by Lucy Ferriss
Chapter 33
Lorenzo lingered for almost six months. Every time Brooke went to see him he claimed he was at rest, he was ready. But even the hospice nurse said he had fight in him. The day before he died, Brooke found him propped in bed, staring down at his legs, which had developed a tremble that wouldn’t quit. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he said in the high, feeble voice brought on by the morphine.
“What don’t you know?” Brooke asked.
“What I’m supposed to do.”
She took his thin hand. “I don’t think you have to do anything,” she said.
Ziadek, back in Windermere—she thought of him as Ziadek now, everyone called him that—was holding up better, though Brooke suspected that he, too, would be gone by summer. At least he had hung on long enough to see Najda settled at the Crosby School, and Luisa beginning to heal.
The week before Christmas, Brooke had brought Sean and Meghan to Windermere. With trepidation she had arranged for them to meet Ziadek, Najda, and Katarina at the T.G.I. Friday’s on Route 6. Luisa had refused to come. Meghan had just lost two teeth within a week, and insisted on bringing them both along to show her grandmother and her new “cousins.” The meeting had been awkward. Najda was due to start at the Crosby School after the holidays. Katarina alternately quashed any excitement about this development and struggled to present her family as a self-sufficient unit, allergic to charity. Quickly she targeted Sean as a possible ally against relations between the two families. But Sean had the gift of geniality—he was delighted to meet her, to meet Najda, to have the privilege of knowing Ziadek, of whom he’d heard so much. Now and then, Brooke had felt the warm pressure of her husband’s hand in the center of her back, like a support on which she could lie back and float if she needed to. And Meghan, luckily, had regained her chatty self. She insisted on climbing into the wheelchair, on Najda’s showing her how all the controls worked; if she noticed that her new cousin moved strangely or had trouble with words, she let that go in favor of novelty.
Ziadek had lost his hair to the chemo by then, and scarcely ate. But he took Brooke’s hands in his own, once the meal was blessedly over, and said in a rasp, “He has done this thing. Your lawyer. We need to pay him.”
“No,” said Brooke. “You don’t.”
“Luisa. She—she is not ready.” He pinched the transparent clamp that held the tube of oxygen to his nostrils. Already Brooke could trace the plates of his skull, the hollows for his pale eyes. He attempted a smile. “She is liking this coach you send, this Jennifer.”
“I didn’t send Jennifer, Ziadek.”
“No, no, I mean the boy sent her. The boy who save Luisa.”
“Alex?”
“Alex.” Ziadek managed the smile, showing his long teeth. “Good boy, Alex. He watch for her, for Luisa.”
“Are you sure it was Alex? He paid for a coach? What kind of coach?”
“Life coach.” He humphed; the rice paper of his eyelids fluttered. “Funny word, coach. He pay for many things, your Alex. Luisa sends him pictures. A good boy,” he repeated. He squeezed Brooke’s hand.
I am not running away, Alex had said. And maybe, Brooke thought, he wasn’t.
Najda herself was different—more reserved, more watchful. When she spoke of the Crosby School, her eyes shone. “I swim,” she said of the visit she’d had there. “Say they walk maybe. Me, I mean. Walk!” She admired Meghan’s teeth. She shook Sean’s hand. She allowed Brooke to fit an early Christmas present, a red wool coat specially made for wheelchair users, around her shoulders. But there were no hugs. She did not call Brooke Mother. She did not mention Alex. Luisa’s ordeal had obviously shaken Najda, had changed her outlook. Perhaps, Brooke thought, Najda had come to think differently about this long-awaited mother who had returned to put her together like Humpty-Dumpty.
“It does no good to press her,” Sean had said on their way back to Hartford from Windermere.
“I’m afraid she’ll start hating me.”
“Not if you don’t start hating yourself.”
“I know. I know.”
Back and forth, that winter, they went over the familiar ground: what Brooke could and could not forgive herself for; why she refused to blame Alex for anything; what she wanted for Najda, what she wanted from Najda. “I’ve got to stop burdening you with all this,” Brooke said more than once, when their talk had gone past midnight and Sean stayed up after to study music theory.
