The Lost Daughter Read online

  “Merlin,” Meghan chimed in, her voice high and thin, “was Arthur’s wizard.”

  “And a great wizard, too. He taught the Lady everything she knew, and she became more powerful than he was. Girls do that, you know.”

  Meghan giggled. Sean peeked in the door. Just the nightlight was on, but he saw Meghan making finger-shapes in the glow it cast.

  “So when the Lady saw that King Arthur had trouble in battle,” Brooke was saying, sitting on the edge of the bed, “she determined to give him the sword Excalibur.”

  “He pulled it from the stone!”

  “That was his first sword. Excalibur was his grown-up sword, his magic sword. But it really belonged to the Lady of the Lake, and she had to have it back one day.”

  Sean drifted away. Downstairs, he felt thirsty. He popped open a beer. These were the things that touched his wife’s heart, he thought. An old boyfriend named Alex. Gypsies, and running away, and mysterious deadly women in lakes. Not family. Not an out-of-shape, ordinary printer and an impulsive, freckled daughter. He felt the joy of singing Bach drain out of him. He was back to real life and its discordances. Passing through the kitchen and family room, he covered the canaries, who looked at him quizzically. He let the dogs out to pee. Then he stood at the picture window in the living room, gazing out on the street, until he felt a hand on his back. “Hey,” said Brooke.

  “She’s asleep?”

  “Like an angel. And last night she was a devil.”

  “You really think those help? Those stories of yours?”

  “She loves them. Not as much as your singing, but—”

  “I think,” Sean interrupted, “they get her riled up. Thinking about swords in lakes, people trapped in trees. I don’t know why you fill her head with that garbage.”

  His arms were crossed over his chest. Brooke pressed against his side; she tipped her head, trying for eye contact. “They’re old, old stories,” she said. “I loved them as a child. They’re the only stories I know, really.”

  “What, you don’t know Goldilocks and the Three Bears?”

  She chuckled. “Meghan outgrew that one maybe three years ago. Why are you so grumpy? Do you want something to eat?”

  “I’m not hungry,” Sean said—though, suddenly, his stomach felt like an empty cavern. He drank his beer.

  “Well, you should be. How was your rehearsal?”

  “It was hard. It’s hard music. I’m tired. And now Meghan’ll have nightmares, and I’ll be up half the night.”

  “Why would she have nightmares?”

  “From that claptrap you tell her. You want her to sleep peacefully, tell her something that ends happily ever after.” He shook his head, drained the beer. “You don’t know how to go from point A to point B.”

  “Really.” Brooke moved around him, her hands on his torso. She leaned against the picture window. “Like for instance.”

  “Like we want another child, let’s have another child. Is that just too straightforward for you?”

  He felt her stiffen. “Sean, I told you. Meghan’s birth wasn’t exactly straightforward.”

  “It was straightforward enough.” He turned away from her, moved to the couch. “Except for someone who doesn’t want to have her own husband’s children.”

  “Sean, don’t.” Brooke followed him. On the couch, she tucked her legs underneath her. They were sleek and tanned, the calves scratched by thorns but smoothly muscled, the arches of her feet high as a dancer’s. She wore a white tank top and beige shorts, her summer uniform. In the light of the streetlamp just outside their house, he could see the outline of her nipples. “I surfed the web a little before I went to work today,” she said. “I’m getting info from a bunch of agencies. Some of them are obviously scams, but—”

  “I don’t want to adopt a kid, Brooke.”

  She looked down. She picked at an invisible bit of lint on her shorts. “Well, I don’t feel safe having one. And it’s my body.”

  “Brooke, that is bullshit.” He hissed the word. Despite the beer, his mouth felt dry. She looked at him with those wide blue eyes, eyes that were clear as a lake and hard as steel. When he sat forward they blinked, as if she feared he would hit her. “You loved being pregnant,” he said, slapping his index finger against his open palm. “You loved nursing.” He slapped the middle finger against the palm. “You loved what your body could do.” He slapped the ring finger. “Don’t give me this feminist crap.”

  “It’s not crap.”

