by Lucy Ferriss
“I didn’t do those things,” Brooke interrupted, “because I knew something was wrong with the story we told ourselves. I didn’t know what was wrong. I couldn’t look at it. But now I am looking at it. I’m owning it, whatever that means.”
“No!” Alex almost shouted. His hand gripped her thigh just above the knee. “I’m the one who’s owning it, Brooke! You’re right. It was no miscarriage. But my hands, what my hands did”—he set his Scotch on the coffee table and gripped her other thigh—“that is the thing that’s fucked everything up. Not some miracle rescue.”
“What is so miraculous about a damaged child?” Brooke turned to look at him, her eyes red-rimmed. Her hands let go of the cushions and cupped Alex’s jaw. He felt her cool fingers. “Maybe you squeezed too hard,” she said softly. “Or maybe we just didn’t do enough to get her breathing. What’s wrong with Najda—it has to do with not getting enough oxygen to the brain. I looked it up.” Her voice had gone hoarse. Her lips as she spoke were swollen. “There’s no way out of this,” she said, “without damage.”
“Of course there is!” He leaned forward and kissed her, quickly, as if to stop more such words from forming. “For you, there is,” he said. His face was close to hers; he could smell the salt of her tears. He seemed to swim in her eyes. “You believed you had a miscarriage. You never did anything wrong. I did a wrong thing, and I’m paying for it. The damage is done, long ago done. And none of it was your fault. You’re whole.”
“That’s the last thing I am.”
Her lips moved toward him then. A great wave of familiarity washed over him, as if he had moved among strangers for fifteen years and only now, in this instant, was seeing—was touching—one who knew him at the core. They kissed for a long while. Her tears kept running down, flowing between both their lips, so they both tasted salt and Scotch at once. His hands went under her knit top. They pushed up her bra, held her breasts, round and more lovely for being heavier since childbirth. “I want to go back,” he heard himself say. “Back to you. To what happened. Make it right.”
“And I don’t.” She fought with him still, even as she pulled him onto the stubbled fabric of the couch. “I want to do what we can to help her.”
“Help who?”
“Najda! You don’t believe me, do you? You don’t believe she’s our—oh, Christ.”
Her hand had slipped under his jeans. He felt her fingers against the skin of his buttocks. He went hard. With a groan, he pushed her top up, over her breasts; he unhooked the bra. “This is what you want,” he said. “It’s what you’ve been wanting.”
“Is it?” she said, wonderingly.
Her mouth had gone slack. Her body gave off a ripe, passive heat. He took off his glasses and set them on the coffee table. He leaned down and took her breasts into his mouth, felt the nipple harden against his tongue.
“I have loved you,” he murmured as he moved from one warm breast to the next. “I love you now.”
“Help me then,” Brooke said above him. Her hands feathered his back. “Help me help her.”
“Brooke”—he moved up to her neck, his hand against the stiff seam of her blue jeans—“I don’t believe in her.”
But she didn’t hear him. She went on, “They need money. Najda needs a better school. My mother is sitting on a trust fund from my grandfather. I’ve never wanted a share before, but I’m going after it now. And you have money— Oh.” She sucked in her breath as he bit softly at the thin, damp skin of her neck. “Kiss me,” she said.
And when he had, she pressed him down on the couch cushions. In the dying light, she studied him. Her gaze went through his clothes, through his skin. Were they going to make love? Could the world turn inside out, just like that? She stayed silent too long. Her hand lingered at his belt. “I’m facing my past,” he heard himself say—guessing, groping—“so I can live. You don’t have to face anything.”
Brooke’s index finger traced a line from his belt buckle to his throat. “Keeping all the guilt to yourself,” she said thoughtfully. “It’s selfish.”
The accusation hit him in the gut. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s all about you, this guilt. Forgive yourself, and suddenly you’re not so important. You don’t own all that history.”