“She ain’t heavy,” he would croon, cornily, each time. “She’s my lov-err.”
Their days arranged themselves differently, now. The daffodils were up. The Simsbury location was opening in two weeks. Sean had dived into a full load of classes and spent thirty hours a week at the nursery. Besides the website, he had designed a new logo for Lorenzo’s, plus the banners and brochures that announced the new site and management. He had helped Brooke compose a page commemorating Lorenzo; already, Brooke had received a half dozen e-mails from his relatives as distant as Italy, thanking her for the photos and memorial. Meghan was back to ballet and also playing spring soccer. Brooke liked to pick her up after a day of greenhouse work. They would vie for who was muddier.
Today at Lorenzo’s they were putting out the first boxes of pansies. The indoor shop was filled with bell-shaped lilies and purple tulips for Easter. Five days of steady warmth had melted the last of April’s snow, and cars splashed through great puddles in the parking lot. As Brooke stepped out from the greenhouse where she was incubating the starter vegetables, a loud blast of hip-hop veered into the drive. Shanita had called from the Simsbury location a half hour ago, and here she was already, to pick up pansy reinforcements.
“Hey, Boss Lady,” she greeted Brooke as she stepped down from the truck. Her boys crowded the passenger seat, worrying their PlayStation Portables.
“Told you not to call me that,” Brooke warned.
Shanita inspected the pansies. “I used to tell Lorenzo,” she said, “I don’t know why folks call queer men pansies. They look nothing like these little faces, here.”
“You never said that.”
“You not the only one with an inside track.”
It was still taking some adjustment, this new relationship since Lorenzo’s death. Brooke had said nothing about it beforehand, and in the first week Shanita had threatened at least five times to quit before she’d take orders from her old buddy. Now they handled it with these dumb jokes and subtle digs. Brooke pulled on her gloves and helped carry flats of pansies to the truck bed. She wore wading boots every day in the slush, and still came home with mud on her jeans.
“Hey, boss,” Shanita said as they loaded the last set. “You’re wobbly.”
“I’ve been on my feet all day, Shan.”
“I don’t mean that.” Hands on hips, she stepped back and stared at Brooke’s belly. “You got a little passenger in there, don’t you?”
The air was still cool, but Brooke’s face flamed. “I can’t believe it shows.”
“I’ve got a practiced eye. How far along?”
“Just a couple months. I’ve only put on six pounds!”
“Well, that’s a sack of potatoes, and they’re all in one spot. Guess you don’t have to raid Africa for your baby now, huh?”
“Shanita.” Brooke set the pansies in place. “It was never about that. It was just about me, about…old fears.”
“But you don’t tell me you’re with child. I need to guess at it. Now you’re the Boss Lady, where’s my friend at?”
Brooke faced her old confidante. What a cyclone the last six months had been! But she couldn’t allow the swirl of her life to leave Shanita in the dust. What had she claimed, to Dominick, back in October? She was done with keeping it a secret. “Let’s knock off early today,” she said. “Let the guys close up. I’ll buy you a glass of wine.”
“I got to get the kids home,” Shanita said—sulking, a little, not wanting Brooke to take her for granted. And she was right, Brooke thought.
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��How about I come over then?” she said. “I’ll bring the wine. I’d like to see your new place.”
“If you don’t mind boxes,” Shanita said.
One by one, Brooke thought, one by one, she was unstitching the shroud of her past self. There remained tight stitches to undo, strong seams resisting, risks to run.
Shanita drove off to Simsbury. Brooke moved through the greenhouse, misting. People always came looking for herbs and lettuce before the season was well enough advanced. One element she hoped to add, once Shanita had the Simsbury operation up and running, was a tasting room. If the nursery forced some of the plants a bit early, they could offer a spread of pesto from their own basil and garlic, a small cup of sliced strawberries, a salad of fresh arugula drizzled with cold-pressed olive oil, which they could also offer as an impulse buy. Last fall, tossing their lives in the air like a deck of cards, she and Sean had talked about his career—what he could do, realistically, in music; what made him happy. In the end, he had turned to her. “When we met, you were working with plants,” he said, his amber eyes warm on hers. “You said they were easy to talk to. I think maybe they didn’t ask you any questions.”
