sword in their throat, or bleeding to death like Arthur, or disemboweled like Percival. What did they want with those pencil-hatted ladies? She would endure with them—would stand the trials of pain and fearful visions, would drink the poisoned mead.

  As she straightened from her planting, the ghost of a smile crossed her face. Alex was still on the phone. Glancing at him, she remembered the letter. She had sat down to write it a week after receiving her acceptance from Tufts. Longhand, of course, and on new stationery she had bought at the store in the village where no one shopped except for graduation gifts. The sheets had been beige, with an almost invisible print under the surface of gold and lavender flowers exploding into one another, like a crowded tapestry. The same print, in full color, lined the envelope and made her think of the heavy curtains that hid the dying Gawain in Mists of Avalon.

  Dear Dr. James, she wrote—that had been his name, James, she could see it now on the stationery. I am looking forward to being in your Chaucer class next year, if I can get through Freshman Comp. I want you to know something before we meet again. I am with child. I have taken a potion—potion, she remembered, took a long time to arrive at—but my face will surely bear the mark of my sorrow. I trust you to treat my fragile self, not with pity, but with honor.

  She did not mail this absurd letter, but sealed it in the square envelope and took it from her drawer, now and then, to study the address and imagine the high stone walls of the university and the soft, Virginia-inflected accent of her favorite professor. Finally, one day, she had burned it, the flame rising like a lady’s pointed hat.

  Even more keenly than the letter, she remembered the last Saturday of May that year, how it dawned cold and overcast. Like today, she thought. She’d had the keen sensation, as she woke in her narrow bed, of crossing a bridge, a long narrow span that dissolved behind her. She had touched between her legs, but the skin there was dry. Damn, she had thought, damn. She shut her eyes. It was like vertigo, the feeling of the bridge, like one of those swaying rope bridges over chasms that they showed in movies. Had the thing kicked? That was one possibility that terrified her—it would kick, to announce it was alive, and everything she had claimed would shatter. In medieval times, they had called it quickening. She put her hand to her belly; pressed. She felt nothing but the usual hard, growing sphere. Then she hit on it. Third trimester. She was six months. Sitting up in bed, she calculated. The tail end of November, all of December, January, February, March when she’d missed out on Florida, April, most of May. The operation wasn’t legal at this point. Or maybe it was, but only in special circumstances. They said you had a baby now. The bridge lay between the first two-thirds, when she didn’t have to believe in it, and the last third, when she did. On the other side of the bridge she could have gotten help if she had asked the right people. Now there was no one to help her, except Alex.

  “Hey,” he said behind her.

  Brooke almost jumped. She looked up from the fresh mound where she’d planted the spruce. A truck was pulling into the dirt drive, its back loaded with more plantings. Absently she waved at the driver.

  “Sorry about that,” Alex was saying, waving his cell phone. “I have to get back to the branch office. These guys are desperadoes. You all right?”

  With the back of his finger he brushed dirt from her cheek. She felt lightheaded. Not meeting his gaze, she sat on a stump. “I was thinking about that time,” she admitted. “About how the days went by. It seems so impossible now, the way I let time slip through my fingers.”

  Alex crouched, his forearms on his knees. Still she would not look at him. They were silent for a long moment. When he spoke, she felt as if she had known this was coming; that he had traveled, not only from Boston, but from Tokyo, from across the silent years, to tell her this one thing. “It was my fault,” he said.

  Brooke examined her nails: dirty, cracked. “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “It was a long time ago.”

  “You don’t understand. I mean really my fault. I mean I did something. To the baby.”

  “It wasn’t a baby, Alex. It died before it became a baby.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. He didn’t die, like that. I killed him.”

  A gust of wind knocked down one of the unplanted spruces, and a chill ran down Brooke’s spine. “Nonsense,” she said.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he went on, “since seeing Charlie, how I want to back up. Face consequences.”

  Abruptly, Brooke stood. “Consequences?” she said, and she heard the ragged edge of her voice. “Don’t talk to me about consequences. My whole life is a consequence.”

  He frowned at her. The mist was intensifying, the breeze blowing in tiny needles of rain. “Brooke, you thought it was a miscarriage. You’ve got your husband, your little girl—”

  She shook her head. “It’s never over,” she said. “I caused it and I—” Her voice trailed into the mist. She looked at Alex, this man she had not seen in more than a decade. What possible concern of his could her life be now? But she went on. “With my husband,” she said. “He wants a second child.”

  “And you don’t, right? That’s what you told me.”

  “It’s not that.” She drew in a deep breath and exhaled. “If I hadn’t, I don’t know, denied ours, yours and mine, its chance to be bor
n, I would give him—give us—a second one. A third one. Whatever could make us happy.”

