The Lost Daughter

by Lucy Ferriss

  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.

  “I know,” I say. That was the name she used on her cell phone, last week. Alex. We don’t say anything for a long time. He didn’t expect to find me here. He didn’t plan to lay eyes on me again. It’s awkward. Too bad.

  “You know who I am,” he says at last.

  I nod.

  “I left you”—he looks around, at the rusted cans, broken bottles, the weedy field—�
�here. When you were just born.”

  I nod again. The picture in my head starts to change. Not just a girl giving birth. A girl and a boy. Someone to cut the cord. This boy.

  He looks away. He yanks up a weed. He talks as if to himself. He says, “I thought you weren’t alive. I swear to almighty God, that’s what I thought.”

  Again I nod. What is there to say, to ask? What if you had murdered me? Would you know it, in your deepest heart? How deep is your heart?

  “I used to dare myself,” he says, “to come back here. See if you were still here.” He swallows hard. “Plenty of nightmares brought me here. That’s for sure.” He studies his fingernails. “No one was at your trailer,” he says when he looks up, “so I came over. An idle thought, you know. And here you are. Christ. All along, you’ve been right where I left you.”

  “Almost,” I say.

  Mostly I hate him. He’s like one of those teenaged boys who just quit this place. Careless, cruel. But part of me, not hating him, feels surprise. Not at him, but at myself. All these years I’ve thought about my real mother, dreamed of her, called for her. I’ve never thought about my dad. Maybe because I’ve only had Luisa. But also because when I’ve thought about what must have happened, it’s only made sense to me with a woman giving birth alone. I’d have guessed that the guy who knocked her up never even knew she was pregnant. But now that Brooke’s sat in our living room and told her story, I realize that makes no sense, her being alone. If she really thought her baby wasn’t alive, she never could have taken me outside in time for Luisa to find me. There must have been someone else.

  “You,” I manage to get out, and I indicate the wheelchair, my right arm, “This. To me.”

  “I did that to you, yeah.” He presses his lips together and looks at the ground. His upper lip’s split and swollen on one side. From under the white bandage, you can make out a purple lump. Somebody got him, and good. His left hand hangs limp from where he rests his arms on his knees. He isn’t wearing a wedding band. “I didn’t know you.” I don’t want to know you, I feel him thinking, as if I can read his mind. “I didn’t understand what I was doing. But I was going to confess it, you know?” He holds his hands in front of him, empty. “I don’t know how to confess this,” he says.

  “Don’t,” I say.

  “Well.” He gives an acerbic chuckle. “I didn’t commit murder.” Maybe it would’ve been better if I had.

  So this is it. This is having a father. I’ve never known I wanted one, and now, just as I feel longing bloom inside me, I hear a siren whine down the highway. I think of my mom again, of Luisa. And the father crouched in front of me seems like an accident, like one of those footnotes in a book that you can skip and still get all the main ideas. I struggle to get a word out. Finally it comes. “What,” I say, “do you want?”

  He looks startled. “Nothing,” he says. “What do you want?”

  The words jam up in my throat. We stare at each other. I see my eyebrows. My jaw. Clearing his throat, he reaches into his pants pocket and pulls out a little box, like for a ring. He opens the top. “I was going to leave this here, but…,” he says. He shuts it, hands it to me. I open it with my good hand. Inside curls a tiny lock of dark hair.

  “Not mine,” I say. I lift my own wheat-color hank to show him.

  “Babies are born with dark hair,” he says calmly. He looks right at me. “Then it changes.”

  I could keep this thing. I could look at it and think of this guy, my father, of how he must have cut a bit of me away before he left me to die. I could do that, and get so mad that everything else stops dead. Or I could give it back.

  He hasn’t said he wants to be a father to me, or even to see me or hear my story or understand me. Well, okay. At the same time, forgiveness is not what I want to give him. I snap the box shut. I hold it out, pinched between thumb and forefinger. Finally he takes the thing and puts it in his pocket.

  He stands up. In the dense twilight he paces up and down the back lot of what used to be a motel. He cups his sharp chin in his hands the way Katarina says I do. I wonder how he got hurt, but then I don’t care. I guess he’s a handsome man—a lot handsomer, anyway, than Chet or Ziadek. There are handsome boys at the high school but they look right through me. When my real mother was my age, she had this cute boyfriend, because she wasn’t in a wheelchair, she wasn’t spastic and dyslexic like me. He stops pacing and comes back to me. He pushes his bandage back where it’s hunched over his eyes. He takes my right hand in his and turns it one way and the other, like a fortune teller. “I’m not staying,” he says. “I’d just make things worse.”

  “Damn straight,” I say. It comes right out.

  “But maybe I can—I don’t know.” He holds my hand. He’s got an idea. “You can’t be looking out for your mom forever. For Luisa, I mean,” he says, though I knew what he meant.

