The Lost Daughter (26 page)

“Lunchtime, Ziadek!” Luisa called from inside the trailer. “Hello! Ziadek! Lunchtime!”

He turned to the next Sudoku. It was not good for him to shout, Dr. Sanford had said. They would find him soon enough.

“Ziadek! Ziadek!”

He heard the screen door being pushed aside. He turned to see Najda, her face tight with determination, wheel herself onto the deck. She was still humming low, almost a growl. The sun struck her hair, which Luisa always brushed in the morning until it crackled. The hair
shone like a spring daffodil. For the first time Ziadek saw that the foundling, for all her defects, was maturing into a lovely young woman. Her sweater hugged her young breasts; her waist nipped in.

“Ziadek!” Luisa called. She was in his bedroom now. “We’re hungry!”

Najda shot Ziadek the glance of a conspirator. But he would not tolerate disrespect in his house. “Tell your mother,” he instructed the girl, “where we are.”

Wheeling over, she craned her neck to see the Sudoku. It was tempting to ask her; this puzzle was one of the harder ones. She was quicker with numbers than with words and could spit them out without hesitation. Reluctantly Ziadek closed the book. “Go tell her now,” he said sternly.

Najda’s lower lip pushed out, but she turned the wheelchair back to the open door. “Mo-om,” she called in English, petulantly and barely loud enough. Ziadek shook his head. Two weeks ago, Luisa had started her first job outside the home, helping the Guatemalans who ran the Quik Mart by the gas station. But if this stay-at-home situation kept on, Luisa would quit her job, come home, and take orders from her daughter. The girl needed to be back in school, and soon.

“
There
you are,” said Luisa. “Ziadek, we need lunch.”

“You know how to fix lunch,” he replied evenly. “I am not hungry.”

“But, Ziadek.” He turned. His daughter was twisting her hands in front of her. It wasn’t food she was talking about. Something had happened.

“Bring me my ginger ale,” he told her, “and come sit.”

As Luisa disappeared into the trailer, Najda made as if to wheel herself down the ramp from the porch, onto the flagstone path that led around the clearing, to Katarina’s place. “Oh, no you don’t,” he said to her. “You stay here a moment, grandchild.”

Luisa clutched the can of ginger ale with her elbow while she carried
a fistful of red licorice in one hand and an apple in the other. As she stepped onto the porch, the apple went down. Ziadek scooped it up. When he handed it to her, her eyes welled with tears. “It’ll bruise,” she said.

“It will be fine. What are you two fighting about?”

Luisa and Najda exchanged glances. Finally Luisa said, the tears starting to fall, “She wants to go
away
.”

Ah. So it had come out. “Some of these schools,” Ziadek said gently, “are not so close.”

“Nobody
told
me that.”

“And nothing has been decided yet. Najda must get a scholarship, or she goes back to the public school.”

“I don’t want her to get a scholarship.”

“Luisa, we talked about this.”

“Don’t do the forms, Ziadek.” Luisa bit off a chunk of licorice and chewed it angrily. She was curled into herself on the other plastic chair, a damp lump of sorrow. “She just wants you to do the forms,” she said around the candy, “because she hates me.”

“She does not hate you.” Ziadek held up a hand to shush Najda, who sat glowering at the top of the ramp. She had started to emit gurgling sounds, and he feared they would form themselves into the words, into
Yes, yes, I hate you
. And what would he do then? Marika would know what to do, but he couldn’t think the way she did. He inhaled the oxygen, pure and cool, and still he felt short of breath. “All parents let go of their children,” he said, taking Luisa’s free hand in his.

She shook her head. “Not true, not true.”

Of course it was not true. He had not let go of Luisa. How could he? Someday, in fact, he would have to, or she would not survive his death. Maybe, Ziadek thought as he held his daughter’s hand in the October sun, this was the first step, which Najda was taking, to letting Luisa herself go.

“And then they come back,” he said, “and love you just as much as ever. You don’t want to lock your daughter up, do you?”

Najda wheeled closer. The sounds in her throat were working their way out. “That,” she said. They both looked at her. “That,” she repeated, “that school.” She made a fist of her good hand and shook it at Luisa. “Kill myself,” she hissed. Her mouth contorted in an awful grimace.

