The Lost Daughter Read online

“I don’t have to tell you anything.”

  “I’m the only one here!”

  “So go away. Oh fuck.” She rolled back and moaned, deep in her throat. Alex wanted to grab her arm, yank her out of there. Stubborn little bitch, just like his sister Charlie, no sense. Then faintly, reading his mind, Brooke said, “You promised. Remember. Not to get pissed.”

  “I’m not pissed!”

  “Rub my back?”

  “Okay. Okay.” He pulled off his outer shirt—it was too warm in the room—and moved over to the bed where Brooke lay. They’d given each other back rubs, the first couple of months they were going out. It was a way to explore a person’s body without screwing or threatening to screw. He used to sit on her ass while she lay with her top off, and he’d move his hands out from her spine under her shoulder blades and around to where her breasts spread sideways beneath her raised arms. He’d rub his thumbs against the delicate white flesh there, and after the first couple of times she lifted for him, so he could slide his hands underneath and catch a feel of her whole breasts.

  Propped on her bed, trying to find a spot on her back under her loose white shirt where he could dig his thumbs in and give her some relief, Alex wanted to remind Brooke of that time. The spring before this one, it was. Then she started moaning again, saying, “Not there, Lex, lower. Yes, that’s it—no, you’re too soft, rub harder—harder—”

  “Jesus, baby, I’m trying.”

  “I know, Alex, I know. Listen.” The cramp was gone now. She sat up. Her face and arms glowed with sweat. “I don’t think—remember, you promised not to be pissed—but I don’t think this is a normal miscarriage.”

  “Yeah, Toto,” he said—you had to get funny, what else did you do in an Econo Lodge with your girlfriend opening the oven door?—“and we’re not in Kansas anymore, either.”

  “If you stay here, you’ll miss your game.”

  He shrugged. “Exhibition match. I’ll tell them I got a flat tire.”

  “I’m not going to have a baby, though. You know that, right?” She put her fingers on his face. He turned away.

  “If I thought you were going to have a baby,” he said slowly, “I’d have taken you to a hospital.”

  But he hadn’t taken her. She hadn’t let him, Brooke thought. From the start it had been like that—she had been pigheaded, not listening to Alex Frazier with his facts, with his sensible plans. Now, as the afternoon wore on, as the sun shot through the window, the idea of the hospital drifted further away, to another world. “I feel like I have to go to the bathroom,” she said for maybe the twentieth time.

  “Okay. I’ll help you. Up,” Alex said.

  She looked at him. He looked like her father, his right temple resting on the fingers of his right hand, his left hand hanging downward in a gesture of defeat. “No,” she said. “No, not that way. I’ve got to do it on the bed. It’s the baby, I think. The fetus. I don’t know. I’ve got to push it out.”

  “So push it,” he said. He turned, put his hands on her knees. “It’s time, that means. Jesus, Brooke, don’t hold back.”

  It was a wave, this pushing, that crashed over her head and then moved down through her, expelling everything in its path. She held her breath as it grabbed what was in her abdomen and tried to pummel it through the opening.

  “It’s gone, now,” she said when it had passed. “I’m not sure anything moved.”

  But it came again, a matter of seconds later. “Push,” Alex was saying now, only there was pain like a thick blanket between her and him so she could hear but without understanding. She clenched her teeth, squeezed her eyes, and bore down. Then it passed again. Then again—the wave, the pressure, the squeeze, oh my God the pain, the pain, the thing down there going nowhere, and then it passed.

  Again and again.

  At some point—had it been five minutes? two days?—she glanced over at the bedside clock, but the numbers swam.

  “What time is it?” she asked. Coming out of a dream.

  “Six fifteen. You’ve been pushing since three.”

  “Oh Jesus, I forgot to call home. Jesus. Here it comes again.” And it did, but she couldn’t give it her attention, the wave of pushing and pain.

  “You’re worn out, Brooke.” He had his cap off; his T-shirt was soaked in sweat. Stepping to the bathroom, he filled a plastic cup with water and drank it down; he motioned to her, but she shook her head. Filling it anyway, he brought it to the nightstand. “Worn out,” he repeated.

