The Lost Daughter Page 17

  Almost two weeks after he came to find her at the nursery, she drove the truck back from Simsbury to the main site in Hartford to find her boss waiting for her. Shanita had gone home early for a sick kid. Lorenzo sat on one of the benches by the greenhouse, a crisp straw hat shielding his face from the lowering sun and his hands on the knees of the jeans that he always kept mysteriously pressed to a sharp crease. He looked old, Brooke thought, and frail, like an old Italian winemaker who should be napping away the afternoons on a terrace outside Naples. “Don’t you trust me to lock up?” she said as she stepped down from the cab.

  Lorenzo smiled, his lips thin. “I was waiting for you,” he said. “It is time for us to talk.”

  “Funny,” said Brooke—though it was not funny, nothing these days was funny—“you’re the second guy this month to tell me that.”

  He stood, pressing hands to knees, to help himself up. Lorenzo wasn’t seventy yet, and he had always been vigorous. Dreading and denying, Brooke knew what was coming. “Have a glass of wine with me,” he said.

  “Second one to ask that, too.”

  The invitation itself wasn’t unusual. How many times had they finished a busy day in Lorenzo’s small air-conditioned office, clinking glasses of Chianti? Of all people in Hartford, Lorenzo was the one to whom Brooke had come closest to revealing her past. Just last spring, when they had finished setting up for Easter and had retired to the office to toast the holiday and talk about Lorenzo’s baroque faith in the whole Christ-child story, she had blurted out, “You know, I gave birth once. Once before Meghan, I mean. A stillbirth.”

  And Lorenzo had put his dry, warm hand over hers and squeezed the back of the palm. “Not with your husband,” he had guessed.

  “No,” she had said. Then she had wept, quietly but for what had felt like a long time, while her boss just kept his hand on hers and now and then patted it, saying, “Go on. Go on, dear. Go on.”

  Now she looked at her watch. “I can’t, Lorenzo,” she said. “I’ve got to pick Meghan up.”

  “I thought your husband did that.”

  “Not this week.” She met his brown eyes. She had told no one, not even Shanita, of the unsettled weather at home. Ever since her mother visited—and that was the easiest, to blame her mom, who trailed anxiety behind her like perfume. But her mom wasn’t at fault, she was. She had to focus on her life now, to push the past back into its box and seal it up tight. The effects jangled all around her. Sean was drinking one more beer after dinner, then two, now three. Meghan had started acting out. This morning she had refused to dress herself; and when Brooke caved and played along, pulling Meghan’s Cinderella underpants over her long legs and bunching a Hello Kitty T-shirt to pop over her head, Meghan waited until the whole exercise was through before she stripped everything off and demanded an outfit with no pictures on it. Only a call to Sean at work had gotten Meghan to knock it off.

  And yet just this morning, clutching her bottom lip in her teeth, she had answered Alex’s persistent calls with a text message. They could have a drink, she wrote, on Monday night. She didn’t mention that was Sean’s night at choral practice. She had felt, pressing Send, like a sneak. She would invite Alex over, she had told herself many times; once he met Sean and Meghan, everything would fit back into its place. Only that wasn’t so. Because if Sean were to meet Alex, he would have to learn what Brooke had done with Alex, what she had kept hidden all these years.

  Funny, she thought now, standing in the nursery parking lot, how she could tell Lorenzo about a lost child, and not her husband whom she loved.

  Lorenzo had removed his straw hat. A cool breeze lifted his hair. “You run along then,” he said. “Next week we can—well, actually, next week I’m going into the hospital.”

  Blood drained from Brooke’s face. She had sensed this, sensed he was terribly ill. But she did not want to hear it. She searched his tanned face. “Can you tell me?”

  “They think I’ve got a year. Maybe a bit more, if I do all the nonsense they’ve got lined up for me.”

  “My God, Lorenzo. No.”

  “I’m afraid yes, my dear. It’s not something you can quarrel with.”

  “Cancer?”

  He nodded. “Pancreas. They never catch it in time. That’s what they told me. So I have to make some plans, Brooke. And they are going to involve you. Like it or not.”