“Ziadek!” Luisa cried.

“You will do no such thing,” Ziadek said to Najda.

“Kill myself. Kill myself.”

“But you see, my Luisa. You must let her do what she can.” Reaching out, Ziadek ran his thumb under Luisa’s crying eyes, first one, then the other. “Now we will talk no more about this. We will have some lunch. Najda, you let your mother take you to the park after we eat. You say nothing more of killing. Luisa, you have work later, remember? At the Quik Mart? If we have not so many days together”—here he looked directly at Najda, who he knew understood him so much better than her poor mother—“we must enjoy every one of them. While your mother is at work, my stubborn one, we will look at your schools. There is no time to waste.”

Najda went obediently inside, her head held high, feeling she had won. Ziadek sat with Luisa while she wept. Would her foundling child, he wondered, develop a heart, once she was free to pursue all the things she hungered to learn? Would she, in her own crippled way, care for Luisa when Ziadek was gone? There were such people, he knew. He had seen one or two of them featured on TV—Stephen Hawking, Christy Brown, people whose minds soared even as their bodies trapped them. If Najda could become one of those people, she could find the resources to maintain her mother, who was all heart and no head, and Ziadek could die in peace.

T
he stars chased Brooke’s Subaru west from the Pennsylvania border. She wasn’t the least bit tired. Her head seemed to have a big open space in it, where the future lay, and her mission was to fill the space, arrange it, make it different from before. Sleep was out of the question. As one radio station fizzed into static, she scanned for another. Country rock; Willie Nelson. Whatever. The white beams of tractor trailers roared past her on the downslope, chugged behind uphill.

Meghan, she told herself, would be fine. “She’ll be fine,” she repeated aloud every now and then, whenever the picture of her daughter rising from her bed at home filled her mind. This was just for a few days, until Brooke learned whatever she needed. Would Sean drink? Maybe. She had to take the chance.

The sky changed from ink to dull charcoal. At Scranton Brooke took I-380 north through Clarks Summit, then Route 6 until she crossed the Susquehanna and followed the back roads to Windermere. She had left Hartford just before midnight; she should reach the village
by five. Speeding west under the stars, Brooke had a clear image, like a blueprint, of how her actions might look to someone who had come into the story seven years ago. She had driven a good but vulnerable man to drink. He had become—no, threatened to become—no, had a moment in which he became violent. Now she was fleeing her marriage. But that wasn’t it at all. She was hurtling less away from Sean than toward Windermere, and whatever she might find there. Alex had come to her with a terrible story. On its truth or falsehood rested anything and everything she might do next. She had to find out, if she could, what had really happened. If she could prove to Alex that he had killed nothing and no one—if she could put the liability back where it belonged, with her own young self—then she could face not just Alex but Sean, too, with a clean heart. She could keep her guilt, like the bars of a cage whose clear, smooth design she claimed as her own, gleaming around her. She could go back to what she had become, or let come what might.

B
rooke’s mom lived in a new condo complex behind the high school in Windermere. She had moved in there five years ago, after Brooke’s father died. Brooke and Sean had helped her move, Sean lifting and carrying and Meghan just beginning to toddle around the unopened boxes and disarranged furniture. Now Brooke pulled out the key her mom had given her and opened the door noiselessly. She had left the birds in the car. In the kitchen, lit by a dim light above the stove, she wrote her mom a note. Then she tiptoed to the guest room, stripped off her clothes, and slept dreamlessly. When her mom’s radio alarm woke her, she needed a minute to remember where she was, and why.

She emerged from the room rubbing her eyes. The condo was done in buttercream and a color Brooke’s mom called peanut, and
its temperature felt the same as its colors, pale without being white, not quite cool enough to be labeled cold. Stacey Willcox’s hair was in the same family, a muted wheat. “A surprise visit,” she said, placing a mug of coffee in front of Brooke. “For my birthday?”

Brooke smiled sheepishly. “Sure,” she said. She took a stool next to her mother. “Let’s call it that. Happy birthday, Mom.”

