The Lost Daughter (41 page)

“I don’t think so, Geoffrey. I don’t even know if the chorale—”

“Oh, no. No no. We’re not talking about that. You are not quitting this group.”

“Man, please.” Sean loosed his arm, held up his palm. “Not that I don’t appreciate.”

“All right.” Geoff nodded. “Don’t mean to push. Just—talk to me next week. Okay?”

“Sure,” Sean said, and they shook hands, as if they had some kind of deal. He headed out into the windy night. Geoffrey was a kind guy, he thought, but things had gone easy for him. He didn’t understand how things could go hard. At the sidewalk he stood for a moment, feeling the events of the day like clothing he would somehow, eventually, have to fit to his body. He had lost his job. His daughter slept safely across the street from their house. He had sung the Evangelist. He had lost his wife. He needed a drink. Just one. A whiskey, dry and burning.

A car drew up, the passenger window rolled down. “Hey, stranger,” came a soft voice. Sean leaned into the open window. It was Suzanne. Her pocketbook, brimming with knitting, sat on the passenger seat; two booster seats filled the back.

“What’re you hanging around for?”

“Wanted to congratulate you.”

“Well, thanks, but—”

“And to ask why, whenever the tenors aren’t singing, you look like you just got handed a death warrant.”

Ruefully he smiled. “Is it so obvious?”

“Only to someone with eyes. Can I take you for a drink? Celebrate your solo? Drown your sorrows?”

He dipped his head into the private space of the car. It smelled of spilled milk and the chemical pine scent of the cutout dangling from the mirror. In the yellow light of the streetlamp, Suzanne’s features
welcomed scrutiny; her smile dimpled a shadow, and her flattish bone structure offered no threat. He nodded toward the back. “Aren’t your kids expecting you?”

“I keep the sitter till eleven thirty, in case we run late.”

An hour, Sean thought. What would it hurt? And this sweet woman, who had never resented him for raising her hopes, who had plugged along and brought good into the world, would listen to his troubles. She was not the sort to tell him what he ought to have done. She had a disposition to promote his good, or someone’s good anyway. His hand moved to the door handle. Then he remembered. “Thanks,” he said, “but I’m keeping to Diet Coke, these days.”

“Then drown the sorrows in Diet Coke.” She picked the pocketbook off the passenger seat and tossed it into the back, into one of the booster seats. “You look like you could use a friend.”

Sean did not want a Diet Coke. As he stood leaning into the car, he realized what—besides his wife back, his job back, his life back—he wanted. He wanted a desirous body, an eager and pliant body, to hold him tight and let him pound his frustration into her pillowed warmth. If he let Suzanne’s body be that body…it would not stop there. In her patient smile he saw her old need, lying dormant. “Just knowing I’ve got a friend,” he said, making himself smile at her, “does me a world of good.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I’ve got to get home. Got my little girl,” he lied.

“Give you a rain check,” Suzanne said.

“’Preciate,” he said. Lightly he slapped the door frame, releasing her. He stood back before temptation got hold of him. “See you next week,” he said. But she was already rolling up the window.

He regretted it almost as soon as Suzanne’s red taillights disappeared around the corner. Hadn’t Brooke probably left him, left Meghan, for this guy Alex?

No. Alex didn’t know where Brooke was. She had left because he had gotten drunk and abusive.

Then why would she leave Meghan with him?

She had left because she didn’t want him, or his child, because he wasn’t good enough for her and never had been.

She had left, that was all that mattered. And now he’d had the chance for a bit of comfort, and he had let it drive off.

Starting up his own car, he ejected the Bach Oratorio CD and put in
La Traviata
. He cranked it up to top volume, that tale of love and betrayal, and let the voices wash over him as he drove. Tomorrow he would register for unemployment, stop at a couple of temp agencies, push forward. Tonight he invited sorrow to drown him. When he reached the left turn off Farmington, he was tempted to keep straight, toward the Half Door. But the chorus kicked in and he turned left, and left again into his driveway. And there sat her Subaru, patient as any beast of burden. Inside the house, a warm light in the kitchen. Brooke was home.