  “If you don’t think my kids are smart enough and beautiful enough to come out of your smart and beautiful body”—he was spitting the b’s now; a fleck of saliva flew onto Brooke’s cheek—“then you should get yourself some gorgeous brilliant seed and have his babies. You can have Alex’s babies, how’s that?”

  He turned to her. Her face had gone chalk white. Like a statue she sat there on the leather couch, before the fireplace that gathered them together in the winter, in the small square living room whose walls she had painted a garnet red and hung with prints of abstract art that Sean couldn’t understand but found vaguely pleasing. It was all perfect, the life they’d made full of love and laughter. It was all about to go up in smoke. The blood had drained from Brooke’s face because he’d stamped the truth on it. “I will love his kids,” he said, soft but fierce. “I will treat them like my own. If, that is, you will let me.”

  “Sean, this isn’t about Alex. It isn’t even about you.”

  “It is exactly about me!”

  He picked up a small glass figurine of a cat curled into itself, its back rounded and sleek. He’d bought it for Brooke at some stupid outdoor craft show in the Adirondacks, when he used to drive back there to see her. He’d said it reminded him of her, that she was lovely and contented, but mysterious inside, and he loved her not for the beauty but for the mystery. Now he lifted the piece of glass and made as if to hurl it into the corner of the room. Two of the dogs shrank into a corner, their tails curled into frightened commas. Brooke said, “Sean. You’ll wake Meghan.”

  He finished the throw, like a pitcher loosening his arm. He set the cat back onto the coffee table. “I’m going out,” he announced.

  His steps crunched down the drive. He felt he was being watched. Good, he thought. Let her watch me. For a wild moment he had a thought of taking the car, of driving over to East Hartford where Suzanne lived, if she still lived in that apartment, with her foster kid or three, and plowing himself into her shapeless, willing body, her muddy alto voice. But he’d left his keys on the kitchen counter. At the sidewalk he turned first right, then left, down Farmington, a ten-minute walk to the Half Door on Sisson Street. On Wednesday nights, Paddy O’Rourke performed his fiddle here, and when Sean was younger he used to put down a few and join in the singing.

  But tonight was Monday; the place was pretty quiet. A soccer game played behind the bar. Sean took a pint from the barman, Tommy, a stocky guy who knew when and when not to talk. He watched the game. Bach still played in his head, but only the messy parts now, the fugue he could never learn. Alex, he thought. One of those names that could be a boy or a girl. Stupid. After a while a couple of guys came in complaining about their wives. He ordered everyone pints.

  Then, he didn’t know. Maybe he joined in the complaining. A poisonous feeling filled the warm space of the Half Door, and you had to order more just to douse the poison, so he did. The beams lining the ceiling of the bar were hung with incongruous mementos—a couple of miniature harps, dried sprigs of holly, soccer cleats, Paddy’s Day lime-green plastic hats. In the corner a couple of slutty-looking girls were downing puke-green apple martinis that the guys coming in would buy for them. After a while one of the girls went out with one of the guys, and some minutes later the other girl shuffled out by herself. Sean noticed these things, but he couldn’t say how much time lapsed between them. Kids, he remembered saying at one point, and one of the other drinkers misunderstood him.

  Yah, the guy said, the wife pops ’em and lets
her body go to shit. Best birth control in the world, makes you not want to touch the bitch again.

  No, no, Sean said, that wasn’t what I meant. Or maybe he didn’t say it but just got quiet, sipping his pint, light-years away from Bach. When Tommy said he was closing, he paid up with a credit card, crumpling the beer-soaked receipt into his back pocket.

  Walking home, he almost bumped into a guy on the sidewalk, right in front of his own house. One of those professional-type guys, not real tall but muscled, good-looking, in need of a haircut, dressed in chinos and a polo shirt. Sean felt like throwing up on him but he only asked what was he doing there, was he coming to bang his wife?

