The Lost Daughter Read online

  “Mum!” said Kate. She glanced apologetically at Brooke.

  “It’s okay,” said Brooke.

  “Five I had, and look how they all turned out. Good young men.”

  “Fanny’s a sweetheart, too,” said Brooke.

  “So have you got another in the belly yet, Miss Brooke?”

  “Mum, please,” said Kate.

  “You want to shut me up, get me another drink.”

  “In a minute. Eat your chicken.”

  Mum took the wing and nibbled. Watching her, Brooke missed her own mother, who had promised to visit before the end of summer. Not that she was close to her mom—the ties that bound them were, in their own way, as tangled as Sean’s to Mum—but at the very least her mom would have no words of advice about family size. The kids were crowding around, begging for chicken wings. Brooke crouched and let them grab, then called after them to toss bones in the garbage cans, wipe hands on napkins. When she glanced up, Kate was looking thoughtfully at her.

  “We couldn’t have done this without you,” Kate said.

  “I’m happy to share the space.”

  “Not just the space. You planned everything.” Kate sighed. “I thought I could manage with four. Now I’m not so sure. This fellow’s the last, I’ll tell you that.” She leaned toward Brooke. Narrow-shouldered and snub-nosed, Kate had been a bouncy cheerleader when she married Gerry. Childbearing had widened her hips and burdened her breasts. She colored her hair a deep auburn. “They tied my tubes, when they took Derek out,” she confessed in a low voice. “I didn’t tell Gerry till after. We can’t afford another. We’ve got to get a house.”

  “I think you’re fine with four. Two of each,” Brooke said.

  “I wouldn’t have had the courage to do it if this one hadn’t been a boy. Feminism’s a dirty word with this clan.”

  “I’m not sure it’s a word they can pronounce,” Brooke said, smiling.

  “Still, you know. Mum’s got a point.” Kate glanced around. Mum had risen and was making her way purposefully toward the drinks table. “If you wait much longer, Meghan’ll be halfway through elementary school. Look how mine play together.” She gestured toward the climbing structure, where her two oldest—both girls, their ages sandwiching Meghan’s—chased each other around the slide. “More than six years apart, you’ll never get that pleasure. There’ll be other pleasures, of course,” she hastened to add. “I don’t mean that, if you’re having trouble, you should stop—”

  “I appreciate your concern, Kate. Really, I do.” Brooke had straightened up. She liked Kate, she reminded herself. Kate had helped her learn the ins and outs of the O’Connors; had protected her from them. Her platter almost empty, she was already moving away. “We’re just taking our time,” she said.

  She set the handful of wings down with the rest of the food, which looked fairly scavenged. Two of Sean’s cousins were combining platters, tucking the empty ones away. Cumulus clouds crept over the horizon; the air was growing heavy. Several stands of late iris and daylilies had been trampled, Brooke noticed. She’d have to get to work early tomorrow, cut away the ruined blooms, prop up the injured stalks. Sean’s younger brother Danny was tossing up chunks of watermelon and catching them in his mouth, to the delight of a gaggle of nieces and nephews who tried the same and were littering the grass with juicy pink blobs that would draw bees. By the begonias sat a human layer cake: Gerry with Meghan on his lap and baby Derek, now awake, on hers. Derek’s lacy christening gown trailed over Meghan’s knees. With her uncle’s arms cupping them both, Meghan was giving the baby a bottle. “Look at me, Mommy!” she cried when she saw Brooke. The bottle immediately dipped; the baby’s arms flailed. “I’m nursing!”

  “Good girl,” Brooke said. “Keep the bottom up high, okay? Don’t want Derek to suck air.”

  “Here you go, Derry. Here you go.” Meghan turned her attention back.

  “She’s a natural,” Gerry said.

  “She loves your little guy,” Brooke said. Though Gerry didn’t reply, she heard his remark in her head: She’d love one of yours better. They never let up, even when they were silent. Even Neal, the gay one, when he visited from San Francisco, asked what was in Brooke’s oven.

  “Uh-oh,” said Meghan. Derek had twisted away from the bottle and begun to fuss.

  “It’s okay, honey,” Gerry was saying. He tried to lift the baby, get the bottle, and slide Meghan down at the same time. Brooke stepped in and picked up Derek. As she put him to her shoulder, she saw Gerry’s eyes widen, as if her knowing how to burp a baby was a miracle. She turned away so that he couldn’t see the aggrieved look on her face. Derek gave a hiccup and a belch.

