The Lost Daughter

by Lucy Ferriss

  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.

  Chapter 17

  The 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.

  Brooke’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.

  Brooke 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.

  “Sorry,” Brooke had mumbled. Her mother turned away, back to Letterman. Brooke had made her way upstairs. She’d wanted to shower again but hadn’t. Five times that night she changed pads. She kept the bloody ones tightly wrapped in a plastic bag under the bed. She found an Ace bandage and wrapped it around her breasts so they felt less pendulous and needy. Finally, sometime before dawn, she fell into a sleep so deep that she leaked through the sixth pad and into the sheets before her dad’s voice woke her. “Brooke, honey,” he was saying. He tapped three times very softly on the bedroom door. “Brooke honey.” Tap tap tap. “Brooke honey, are you ok-k-…ok-k-kay?” Her eyes snapped open to the red numerals on the clock: 12:48. Between her legs she felt the sore tissue and the sticky mess. Horror eclipsed relief.

  “I don’t feel all that great,” she called back.

  “Can I…c-c-c-can I enter?”

  “Gimme sec.” She was wide awake, her heart racing, but she made her voice sound sleepy. Swiftly, silently, she threw off the covers. Hand between her legs, she tiptoed to the little bathroom she had all to herself, where she whipped off her nightgown and the drenched pad. With a damp washcloth she wiped off her legs before she found a new pad, new panties to secure it, a fresh nightie in the drawer. With no time to worry about sheets, she brought her biggest, fluffiest white towel back to the bed and laid it over the stain. She managed that much before her knees buckled. She eased herself onto the bed, pulled the thin coverlet over. Her father had started tapping again. “Brooke?”

  “Yeah, Dad. Come on in.”

  Only as he sat by the side of the bed, running his fingers through her hair, did she realize how clammy her skin was with sweat, how thirsty she felt. “Ice water,” she said when he asked what he could get her. “From the fridge.” While he was gone she stuffed the nightie, the panties, the pad she’d thrown in the bathroom sink, all into the plastic bag under the bed. She loosed her breasts, which ached but less than before and smelled of sweat and salt. Then her dad was back, worry wrinkling his brow.

  He said nothing about her supposed drinking, though she knew her mom had reported to him. He was all set to take Brooke to Cowanesque Lake, the big father-daughter outing before graduation. “Oh, Dad,” she said when he reminded her.

  “Ssh. It’s okay. You’ve got a b-b-bug, Brook Trout.” He stroked her hair. That was his pet name for her, from when they used to go fishing. “Too much p-p-partying,” he said. “Those germs just fly around.”

  “I feel like crap,” she said, which was at least true.

  “You’ve been stressed all spring. Haven’t you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Our ambitious girl.” He reached his hand around to the back of her sweaty neck, and kneaded it. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses, his pale eyes drank her in. She could have told him, right then. But it was over, over, and his caring touch eased her muscles. As always when they were together for a while, his stutter vanished. “You’ve looked pale and puffy,” he said—not critically, the way her mom would have, but like someone who would love a pale, puffy Brooke if that was what Brooke wanted for herself. She could have told him, but she didn’t have to tell him. He would not make her tell him. What was there to tell now, anyway? “I wonder if we should get you to Dr. Harris.”

  Panic knotted her gut. “I’m fine, Dad.”

  “Not fine enough to go to the beach.”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’m staying home. I’ll fetch you some chicken soup. Your mom’s out for the day. We’ll just hang around in our slippers. Sleep and loaf.”

  “Okay.” She had shut her eyes. The knot loosened. She felt herself drifting back to sleep. She heard her father take in a breath, as if to say something; then reconsider; then come out with it after all.

  “Alex c-c-c-…phoned. Twice.”

  She frowned. Alex had saved her. Alex was her life. Alex was, suddenly, impossible. “I don’t want to talk to him.”

  Her mom would have asked, Did you break up with him again? Did you kids quarrel? What did Alex do?—as if, whatever Alex had done, Stacey Willcox was prepared to defend him against her daughter who was so lucky to have him as her steady guy. Brooke was lucky. For two years, the luckiest girl on the planet, never deserving Alex and certainly not now. No, she could not have Alex, or anyone. She was too stupid and foolish, she would only make a mess of it all again. But her dad didn’t say anything more about Alex. He said only, “Let’s get a fan in here. Move the air around a little.”

