The Orphan Daughter

by Cari Noga

  Chapter 6

  JANE

  “Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of Delta Airlines, we’d like to be the first to welcome you to New York. Passengers making connections will find departure information from the representative at the gate or on the boards throughout the terminal. If New York is your final destination, we wish you a pleasant stay here in the Big Apple.”

  There probably isn’t a real apple tree on the island of Manhattan, yet it’s the Big Apple. La Gran Manzana, as bilingual Lucy would also say. That was one bit of relief: Langley told me Gloria spoke to her in English and Luis in Spanish. The au pair speaks English.

  As I follow the signs to ground transport, I notice uniforms everywhere—whites, blues, khakis, camo. I think of Matt, on the other side of the Atlantic. We last talked on his birthday, in February. Not so long ago, for a mother and her enlisted twenty-three-year-old son. Having a son join the military might upset other mothers, but I’m relieved he’s found a place for himself in the army. And stationed in Germany I know he’s safe, at least relatively safe. He’s a medic, mostly doing transport. The distance is a dam against my guilt and regrets, too. Twenty-year-old regrets, now. Half my life. Or maybe double my life, the way it feels. Despite Jim’s assurances, the move to Houston hadn’t helped. Though the subtropical weather there was the opposite of Alaska’s cold, dark bleakness, the year-round sameness was just as oppressive. It mirrored the dullness I felt inside, too, despite going through the motions of motherhood. A singular stupor set in, inuring me to all but the lonely ache for what we buried on Kodiak. I’d take Matt to the playground but furtively watch the little girls and brother-sister duos, berating myself for what I could no longer give him. Yet the hysterectomy offered relief, too; at least there was no further risk of damage to heart and soul. Back then, my marriage didn’t occur to me. Nor did the possibility that Gloria would get the daughter I was denied.

  Near an escalator a man is talking on his phone and holding a cardboard sign: “McArdle.” Seeing my name, I hesitate. If only there were someone else. If only Gloria and Luis’s car hadn’t crashed. If only our blended family hadn’t separated, like oil and water.

  The driver hangs up and scans the room, catching my eye. With a lift of his eyebrows and a nod of my head, I’m committed. I follow him outside, where the air, thick with diesel exhaust and surprisingly cold for April, gags me.

  Through the square of glass in the silent cab, the sharp gray-and-black geometry of the city looms above me, so different from the organic greens and blues that unfurl from my windows at home. The peninsula will be another country to Lucy.

  Her apartment building is a few blocks from Central Park, Langley told me. Already, amid all this concrete, I’m feeling like a dried-out sponge. I plan to walk to the park tomorrow. Grass, trees, open space. I need my daily dose.

  The driver unloads my bag and approaches a doorman. “McArdle. Fourteen A. She’s expected.”

  Expected. As if this were all planned and arranged like any normal family visit, rather than a tragedy that’s altered the axis of two lives. My heart is pounding.

  With military precision, the doorman nods and opens the door. In the lobby he summons a luggage cart with a snap of his fingers. He jabs the button to the elevator, whose doors open instantly, then escorts me to 14A and departs. All without a word.

  A twentyish brunette wearing an I-love-New-York sweatshirt opens the door.

  “You must be Mrs. McArdle. I’m Deirdre, Lucy’s au pair,” she says in a British accent, holding out her hand.

  So much for the prim matron. I shake her hand automatically. “Call me Jane.”

  “Mr. Langley was hoping to be here to meet you, but he’s been delayed, so I’ll show you your room first.”

  I follow her down a hall. “Where’s Lucy?” My mouth is dry.

  “I’ll be leaving to pick her up from school directly,” Deirdre says. “She usually has tae kwon do after school Mondays, but under the circumstances . . .”

  My pulse slows with relief at another reprieve, dwelling on Deirdre’s words. Circum, from the Latin, round, just like the circles I’ve been going in since Langley called. Now I imagine our circumstances as a Venn diagram overlaid on a map. Lucy, la huérfana, orphaned in New York, at the center of one circle. Me in Michigan at the center of another. Our edges barely overlapping, somewhere over Lake Erie, maybe. Until five days ago, when the circles started sliding toward each other, like tectonic plates.