“I can’t,” he said. The room had grown dim. He could hardly make out her features. Her fingers ran over his eyebrows, his nose, his ears. His erection had softened. It was too much like what he had heard from Tomiko, after they had lost Dylan. It’s all about you. “I love you,” he said for the third time, but his cock was giving up. He pulled her to him, their legs tangled. In his parents’ basement they had lain like this; on the beach; in the backseat of his car. And yet the last time his hand had touched between her legs—he remembered as Brooke’s heartbeat slowed—it had been to help her rid herself of a child. At that memory, what was left of his erection shrank like a sea anemone at human touch.
Brooke lifted her head. “But you don’t love me,” she said softly. “You love the idea of me, just like I love the idea of you. I wanted that idea back, for a while.”
“What about us back?”
Slowly she shook her head. She sat up and flicked on a floor lamp. In its harsh glow he studied her figure—the heavier breasts, hips that had carried a child to term. “Okay, but,” he said. He watched while she rehooked her bra. Desire was a liqueur at the back of his throat. “If you did not believe that this Najda was your daughter—”
“Ours.”
“Ours, okay. If you hadn’t met her, but had only talked to Isadora. If you had become convinced that what happened in that place—”
“That place is a paintball arcade now. You should see it.”
“Maybe I will. While we’re strolling down memory lane. But let’s say”—he found his hand on her knee, the stiff jeans between them—“you didn’t have this evidence of a child who lived. Let’s say you only knew that you might have given birth to a living baby, and here I am telling you I pressed that baby’s skull too hard.” He frowned. “Don’t you want to kill me? Don’t you think someone should kill me?”
Brooke’s mouth twisted. “Maybe I’m not all that willing,” she said, “to share my own guilt.”
“You’re going to have to.”
“Am I?” Turning, her eyes challenged him. Invited him, again, into a world where the child had survived, had grown into the girl in the wheelchair. Feel guilty about that, her eyes demanded.
“Jesus, Brooke,” he said. He rose from the couch, took the two empty tumblers to the kitchen, rinsed them and filled one with cold water. When he’d slaked his dry throat, he looked across the wide space to where Brooke stood by the window next to the cupboard, the Scotch tucked away. Desire lay heavy in his veins. They weren’t going to make love, not now, not ever. But it wasn’t just an idea he’d wanted. It was her. To thrust himself inside her, to drown in the sea of her. He refilled the glass and brought it out. Brooke was gazing westward, at a long orange sunset.
“By your lights,” she said, after she had taken a deep drink from the glass, “you have lost both your children.”
“I guess I have, yeah.”
“Do you have a picture of Dylan?”
He reached into his pocket. “Hang on,” he said. He flicked on the light. Retrieving his glasses, he found his wallet on the floor by the couch. From it he drew out the snapshot he’d kept behind his credit cards for three years. “That was just before he went into the hospital for the last time,” he explained. “He was never a strong kid.”
She held it to the light. He watched as her eyes searched the photo. With pain he remembered the setting—Tomiko and himself on the window seat, the shade lowered behind them to reduce the backlighting, Dylan propped between them with his favorite stuffed monkey. “Beautiful, though,” she said.
“He was a stunner.”
“And your wife also.”
Brooke handed back the photo, but he didn’t look at it. He tucked the wallet in
to his back pocket. They stood quite close; he smelled the slight tang of her sweat, the Scotch on her breath. Past mixed with present—what a cocktail, he thought, what a drug. He lifted his jacket from the floor. “I should go,” he said.
“I guess the leaf peepers’ll be back by now.”
“We’ll talk tomorrow,” he said. He squeezed the tips of her fingers, and she nodded. But as he headed out on foot, he thought they would not talk—not tomorrow, not the next day, perhaps not for a long while. He could not turn himself in, not now. Brooke would have this other story to tell. And what of his mother, when it all came out? What, for Christ’s sake, of his sister?
Rapidly he strode out of the condo complex, around the old soccer field, the high school; across the village green; and into the neighborhood that rose up a long, low hill above the village. The lights were on in the Victorian farmhouse where he had grown up. His car sat in the drive: the girls, back from their mountain adventure. And sure enough, a second car behind his. A old green Dodge Dart, with TUFTS UNIVERSITY on the back windshield, the backseat strewn with clothes. Pablo, he thought. For his sister’s sake, he smiled as he opened the front door to their chatter and good cheer.