  “Don’t talk about going to the hospital, Lex. Not now. Get the phone to work. Okay?” she said, and she started to cry. She was just so fucking tired.

  “I think I should reach up. That’s what they do on ER. Reach up and see if you’ve got enough room, or whatever.”

  “That’s TV, Alex.”

  “They have doctors consulting.”

  She didn’t move, not even when the next wave hit. She could hear him in the narrow bathroom, washing his hands. Nothing was right. Nothing ever had been right. Then he was back. His hand went up into her, a dull pressure. He kept the other hand on her knee, to steady himself. “I can feel something, up there,” he said at last. “It’s—like—protruding out of the main place, but it’s awful squeezed in here. And there’s a bone—your bone, I mean—that’s kind of in the way. I can’t get a grip on anything.”

  “We’ve got to get it out, Alex. I can’t push anymore.”

  “At the hospital—”

  “You want the hospital?”

  “I’m saying for you,” said Alex.

  Brooke moaned again. He held her slippery hand. “I’ve got to rest,” she said when it passed. Her eyes were shut. “Let me rest. Go downstairs, okay? Pay for the phone? I’ll try again in a little bit.”

  Alex flew out the door, escaping. He took the stairs down. The lobby was carpeted in deep red, with shrimplike curlicues in royal blue swimming through the plush. Music you couldn’t blame for anything piped through the stale air. “Here,” he said to the same clerk who’d checked them in. “We’d like to make a couple phone calls.”

  “We don’t tolerate parties,” the clerk said. He had an oily mustache and a strange growth behind his left jaw—not a mole, more like scar tissue. He spoke with an accent.

  “No, no. We’re not calling friends. Just some—some relatives. In the area.”

  “We can monitor. Go over the limit, we switch you off.”

  “Local calls,” said Alex. He unrolled the money and placed it on the polished counter. There was blood on the back of one hand. “Can I get a receipt for that?”

  “What a world.” The clerk shook his dark head. “You’re an entrepreneur now.”

  “I just want to make sure—you know, when we check out—”

  “Yah, yah, you can have this piece of paper.”

  While the clerk turned to find a receipt, Alex swiped his hand on his jeans. He gazed out the picture window. Out on Route 6, cars churned by. Upstairs Brooke would be moaning again, thrashing uselessly. It wasn’t alive in there; she was right. The thing he’d touched—it had been like a warm, wet rubber ball caught in a chute. You couldn’t get it out in one piece. And she couldn’t push it out. It was dead matter, that was all. At the hospital, they’d call it a miscarriage—or no, a stillbirth—and there would be Brooke’s mother looking at him like he’d raped her daughter, and his own dad lecturing him about whether he was ready to go off to college and run the risk of knocking up strange girls. Right now there was none of that; they knew nothing. Even Isadora, who’d given Brooke the abortion remedy five months ago, could think they’d just taken care of it themselves.

  “Never mind about the receipt,” he said to the clerk.

  “No, you take it! You take it, now you made me run it out!” The lump under the clerk’s left ear had gone reddish. He yanked the perforated sheet from the printer and thrust it across the counter at Alex. Alex crumpled it into his pocket, pushed out the glass doors, and sprinted across the parking lot.

  A br
eeze had kicked up, the way it had been doing in late afternoon—clouds on the horizon threatening, but they never delivered. This was what people on the outside were wondering: Would it rain this time, or would the drought go on forever? What about the reservoir? They hummed along, going home from work or heading for the game Alex was going to miss, and they thought about weather.

  Inside, it was different.

  Unlocking the car door, Alex paused for just a second. But no one needed him out here, that was the fact of it. He ducked his head inside the car and started rummaging around. He needed a tool. Something long and thin, but blunt. Baseball glove, Charlie’s dumb car games, a bunch of old magazines in the back. This was the junk car, his mom said. He moved the front seat, checked underneath. Windshield scraper, hockey puck, half an apple dried to a pucker. Then—under the magazines, when he got desperate and started just shoving stuff around—left over from the potluck she’d gone to a month back, the stainless steel serving spoon his mom had been looking for. It was coated with spinach gunk, a scrap of paper napkin stuck to the back.

  “The ticket,” Alex said aloud.