“Fifty-two,” Stacey said. She pulled a tray of mini-muffins from the oven. “Not that I need you to come hold my hand for it,” she said, turning them onto a plate. She winked at Brooke. Stacey Willcox would have been a beautiful woman except for the hard lines around her mouth. She had more curves to her figure than Brooke. A strict exercise routine—tennis three times a week, two hours a week in the fitness room—kept her calves hard and her biceps smooth. Her posture was erect without being rigid, and she moved fluidly from the hips, like a much younger woman. Walking down the sidewalk with Brooke in Hartford, last month, she had been mistaken for Brooke’s older sister, the one joke they both laughed at.

“That’s not what I came for,” said Brooke. “But I hope you’re celebrating.”

“I’m considering the alternative.” Stacey knifed the muffins from the tin and placed one on a plate for Brooke. She stood across the breakfast counter from her daughter. “So are you going to tell me?”

Brooke shrugged. She broke open the muffin, cranberry and walnut, steam rising from the center. “Sean and I are going through some stuff,” she said.

“Have you got money problems? Why didn’t you bring my granddaughter with you?”

Brooke tried not to wince. It was always
your husband
but
my granddaughter
; the questions always followed in a sort of relay, not so much an interrogation as a rehearsal of the questions Stacey had been posing to herself, ending with whichever question she hadn’t
managed to answer for herself without Brooke’s help. “I needed to come alone,” Brooke said guardedly. “I thought it would be good for me to revisit some old haunts. Might help me make some decisions,” she said—playing into her mom’s hopes, but she couldn’t invent everything, and there were decisions to be made—“about what I want to do now.”

“About divorcing your husband.”

“I’m not talking divorce, Mom.”

“Really? And your seeing Alex again. That’s just a coincidence?”

“I am not
seeing
Alex. I
saw
Alex. He’s back in the States. That’s normal. And it’s not why I’m here.”

“Hmm.” Stacey’s quick nod was like a prosecutor’s satisfaction at a polygraph. “Well, stay as long as you like. I’ve got to get to work. Don’t you have work?”

“I’m calling in.”

“Hmm. Well. Take a key if you go out. I’ll be here tonight if you want to talk.”

Stacey glanced at the clock, which read nine twenty-five. She was due, no doubt, at the school superintendent’s office, where she single-handedly ran a program that tried gamely to procure state and federal grants for the county’s shoestring schools. The job, Brooke suspected, paid little; Stacey’s income still came from the interest on the quarry left her when her own father died. But it allowed her to attend regional planning meetings in Scranton and Harrisburg and to carry a torch for culture in the wilderness. Brooke smiled wanly at the girlishly sweet perfume as her mom pecked her softly on the cheek; and then Stacey was out the door.

B
rooke missed her dad. Jim Willcox had just turned forty at her birth, a handsome but painfully shy newlywed, a stutterer, a
book collector. It was on his shelves that Brooke first discovered the medieval tales that captured her imagination. When her mom was still Stacey Albrecht, a privileged teenager working after high school graduation at the library, she had met Jim Willcox while he roamed the stacks and considered graduate work in history. He never got to grad school, of course; Stacey’s pregnancy derailed that. He got his insurance license and provided for his family, and read history books only as a hobby. But he loved his daughter and accepted his lot.

Brooke unpacked. She went out to the Subaru and brought in Dum and Dee; unveiled the cage and set it in a sunny window; refilled their water. As she roamed the living room, the birds’ cheerful chirps behind her, she ran a finger over the shelf of her father’s books. Decoration, now. She wrinkled her forehead. Where had her dad been, what had he known, that spring of her last year in high school? Always, she had trusted him. He had taken her hiking every summer. He had taught her the names of plants, of constellations. When she began dreaming of a future in medieval studies, he had listened to her ideas; he had nodded at what she saw in those strange and elliptical stories. What was there to trust, if not him? Yet she had not told him. She could not say, today, if he had suspected his only child was carrying a child that year. They had fallen back, both of them, on old habits and ways of relating. She had not crossed the threshold to say,
Dad, help me
. He had not crossed it to say,
Brooke, let me help you
.

Her sharpest memory of her dad was from the days after Alex brought her home from the Econo Lodge well after midnight, thick pads stuffed into her book bag. Between her legs lay a raw wound. Her breasts felt heavy as grain sacks. Her mom had stayed up that night, watching David Letterman in the old family room, and said only, “You’ve been drinking, haven’t you,” and it wasn’t a question.