Chapter 24
I think it’s time,” Brooke’s mother said, pouring her a second cup of coffee, “you told me what your visit here is really about.”
Brooke chuckled drily. Her mom had returned home yesterday maybe ten minutes after Alex left. Had she wanted Stacey to come upon them like that, making out in the living room? All night she had shifted positions in the pullout, trying to ignore the metal bar that cut across her lower back and trying to figure out what she’d been doing, what she expected. Alex, she concluded, wanted his guilt straight, like his Scotch. A distant action, a lost baby. The cocktail that was Najda and Ziadek and the slurry of the present would not go down with him. And now Luisa had vanished, another consequence. “The purpose of my visit,” she said to her mother, “changes on an hourly basis.”
“Start from now, then. I’m a quick study.”
She was, Brooke thought. However blunt Stacey Willcox’s constitution, she had always been able to turn on a dime and get things done. Now she sat on a bar stool across from Brooke at the white counter framing her kitchen. The sun poured through the glass doors from the patio, where pots of bright mums lined the steps. Over crisply pressed pants, Stacey wore a scoop-neck silk tank that hugged her neat torso. It was Sunday, but still she had risen early, pulled herself together. Brooke had not yet combed her hair. She touched a finger to the hot surface of the coffee, then licked it: strong, laced with hazelnut. She met her mom’s disquieted eyes. Here, she thought, was as good a place as any to begin a new life.
“I have a daughter,” she said. She took a sip of the coffee. “Not Meghan, but another. She’s fifteen years old.” She heard rather than saw her mother’s quick intake of breath. Brooke kept her eyes on the coffee mug—cyan blue porcelain, with a rim of red. Steam rose in genie-like swirls. “Najda is severely disabled, but she is not retarded. I did not know until four days ago that she was even alive. She lives with a Polish family, in a—a development. On the way to Scranton. She needs help. She needs to be at a better school. But I don’t know what to do.” Now she raised her eyes to meet her mother’s. Stacey’s brown irises had gone wide. She stared at Brooke as if seeing her for the first time in a decade. “I can’t afford a mistake here,” Brooke said. “I’ve only got the one chance.”
From an avalanche of questions Stacey seemed to choose one. “This girl—Najda—was born while you lived at home,” she said wonderingly. Then just one word. “Why?”
Brooke sighed. She hated, hated to relive any of this. But she had started. “I went to Isadora,” she said. “You remember Isadora Bassett—”
“She’s a flake. Believes in auras.”
“Well, back then she believed in herbal remedies. She told me a certain tea would—would cause a spontaneous abortion.”
“Jesus Christ.” Stacey’s mouth wrinkled in the disdain Brooke remembered from the many times she had fallen short of her mother’s expectations. But she recovered. She got the coffeepot and poured them each a refill. Hers she topped with cream and stirred thoughtfully. “Obviously it failed. You had the child.” She shook her head, wondering how in God’s name such a thing could have happened under her nose.
“I did, yeah. In a motel room.” Brooke realized that she was avoiding mention of Alex. But she couldn’t put his name to her lips. Eventually, her mom would ask. “I thought,” she went on, “it was a late miscarriage. A very late miscarriage. A stillbirth. But I guess the baby just wasn’t breathing well. Someone found her and saved her. Only I didn’t know. Till now.”
Morning light spread across the rim of Brooke’s coffee mug. She could not bring herself to meet her mother’s eyes. She had told the story, she realized, to the cooling coffee. Finally, breaking the long silence, Stacey said, “I’d have thought you could come to me.”
“I know,” Brooke said to the coffee.
“I would have paid for an abortion. I’m not religious.”
“I knew that.”
“Help me out here, Brooke. I want to understand.”
Brooke finally lifted her head. Her mother looked fragile. Stacey’s skin was beginning to thin. Fifty-two. The actual date was tomorrow. Brooke grasped for a memory, just a snapshot, of when they had felt close to each other, and came up empty. More keenly, she felt it had been she herself, not just her young mother, who had pulled away, who had let the distance enter in. “You remember when you took me to get birth control?” she said. “You remember how I wanted the Pill, and you said I should get a diaphragm instead?”