  Sorry, the guy said, just walking. Was that Farmington in front of him? Sean didn’t answer. He pushed past the intruder, through his gate, up the walk. Brooke had left the light on, and he got his key in the lock on the third or fourth try. Inside, everything was still, alert. Lex trotted over and sniffed his hand. The other dogs just stood there, wagging their tails slowly like they were fanning themselves. The cat’s eyes glowed like coins from the dark corner. Sean pulled himself upstairs by the railing. By the bathroom nightlight he brushed his teeth, then pressed one hand against the wall to steady himself while he took a three-minute piss. He didn’t flush. In the bed, only a white sheet pulled up to her bare shoulders, Brooke was pretending to sleep. He let her pretend. He could remember scarcely a note of the Bach; it was all a jangle. Tomorrow, he thought, as he dropped his head on the pillow and the room spun above him. Tomorrow he’d set things straight.

  Chapter 6

  With summer camp over, Meghan was spending the late August days watching cartoons and chalking the sidewalks and driveways with Jackie and Taisha, the only two neighborhood kids who hadn’t left on family vacation. These two weeks before school started were the hardest. Brooke couldn’t get away from the nursery at what was still high season. Babysitters were impossible to find. Usually Brooke and Sean handled late August on a day-to-day basis, trading off child care with neighbors and moving their work hours around. But Sean had been acting wounded ever since Brooke brought up the idea of adoption. So she tiptoed around him; she tried to make things work without messing up his day. Today, Meghan would simply have to come with Brooke to the nursery. She got bored there, but too bad. Shanita’s kids had played there for hours without complaint.

  At nine forty-five, the call came—fifteen minutes later than yesterday. Brooke watched the lit numbers pulse on the phone as the rings sounded, four of them before the machine picked up. “Brooke, it’s Alex again. I’m still going to be in Hartford tomorrow. Meeting’s been changed to afternoon, so maybe we could do lunch? So much I wish we’d said before. Here’s my cell.” After he left the number he paused, as if he wanted to go on, maybe just to remind her that this was his third call. Then he hung up. Brooke pressed Repeat on the machine, listened to the message once more, then erased it.

  Her coffee drained, she rinsed the mug. “Bitsy!” she called. “Mocha! Lex!” The dogs trotted over. Lex licked her hand; Bitsy panted. She leashed them and banged out the screen door. The girls were in Jackie’s wide driveway, across the street, circling their bikes in slow motion like pink moths. “I’m taking the dogs for a walk!” she called to her daughter. “When I come back, we need to go to my work. Okay?”

  “No!” Meghan called back. She kept circling her bike, the streamers wafting in the hot air. Brooke sighed. No point in reasoning. She pulled on the leashes and headed up to the park with the dogs.

  If only Sean weren’t acting so jealous, she would call Alex back. She’d change the plan, invite him for dinner. An old friend, why not? But even as she rehearsed these thoughts, she felt Shanita’s hand gripping her heart, telling her she was making this stuff up out of her head, telling her she wasn’t feeling the thing she was saying. Just like with the notion of adopting. Well, what was she supposed to do? If she let her heart do the thinking, she’d have gone out of her mind the last time she saw Alex Frazier, a dozen years ago.

  His dad’s funeral, that had been. Her heart had lodged in her throat, all the way through the service. Afterward they had served sandwiches and coffee, but she couldn’t swallow a thing. The sorrow in Alex’s eyes—she saw it and wanted to go to it. To wrap her arms around his firm young body and say something, say anything, say love. She had drifted close. Stood in a loose circle with Alex’s old friend Jake, next to his kid sister, in middle school by then, a firecracker of a girl with coltish legs. Searching his face, she found the same eyes that had looked into hers that afternoon in the motel room, after he came back up and it was gone, emptied out of her. She saw the same dull blue in his eyes and she shut the doors of her heart. She locked them together with a key. She excused herself from the circle, said good-bye to Mrs. Frazier. When Alex caught up to her outside the church, tried to get her to walk with him, said he was going away, she shook herself free.

  She wished, walking the dogs, that she hadn’t erased the message. She wanted to hear his voice again, camouflaged by age and the answering machine. That voice conjured not the man in his thirties in his business attire, not the grieving son with words strangled in his throat. It conjured the sixteen-year-olds they both had been, back in Windermere. It conjured the hoarse cry of victory after the goal Alex had scored to win the soccer game; the steam that came off his body after. It conjured his swift, tightly packed body as he charged down the field, the feet so nimble, capturing the lofted ball and dancing it past the opposition. And his hands. Corralling the dogs toward the park, she stopped suddenly on the street corner, struck by the memory of Alex’s hands.