  “I don’t understand,” Alex said. “Did you not want your daughter?”

  “Oh, there was no question with Meghan.”

  He stood. He took her dirty, clammy hand. “If what happened, with us,” he said cautiously. “If it made you not want to have children at all, that would make sense. But to have one—and she’s okay, right?”

  She couldn’t meet his eyes. “She’s beautiful.”

  “To have her, and then refuse another—”

  “It’s not rational, okay? I stopped pretending I had an argument about this a long time back. Any guilt you’ve got isn’t rational either.”

  “Oh, yes, it is.”

  She swiped at a tear, feeling the grit smear across her cheek. From across the yard, Shanita was calling—it was raining now, they should go in, finish later. She held up a hand, then stepped back and faced Alex. He looked the same to her now, even with his glasses misting over. The boy she had known. “It’s deeper than reason,” she said. “You remember how I went to Isadora?”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “She talked—maybe she was just making me feel better—but she talked about the spirit children. Who were waiting to be born. She used to tell me I should talk to this spirit child, tell it that this really wasn’t its time. She said the child would understand, that the spirit children were all very understanding.” She wiped her hand off on her jeans, then placed it flat against Alex’s chest. “When I had Meghan,” she went on, “I felt like the spirit child I was meant to have had cut me just a ton of slack, and now it was emerging as my daughter. I felt incredibly lucky. But I get suspicious of luck. If I push that luck, if I try for a child beyond the one I needed to have—” She broke off. Meeting his eyes, she suddenly remembered. “Christ,” she said, “what am I saying? My kid is alive. Oh, Alex, I’m sorry, I didn’t think.”

  A corner of his mouth twisted painfully. “If the spirit children are seeking revenge,” he said, “they got theirs with me.”

  “I didn’t mean that.” She wanted to reach her arms around his lean torso, but he held himself rigid as a tree. “Look, we shouldn’t talk about this. I’m so sorry about Dylan.”

  “I wish you’d met him. Maybe I can meet yours.”

  From behind Brooke came the bleat of the truck horn—Shanita, ready to leave. “I’ve got to go,” said Brooke.

  “Have a drink with me. Next week.”

  She shook her head. “We’ll dredge up more useless memories.”

  “It’s time for us to talk. You haven’t heard my side of it.”

  “Yes, I have. You feel guilty. Join the crowd.”

  “You haven’t heard my side, Brooke.”

  She stepped away. “I don’t want to hear your side.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  It was too much for her. With a quick step, she reached his damp, stubbled cheek and gave it a fleeting kiss. Then she turned and hurried across the muddy lot, the rain now coming steady and Shanita glaring from the cab of the truck.

  Chapter 11

  Najda

  When it comes to the way I act around people, I make an exception for Mrs. Kendrick at the library. Sure, she acts the way the rest of the world does, like I’m retarded and half deaf. She talks slowly and points to her own mouth. She smiles at me the way people smile at babies, so the babies will imitate them and smile back, even when the babies don’t know what happiness even is. Mostly with people like that I go way deep inside, to where I’m smarter and quicker and funnier and better than all of them. I picture them in a swamped boat, or maybe even drowning, or hanging by a thread over a canyon. I smile and leave them behind to die and I go about my business.

  But Mrs. Kendrick’s face lights up when she sees me. It’s not like she pities me. So I stay right up at the surface with her. When I thank her I mean it. Pretty soon I’ll have plenty to thank her for.

  Today—like the past five days—I’m at the library with Luisa. Luisa’s my mom. To her face I call her Mom. I’m expected to, plus I love her. I don’t want to hurt her. But to myself I call her Luisa. Somewhere, I know, I’ve got another mother, a mother who didn’t want me because I was too fucked up, even as a baby. Sometimes I hate that mother. I put her in the swamped boat, far far out at sea, where she calls and weeps and apologizes while she drowns. Other times, I find her deep inside me, where we talk and laugh together like normal people, and she knows how to love me, she knows what I’m capable of. It’s for those moments that I’m reserving the name Mother. A tiny, hopeful part of me believes there’ll come a day—there has to come a day—when I’ll use it.

  Today I got sneaky. Before I let my mom bring me here to the library—before I would listen to those Jonas Brothers songs she sings all the way down the road—I dawdled and messed around until it got late. That way I knew Luisa would miss That ’70s Show, which is her very favorite, if she stayed at the library more than a half hour. “Go on,” I told her when she kept glancing at the library clock. “Go home. Your show.”

  “But how will you get home, Najda?”

  I demonstrated my wheelchair for her. “Self,” I managed to say.