  “I’m kind of surprised she’s even at school,” I say.

  “The social worker suggested that a neutral environment could be helpful. She’s only been there since lunch—for an appointment with him and to see her best friend.”

  A neutral environment. As opposed to home, which is certainly charged with my arrival. Not to mention Gloria and Luis’s absence. Tectonic might understate our circumstances, actually.

  Deirdre opens a door to a tiny bedroom. “I hope it’s to your liking. After you’re settled in, you can wait for Mr. Langley in the living room.”

  I set my suitcase on the zebra-striped rug and sit on the bed, which is covered in a bright-red spread. It’s one of those beds that have a dozen different pillows arranged on top. I touch a beaded one tentatively. Why would you put all those beads on a pillow? At home I have flannel pillowcases on regular pillows and a green quilt that I got on sale after Jim departed. That was one thing I wanted brand new. The old one was still perfectly fine, so I gave it to Goodwill. I don’t have a rug, just bare wooden floorboards. Makes it easier to sweep when one of the seed trays spills.

  In the living room the wood floor makes me feel better, even if it does have a fussy parquet pattern. Langley never shows up, though. When the door opens again, it’s Deirdre, accompanied by a slight figure who hesitates behind her. The hair is what I notice first, two thick braids of dark hair brushing her shoulders. Her face is tilted down. She’s wearing jeans, silver glitter high-tops, and a purple hooded sweatshirt with neon peace signs.

  “Lucy, you remember your aunt Jane,” Deirdre says. She steps to the side.

  She couldn’t remember me; she was barely walking. “Hi, Lucy.” My voice sounds forcibly cheery. I step forward with my arms open. “You’ve grown up a lot.”

  “Hi.” She crosses her arms, keeping her head low, not looking at me.

  “Well.” Deirdre looks from me to her as my arms fall back to my sides. “Mr. Langley apologizes. He got held up at the office but will be here for dinner. At six thirty.”

  “OK,” I say.

  “I’ll let you two get reacquainted, then.” Deirdre backs out. I stifle an impulse to run after her, since it’s just after five and dinner feels about a hundred years away. “I’m sorry about your mom, Lucy. I mean, about your parents,” I amend.

  “Everyone is.” She goes to the window and stares out, her breath fogging the glass.

  “How are you feeling?”

  She shrugs, reaching for the end of her braid and twirling it around her finger. I can see her features better now—sharp and pale. I don’t see Gloria’s sparkle and verve anywhere.

  Both her parents just died, I remind myself. I walk to the window and look out, too. Central Park is visible in the distance. Just the view of the green rectangle is comforting.

  “That’s Central Park, right?”

  She nods, trailing her finger through the circle of condensation she’s creating on the window, drawing a lopsided heart.

  “Maybe we can take a walk there together later.”

  The line she’s drawing stops. She shrugs again.

  “No rush. Tomorrow’s fine.”

  “Tomorrow’s the funeral.”

  “Right.” I wince. “Well, Wednesday, then. I’m going to be here until the weekend.”

  “And then what?” She turns away from the window and looks directly at me for the first time. Her jaw reminds me of Miguel’s in my kitchen.

  “I—I think we’re going to figure that out this week.”

 
Her shoulders relax for a moment.

  “I don’t have to go live with you?”

  Shit. Is it good the feeling’s mutual? Something we have in common?

  “Let’s try not to decide anything now, OK? Just get to know each other better.”

  She bites her lip and looks away again, down at her sparkly high-tops. I pull the photos out of my bag and lay them on a table.

  “I brought some pictures of your mom when she was a little girl.” I went through all the albums and tried to find a good sample. Trips to the beach, holidays, birthdays. After she blew out the candles, Gloria always told everyone what she wished for, even though I told her not to. She usually got it anyway. I bet Gloria and Luis pretty much granted Lucy’s wishes, too.

  “Yeah?” She turns to face me again.

  “She’s around your age in this one.” I point to the graduation picture. As Lucy moves toward me, I see that the heart she’s drawn in the condensation is disappearing into droplets of water, bleeding there on the glass.

