The Lost Daughter Read online

  “What are you doing?” she gasped.

  “You got any idea what is involved in bringing up a child that got someone else’s genes? Someone else’s moodiness or asthma or I don’t know what all?”

  “I’m sure it’s not the same. But it’s still wonderful.” Brooke dabbed at her eyes. “Or it…it can be.”

  “That decision lies at the top of a mountain. I mean, if you are not planning to be like Madonna.”

  “Who said anything about Madonna? Those girls who were just here—”

  Shanita cut her off by grabbing her wrist. Her eyes smoldered. “I owe you a lot, Brooke,” she said in a low voice. “And most of all I owe you this little nugget. You cannot solve a problem in here”—she pressed Brooke’s trembling hand to her own neatly rounded breast—“with the tools you got up here.” She pulled the hand up to her temple.

  Then Shanita let her go. She stood and tossed her crumpled bag across the back patio into the wire bin, a perfect swish. Turning back to Brooke, she said, “And I don’t care how good those tools are. Might as well try to fix a car engine with a dentist drill.” Brushing crumbs from her T-shirt, she walked away, muttering, “Adoption. Shit.”

  Brooke felt rattled. For the rest of the afternoon, she stayed clear of her friend. At three she checked in with Lorenzo, who was doing inventory on a shipment of baby chrysanthemums. “I’m ducking out in a minute,” she said, “to take Meghan to dance class. Then I’ve got—well, some errands. Back in a couple hours.”

  “Thought your hubby did all that,” said Lorenzo, winking at her. Lorenzo’s winks didn’t mean anything. They were his way of bridging the divide between boss and employee, of staking a claim to intimacy with Brooke. Lorenzo was close to seventy, by Brooke’s estimate—a short, dapper man with a white mustache and a permanent tan, pale only in the spray of crow’s feet around his dark eyes. He was a widower of sorts. The year Brooke arrived, his partner Angelo had died of AIDS and he wore a mask of suffering. Customers at the nursery claimed Brooke had brought him back to life, but she brushed such comments off.

  “Sean’s got some stuff at work,” she said now. “And Meghan’s angling to quit her lessons. I don’t want her twisting him round her finger.”

  “Tough love, baby,” Shanita called from where she was picking at leaves, checking for bugs. “Only way to go.”

  “You’ll be back, though, right?” Lorenzo asked. He stepped over to where Brooke was gathering her pocketbook. “I was thinking we could talk about your hours. Maybe shift you to take charge of the new location this fall. Get it all set up to open early spring.”

  Brooke’s eyes widened. However much responsibility Lorenzo had slowly given her over the years, the Simsbury location was his darling. For the past year he had talked about nothing but how eager he was to lord it over his newly acquired suburban kingdom. He loved putting on his Italian charm whenever one of these country-club women came into the nursery; he wanted nothing more than to dwell among them and hear them laugh at his jokes. “You mean just for a week or two?” she asked.

  Lorenzo shrugged. “You understand that clientele,” he said, winking again. “You’re my best girl. Can’t keep you locked up on Park Street. And I am not going to be around forever. “

  “Of course you are.” Brooke tried winking back, though it felt more like a tic than a wink. Lorenzo’s hair, Brooke noticed, looked thinner; the sun shone through the frosty strands onto his leathery scalp. Perhaps he was ill. She wanted to touch his arm, remind him in some corny way of how they were all a family, here at the nursery he’d built. But he held himself apart, in his courtly way. So she didn’t ask what was wrong, why he was giving her the new location he’d dreamed of for himself. Instead she pressed him a bit, as if probing for his backbone. “Well, if I set up the Simsbury branch,” she said, “I’ll need Shanita to help me.”

  Lorenzo shook his head and waved a hand in the air. “You girls figure it out,” he said. “Now go on, run your errands. I need staffing for spring, that’s all I know.”

  Brooke cut through the West End to the grade school near Elizabeth Park. In the semicircle of waiting cars, she found herself paying attention to the complexion and hair of the kids getting picked up. She stepped out of the car into the sunshine. There was another Asian girl, her blond mother waiting with an infant strapped to her back whose features Brooke couldn’t make out. Shanita, she thought, could talk all she liked about what she felt and didn’t feel. Shanita didn’t know what happened when Brooke thought about giving birth again.