  “Why not?” I say.

  His eyebrows rise. “You’ve got your own life,” he says. “College.”

  The tears have me again now. I can feel the words in my head all breaking up. There’s no point trying to say anything.

  “I’ve got some money,” Alex says. “I’ll talk to your grandfather. To Ziadek. Okay? Is this okay? We’ll set up a fund. A trust. For Luisa. So she’s always got someone to help her.”

  “Ziadek—” I start to say, and I want to tell him I think Ziadek’s going to die, but the words are in pieces.

  “Ziadek doesn’t have to worry. And your sister—your aunt, I mean—”

  “Katarina.”

  “Katarina, right. She doesn’t have to quit her job. You can go to a school that—that can help you.” He doesn’t know how to say it, a school for crips, gimps, whatever I am, but he’s glowing now. He has a plan.

  But I shake my head. I try to say I don’t care about school anymore, but I think it comes out something like “School give up” or maybe even “Gool skiv up.” Either way it gets across because he takes the hand he’s been turning over and laces his big fingers in between my thin ones.

  “You are not giving up,” he says, looking into my eyes. That’s all I can make out of his features now, the light shining off his swollen eyes under the bandage. “You’ve got your mom’s stubborn streak. That’s how I finally recognized you, you know. Not the nose.” He touches mine with the index finger of his free hand. “The pigheadedness.”

  At this I manage to smile. It’s not the first time someone’s called me pigheaded.

  Alex wants to drive me back across the highway, and I let him. He’s awkward helping me into his car, and he doesn’t believe me when I tell him I can get the seat belt okay. Banging around with the wheelchair, he gets it folded and into the trunk. As we drive through Trails End, I panic, thinking everyone will be home and angry with me for being gone. But Katarina’s car is still not there, and only the outdoor light’s lit on our house. Alex parks. He says something else about Luisa. Later I’ll learn he was the one who found her, in the alley in Scranton. I’ll learn that’s how he got beat up.

  “Phone,” I finally manage to say as he follows my gaze to the house. I haven’t heard it ring, but it might. He gets my drift and goes to pull the chair from the trunk. When he opens the door on the passenger side, he crouches to look straight at me.

  “I don’t live all that far away,” he says, taking my hand again. “I don’t know what Brooke’s going to do. But if you need me—I mean me, not just my money—all you have to do is holler.” Reaching into his back pocket, he pulls out his wallet and from it takes a business card. This he tucks into my shirt pocket. As he does so, I see a tear gather in the well of his eye and drop over the lower lid. “Forgive me,” he says, his voice cracking.

  As I swing my legs free of the car, he puts his strong hands under my arms and hoists me up. His arms go around my back. Lifting me off the ground, he hugs me. I smell his salty skin, his man-odor, some kind of medical cream. We breathe together. I cling to his neck. I don’t want him to let me go. But he does, finally,
settling me into my chair. I tell him I’ll make it up the walk myself. But once I’m at the front door, I turn and he’s still standing there. We both stay like that a long time. When he gets into his car and drives away, I feel the way a mountain must feel when an avalanche shears off from its side and the sound slowly dies into silence.

  Chapter 30

  In the early light Brooke left him sleeping—the deepest Sean had slept since they had married. She uncovered the birds that Sean had put to bed last night. She fed the cats, who gave in and purred madly, rubbing against her legs. She walked the dogs to the park. The air was warmer than in Windermere, the leaves still golden on the trees. Later she would visit Lorenzo in the hospital and bring him an autumn bouquet, orange cannas and Chinese bellflower. Only as she turned back from the park did she dare to check her cell phone. Besides the six missed calls, there was one text message. Luisa found. Call me. Lex. The news was a relief, though puzzling that Alex should know, or care. He had denied any relationship with Najda or the Zukowskys. She returned the phone to her pocket. She pulled the dogs with her away from their usual track, across the street, where she rang the bell.

  “Mommy!” Meghan cried out. Brooke could just see her from the short hallway, through the high-ceilinged dining room into the kitchen, where she sat at a round table with Taisha, both of them digging into Cheerios. Meghan dropped her spoon, slid down from her chair, and raced to Brooke, who lifted her for a hug. “Mommy Mommy Mommy,” Meghan said, patting Brooke’s cheeks. Her hands were slightly sticky; her breath smelled of milk and sugar. From outside the screen door, the dogs whined. Meghan frowned. “Don’t you ever do that again,” she said.

  “Go away, you mean?”

  “Not ever. I hated you, Mommy.”

  “But I’m back now.”

  Meghan dropped her head onto Brooke’s shoulder. From the doorway to the kitchen, Brenda watched with a skeptical smile on her face, Taisha wound around her knees. “It was a family emergency,” Brooke said to her. “Thank you so much.”