I
n years to come, I’ll remember my mom’s disappearance as the day I began to understand the world. Or as the day I understood I had a family (which amounts to the same thing) because I almost lost them. How many times did Luisa bring me to the library, only to sit patiently while I ignored her, while I took not even five minutes to share with her all the things I was learning? It wouldn’t have been hard. Luisa’s happy to capture a word or phrase—like
differential equations
, or like that quote from Gödel, “A brain is a computing machine connected to a spirit”—to repeat when she wants to tell people what I’m learning. But before last Saturday, I despised my mom for being slow, for being as stupid as people think I am. So I punished her; I treated her to silence. When I decided I had to find another school, a real school, I never turned to Luisa. I didn’t care if she was proud of me or not. I reached past her to Ziadek. And so my mom ran away, straight into disaster.

Katarina won’t let me come to the hospital where they’ve taken Luisa. She’ll claim there wasn’t time, with the wheelchair and all.
But that’s not true. Katarina’s furious with me. I deserve it, too. She’s gruff but I love her, my aunt Katarina. For years, while Ziadek was working, she stayed home with me and Luisa. She carried us all on her strong back. Now because of me, this awful thing has happened to her baby sister, to my mom.

When they’ve gone, I stay in the house and weep. Maybe I should wheel out to the short bus and go to school, just to be a good girl for a change, but I can’t. One after the other I snap tissues from the box in the kitchen to sop up the tears. My mom isn’t dead. There is that, Katarina’s said, to be thankful for. But Luisa’s been beat up—and raped. That much I know, even though no one’s told me. The way she was left in that alley, she has to have been raped. Raping Luisa is like plucking feathers from an angel’s wings. That’s what I think. Because whatever insults I’ve hurled at her, I know my mom is the soul of goodness.

I’ve just started to think about having sex. No one will ever want me, of course. Still, I lie awake imagining myself naked with a beautiful boy. I imagine his touch. It’s gentle and hungry. His touch brings me to life in every part, even those parts that normally pay no attention to what I want. Sometimes my hand delves between my legs, and it feels so good, touching there and thinking about that boy. But that’s not what’s happened with my mom. What she got in Scranton was like a fist in the face. And if we go back further, to when she found me, when she made me her daughter?
That
had nothing to do with beautiful sex. Someone else had the pleasure, and Luisa took on the duties.

When my tears let up, it’s not because I feel any better, but only because I’ve run dry. I drink a tall glass of water. I get myself to the bathroom, where I make a point of not looking in the mirror. If I did, I’d spit at my reflection. Then I wheel outside. I’ll wait for them. I’ll watch for them, and when they bring my mom home I will slip
from my wheelchair and go down on my knees. I will beg Luisa’s forgiveness. And I will promise—yes, I will, everyone else has made sacrifices and now it’s my turn—to give up on another school. Starting tomorrow, I’ll get on the goddamn short bus and go to the special classes. I can stand it, and Luisa can’t stand the alternative.

Hours pass. I wheel over to Katarina’s empty house and back. I listen for the phone. I go inside and fix lunch; I turn on the TV, but it’s all stupid. No point now in reading the books I brought from the library, or looking at the school brochures. I recite to myself the longest poems I know, “Song of Sherwood” and “The Children’s Hour.” When I get to the part about the round-tower of Longfellow’s heart, the eye faucets turn on again.
And there shall I keep you forever, yes, forever and a day, / Till the walls shall crumble to ruin, and molder in dust away!
It makes no sense—he’s talking about keeping his children dear to him, nothing wrong with that—but I can’t help feeling myself kept in the tower, and my mom moldering to dust.

At three o’clock, I try Katarina’s cell phone. No answer. I’d like to howl. She’s probably seen the incoming number and refuses to pick up for a spoiled brat like me. I wheel down the ramp again, and then out toward the Quik Mart and the highway.

There, across the busy intersection, sits the paintball place that used to be a motel. Not just any motel, either. The motel where I was born. How old was I when Luisa was allowed to tell me the story? “Like Moses,” Luisa used to say, “in the basket.” I must have been eight or nine, because Katarina had had a spurt of making Jude and Robby attend Mass, with Luisa and me tagging along. That’s where we heard the Moses story. How Moses’ slave mother couldn’t care for him and sent him floating down the river in a basket, and Pharaoh’s daughter found him and named him as her own. I was supposed to think of my birth mother as a good woman too poor to keep me but clever enough to know that Luisa would take the best care of me.