  “Eww!” cried Meghan. “It’s all nasty on your shoulder, Mommy!”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Brooke said. “It washes out. You feel better, don’t you?” she said to the baby—whose face, truth be told, looked like that of a jowly old man contemplating a jar of pickles. She was about to set the baby on her hip when she found Gerry reaching for him. She handed him over and went to find a paper napkin for her shoulder.

  The cumulus cloud had risen and darkened; the smell of ozone was in the air. The various components of the baggy family called the O’Connors—though there were Mulligans among them, and Peases and even a set of Wuertenbachers—picked up their toys, their platters, their sticky children. Brooke gracefully and efficiently put away the leftovers and stuffed the trash bins. Sean’s cousin Dominick—a source of pride for some in the clan, an irritant to others—stood arguing with Father Donnell about school choice. A civil rights lawyer in Philadelphia, Dominick was rumored to have political ambitions. He was beefy even for an O’Connor, with shoulders that hunched forward and small, keen eyes that missed nothing. “You people use that word choice at your convenience,” he was telling the red-nosed priest. “If it’s a woman wanting an abortion, you reject the word. If it’s a Catholic school wanting state funding, you own it.”

  “So that seems right to you, does it?” said Father Donnell. “That a mother can choose to kill her unborn child, but she can’t choose to send her living children to a safe place where they’ll learn Catholic values?”

  “They can get the Catholic values on Sunday. You make that twelve-year-old rape victim carry to term, she don’t get her life back.”

  “She has her life. She’s a mother.”

  “Okay, look.” Dominick pulled a jumbo shrimp off a platter just as Danny’s birdlike wife, Nora, swept it away. “I don’t mean to push your family-planning buttons. But when you’re talking state education coffers that are stretched to the max—when you’re talking special-needs kids who can’t get the funding for basic skills training—then I’m sorry, Father. I don’t see shelling out for weekday Bible class. Hey, Brooke, you packing up the cooler?”

  “Rain’s coming,” said Brooke, nodding at the cloud.

  “Brooke has an opinion,” Father Donnell said, waving his bottle in her direction. “She’s got one, but she’ll never share it. Will you, Mrs. O’Connor?” When Brooke didn’t answer, he said in a boozy stage whisper, “Calm as a lake. When Sean was a young hellion—”

  “Sean,” interrupted Kate, “has to sing us a lullaby. One for the baby, anyway.” She held Derek against her midriff, facing out. His eyes were glazed with fatigue.

  “Oh, now,” Sean said. He grazed the baby’s silky hair with a rough finger. “Everyone’s still talking.”

  “They’re O’Connors, aren’t they?” said one of the Wuertenbacher cousins. “Nothing shuts ’em up.”

  “The rain will, soon enough,” said Brooke. “Go on. A lullaby.”

  She squeezed her husband’s arm. Everything Sean did, she knew, he did to perfection. Underappreciated things, like his singing, like the work he did on their home garden, where his thumb was greener than Brooke’s—things he advertised to no one but simply carried forward. “He has a kind of grace,” she had said once to her mom, back in central Pennsylvania. Her mom had laughed. Brooke hadn’t discuss
ed Sean with her after that; she would avoid the subject when her mom came to visit. Father Donnell was right; she kept her opinions under wraps. But if she let herself loose, she would resort to a word even more old-fashioned than grace. She would say he kept his troth. Like Gareth, she would say, the knight in King Arthur who comes disguised as a kitchen boy and takes all the abuse anyone can heave at him before he becomes a hero. But she would lose her mother—rolling her eyes at Sean’s freckles, his fading hair, his humdrum job—with the words kitchen boy.

  Now Sean’s mother was pinching Brooke’s forearm. “Thinks he can sing,” Mum said. Whiskey laced her breath. Brooke tried to step away with her, but Mum’s aside had already carried across the lawn. “Asked for lessons, whole time he was growing up. Priest paid for a few, and what good is it?”

  “He sings in that chorus, doesn’t he?” said Sean’s sister-in-law Nora, from the other side of the picnic table. “You know, the one with the symphony.”

  “Couldn’t be bothered with the church choir,” said Mum. “Ungrateful.”