  Chapter 7

  LUCY

  Mr. Langley’s finally here. While he and Aunt Jane talk, I take her pictures back to my room, eight altogether, to scan and add to the slide show. Mom’s the oldest in the graduation one on top, about the same age as me. There’s a birthday picture where I count six candles on her cake. Aunt Jane’s sitting off to the side. A back-to-school picture with both of them standing in front of a tree. A Christmas picture on Santa’s lap, and a summer picture at the beach. Aunt Jane’s in that one, too, kneeling next to Mom in the sand. Three baby pictures, one with Mom propped up, one crawling, one standing up, holding on to an ugly light-green couch. Even in the baby pictures, she has lots of curly hair. Mine has always been dark and thick like hers, but never curly. Sometimes she curled it for me, like for school pictures or a special occasion, but the curls never even lasted all day. It’s so thick that it’s hard for me to do anything except put it in a ponytail. Phoebe did the braids in Mr. Meinert’s office today. We liked to do each other’s hair. Plus, then I didn’t have to look at her.

  I spread out the pictures with Aunt Jane next to my laptop. Mom looks the same in all of them, just like I remember, huge smile and hair springing wildly from her head, no matter what she’s wearing or how old she is. Aunt Jane looks happiest in the one at the beach. She’s smiling in the graduation one, but it doesn’t look real. In the birthday and back-to-school one, she’s barely even smiling.

  She wasn’t today, either. And the clothes she was wearing were so ugly. Jeans, a green fleece vest, a long-sleeve T-shirt. All faded, like her grayish-blond hair and pale skin and blue eyes. One knee even had a green stain on it. I couldn’t stop looking at it. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing.

  “What’s what?” She didn’t even notice anything.

  “On your knee.”

  She rubbed at it.

  “Must be a grass stain. I’m afraid I don’t have a very fashionable wardrobe. I’m a plain Jane.” She laughed, a loud, barking sound that made me flinch. “Sorry. Inside joke. That’s the name of my business, too. Plain Jane’s.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t know she had a business. Not that I want to know. Especially if it means wearing stained, dirty clothes. I threw away the leggings I tore on the field trip as soon as I got home and scrubbed off the grass stain on my knee, but I couldn’t stop the rhyme in my head. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Step on the grass, make her car crash. Now Aunt Jane wants me to go to Central Park. Hah.

  I turn to the computer and open the slide show. Mom’s wearing bright colors in almost all the pictures. Hot pink, turquoise, bright green. Shiny necklaces. Red lipstick. Her dark hair bounces to her shoulders and is almost as wide.

  I pull my braid over my shoulder and twirl the end, looking down at my lap—my arms in the sleeves of a deep-purple sweatshirt, my jeans shot through with glittery threads, my striped socks. People always said I look like her, even with straight hair. But I feel like Aunt Jane looks. Like I could just fade away.

  Chapter 8

  JANE

  The funeral is private. The network’s organized a memorial event, too, but Tuesday’s service, held at a funeral home, is limited to a few dozen of Gloria and Luis’s closest friends and colleagues, Lucy, Langley, Deirdre, and me.

  “No one from Luis’s family?” I ask Langley.

  He shakes his head. “His father is dead, and his mother’s in poor health. I don’t know much about his siblings. His sister told me they don’t have the documents to make an international trip.”

  Thankfully, Luis and Gloria stipulated cremation, so there are no caskets. You can’t escape the funeral feeling, though, with the rows of folding chairs and flower arrangements all over the place. A slide show plays on a big screen, rotating pictures of Gloria, Luis, and Lucy. A Spanish song plays, a sad, slow one, as the pictures peel back the years. A wedding picture, white satin and lace, whiter teeth in giant smiles. Heads together over champagne glasses at an outdoor table, a palm tree visible behind them. Holding a newborn Lucy wearing one of those pink-and-blue striped knit hospital caps, the same exact kind I got for Matt. They didn’t give me anything in Alaska. Not a chance to hold her. Only prescribed consolation that chided more than comforted. “After all, you still have your son,” the doctor said.

  I stare at the pink face that isn’t even discernably female. Gloria called me from the hospital, the first year I ran Plain Jane’s. I knew she was expecting, of course, but they hadn’t found out it was a girl. I managed to keep it together while I congratulated her. Then I escaped to the tomato rows, where neither Jim nor Matt would come looking, and wept for hours. My daughter was buried on Kodiak while Gloria held hers in her arms. With Lucy, my sister changed everything then, as she has again now.