  He rode the elevator up with his eyes shut. Out into the universe, that was where he’d go if he could. Up and out, and tumbling gently over and over—no pain, no impossible tricks, only silence.

  Back in the room, Brooke was already on the phone. “I don’t care about dinner,” she was saying, her voice high and light. “No, don’t keep it warm for me. We’ll probably get pizza. Yeah, a bunch of kids. Love you, too, Mom.”

  Alex watched her hand tremble as she cradled the receiver. He stepped forward. “I got something,” he started to say. But Brooke was twisting back into the bed, her bare legs white. “Jesus,” Alex said. Below her the towels were dark red, swampy with blood.

  “Something gushed.”

  “Christ, this can’t be right. Jesus.” When he got near the bed he felt dizzy. He sank down on the other one. He’d heard of men fainting; he wasn’t going to do that. Just, there was so much of it. And the smell, like his uncle’s farm almost.

  He thought of his coach, of that tone of voice he used at the half when they were down by three. “Here,” he said. He caught the blood up in the towels—there was a fair amount leaking through and over the sides—and when he’d run with them to the bathroom and thrown them in the tub, he came back with his Polartec jacket. “It washes out, right?” he said.

  Brooke didn’t answer. Her hands were on her naked belly, pushing at it. Her skin looked glazed; her hair was a wild tangle from all the thrashing about on the pillow, and there was no grace left in her limbs. He’d never seen her so ugly—he’d never seen her ugly at all—and he’d never wanted her the way he did right then. This thing hurting her—he’d get rid of this thing.

  “I’m not going away,” he said to Brooke. “Just to the bathroom, to get this spoon clean. You hearing me?”

  He thought she nodded, though it might have been a tossing of her head. The bathroom was blue-white garish, the ceiling fan like a giant bee. He ran the water scalding; lathered the spoon up; scraped at the sticky bits with his thumbnail. Then the rinse, just as hot. No clean towels; he wiped it on three of the tissues that popped from a box in the wall.

  “Now hold still,” he told her.

  He took the shade off the bedside lamp and placed it on the rug beside the bed, to help him see. From outside came a slow roll of thunder, and a flash of lightning in the uncurtained window.

  His right hand went in, as did the spoon held by his left. The spoon pushed and prodded at the blood-slicked rubbery walls. When his fingers touched the round thing—the head, he made himself think it—he slid the bowl of the spoon around, like fitting a shoehorn around a heel. Pressing against the spoon, his fingers managed to grip and pull it. Pull and pull, Brooke screaming now, screaming, “Stop, Alex,” and it came, dragging its scrawny body behind it.

  And there was—yes, Alex would admit it to himself, in the dark before dawn and much later—a moment where the spoon and the hand both squeezed too hard. Where the hard surface between them might have buckled just a little bit. But if it happened, when? On the way through the birth canal perhaps, exuberant that he had the thing now? Or perhaps just after, when he saw what must have been its face, and yes, there was a trace of life, not the kind of life he’d ever imagined but just the promise of it that he almost remembered from his own beginnings, before he was Alex or knew that he was anything. Over and over he would try to remember, to freeze the moment, but again it would pass, and only what followed would remain.

  Chapter 1

  2008

  The afternoon of the christening party, the garden sparkled. It had rained the night before. Summer flowers rimmed the wet grass. The brick patio that Brooke had persuaded her boss, Lorenzo, to put in was large enough for the drinks table and a fair amount of milling around. The whole garden, in fact, had been Brooke’s project. The regular patrons of Lorenzo’s Nursery loved sitting in it. Drinking the iced tea the nursery provided, they would talk plants until they had persuaded themselves to try a new hosta or a wild geranium. The boost in sales since installing the garden was the main reason Brooke could co-opt the space for the christening. She and Sean had nothing like it to offer. Sean’s brother and sister-in-law, Gerry and Kate, whose son Derek was the focus of all the attention, lived in a crowded condo with a backyard the size of a shoebox. When Sean’s family got together, the event was bound to be boisterous. This time they were two dozen, not counting the children Sean’s family seemed to produce in droves. The garden at Lorenzo’s, even with soggy grass, was a godsend.