  “Come on, Sean,” Dominick said. “Give us a tune.”

  “I don’t know,” Sean said. Quickly he glanced toward his mother before his eyes sought out Brooke’s. “Had a ragged throat earlier, and this beer—”

  “Sing, sweetheart,” Brooke said softly. “Before it rains.”

  Sean set down his plastic cup. He stepped away from the table. A hush fell over the group. Sean’s shoulders squared. His arms hung to the elbow, where they crooked, the palms of his hands up as if he held a cloud in his forearms. His torso filled with breath. “Oh Derry boy,” he sang. “The pipes, the pipes are callin’. From glen to glen, and round the mountainside.” His clear tenor voice filled the warm air. Tears sprang to Brooke’s eyes. “The summer’s gone, and all the flowers are dyin’. ’Tis you, ’tis you must go and I must bide.”

  Meghan tugged at her mother’s pants. Brooke leaned down. “The flowers aren’t dying,” Meghan said.

  “Ssh, honey. I know. It’s a song.”

  “Why are you crying?”

  “Because it’s so pretty. Ssh.”

  Sean’s voice had begun to soar. It was like spun sugar, Brooke thought, the sweetness of the held high note. She knew little about music—her father had liked Keith Jarrett, and Bach on rainy days—but on the first full weekend she’d spent with Sean, a decade ago, she’d woken to hear him singing Italian in the shower and had wanted him, suddenly and completely, back in bed. Now Kate had tears in her eyes, too; Father Donnell as well. “’Tis I’ll be there, in sunshine or in shadow. Oh Derry boy, oh Derry boy, I love you so.”

  The air held stillness. A few of the children started to clap, but mothers stayed their hands. They motioned to baby Derek, who had dropped off to sleep in Kate’s arms and looked for once, as the sunlight slipped behind a cloud, like a lovely baby. Sean’s body relaxed. The smile that crossed his face was slightly rueful, as if he had gotten away with something. “Oh, Sean,” Nora finally said, and stepped forward to kiss him on the cheek.

  “That’s my song, there, you stole,” Danny said when the other women had finished planting their lips on Brooke’s husband.

  “It’s Derry’s now,” Sean said. “Passing to the next generation.”

  People began packing up strollers and coolers. “That,” Brooke said, taking Sean’s hand in hers, “was a magic moment.”

  “Tell that to her,” Sean said, jerking his head to where Mum was making her way down the gravel walk with Kate.

  Mum, Brooke wanted to say, has a tin ear and a pole up her drunken backside. But she knew better than to start. “Why don’t you help me with the plates?” she said instead.

  Soon the last of the stragglers were driving off, wives at the wheel, with another round of teary thanks from Kate to Brooke before a sleeping Derek was strapped into his seat and the parking lot emptied. Meghan executed another dozen cartwheels on the flattened grass while Brooke and Sean folded tables and tucked them into the nursery shed.

  The rain began as they drove home, lightning illuminating the sky and then fat drops fanning dust from the windshield. “So Kate’s quit her job, you know, with this one,” Sean said as he turned off the interstate into the west end of Hartford.

  “Strange. She said they were buying a house. But I guess with four—”

  “They can live in our house,” said Meghan from the back, kicking at Brooke’s seat.

  “Be a bit crowded, don’t you think?” Brooke said.

  “Nuh-uh. Baby Derry in my room. Auntie Kate and Uncle Gerry in the basement. Rosie and Sarah in Mommy’s study.”

  Sean chuckled. “And Jimmy?”

  Meghan frowned. “He can go stay with Aunt Fanny.”

  “I don’t think they want to live in our house, honey,” Brooke said. “They want a house of their own.”

  “But we’ve got lots of room. You could even have twins, Mommy, and they could have their very own room. They could have my room. I would go sleep in your study, and—”

  “I am not having twins, sweet pea.” Brooke twisted in her seat. A flash of lightning lit Meghan’s face, pale with excitement and fatigue. “But we’ll see lots of baby Derek. When you’re a little older, you can babysit him.”

  “I don’t want to babysit him.” A whine crept into Meghan’s voice, and she kicked the back of the seat again. “I want a baby of my own.”

  “You mean of Mommy’s own,” Sean said. He pulled into their driveway and turned off the ignition. The rain was steady now, the blacktop slick.