  She had Meghan, she reminded herself. Nothing bad was going to happen to Meghan. But Sean wanted another. Her family—just hers, no one else’s—needed another. And they could have a child without triggering the fears that rose like a tsunami from Brooke’s past and washed her away. She studied the children jumping into their mothers’ arms, the ones whose features didn’t match but whose expressions did. Shanita’s case had been different, she told herself. It had been about foster homes, older kids who needed their birth mom. Her advice didn’t extend to Brooke’s case. It couldn’t.

  “Looks like you’re not sure which one’s yours,” said the man standing by the Mazda next to her car.

  Brooke blushed. “Oh, she’ll make herself known when she comes out. I don’t worry about that.”

  The man stepped out of his car and stretched. He was an inch or two taller than Brooke, and not much older; gray hair was just making its appearance at his temples. The shorts he wore revealed the muscled calves of a soccer player. “Quite a rain last night,” he said.

  “Broke the humidity, I guess.”

  “True enough. Not so great for my business, though.” He squinted at the sky.

  “And what business would that be? Air conditioning?”

  “Pools.” He extended his hand. “Tad Horgan. Jason’s dad. I think our kids are in the same group here.”

  Tad’s handshake was warm and firm. Brooke hadn’t noticed him before, but her circle of fellow parents was confined to the ones whose daughters played with hers. “If you say so,” she said. “Meghan’s still at the boys-have-cooties stage.”

  “And Jason definitely has cooties. Got them from me, I’m afraid.”

  “I doubt that.” He was flirting with her, Brooke thought. She glanced at her watch. She was due at Starbucks in a half hour. “How did you know Meghan’s in his group?”

  “Jason is not at the girls-have-cooties stage. Causes him some problems with the other boys. But I think he likes your daughter. Your clone, I should say.” He winked. “Didn’t take rocket science to figure who you were, but I still don’t know your name.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Brooke O’Connor.” She wanted to steer the subject away from kids before they got to the “How many others?” question. “So, pools,” she said. “Backyard pools? Country-club pools?”

  “Just those kidney-bean things. I run a little franchise out in Manchester.”

  “You’re not a swimmer, though.”

  “A shower’s about as much water as I need, personally. How’d you know?”

  Brooke cracked a smile. “An old boyfriend was a soccer player. He had your legs.”

  “I’ll be damned.” Tad looked down at his calves. “Wonder how he’s managing without them.”

  Brooke chuckled. “I’m meeting him for coffee. I’ll ask.”

  “Ah.” Tad’s eyebrows lifted.

  “Not like that. Old times. You know.”

  “If you say so. Anyhow, you’re right. I kick the ball around, most Saturdays. Buncha Jamaican guys and two palefaces. Look, here they come.”

  From the quartet of bright blue doors at the entrance to the school the kids poured out, bearing their kites and lanyards and still-sticky collages. A towheaded boy in a Spider-Man T-shirt flung himself against Tad’s car and got in without a word. “Well, hello to you too,” Tad said. He turned to Brooke. “See you here again.”

  “Not often. My husband’s usually the pickup guy.”

  “Have
I—?” Tad paused, his hand on his chin. Then he opened his door. “Of course!” he said. “Sean O’Connor. Don’t know why I didn’t put it together, Meghan gets into his car. Duh.” He pulled a goofy face. “I guess I had a mental image,” he said, “and I—”

  And you didn’t figure I’d be with him, Brooke finished silently. She saw Meghan at the blue door and waved. “So you know Sean.”

  “He prints our pool brochures. I don’t know, maybe I thought you were divorced, I don’t know.”

  “Sean’ll be back tomorrow. Hi, Bug,” Brooke said to Meghan, who was dragging her bag of artwork. Recently she had been focused on kittens—kitten pictures, collages of kitten photos from magazines, a fluffy kitten resembling a sheep, made of glued cotton balls stuck to cardboard.

  Meghan glanced at the boy in Tad’s car. “Mommy,” she hissed, her eyes darting back and forth.

  The adults exchanged smiles. “You got a cute clone there, Mrs. O’Connor,” Tad said.