“True enough,” Brooke had confessed. “And I could get the job without going to college.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Miss what?”
“College. The life of the mind. All those clever things you’d have been so good at, the way your friend Alex is good at them.”
She couldn’t help the small thud in her heart. “Don’t go getting jealous of Alex again,” she said quickly.
“Don’t go getting defensive.” They had been in bed; he pulled her close and kissed her earlobe. “What does Brooke want, now that she’s not in hiding anymore?”
She had lain quiet a long while. Finally she said, “I love the nursery. Maybe I wouldn’t have chosen it, if things had gone differently for me. But I can’t imagine other work, another career. I make things grow. I help people find a kind of beauty they can care for. Lorenzo’s leaving us a gift and a challenge. I want what we have, Sean.” She laced her fingers through his chest hair. “Isn’t that funny?”
A rap at the greenhouse door interrupted her thoughts—Eddie, one of the ponytailed guys who’d resurfaced for the spring season. He and his buddy Jasper were strong and steady, but they knew no more about plants now than when they started a year ago. “Customer, Brooke,” Eddie said. “Guy wants a whole garden’s worth.”
The man standing with his son on the damp mulch looked familiar. “I’m Brooke,” Brooke said, striding toward him in her waders. “We’ve just got plants out that can take a frost right now. Don’t be fooled by three days of sun.”
The man scrutinized her, then broke into a smile. “I can’t believe I haven’t bumped into you again,” he said. “I’m your old boyfriend, remember?”
Brooke’s hand froze in a moment of wild confusion.
“Tad Horgan,” he said, squeezing and then releasing her hand. “And this is Jason? You said I reminded you of your old sweetheart. My legs did, anyhow.” He made a lame attempt to pull up the cuff of his pants.
“Da-ad,” said the boy.
“I remember now.” Instinctively, Brooke put a hand on her belly. No one but Shanita would be able to tell yet that she was pregnant. But the slight swelling reminded her how far she had traveled since August. “You must have thought I was flirting with you.”
“Can’t blame you, with these legs. Made a point of covering up this time.”
The laugh Brooke tried to hold in came out as a snort. “And is this guy following in his dad’s footsteps?” she said when she had recovered.
“Playing soccer? You bet. In fact, I think we’ve seen that champ of yours on the field.”
“Dad, she’s on my team!” Jason shook his father’s elbow. “She passed the ball to me last Saturday, remember? And I scored?”
“Scored, huh?” said Tad. “Cooties gone, I guess.”
“So what brings you to Lorenzo’s, Tad?”
He sighed. “My wife wants landscaping. And she wants it before the pool season opens and I disappear.”
Pools, Brooke remembered—Tad installed swimming pools.
“And I said no pansies!” Jason added.
“Well, we’ve got a lot of pansies,” Brooke admitted. “But there’s dianthus, too, and snapdragons, and of course the spring bulbs, but you’re too late for those.”
She took them around the grounds. She had flirted with Tad Horgan, last summer. How far away it seemed, that time when a pair of muscular legs put her in mind of Alex Frazier. Tad seemed a nice guy, quick to let things pass. And when she thought of Alex, she no longer thought of his teenaged body but of the e-mails she’d started getting, every couple of weeks since January. Brussels, he wrote, was a strange, twisted place in a disguise of dullness. He was brushing off his high school French in hopes of getting away from the Americans. He had a little place in the Ixelles district, near some good jazz haunts. If the rain ever let up, he might check out the old-men’s soccer scene. He struggled with depression, sometimes. But he was happier than he had been in Boston; he could imagine settling—he did not say marrying, but the hint was dropped—in Belgium. He did not mention the money he was sending Najda, and Brooke did not ask. She did report what she had heard from Ziadek about Luisa’s coach, and she described Najda’s victory over the school system, her new life at Crosby. To these updates Alex never responded directly. But the e-mails kept coming, like green shoots emerging in springtime, hints of a garden they might one day call friendship. Soon, Brooke thought, she would divulge her pregnancy. And she would tell Sean—yes, she would—that she was writing Alex.