  “Poor little bugger’s exhausted,” Sean said. He nodded at baby Derek, still clad in Irish lace but drooling in his stroller, his big head dropped to his shoulder. “Not like our Meghan, here.”

  “Don’t remind me,” said Brooke, spilling more chilled shrimp onto the platter.

  “What’d I do?” Meghan, a bundle of six-year-old energy with hearing keen as a bat’s, cartwheeled between cousins across the wet grass toward her parents.

  “Screamed bloody murder all through the cleansing away of your sin,” Sean said. He kissed Meghan’s red hair. “You’d have thought it was an exorcism.”

  “What’s that, Mommy?” Meghan asked, taking a shrimp. She always asked Brooke about words, even the words her father used.

  Brooke smiled wanly. “Exorcism’s taking the devil out of you,” she said.

  “Doesn’t always work,” added Sean.

  Meghan stuck her tongue out at him and cartwheeled away.

  “D’ja see that?” Sean said to his brother Gerald. “Girl gives her father no respect.”

  It was a joke, but Gerry and Kate exchanged a look. Gerry said, “Our first was like that. Then she got a sister to look after. Set her straight soon enough.”

  Brooke felt her husband’s quick intake of breath. It had to come up. How could it not, at a family christening? Still, she gritted her teeth. Would they never let up? Sean had three brothers and a sister. Every one of them had produced multiple offspring except for the youngest brother, who was gay and lived on the West Coast. Though no one attended church regularly anymore, they all christened their kids and described themselves proudly as Irish Catholic. Once, when the mild allusions and teasing about Brooke and Sean’s only child had grown more insistent than usual, Brooke had turned to one of her sisters-in-law and asked if she didn’t think ZPG was a good idea. “ZP who?” the sister-in-law had replied, and Brooke couldn’t bring herself to press the point. In any case, the population growth of the O’Connor clan was far from zero, and Brooke’s in-laws considered that the number one—meaning Meghan—didn’t really count.

  Sean, Brooke saw as she brushed the back of his palm with her fingers, didn’t really count it either. No matter how much he loved his daughter, Meghan alone would never be enough for him. He stiffened and made smart cracks when his siblings teased him. He couldn’t defend the choice Brooke had made, and he wouldn’t simply remind th
em all it was none of their business. “So I didn’t tell you?” he said now to Gerald. “We’re sending Meghan to you for the summer. You can clean up her act, hey?”

  Brooke slipped away from the men. She picked up a platter of chicken wings and wove her way through the crowd. Though she stood taller and blonder—WASPier—than the rest of the O’Connors and most of their friends, she managed to glide almost invisibly. She made small talk about the garden and the church ceremony. Though Father Donnell’s eyes ranged up and down her slim white pants and silk top, their conversation extended only to the climbing roses and the science of pruning. There might have been a time when Brooke seemed an object of mystery to many in the christening party. But it had been seven years, now, since she had come to Connecticut and married Sean. Her quiet accommodation struck most of those who took a barbecued wing from her platter as a little dull, nothing more.

  Everywhere, children darted through legs and cultivated grass stains. Counting Derek, Kate had informed Brooke, there were seventeen kids present under the age of ten. The small plastic climbing structure on a patch of sand in the corner of the garden was swarmed, but Meghan and her favorite cousins preferred the grass and a game of chase among the flowers. “Shouldn’t we get them out of there?” Kate asked when Brooke stopped by the bench where she was sitting with Sean and Gerry’s mother, Matilda, known to all as Mum. Not yet sixty, Mum sat with her hands folded in her lap, a half pint of whiskey in her bloodstream.

  “They’re fine,” Brooke said. “Wing?” She extended the platter and a fistful of paper napkins. Kate shook her head. Gingerly, with a pale thumb and forefinger, Mum reached forward. The edge of bone she pinched slipped away, shot across the platter, and ended on the grass. Mum bent down to retrieve it.

  “No, no, Mum. I’ll get you another. Here.” Quickly Kate plucked a chicken wing and a napkin and cupped them in her hands, prepared to feed her mother-in-law like a toddler if need be.

  “It’s a fine party,” Mum said to Brooke, ignoring the food. “But you should be giving it for your own, you know.”