At the traffic light I press Walk. I know the truth, now. Brooke is not a poor woman, a desperate slave. She’s a rich-looking lady with my nose and eyes. And she doesn’t seem happy with what she did. Maybe she meant to snatch me back, out of the rain and back into the motel, only Luisa was too quick and took me.

No. It wasn’t Luisa’s fault. She was born the way she is, just like me.

The light changes. Cars screech to a halt. They aren’t used to stopping here. As I roll into the front lot of the paintball place, a group of boys come stumbling out. A blast of warm air follows. It stinks.
Awesome
, the boys are saying,
sick, wicked, you dweeb, you moron, get me Jack Bauer
. One of them spots me.

“
Here
’s what we needed in there,” he says. His gang stops to stare at me. He looks used to commanding them. “A decoy!”

“She here for wheelchair paintball?” says one of the other boys. He punches a third one in the side.

“Ahh, duh, ah hit mahself!” says the last one, a small kid with a big nose and a bruise on his temple. He mimes pointing a gun backward and firing at his own face. Before they can all collapse into giggles, I turn my wheelchair, speed it up, and knock him down.

“Fuck yourselves, assholes,” I say. The swear words always come out like this, without a stammer. I wheel around again and continue past the entrance to the place. I don’t look back. I’ve learned that if you strike swiftly and continue, the small spiteful people get so shocked that they don’t pursue. My mom has never learned this. If I had been with her, last night, I’d have fended off those men—no matter how big, no matter how evil.

Keep moving, I tell myself, and I do.

The back lot of the paintball place stands empty. Weeds push through the cracks in the asphalt. From inside come a few thwacks, but it’s five o’clock on a weekday, and business is winding down. I
hear a woman’s voice and the slamming of several car doors—one of the boys’ mothers, picking them up.

I sit there a long time. A breeze blows through the dead grass of the next lot over. Traffic whines on the highway. Inside this place, fifteen years ago, a girl not much older than me thought she lost a child. Not that she wanted a child—I swallow, hard, around the lump in my throat—but if the baby that came out of her had cried, or kicked, or smiled, she would have taken it to her breast. She would have said, “You’re mine, all mine. And your name is…” What name? Not Najda. There would have been no Najda. There would have been someone else. The body itself would be different, strong and not lopsided, and her words would come out every time the way they’re meant to.

Instead, the baby that was not yet me lay there, limp. So the mother said, “I can’t look at her.” She cut the cord and took the baby to the back lot and left it. And all the while—as she took the stairs down, as she pushed open the back door, as she found the crate and another crate to protect the baby from the rain (and why protect her from the rain?)—the baby’s brain cells were winking out, one by one, like stars. That’s what happened. It is up to me to accept it. And to ask forgiveness of my mom.

Tires crunch behind me. I wheel around. On my tongue sit the swear words, to make the boys go away. Almost dark now. A red Prius pulls up next to the paintball, by the Dumpster. A man gets out. He seems not to see me. But when he turns slightly, pulling up the collar of his jacket in the cold breeze, I draw in my breath so loud that he startles. On Saturday, I realize, I saw this same man. He was with Brooke when she came by the house, just after Luisa disappeared. He walked away from all the arguing, and Brooke followed—because she cared more about him than about me. Now he’s got a big white bandage wrapped around his head.

“You,” I say.

The man jumps as if stung. As he turns to me in the waning light, the color drains from his face. “What are you doing here?” he asks.

I’m not going to be able to make the words come out in the right order. It’s too unexpected, seeing this man in this place. I know at once and without any doubt who he is. How did it escape me before? Well, I wasn’t thinking about it. About having a father. And then my mom ran off, and I was thinking about her.

So this is the man whose seed got into the girl’s body. His blood runs through my veins. “I am looking,” I try to say, though it comes out garbled, “for you.”

By the way he smiles I knew he’s understood me. From the glint in his bruised eyes I think maybe he’ll run again, the way he did from our house. But his shoulders only rise and fall in a deep sigh. Stepping over to my spot near the back door of the arcade, he stops to drag an empty paint barrel with him. On this he sits, facing me. A dim light over the back door has come on, so I can see his face. He searches mine for a long time. “My name’s Alex,” he says at last.