“Did I? Those pills were a lot stronger then.”
“That’s not why. You said I needed to take responsibility.” Brooke wet her lips. Her mouth tasted of coffee, acidic and bitter. “So I got the diaphragm and I took responsibility. But the thing was sized wrong. It slipped. And I thought you wouldn’t believe me, you’d think I didn’t use it.”
“I always believed you, honey. I trusted you.”
“But you were waiting for me to fail. Just like—”
She broke off. She stood, went to the sink; returned with a tall glass of cool water. “Just like I failed, when I was eighteen?” Stacey said when she’d sat back on the bar stool.
Brooke twisted her hands in her lap. “Did you?”
“No.” Stacey’s smile began tight, then spread. “You’re the greatest success story of my life,” she said.
“But I lied to you. I became pregnant and tried to abort the fetus and gave birth and abandoned the infant. And I never shared a word of it with you.”
“And I never knew. Because I wasn’t paying attention.”
Brooke didn’t argue with that—it was a moment of honesty she had never anticipated. She blinked back tears. She studied her mother. The roots of Stacey’s flaxen hair were showing salt and pepper. Stacey’s nose lacked the signature bump of Najda’s—that had come from Brooke’s dad—but something about the set of the neck, and the flat upper lip…but no. Brooke knew where Najda’s mouth came from. “The father,” she surprised herself by volunteering, “was Alex Frazier.”
“Well, of course,” said Stacey. That was her mother, Brooke thought, acting always as if she were one step ahead of you. “And he’s back now. And you’re in touch with him. You’re getting another chance.”
“No. No!” Brooke slipped off the bar stool. She walked a quick circle on the blond carpet of the sitting room. Yesterday’s moment with Alex, when she had wanted him beyond all reason, entered her blood again as if through a hypodermic. How quickly desire had filled them and left them empty. When she had told him they were making a mistake, he had not argued. They would talk today, they had agreed. But she expected no call from him. He had blown through her life like a warm, piquant wind. She longed for many things, the past included…but she did not long for Alex. Out of all her feelings, what surprised her mo
st was realizing that she had longed for him all these years, up until now.
“Alex does not believe,” she told her mother, returning to the counter, “that the child lived. That this child we’ve discovered is ours. Look,” she said as Stacey’s brows furrowed, “something hurt Najda. The herbs themselves, or the messy way she came out, or being left for”—she made herself say it—“for dead. I don’t know. She cannot walk, or talk properly. Her life’s been one long frustration, because of me. But she’s here. And I’m here.” She felt sure of herself as she spoke, more calm than she had been in years. “And she has a family who loves her, including a mother.”
“You gave this child up?” Stacey asked wonderingly. “And now you want her back?”
“No, I told you! Luisa found her. Behind the motel.” She hesitated; she was ready to tell her mom about Najda’s deficiencies, but not about Luisa’s. “And now Luisa’s afraid of losing her. Which she won’t.” She pinched her lips together, holding in fierce remorse. “Najda,” she went on, “doesn’t need me, not personally. She needs a good school. A school that understands smart kids in uncooperative bodies. She needs a lot of money. And I want to give that to her. I want to give her Grandpa’s money.”
Brooke’s gaze rested on her mom. In Stacey’s eyes lay the idea, the ideal, of Brooke Frazier, of that perfect young couple. It was a stubborn ideal. “Alex has money,” she said.
“Forget Alex, Mom. He doesn’t believe in this.”
“And you’re sure—”
“I’m sure.”
“Well, your grandfather didn’t leave much. He didn’t leave enough. You think I would still be here”—she gestured around the small, elegant condo—“if my father had left me a fortune?”
Yes, I do, Brooke wanted to answer. But too much was at stake. “What about the quarry? What about the sale?”
“Honey, by the time your grandfather sold that quarry, it was practically worthless. There had been something fishy, you know. With the accounting. Not enough to land anyone in jail. But by the time he paid off his creditors…” She held up empty hands.