  The fingers were short, stubby, the palms no longer than Brooke’s own though Alex topped her by two inches and had feet like a puppy’s, too big for his build. She loved to lace her fingers with his, to feel the calluses that developed from the landscaping job he held on weekends. Of course he never touched the soccer ball with his hands—and sometimes, watching him work the ball down the field, she imagined that he was keeping the hands for her. The way he touched her wasn’t like other boys. He didn’t grope or pinch her. He brushed her skin with the blunt tips of his fingers; when she took her bra off for him, he cupped her breasts in his palms as if they were baby birds he might keep warm until they flew away.

  His being her boyfriend, even after they’d gone steady for a year, had still been such an unbelievable thing, an accident due at any moment to be corrected, that she had to perform certain rituals—hold her breath to the count of forty-three, repeat the Nicene Creed, keep her eye on Alex’s jersey number rather than his face each time he headed a soccer ball—to keep the spheres of chance in their proper alignment. When she missed her period, she didn’t go to him at first. She didn’t go to her mom either. She went to Isadora.

  She had babysat for Isadora for four years, and Isadora was still the only adult who asked Brooke to call her by her first name. “Please, none of this Mrs. Bassett,” she said. “Bad enough that I gave up my name and didn’t even take it back when I left him.” Isadora was a painter who had lived everywhere—California, Europe, India—and had a house full of exotic fabric, sculptures, boxes filled with mementoes. She always asked Brooke to stay a while when she came back home from parties. She asked Brooke about her life, and Brooke got the feeling Isadora really wanted to know; that she found Brooke’s life not silly or wrongheaded but downright fascinating. In return, Brooke learned plenty about Isadora, about the drugs she’d done and the lovers she’d had, about her stint in a rock band in London back in the seventies. She had turned out all right, though. She had a big house in Windermere and a pair of sweet kids. From Isadora Brooke had learned that you could live your life in ways different from your parents. Disaster would not strike.

  “Deciding not to have children,” Isadora had said when Brooke explained her dilemma, “is as old and natural as deciding to have them.”

  Isadora gave Brooke a tea that tasted like hot mud. Pennyroyal, she explained. You sprinkle it on baked potato
es sometimes. Plus black cohosh, tansy, mugwort, goldenseal—all of them the leaves and flowers of plants, the recipe as old as humanity.

  “How long will it take to work?” Brooke had asked, tucking the little baggies of herbs into her parka pocket.

  “That’s hard to say. You shouldn’t drink it more than ten days. That’s all it takes, and any more might start to affect you systemically. It won’t necessarily happen right away. A friend of mine took this cure in her fourth month, and miscarried in her seventh. But it wasn’t alive; it hadn’t been alive for a long while.”

  “What if it doesn’t—you know—work, completely?” Brooke couldn’t get herself to say kill the fetus, even though that was what she was thinking. “Does it get messed up, somehow? Its brain, I mean.”

  “It will work.” They were in Isadora’s kitchen, which faced south and caught all the light winter had to offer. Isadora put her cool, slender hands over Brooke’s warm ones. “And remember, you’re not alone in this.” She made Brooke look at her. “Alex is a good boy, Brooke. He can help you in your decisions.”

  “I know that,” said Brooke. But at first she wasn’t sure. What had occurred to her, once she knew—rather, once she had proof, because she knew, in spite of having worn her diaphragm, that very night—was that she didn’t have a clue about Alex, not really. They knew each other’s bodies, sure. They both liked Deep Blue Something and neither of them was a Phishhead like so many kids at school. Brooke knew Alex wanted to travel to exotic places like Cambodia. She knew he worried about Charlie. Alex’s parents were both as old as Brooke’s dad; when they compared their moms it felt intimate, like something you didn’t share with just anyone. But even with the plan to be together next year in Boston, they were still a high school item. Anything could happen, and suddenly they’d break up, and it didn’t mean Alex wasn’t a good boy but you didn’t want to depend on that.