  Later he said, “I’m just downstairs, okay? Or in the back garden. Just puttering around. You just shout and I’m here.”

  She slept. Changed the pad again. Slept. While her dad was weeding the ivy by the back fence, she stole downstairs with the nightie and the sheets and mattress pad and threw them into the washing machine on cold. By evening she was running a fever, and when she woke at night there was her dad with more ice water and a couple of aspirin. His skin was dry and freckled from too much sun at the quarry; his lips were thin, the skin of his neck and eyelids already gone to rice paper. But for those two days, he tended Brooke with energy that never flagged and care that refused curiosity. Later that summer—after Brooke had turned down Tufts, while her mom raged and stormed about wasted years, wasted talent—he took her deep into the Alleghenies, where they camped overnight and cooked the fish they caught from the shore of a deep, cold lake.

  Now, in her mom’s pale condo, she wondered again, as she had wondered that summer. Had he guessed? Her dad’s trademark forbearance had grown increasingly resigned, even defeatist, as Brooke matured. He would never have said he regretted the one summer’s dalliance with the bright, coquettish junior librarian that had resulted in his marriage and his child, because he loved the child and he could stand the marriage. He would not regret it, because a truly happy life was never his to live. Increasingly, Brooke’s dad seemed to know ahead of time what happened to hope or ambition: It died, either quietly or noisily. For himself, he preferred quietly. Hadn’t he hoped to finish his doctorate, to travel in the intertwined groves of academe that stretched around the world, to write books that would work in those groves like roots, setting forth new ideas to blossom? Of course he had, and of course he never did those things, because Stacey got pregnant and a part-time stint at Scranton Community College wouldn’t cut it and Lester Albrecht had connections in the local insurance agency. He hoped just as strongly—Brooke came to realize this only after she left home, when she could look back and see everything so much more clearly—that the unlikely romance, the accidental pregnancy, the sudden marriage would lead to happiness. Surely it had seemed to him, in his optimistic forties, that with all the love he had to give and all the determination he could muster, happiness had at least a fighting chance.

  But by the time Brooke was getting ready to leave Windermere, her dad understood that he would never make his wife happy. He would never enjoy selling insurance. He would never write anything. He would find joy in his book collection, in the mountains, and most of all in Brooke. That Brooke’s own dreams would turn to dust he seemed regretfully certain, even as he told her over and over how pleased he was by the little successes that made her happy—the school prizes, the high SAT marks, having and keeping a boyfriend.

  So yes, he might have guessed that Brooke was pregnant. He might even have guessed that she had miscarried, or aborted. Guessing, he would have felt huge anxiety, e
ven pain, for his daughter and at the same time despaired of affecting the turn of events. Waiting, tending, being patient—these things he could do. Take her fishing. When Brooke announced, a week after graduation, that she had turned down the offer from Tufts, her dad put every ounce of his energy into diverting her mom’s furious disappointment. Never once did he speak to Brooke directly about what she was choosing, or why. He only looked at her with the deep sadness of his pale eyes behind his glasses, the sadness that said it was tragic for her to turn away college, but that college would have brought its own tragedy. Not because it was college, but because life itself, in the end, was a tragic journey.

  In the hills, though—there, they were happy. Tucked into the ledges of a great granite boulder in the sun, overlooking a pine-rich valley, both of them with their noses stuck in books; or standing knee-deep in waders, casting their flies through a fine-needled rain. There and then, with her dad, Brooke felt more than at any other time that life would turn out all right, somehow. Now she ran a finger across the spines of his books and smiled at the irony of it. How she missed him! The sun he loved had gotten him, in the end: Melanoma, the doctors said, metastasized to the brain. He had been gone in six months, putting up what everyone knew was only a token fight. His last words to Brooke, when she took a week off to stay with him in hospice, were “Now don’t you give up before you start.” He had gripped her hand as he said it, a grip stronger than any she remembered from her childhood, though his face had sunk into its bones and his eyes had focused on nothing.