  “It’s not safe. That’s two miles, and remember when your wheels caught?” She looked at the clock again. “I’ll come back,” she said. “Right after the show. Okay? Okay, Najda?”

  “Dokey okey,” I said. That’s one mix-up I can correct, but it brings a smile to my mom’s face so I never do. Luisa kissed me on the forehead—I hate that—and left. Now it’s just Mrs. Kendrick here to help me.

  I get a half hour on the Internet before the next patron gets a turn. If no one’s waiting, I can stay. Today, two people are waiting. I click the keys fast as I can. Google search. School, I start to type, Pennsylvania. No, Pennsylvania New York Ohio New Jersey. Anywhere I can take a bus to. But that’s too many words; no matter how hard I concentrate, I won’t get them all right. Stick with Pennsylvania; add Disabled. If I type too fast, the letters all scramble themselves on the screen. Even Google can’t sort out sochol Pensnylnavia.

  When a hand falls on my shoulder, I know it’s Mrs. K. “Can I help you, dear?”

  I look up and smile. Mrs. K is tall, kind of mannish. I can tell she plucks the hair from her chin and eyebrows. She wears clothes that hide her figure. She wears a wedding ring, but she’s got no pictures of kids or husband on her desk. I wonder what she ever wanted in her life, why she didn’t get it. I need a new school, I want to tell her, one that will teach me something I don’t already know. “School,” I manage to get out. “Things. I don’t know.”

  “If you don’t know what you’re looking for, honey, you should give Mr. Gustavson a chance.” Mrs. K nods at the man sleeping in the metal chair by the radiator.

  “Please.” Shit. There comes a tear, dripping onto my cheek. I hate crying. But it happens when I think too hard about this. Ziadek says there must be a place for someone like me, a place that can help me get to college. I pull out one of the scraps of paper they keep by the computer, for taking notes. I do better writing in cursive. When the letters link to each other, I don’t have to track them down and keep their order straight. I manage to scrawl new school Najda. I nod toward the keyboard.

  Mrs. Kendrick takes the seat next to mine. She bends her head so I can see her lips move—yes, I get it, Mrs. K, I’m deaf—and says slowly, “Is this something your family wants for you, dear?”

  “Ziadek, yes,” I manage to say.

  “Your grandfather.”

  My throat hums a little. Words get blocked up. Finally I say, “Please,” and I nod again at the keyboard.

  Mrs. Kendrick purses her lips. Then she says, as if to herself, “I think there’s a lot going on in that noggin of yours.” She types something quickly on the keyboard. A list of sites appears on the screen. “Let’s see,” she says, scrolling down. “I don’t know your diagnosis, you see, that’s the problem.” She turns to me again. She s
peaks more slowly. “You are not autistic.”

  The man waiting by the radiator raises his head. My face goes hot. I remind myself that I’m fond of Mrs. K. Carefully I put the words together in my head, so I won’t be misunderstood. “I look myself,” I say.

  “If you need help,” Mrs. Kendrick says. Her fingers touch my palm, like she’s going to start speaking in fingered Braille, like Annie Sullivan for Helen Keller. I nod quickly. Mrs. K glances at the clock. “You have twenty minutes,” she says. “Twenty.” She flashes all her fingers twice.

  When Mrs. Kendrick’s gone back to the gray desk, I scroll through the sites. A lot of places are aimed at autistic children. Also a lot at teenagers with behavior problems. I may have behavior problems soon, if I have to stay in this backwater, with these stupid people in that idiot school. But there, on the second page: Alternative schools for multiply disabled. I boot up the site. It’s a national list. There’s the Center for Fulfillment in Michigan, the Goodwin Center in Florida, the Teasdale Academy in Nebraska, the Crosby School in Pennsylvania. By “multiply disabled,” several of them seem to mean retarded. But it takes a long time to read through all these pages, more time than I’ve got, and the library doesn’t let you save bookmarks on its browser. So I click Print again and again. I can take the pages home and study them with Ziadek. On a handful of them—the Crosby School especially, I like the picture of their campus, and there’s a link to their pre-college curriculum—you can enter a postal address for a brochure. My hands have started sweating. Ziadek’s right. There really are such places. The sidebars on the sites list all kinds of stuff about money, about school referrals, but I don’t care. I enter the address to have the brochures sent. I put Ziadek’s name as my guardian. By the time Luisa finds out that the school I’m going to isn’t just a bus ride away… Well, it’ll be too late by then, won’t it?

  With five minutes left, I open a Word document. I type my home address again at the top; that comes easy. Then I paste the address—copied from one of the tabs for Further Information—of the Pennsylvania Commissioner for Special Education. Then I concentrate as hard as I can. I type: