by Lucy Ferriss
“ ’Cept I had to spell ’em for you, Martín!” called one of the oldsters from the table.
Martín shot them a look, but kept talking in an undertone, as if he and Brooke were having a secret conversation. “She finish the fucking thing,” he said, tapping the glass counter with a scarred finger, “in twenty minutes. And eet was the Sunday paper!”
Brooke was having trouble processing what this man was telling her. Najda, she repeated to herself. Zukowsky. “That’s impressive,” she said.
“So I tell you, Mrs. Social Worker,” he said, standing straight. “Whatever you do, you don’ put that creepled beauty in with retards.”
“Thank you for the tip,” Brooke said. She paid for the coffee. She wanted to ask how old the girl was, how long the family had lived at Trails End. But a social worker would know such facts. “I’ll try to do right by her,” she said.
In the parking lot, she called up information on her cell phone and got the address. Zukowsky, 561 Trails End Court. Anticipation squeezed her heart. Slowly she drove around the complex, noting the faded plastic flowers and crooked awnings, the busted pickups strewn like a giant’s neglected toys in the back lots. Before long she found it, the number 561 in brass numerals nailed into a post on the porch. The trailer itself was yellow with green shutters, well maintained. Its shades were drawn. She sat with the engine idling, just looking at the place. Then a stocky red-haired woman banged out the back of the next trailer and crossed the yard to number 561. She stared at Brooke, her brows knit together. Quickly Brooke put the car in gear and drove away. What was she thinking? In their eyes she would be a nutcase, this woman arriving out of nowhere, wanting another look at their disabled daughter.
“I’ll be home after the weekend,” she told Meghan when they talked that evening on the phone. “Did you go to school with Taisha today? Is that working okay?”
“Unh-uh,” said Meghan. “Daddy took me. Daddy’s on vacation.”
“Can I talk to Daddy?”
When Sean took the line, his voice was low and almost intimate, the way he used to sound when they lay in bed together after a long day apart. “I took some days,” he said. “Business is slow.”
“Really.”
“Brooke, I haven’t touched the stuff. Not that I’m not tempted.”
She softened. He sounded so tired, and so careful. “I’ll be home soon.”
“Where are you?”
“Just—checking some stuff out.”
“He came by.”
“Who?” Brooke asked, though she knew.
“Your old friend.”
“He’s not—”
“I told him I didn’t know where you were. I said I’d let him know if I found out. But I won’t if you don’t want me to.”
“Just give me a couple more days, Sean.”
“Meghan misses you.”
“I miss her, too.” And you, she almost added, but she didn’t know if that was true. All her heart had room for right now, it seemed, was the face she had glimpsed in the park, before the girl and the woman took off. Zukowsky. Najda Zukowsky.
It took another day to screw up her courage. First she had to have lunch and a beer with Jake, Alex’s best buddy from high school, who frowned when she told him she wanted access to the police department’s cold-case file. “You don’t want to tell me why,” he said—leaning across the table, his chin resting on his knuckles. Jake looked the same as in high school but with padding—fuller face, thicker neck, broader chest, bigger gut. He had married Karen, his childhood sweetheart. Three kids already. Already Jake had asked if Brooke wouldn’t come for supper, and Brooke had concocted excuses—her mom’s health, family stuff, she only had a day or two before heading back to Connecticut.
“I can’t tell you yet,” she said, meeting his small, round eyes.
“Hmm.” His jaw tightened. They had talked about Alex, how Alex had come to see his mother for just one day, before settling into his new place in Boston. He hadn’t called Jake, hadn’t stopped to catch up with anyone. That boy was flying too high, Jake had said, and Brooke had hastily agreed. “Well,” he said now, “cold cases are in the public record, down in Scranton. All on the computer these days, I think. Show ID and you can have at them.”
Thus she had burned Friday afternoon, scrolling through pictures of missing waitresses, victims of drive-by shootings. The cold facts were depressing. One six-year-old girl had been fished out of the Susquehanna River. Three dead infants had been found, but none of them near Windermere, and all in years other than 1993. Still, Brooke found herself squinting at the smudged photos on the screen, trying to remember what she had felt a decade and a half ago, whether a tiny heart had beat against her chest before Alex took it away.
Finally, late in the day, she went back to the trailer park. A cold wind had blown up, the way she remembered from Octobers of her childhood, the advance guard of winter. With trepidation she approached the yellow trailer. Before she could knock on the door, it opened. A slope-shouldered elderly man stood there, a pair of slender transparent tubes running from his hooked nose to an oxygen tank parked at his side. His gaze flitted to Brooke’s face and then dropped. “Leave us alone,” he said before she could speak.
“Are you Mr. Zukowsky?”
“Not interested. Go away.” He spoke with an accent—Go avey. But he had opened the door, Brooke noted; he must have been waiting for her, watching for her. He did not shut it. He stood there, withered from the bulk he might once have presented, the cool oxygen snaking into his nostrils.
Brooke gathered her courage. “I’m Brooke O’Connor,” she began. “May I come in?”
“What you want?”
“I—I’m not sure.” She twisted her hands together. In a matter of seconds, he would shut the door. “I’d like to talk to you, Mr. Zukowsky,” she said. “About—about your daughter, I think.”
“My daughter is okay.”
“Please. Just five minutes.”
He let her in. She followed into the small living room, blinking in the dimness. The TV was on with no sound, cartoons playing. A pass-through to the galley kitchen was piled high with brochures. A corner set of shelves held photographs and painted vases. “Coffee?” Mr. Zukowsky said.
So he was not going to dismiss her, to toss her out. “That would be lovely.”
She followed him to the kitchen doorway. He poured two mugs from a cold pot and put them into the microwave. He kept his broad back to her while they heated. He had been a strong man once, she thought. A worker with a worker’s disease—lung cancer, or asbestosis. A widower, probably, and with daughters, at least one disabled. Did he think she was the new social worker? No. He would not have asked what she wanted; he would have known. The microwave dinged. He reached into a small fridge and held up a quart of milk. “Just black,” she said. “Thanks.”
He motioned her back to the living room, and they sat. Light poured in the dusty window, motes caught in the rays. Surreptitiously Brooke glanced at the photos on the shelves. There was Zukowsky, decades younger, with a wife and three daughters, one of them clearly the woman from the park. Her flat features and teardrop eyes, Brooke suddenly realized, spelled Down syndrome. There the woman was again, as a plump teenager, holding a baby. And there—Brooke dared not let her eyes linger—was the girl in the wheelchair. Najda Zukowsky. She was still a child. She sat outside the trailer in the wheelchair, beaming. Her hair shone like flax. The chair looked brand new, almost too big for her. Brooke pulled her eyes away. On the coffee table next to the brochures sat a chess set with gleaming ivory pieces. On the tired beige rug, grooves worn by wheels.
Noisily, Najda’s father sipped his coffee. “What you want, Miss O’Connor?” he asked.
Her throat was dry, the brew bitter. She pulled her gaze away from the objects in the room to the man. “I have no right,” she said, “to ask anything of you. So I should say at the very start that I put myself in your hands. If what I suspect is true, you could bring charges agai
nst me. You probably should.”
The old man searched her face, taking in the bone structure, the eyebrows, the nose. “What charges?”
“Charges of—I don’t know.” So many times she had accused herself, blamed herself, failed to forgive herself. But not to a stranger, and not for this particular crime. “Of—of abandonment, I guess.”
“What abandonment?”
“Let me back up. Mr. Zukowsky—”
“Please.” He waved his hand. “Call me Josef.”
“Josef, you don’t know me. I have no right to ask you any questions at all. But if you will not give me answers”—where else could she go? How could she rest?—“I think I will never know another night’s sleep.”
“Cut to chase,” Josef Zukowsky said. “You speak of my granddaughter.”
She straightened, startled. “I don’t—I don’t think I do…”
“In chair. My Najda. My Luisa’s Najda. Our Najda.” He licked spittle from his dry lips. Rising, he stepped over to the shelves, plucked a framed photo that Brooke had not noticed, and laid it on the table in front of Brooke. In the picture he stood, perhaps ten years younger, in front of a spindly Christmas tree, with two adult women and a man, two teenaged boys, and a small child in a chair. He did not need to point to Najda. Brooke nodded. Tears started to her eyes. “You come,” Josef Zukowsky said in a tight voice, “for her.”
Brooke pulled out a tissue. Slowly she wiped both her cheeks. It was true. This man was telling her it was true. Only it had not been his wife who found the baby Alex had left for dead; it had been his daughter. His daughter with Down syndrome. Our Najda. She blew her nose, sipped from her mug. The coffee tasted like poison, like the brew she had once cooked up to rid herself of this very child. “Will you tell me,” she asked Josef, “how you saved her?”
He told her. Luisa, he explained in his halting English, had been rooting through the Dumpster across the state highway when a man had come out the back of the motel. As soon as he left the tiny infant, she snatched it up and it gave a weak cry. At first, he thought his poor child had given birth. So many things were wrong with the baby. Problems breathing, problems moving, problems feeding. So tiny. On a respirator at the hospital for two weeks. To the doctors they had lied about Luisa, because who else would love this baby? Not the ones who left it in the rain. And Josef had seen the people from Social Services; he knew where they would put the baby. How the heart of his Luisa, who had lost her mother only the year before, would break into pieces. And so the whole family had learned what to do. How to help the girl move her limbs. How to unscramble her sentences. How to find the money the state set aside for disabled children, for new wheelchairs and physical therapy. “We call her Najda,” he explained, “because it means, in Polish—I don’t know the English word—the one you find like this, with no mother, no father.”
“A foundling,” Brooke said. Her voice rasped with tears.
“And we say God bring her to us so we can love her. But what God? Not a smart God. A smart God bring us Najda before her brain lose oxygen.” He waggled one of the tubes running from his nose. “A smart God don’t make my Luisa suffer so much for this child.”
Brooke kept a fist to her mouth. Tears rained inside her chest. “Is Najda,” she tried asking, “is her brain…”
“Very, very intelligent.” For the first time, a sly smile crept across the old man’s face. “A genius, this girl. You play chess?” Brooke shook her head. “She beats me!” he said, swinging his fist in triumph. “Nine times from ten!”
“Can she—can she move the pieces herself?”
“What you think? She moves from her left side, okay! She has trouble talking, yes. But then she recites. You understand what I mean, recite?”
“Like poetry.”
“Yes! Shakespeare. Emily Dickinson. I don’t know all. When these things she recites, the words come easy.”
“I love poetry,” Brooke said. It pained her to smile but she couldn’t help it. Not when this man was bragging on his grandchild.
“At library, she goes on this computer. She knows all of it, all about this computer, what it can do.”
“But about school—”
“School,” Ziadek repeated. Then again, as if tasting the bitterness in his mouth, “School. That I cannot speak about.” Pushing himself up by the arms of his chair, he rose and stepped to the counter by the kitchen. He lifted the stack of colorful brochures and spread them in a fan over the coffee table. “These places,” he explained, still standing, “I will let her go. Not this school here, what they say she must. This school kill Najda.”
The word kill was like a dagger to Brooke’s heart. She let go the glossy brochure she had been about to open. Josef sat heavily. The joyful pride had fled; his face had gone cloudy with anger. She bit her lip. Shame drained the blood from her face. The old man laid his big hands flat on the table between them, like a cat about to spring. “Now you tell me,” he said, soft and low, “why you try that, yourself.”
“Try what?”
“To kill her. To kill our Najda.”
“I didn’t know.” She spoke around her hand. Her tears had started to fall again. He did not offer her a tissue. “I thought she was dead already. Dead in me.”
“What about doctor?”
“I was in the motel. It’s not a motel anymore, it’s—”
“Yes, yes.” His voice had gone testy, impatient. Brooke felt naked in front of him. Nothing she could offer about what she had done would make any sense. “But the baby,” he went on, his voice steady and pitiless. “It is breathing. No? It has heartbeat.”
“No, it didn’t. Or—I don’t know. It looked all blue. I didn’t feel it breathing. As for a heartbeat—Jesus. I don’t remember. I must’ve held her for a few seconds, that was all.”
“But you throw her out in rain—”
“I didn’t throw her out! My boyfriend was there! He said she was dead. We both thought she was dead. Instead we crippled her. Put her in this wheelchair”—she picked up the photo—“and did God knows what to her poor brain.”
“I tell you. Najda is genius.” He snatched the photo from her. He waved his hand at the photo. “Not enough oxygen to little brain. Speech is hard. Movement is hard. Thinking is fine.”
Brooke pinched the bridge of her nose. She could not bear to speak to him. She had no right. “All our fault,” she said aloud. “It’s worse than what Alex thought.”
Suddenly Josef gripped her arm at the wrist. For all his weak state, his grip made her gasp. “You would prefer,” he said, and he squeezed the arm brutally, “she is dead? That you have killed her?”
“No. No. I don’t mean that, I…” She left her arm limply in his, as if he were arresting her. “We were very young,” she pleaded.
He tossed the forearm away, as if it were useless. He gathered up the brochures on the table. “You were young,” he echoed her bitterly, “and now you know. Najda is safe. She is healthy. You go now. You be happy.”
She looked up, startled. “I can’t just go,” she said. “Najda is my daughter.”
“She is Luisa’s daughter.”
“But I can help her. I can help all of you. I have to help you.”
“No. Is nothing you have to do.”
She bent to the stack of brochures and lifted one. CROSBY, it said in spaced white capitals across the top of the cover. Below shone a photo of a white frame building against a backdrop of rolling hills, with teachers and students—two in wheelchairs, the others not—gathered on a lawn. “You don’t understand,” she said, not looking up. “I ask nothing of you.”
“You ask,” Josef said bluntly, “for our Najda.”
Chapter 21
Najda
I know as soon as I see the car, with its Connecticut license plate. All day my mood’s been black. Last night that fat witch social worker, Delores, barged into the house. She claimed I had to go back to school or face the truant officer. I rolled into my room and shut the door. L
et them scream themselves stupid was what I thought. But this morning it was Ziadek, not Luisa, who switched on my light and ordered me—in Polish, which you know is serious—to move my skinny fanny before he paddled it. So I went to music class, practical skills class, that god-awful regular history class with Mr. Monroe the sadist, and math—my only saving grace—where Mrs. Grenier let me work differential equations while the rest studied slope. No one talked to me.
Now I’m off the short bus and back on the trailer farm. Luisa took me for an ice cream when she saw my face, but I didn’t want ice cream. “What’s that car?” she asks as we draw near the house.
I don’t answer. No one expects me to answer. On the rare occasions when I do, my mom seems more annoyed than pleased. Sometimes I think Luisa would rather have a mute buddy than a breathing, quarreling daughter. Like a dog, maybe, or a robot. I roll up the ramp while she takes the steps, and I reach for the door ahead of her. Right then my black mood slips off, like a heavy blanket falling to the floor. Here, in the familiar trailer, waits my past, or maybe my future.
I roll through and into the living room. I catch my breath. Sure enough, there she sits, the woman from the park day before yesterday, on the couch opposite Ziadek. She’s come—at last—for me. But everything feels wrong. First there’s Ziadek. His face is white; his big nostrils pull at his oxygen. He looks ready to lay hands on the woman. And the woman herself is puffy with weeping. Photographs of our family on the table, on top of the school brochures. There’s no joy here. It all feels sad and angry. “Ziadek,” I manage to say.