  “I don’t know what to say.” She looked at her watch again, as if the hands would have moved backward. “I’ve got to go. Can I take you to the hospital? Can we talk tomorrow? Over the weekend?”

  “No, no.” He took her arm. Gently he steered her toward her car. “Weekend’s for your family. They’re keeping me overnight, I think. You can come see me.”

  “St. Francis Hospital?”

  He nodded. He opened the door of Brooke’s car for her. Then he took hold of Brooke’s temples, bent her down, and kissed her forehead. His lips were barely moist. “Sneak me in a glass of wine,” he said. “They will claim it will kill me, but they will be wrong about that.”

  Awful, she thought, awful. She loved Lorenzo like a father, her own having died a year after she came to Hartford. Once home, she wanted to tell Sean, but he spent the evening practicing his music, letting the distance between them grow, and she said nothing. She put six beer bottles into the recycle bin.

  That night her dream came back, for the first time in years. She called it the Warehouse Dream. In the predawn she woke unsettled. Beside her, Sean breathed noisily from the beer. She remembered the first time she’d had the dream, when she still lived safe in her parents’ home, no one suspecting what had gone on in a motel room five miles from town. In it, she was roaming a large warehouse, or an underground catacomb. She was both looking for someone and fleeing someone. They were strangers, both the one she sought and the one she fled, but she had killed one of them and the other was seeking her out. She used to wake with her heart banging in her chest. When she would go out in the daylight, following a night with one of these dreams, she had felt the sting of accusation from everyone she saw. It was the Warehouse Dream that had first made her feel she could not bear to look at Alex. He had said he loved her. Only love could have led him to tolerate her murderous foolishness, to stay with her, to spare her. But the day would come when he, too, turned and accused her.

  This time the Warehouse Dream was set not in a warehouse, but in the new nursery in Simsbury, with its arbors and hanging roses and a greenhouse filled with shards of glass. She kept thinking Lorenzo would come take charge, set things to rights, but he never came; and then she was running, running to find what she had killed, to flee what would kill her. She woke sweating, in darkness. She lay breathing while light gradually filtered through the Venetian blinds, bringing Saturday with it.

  Always, she thought as Sean turned and she fit herself around the bend of his strong back, she had known her past would catch up to her. For months and even years, she had thought someone would find the remains of the fetus. They would charge her with a crime, though she didn’t know what crime. Had she miscarried? Aborted? Or had she, in her young and dreamy foolishness, killed a child? She had said only, “It’s dead, isn’t it?” and Alex had nodded, and she had turned her face away. She had been weak with loss of blood, dizzy, her vision blurred. She could not say, now, why she was so certain it had been a girl. Need for her baby had flooded her like the need to breathe. But she could not have her baby; there was no baby. Alex had left the motel room with the bloody bundle under his jacket. When he returned there was no bundle, and she had asked no questions.

  When she had moved away from Windermere, the Warehouse Dream had followed her. For a time she thought no one would touch her again. She would spend her caresses on animals, on lame and discarded and flawed creatures. She would bend her passions to plants. Flowers and dogs, bushes and birds, she thought, had no moral code. They never, even silently, accused.

  Then she had met Sean. She had never known anyone—anything—like him. He seemed ma
de, almost literally, of honey—his sandy hair, the sun-kissed skin, amber eyes. His voice pulled on the cords of her heart. And he did not frighten her, the way everything else human had since that wretched night in the motel. In his arms, she almost believed she could emerge from the cocoon she’d spun around herself. The dream didn’t stop, but it came less frequently; she woke with her nerves intact. If she could be careful, she told herself, and steady, if she kept her head down, if she made no more hideous mistakes, there might still be a life for her.

  Seven years ago, when Sean lay beside her and talked about having a kid, Brooke felt she had found her redemption. Until then, she had been a girl who, blessed with a baby, had poisoned it and let her boyfriend dispose of its tiny human remains. With Sean she was being given a window of grace, a chance to do something right. Bringing Meghan into the world concluded that strange pact she had made with the ghost of the stillborn child. I will love you this time, she found herself whispering to the baby.