  “Well?” Meghan glanced from one of her parents to the other.

  “Well, that’s a grown-up decision, Meghan, and we’ll just have to see.” Brooke’s voice was firm. She did not look at Sean. “Now it’s past your bedtime.”

  By the time they got Meghan to bed, walked the dogs through the rain, and washed the party things, it was past midnight. “And a long day tomorrow,” said Brooke.

  “I can pick up Meghan if you like.”

  “Would you? I’ve got a coffee date.”

  “Date?” Sean turned from where he was packing away the picnicware.

  Brooke flapped her hand dismissively. “Old friend from high school, coming through town. Not the best timing, but I said we could meet.”

  To her relief, Sean didn’t ask more. The two canaries caged above the sink chirped irritably. Pulling off her silk blouse with the spit-up stain, Brooke dropped it into cold water to soak. The dogs—two Lab mutts and an excitable terrier, all rescued from the Hartford pound—milled anxiously before they settled in the mudroom.

  Upstairs Brooke sensed her husband’s eyes on her as she ran a washcloth over her face and arms. He hadn’t asked about her date, she realized, because he was still thinking Meghan’s thought, a baby of my own. She felt a knot of panic in her chest. But he needed to be up at six for work. Not enough time or energy for a tussle about family size. Pulling off his T-shirt, Sean came to stand behind her in the bathroom. As he wrapped his arms around her waist, their eyes met in the mirror. Sean stood almost an inch shorter than Brooke. Against the small of her back she felt his belly, which was not fat but solid, a “tire” as the O’Connors said. Recently he had grown a neat goatee to camouflage his delicate chin and make up for the hairline working its way back from his forehead. The forearms circling Brooke’s rib cage were fleshy but muscled, with stiff reddish arm hair that crept onto the backs of his hands. He rested his chin on his wife’s shoulder. Against her backside she felt his penis rise. “They are right, you know,” he said softly, holding her gaze in his bright golden eyes. “If not for our sake, for Meghan’s. You saw how she was with that baby.”

  Brooke let her breath out around the panic knot. “She’s got lots of cousins.”

  “Not the same.” Sean’s hands moved up, began massaging Brooke’s breasts under her light robe. “Maybe you should wean off the Pill,” he said.

  “My boobs’d shrink.”

  “I don’t love you for your boobs. We’
ve got plenty of savings. Gerry says—”

  Brooke twisted to face him. “Gerry wasn’t put on bed rest for any of his kids,” she said. “Neither was Kate.”

  “I know, I know.” Sean studied her collarbone, her jaw, her ears. Sometimes, Brooke thought, her husband was memorizing her. “But it all came out fine. You said it was the most worthwhile eight weeks of your life. And the doctor said it didn’t mean a second time—”

  “Plus I can’t cut back on work,” Brooke interrupted him. “Lorenzo’s counting on me to set up this landscaping contract with Aetna. We’ve got the new location in Simsbury. And with Jessica leaving for nursing school—”

  “Ssh. Ssh.” Sean put a finger to her lips. The plain, solid lines of his face betrayed a sadness he didn’t like to indulge. Sean’s Irish temper sent its sparks not outward but inward, where they smoldered and built up ash. Worse, Brooke’s excuses bewildered him. His love for her harbored no doubts, and he had seen the joy she took in Meghan. Every time they talked about another pregnancy it went this way, but he loved her too much to stop. Sean possessed what Brooke’s father—who read and quoted philosophers as if they were his best friends—called the sign of true love, a constant disposition to promote the other’s good. “I’ve heard it all before,” he said now, lifting his finger, trying to lighten his voice. “Sometimes I think I’ll just have to replace those little pink pills with fakes, what-do-you-call-’ems—”

  “Placebos.”

  “Right. And when you see it’s all working out, Lorenzo isn’t falling apart without you and resting in bed isn’t such an awful thing, you’ll be grateful to me. You’ll say, ‘That Sean, he’s not exactly a prize, but he knows how to love me.’ ”

  He kissed her—lightly, playfully, desperately—on the lips. Brooke pulled away. “I can’t joke about this,” she said. “The way your family puts pressure on—it amounts to harassment. I’m not the only woman in the world choosing to have just one child, you know.”

  Sean would not let go of her hand. “You’re the only one who’s married to me,” he managed to say.