She waved Tad off with a trunkful of sweet William, snapdragon, and even some macho-looking dark pansies. With Jasper and Eddie, she covered the flats of flowers against the night cold. Before she locked up, she called home. “Mommy, Mommy,” Meghan said when she picked up. “Katarina called. And Daddy says I can take piano lessons instead of ballet.” Meghan had lost another tooth and had trouble with s. Lessons came out as “lethenth.” Brooke adored it.
“I thought you liked ballet,” she said. “Why did Katarina call?”
“I don’t like it anymore. Madame made me sit on the piano. Daddy plays the piano, he says he’ll teach me to start. In case I don’t like it. Jackie plays the violin. She goes to Suzuki. When are you coming home?”
“That’s why I called. I’m meeting a friend after work. I’ll be home a little late. Are you and Daddy okay?”
“Daddy’s doing homework. Can I take piano?”
“If Daddy’s willing to get you started, sure. Why did Katarina call?”
“I don’t know. Can we call the baby Katarina? If it’s a girl?”
“I’ll have to think about that. Why do you like the name Katarina?”
“Because she’s strong. And she has red hair. Or else we could call her Tiffany.”
“If it’s a girl. Can you get Daddy to the phone a sec?”
Katarina had called, Sean explained, to report that Ziadek would visit Najda one last time, then go into hospice. He could last as long as a month; he could be gone in ten days. He had asked to see Brooke. “She wasn’t thrilled to be relaying any of this,” Sean said. “But she loves her dad. She’s carrying out his wishes.”
“I’ll go then. Over the weekend maybe. You?”
“He didn’t ask for me. I’ll stay here with Meghan. She’s got soccer.”
Brooke sat on the stoop of the flower shop as the sky darkened. The smell of spring hung in the air—old molds unearthed, thawed manure, upturned soil. She had begun, just barely, to believe in her good fortune. What a resilient daughter she had in Meghan—a kid who spoke out, who acted out, who let you know what she wanted, even if that changed from hour to hour. And Sean. She had sat at the back of the hall during the chorale’s last rehearsal before tech week, when Sean as the Evangelist led the rest of the singers through the Bach oratorio. What courage he poss
essed, and grace. And he loved her. With all her failings and flaws, he loved her beyond measure.
Then there was Najda, who might forgive her one day and the next bring her to judgment. But she had hope, a future, a chance at happiness. Who was it, who had said the past wasn’t dead—that it wasn’t even past? The spring stench of living things waking from the fetid earth made that truth plain enough. The same held for the way Brooke felt, in moments like this, when her thoughts floated and came to rest on the daughter she had discovered. The ache in her heart never went away. It visited her again and again. It would occupy its wounded space as long as she lived, as long as she and Alex and Najda held the past in their bodies.
And in her own body, tiny life. There were no spirit children. She knew that now. They neither waited to be born nor hovered in the ether, making judgment calls. There were only children, rushing into this world in a tumult of blood, seizing their brief season.
A sliver of moon appeared above the line of spruce at the edge of the nursery. Brooke rose and started her car, to visit Shanita at her new home.
READERS GUIDE
THE LOST DAUGHTER
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss Alex and Brooke’s shared experiences and how the past haunts each of them. How have they each tried to distance themselves? How have the events at the motel taken a toll on them since?
2. Sean’s desire to have a second child causes splintering tension between him and Brooke. Do you understand or sympathize with his pain, reasoning, or persistence? Why or why not? Is it this tension that drives him to drink?
3. How do Brooke’s life and future plans change after the birth of Najda? What drives the new decisions she makes—from her choice about college to her overall attitude?