  Two weeks ago, with Alex, was the first time she had ever told anyone about this crazy idea of the spirit children. And even then, she hadn’t admitted how they still scared her. Every time Sean pushed for a second child, she pictured the soul of the one she had destroyed. Out of pity, it had allowed her to have Meghan. If she indulged herself in a second child, if she acted, truly, as if nothing in her past could cripple her, it would have its way. It would show her different. And so she had retreated to lame excuses to postpone a second pregnancy: the bed rest for Meghan, her work. Sean hadn’t bought the excuses. He had come to hate her for her stubbornness. And so, on her long walks alone through the park, Brooke had chipped away at her own shell. When she pictured a second child and the nightmare images began—it would be deformed, she would stumble and drop it in the street, they would all perish in a car crash, Meghan would fall ill and die—she shut her eyes, even as she walked, and let her breath out, and breathed in slow. The past was the past, she told herself. Her risk was no greater than any other woman’s. Wasn’t Meghan proof enough? She had done her penance. No, you have not, a little voice said when she strayed off the asphalt path onto the grass and her eyes snapped open. You have not told Sean.

  I can’t, she said to this voice. And the shell closed over her again.

  Now Sean was drinking, and she was fleeing—not the booze itself, but the truths that the booze would eventually get to. She couldn’t bear the look of pure horror she imagined in Sean’s golden eyes.

  He shifted in the bed; turned to her. His breath had the sour tinge of last night’s beer. “Hey,” he said. “You’re awake.”

  “Can’t sleep.”

  “Turn over.”

  She obeyed and felt his warm hands on her shoulder muscles. One thumb pressed into a knot of muscle; as she felt it give way, a tide of well-being seemed to lap at the shores of her body. “Don’t you have to get up?” she asked.

  “Ssh. Relax.”

  She knew she wouldn’t fall back to sleep, but his hands felt good. She shut her eyes. “Lorenzo’s sick,” she said at last.

  “Sick like a cold?”

  “Sick like cancer. I think he wants me to start taking over.”

  “That’s a big job.” His hands were straying, now, over her shoulder blades and around to her breasts. She started to tense again. If he brought up the idea of a second kid…“You want to run a nursery?”

  “I think I would. I don’t want to think about Lorenzo, you know.”

  “But he’s telling you to.”

  She turned over. It was too dark to make out his features. “What do you want?” she said; and before he could answer “Another baby,” she added, “Do you want to keep working for Larry at the print shop?”

  His finger pushed aside her bangs. They had not made love for more than a week. By evening he was testy, and she was distracted by the presence—in her head, even if she didn’t see him or return his calls—of Alex. Now she felt more than she saw his wistful smile. “I want to do music,” he said. His voice sounded a little dreamy, as if he weren’t awake enough yet to make sense. “I want to sing it. Teach it. Be better at it.”

  “Then you should.”

  “You know the Bach we’re doing.”

  “You’ve been humming it.”

  “Yeah, well.” He bent to kiss her neck, then her right nipple. From outside the door Brooke heard scratching—the dogs, their hearing too keen. Sean lifted up his head. He was hesitating. “Geoff—you know, the director—he’s wanting me…”

  “What? Wanting you what? Sean, you’ve got to tell me.”

  “Do I?” He was propped on his elbow now, his free hand cupping the back of her neck. An edge crept into his voice. “Because you don’t tell me a thing.”

  The scratching at the door exploded. Behind it, Meghan’s piping voice. “Mo-o-m-m-y. You awake? Daddy?”

  Before Brooke could answer, the handle turned. The dogs poured in. Bitsy jumped on the bed, a mass controlled by a wagging tail. Lex put his paws up, his wet nose at her shoulder. Meghan stood in the doorway, her blue pajamas ghostly in morning light.

  “I had a bad dream,” she said.

  His back to Brooke, Sean swung his legs free of the bed. The moment bled back into the night, and the day began.

  Chapter 14

  Riding the escalator to the bowels of the Boston MBTA, Alex felt himself in a farce. What was he doing, all dressed up like a banker? Floating downward in a phalanx of men and women in summer wool, into the hot, rubbery air of the Kenmore T station. As if his life, which ought to have been spent in a jail cell, had some connection to corporate portfolios or the Asian markets. As if there were some point to this daily exercise—the shave, the shoe polish, the brisk walk to the T, the crowded ride, the glass-walled building on Water Street. Days when he felt this way, his small office on the fifteenth floor, with its sliver of a harbor view, felt like a jail cell itself. And yet he got there every day on time, opened his briefcase, checked his BlackBerry for meetings.