  After that, the pictures are less familiar. In front of a Christmas tree. With Lucy at age three or four, the Statue of Liberty looming over them in the background. All three of them are dressed up. Lucy’s holding a small American flag.

  “That was Luis’s citizenship day.” Langley’s at my elbow.

  “He wasn’t already? He and Gloria met in Miami. At the network.”

  Langley nods. “He’d been in the States for years at that point, ever since he attended the University of Texas.”

  “But he hadn’t become a citizen?”

  Langley shakes his head. “He was proud of his heritage and didn’t want to renounce Mexican citizenship. He tried for years to get a dual application approved.”

  The music has changed, something instrumental but happier than the Spanish song. It’s familiar, but I can’t place it. On the screen the pictures churn toward the present. A birthday party, the cake adorned with five candles, Gloria and Luis on either side of Lucy, each flashing five fingers. Disney World, Lucy on Luis’s shoulders, Mickey Mouse in the middle, Gloria on the other side, the Magic Kingdom castle behind them. Reigning over a perfect family. The unfairness of it rises from deep in my gut, just like in the tomato rows on Lucy’s birthday. I was the responsible older sister who did what she was supposed to do. A thirty-year-old memory rises up, Gloria pestering me at my desk.

  “Janey, play with me.”

  “I’ve got homework to do, Gloria.” Mom was meeting Esteban for dinner, and I was stuck babysitting, as usual.

  “Play with me! Mama said!” She stuck out her lip. Over her T-shirt she wore a fancy purple dress, one of the left-behinds at the dry cleaners that Esteban brought home for her.

  “I did. You wanted to play dress-up. I pinned up the straps so you won’t trip.”

  She shook her head. “Play hide-and-seek.”

  I tried to ignore her, but she shook my elbow, breaking the pencil lead.

  “Gloria! All right, fine. You go hide. I’ll count. One, two, three . . .” I tried to stretch out the counting as long as I could, squeezing in a couple of math problems before ready-or-not, but she always got what she wanted. Right up to and including the ideal, idolizing husband. Jim and I were good a
t the beginning. After Alaska I even took solace in the stasis we fell into, rationalizing that at least nothing was getting worse.

  “Finally, a few years after Lucy was born, he gave up,” Langley continues. “‘I have an American family, so I will be, too,’ he decided.”

  “Hmm.” The picture changes again, to what looks like formal network portraits of Gloria and Luis. Luis and Lucy in the kitchen, wearing monogrammed aprons. Ice-skating outdoors. I study Luis’s expression, his smile crinkling his face all the way up to his dark eyes. He did what I never could despite three chances: assimilate. Sister, wife, mother, they all felt like roles handed to me. I tried to embrace wife and mother; look how that wound up. Only Plain Jane’s feels natural, a role I’ve made my own. Can I do Aunt Jane any better?

  Then the full-screen picture suddenly shrinks down to a tiny square surrounded by white space. I see myself in my high school graduation gown, next to Gloria.

  “That’s the picture I gave Lucy! I wanted her to see her mom at her age. How did it get up there?”

  “Lucy must have added it,” Langley says.

  “Added it to what?”

  “She put this slide show together.”

  “The whole thing? With the music and everything?”

  He nods.

  “It looks so professional. She’s only eleven!” I scan the room for Lucy, standing with another little girl whose parents are talking to Deirdre. “Where did she learn how?”

  “She’s got a media production class at school.”

  “But she did this at home, right?”

  Langley nods. “The technology’s pretty accessible these days. You wouldn’t believe what they can do on a phone. Don’t forget the genes, either. Lucy was the daughter of two talented people.”

  A man in a black suit coughs a few times, quieting the room’s buzz. “If you’ll all find a seat, please, we’d like to begin the service.”

  Lucy sits between Langley and Deirdre, in the front row. Unsure where I belong, I sit on the end of the row, leaving a few seats between me and Deirdre. I watch Lucy more than the service. She keeps her head bent, her hair a curtain on both sides. If she cries, I don’t see it. In my head I keep humming the song from the slide show, the one whose name I still can’t remember.