  “She gets it all from her dad,” Brooke retorted, shutting down the flirtation. When the Mazda had driven off, she tucked herself into the car and nodded at Meghan to do her belt. “You took your time,” she said.

  “Mommy, that boy Jason is smelly.”

  “Really? I didn’t smell him. How was your day?”

  “I don’t want to go to dance class. I hate dance class.”

  “That was your day? Hating dance class?”

  “Mommy.” Meghan emitted a great, grown-up sigh as they exited the parking lot and headed toward the dance studio. Did Brooke sigh like that? She glanced sidelong at her daughter. Tad Horgan had called her Brooke’s clone, but Brooke had looked different as a child—paler, longer in the face, with a bumpy nose she was glad not to have passed on to Meghan. It wasn’t as if, were they to adopt, there would be one who matched and one who didn’t. Would there?

  A half hour later she found a parking spot right outside Starbucks. “Here goes,” she said softly to herself. All day, she had been not-thinking about this encounter. She had not-thought about it while she set up the chrysanthemum display, she had not-thought about it while she’d argued with Shanita, she had silenced the shrinks, she had not-thought during the exchange with Tad Horgan. No, that wasn’t true. On no other day would she have told a man she’d just met that his legs looked like a soccer player’s. Unable to resist, she pulled down the visor and flipped open the little mirror. Deliberately, she had left no time to change clothes or put on makeup. If he wanted to see her, he’d have to see her as she was—grimy, disheveled, no hiding the crow’s feet. She pulled away the elastic holding her ponytail, finger-combed her hair, and shook it loose. There. That would do.

  Inside, she blinked in the sudden dimness before she made out his posture, the familiar tilt of the head, shoulders back, knees akimbo. “Alex,” she said as she wove her way around the espresso line.

  He stood. His hair was shorter, still dark, the same cowlick over his left eyebrow. As he stepped around the tiny table for a hug, he seemed both heavier and smaller than she remembered—only a couple of inches over her own height, and heavier not from weight gain but as if gravity pulled on him more. “You really came,” he said. He put his arms around her in a hug made clumsier by the chair-cluttered space. Quickly she pulled away, sat.

  “Was I late?”

  “No! I just—all those years, you wouldn’t see me. So I was ready to be stood up. Can I get you something?”

  “No, no. Just sit.”

  “And let you sip at mine?” He grinned slyly at her. Here came the past, trailing anecdotes. She never used to order fries or dessert, but would pick at his shamelessly until it became their joke.

  “I see you got a venti,” she said lightly, “so I figured you were ready to share.”

  He sat. What was so different about his face? “Glasses,” she said. “You never wore those.”

  He took off the wire-rims. “Six years now. I have astigmatism. Doctor in Japan nailed it, my first year there.”

  “And now you’re back.”

  He nodded. “For now, yeah,” he said. Brooke felt as if she could hear her own voice, could hear Alex, and all the voices around them in the Starbucks—and he was only two feet from her, this well-dressed, muscular man who held an entire past world inside him, like one of those Christmas globes—but she wanted it all to slow way down, until she understood what was going on. Pay attention, she ordered herself. “They offered a transfer to Boston,” Alex was saying, “and I’d gotten divorced, and I thought maybe I heard my own country calling to me for a change.”

  “Divorced,” said Brooke. “Wow.” She took a sip of Alex’s latte. It was lukewarm; he had been here a little while. “I hadn’t known you were married.”

  “Six years.”

  Quickly she did the calculation. Like her, Alex was thirty-three. She knew he had gone to the Far East after college; from her mother she’d heard he was back in the States, at Stanford, for an MBA. But after seven years of Brooke’s saying, “I don’t want to know,” her mother had stopped reporting on Alex Frazier’s whereabouts. So he must have met his wife in business school and then gone away again, to Japan. And lived there, thinking it would be forever. Alex waved a hand in front of her face. “Sorry,” she said. She had been staring at him, her mouth hanging open like the village idiot. “I just—we’re getting so old.”

  “Are we?”

  “Feels that way. Sean and I’ve been married for seven years. We have a daughter.”

  “Yes, I heard her in the background when I called. Meghan, right?”