  The subway train felt primitive, squealing and bumping over the tracks. For six years Alex had taken the Yamanote Line from Ueno station down to Mercator’s charcoal slab of a building across from Tokyo’s Imperial Palace. Now he leaned against the cracked vinyl of his seat, shut his eyes, and tried to put himself back in the crowded Tokyo car, with the departing melody from Ueno like a child’s finger exercise. Back to the house he and Tomiko had found in Asakusa, the old part of the city, near Tomiko’s parents and walking distance from the primary school where they dreamed of sending their children. No, not dreamed of; planned on. And Tomiko—she was so smart, with her Ph.D. from Stanford, her dissertation on multinationals, her postdoc at Hitsubashi—had begun cutting back her hours. She wanted time with Dylan; she wanted to write. A blog, she said, for women executives in Japan, and maybe it would be a book or maybe not, she didn’t know, she was experimenting. Three days a week they brought Dylan to the hoikuen, a day care place so spotless and calm Alex felt he was leaving his baby boy to be painted into a still life. Then they would ride the Yamanote Line together. As the commuters packed in, Tomiko’s body pressed against his. At the stop before his she got off for the America-Japan Society, the only place willing to give her flexible hours. Sometimes Alex got off with her. He walked by the shuttered bookstores in Kanda before submitting himself to the skyscrapers and the murmur of investment opportunities that it was his job to capture before they became shouts.

  How long had that golden season lasted? Three months—Alex counted them now on the Boston T, October November December, the fall Dylan turned two—before Dylan’s health and Tomiko’s job collided and she threw herself into caring for him full time. By December they knew there would be no kindergarten for their son. No more hoikuen, no more romps in Ueno Park with Tomiko’s dogged father chasing the laughing boy under cherry blossoms.

  Still Alex had ridden the train, into the heart of the city at eight, back by nine P.M. if he was lucky. Had jogged home from the station; wrapped his slender, brit
tle, indomitable wife in his arms; sat by the bed of the sleeping child, sipping red wine and listening to Dylan breathe.

  You don’t feel it like I do, Tomiko had said, after it was over.

  What do you mean? I feel like I’ve died myself.

  Not like I do. I watched him every minute. I saw it take a piece of him every minute. Like sand through an hourglass, and you can’t tip it back up. You didn’t feel him fighting, like I did, and your insides torn out bit by bit. You didn’t feel that.

  All right, have it your way. I didn’t.

  The T squealed into Copley Square. Loud commuters boarded, swinging their briefcases and cracking jokes. Alex gave up his seat. That life was gone, he reminded himself. Gone no matter what. Dylan’s fight had been fixed from the start. Here in this corner, ladies and gents, we have a dark-eyed mischievous toddler with a crooked smile and his mother’s heart-shaped face. And here, in this corner, we have Death.

  But there had been another fight, like a shadow behind Dylan’s. And in it, Alex himself had been Death, and his opponent had not yet uttered his first cry. That truth had frozen him. While Dylan struggled and Tomiko suffered, Alex had ridden the train, back and forth, and sat in his son’s room and lain next to his wife and listened to her weep, and the horror of it all had pinned him down so that Tomiko thought his heart was stone. Now he had lost both of them, Dylan to a tiny coffin in the ground and Tomiko to a set of suitcases by the door. All because he could not own up to what he had done fifteen years ago.

  As they pulled out of Boylston, others rose and crowded by the exit doors. In Tokyo, they would have been standing already, the seats folded up for the commuter rush, the odor of sweat and men’s cologne thick in the air. When the doors opened at Tokyo Central, a swarm of dark suits would explode from the train like contents under pressure. Now Alex reclaimed his seat, his hands clasped over his briefcase. He tried to shake his mind into clarity. He had no wife anymore, he reminded himself, no child to be responsible to. The time had come to address the great, squatting monster of his guilt, to do penance.