  “Yeah.” She stole another sip of his coffee. She wanted her own cup, now, but she didn’t want to stay long, to let the conversation range too far. Then she heard herself say, “Sean wants us to have another.”

  “And you don’t.”

  “I—can’t.”

  “Hmm.” He expelled a breath of surprise. “Can’t? Or won’t?”

  “Won’t, can’t. You know.”

  Did he know? She watched him run his hand over his cheeks and chin. He had shaved close, and she recalled his thick stubble. His neck was darkly tanned; soccer, still? “I hadn’t thought,” he said slowly, “I could bear having even one.”

  “But then you did?” Surprise struck her like a slap. But why shouldn’t he have had a child? Of course.

  He nodded. “Dylan,” he said. “Had heart problems from the start. He died just after his second birthday.”

  “Oh, Lex, I am so sorry.”

  He shrugged. “Apparently a majority of marriages end in divorce after a child dies.”

  “That’s why you’re here. In the States, I mean.”

  “No. Maybe.” When he frowned, his mouth looked exactly as it had fifteen years ago. A son, Brooke thought. Like her, he had gone on, and he had fathered a son, and now the son was gone. “Once Tomiko and I broke up,” he said, “it felt like I was just running away.”

  “It didn’t feel that way before?”

  “No, Brooke. It didn’t.” There was the old harshness to his voice, the same she’d heard the last time they met face to face, when he came back from Boston University and she’d moved out, had moved to the Adirondacks and was living alone, and she’d come to his dad’s funeral and heard his last plea. “Look, I really did have business, here, in Hartford, I mean.”

  “I guess so. Look at your threads.” She indicated the loosened tie, the tailored shirt. How funny the two of them must appear, the gardener and the businessman.

  “We’ve got a small branch office here. HR wants to close it. So much happens over the Internet, now. But I said I’d have a look, see what their foot traffic’s like.”

  “And?”

  He scratched his head. “We really ought to close it.”

  She eyed his watch. Just shy of five. “And I really ought to get back.”

  “I don’t think I’ll recommend closing it just yet, though.”

  “Why not?”

  He gazed steadily at her. Heat rose into her f
ace. On the phone Alex had been lighthearted, just passing through, operating on a hunch that she was still at the address her mom had mentioned on an old Christmas card. Surely, she had thought, a decade and a half was long enough. “I’d like to see you from time to time,” he said at last. “If that’s okay. I’m not going to, you know, invade your life or anything. But you’ve been in my head since I moved back.” He shifted his gaze to the coffee cup, which she had drained. An ironic smile played on his mouth. “I’d like the connection, Brooke.”

  “Well, that’s fine,” she said. Her tongue felt dry. “And you could meet Sean at some point. And Meghan.”

  “Sure,” he said, nodding.

  Though he wouldn’t do that for a while, Brooke thought as she drove back to Lorenzo’s. She wouldn’t ask him to. Not only that. She wasn’t going to tell Sean whom she’d met, or why. Once she started, there would be no stopping, not with Sean so watchful of her these days, so eager to know why she wouldn’t go off the Pill, what was up with her.

  When she had rolled into the familiar gravel lot at Lorenzo’s and turned off the ignition, she fished out her cell phone. Her heart, where Shanita had pressed her hand, felt swollen. Think, she told herself. Whatever Shanita said, it was better to lift away from the heart, into the head, where you could think.

  “When I get home,” she said to Sean after they’d discussed their mercurial daughter, “let’s talk. Okay?”

  Chapter 4

  The sky over Hartford was the deep blue of summer evening as Alex emerged from Max Oyster Bar. It had been an awkward business dinner. Restructuring, they called it, and Alex knew when he accepted the transfer from Mercator Investments that he would be the fall guy for a number of these closings in the Northeast. The guys who had taken Alex to dinner couched their desperation in grim jokes. A bear market was an eighteen-month period when your wife got no jewelry and you got no sex. Well, no one would lower the boom on the Hartford office right away. They were too close to all the insurance companies the town boasted, with their own financial network. Alex would recommend a half dozen staff cuts and a performance review of the guy who’d downed three vodka tonics. From here he’d go to Albany and repeat the drill. For now he needed to stretch his legs. He left his car in the lot and walked west.