The Lost Daughter A Novel By Esther Heller A Jewish novel of powerful emotions, painful memories & gripping drama by master novelist Esther Heller, The Lost Daughter is a richly-textured story that will captivate readers from the very first page. Buy The Lost Daughter at a special online price at www.targum.com

Chapter 1

The Truth

Nicole had always imagined she was adopted. A princess stolen away from her royal family. Later on, in a graduate school psychology course, she learned that fantasies like hers were a common occurrence developmentally appropriate and shared by many of her classmates. There was a difference, however. While their adoption fantasies existed only in their imaginations, it turned out that hers was true.

Nicole flung her jacket on a chair, the hospital pass tumbling out of her pocket. She hurried over to her mother. She was asleep. “How is she?” Nicole asked her father.

Robert closed his book, first securing his place with a leather bookmark. He rose and gave Nicole a firm hug. “No worse,” he whispered. His answer had been the same for three weeks, although each day Gwen grew frailer and suffered from grueling headaches.

The hospital bed seemed larger, her mother’s pale cheeks shrunken upon the robust pillow, her declining form crumpled beneath the smooth, crisp sheet.

“How’s the studying going?” Robert asked.

She knew he wasn’t merely making conversation. Her father was a professor of microphysics. He cared deeply about her studies and believed she could bury herself in work even now, especially now. She shrugged. “Did you have any lunch?” He came every morning as the nurses were finishing their rounds. He probably had forgotten breakfast, too. She rummaged through her tote bag, finally finding an oatmeal muffin.

Gwen squinted, her eyebrows bunched. With a low groan she turned her head and smiled at Nicole.

“How’re you doing, honey? You look a little pale.”

Before Nicole could consider an answer, Gwen turned to Robert.

“It’s too stuffy in here. She should be out more, in the fresh air.”

Robert nodded. “You look wonderful, dearest.”

“And you, you lie so sweetly.”

“How about a game of chess?”

“Chess,” she laughed. “At a time like this?” She sighed. “Well, why not? It won’t kill me.”

Nicole sat at the side of the bed. “How are you, Mom?”

“You could skip coming to the hospital one day and go to the beach,” Gwen said. Her hand shook slightly as she moved her pawn.

“No, I wouldn’t miss seeing you. But maybe I could shorten time spent at the library.”

Robert coughed. “Right now? Before finals? Not a sound idea.”

Gwen turned to the window. “How pretty the lake looks. You should be out with your friends at the beach.” A short moan escaped from her. She pushed away the chessboard and gripped her head.

Nicole leaped up. “I’ll get the nurse to give you more painkillers.”

“Don’t bother. It’s q.i.d. and I already had it two hours ago.

“I’ll check anyway,” she said, darting out the door. It amazed her how her mother was able to uphold her professional knowledge of nursing even now, despite everything.

Nicole returned. “I’m afraid you’re right. The nurse says it’s too early.”

Gwen cradled her head in her arms. “Of course. Too many drugs. They’re afraid that in fifty years I could suffer side effects.” She stifled a moan.

“Can I get you anything, Mom? A sip of water?”

“No.” She squeezed Robert’s hand. “I hate the smell of hospitals.”

Nicole paced from one side of the room to the other. She tucked in her mother’s blanket, set her watch to the clock on the wall, folded up newspapers, and was about to test the call button.

“Tell her to sit down, she’s making me dizzy.” Gwen murmured before she dozed off.

Robert read for awhile and Nicole stared out the window at the sun sparkling over the blue-green lake. Her mother was right. She spent too much time in airless rooms. But how could she skip seeing her mother? Or neglect her studies and disappoint her father?

Robert was fishing through his briefcase. “Want a crossword puzzle?”

She shook her head. “I’m tired of thinking.”

For a moment he looked discouraged, then he went back into the briefcase and came up with a Rubik’s cube.

“If it will make you happy.” It took an organized mind to excel at this sort of thing.

While she fiddled with the cube, Robert took a break. She watched him from the window, crossing Lake Shore Drive, past the concession stand, over to the flat, unending stretch of sand. He seemed to be studying the waves rustling out of the lake. He tilted his head back to examine the sky. The clouds were like ashen wisps of smoke wafting above the lake, but to her father, specializing in cloud physics, she knew they were different. They held secrets for him, secrets of climate, precipitation, and other portents of nature.

How reassuring to know something that well. If only she possessed the mind for physics or mathematics, perhaps she would feel more certainty in this world. But when she looked once again at the lone figure, his hands in his pockets, scarf flapping, she realized that his theories of stratospheric cloud formations were useless to him now. Her father, always in motion. Whether it was biking or playing chess, he was always occupied, never still enough to let the clouds clear and see what was behind them.

I can’t let him down. Not now. She opened a book and tried to concentrate, but her thoughts refused to cooperate. They rotated like a fan, from her ailing mother’s stoic perseverance, to her attentive father sitting by her sickbed, reassuring them all, fueled in part by his pride in his daughter’s academic achievements.

Robert returned with two root beers from the concession stand, his blue eyes dulled and anxious. The repetitive roar of the waves was comforting, he told her, but watching the speed with which the waves were obliterated on the shore was another matter altogether.

That evening, Robert waited until Gwen finished a few spoonfuls of her supper, then wished her good night. She angled her body away from him and bent herself into sleep.

When her father left, Nicole packed up her books. A wasted effort it had been, lugging them around all day. Maybe her friend Danielle would want to go to a movie. She grabbed her tote bag and gave her mother a quick, soft, kiss. Gwen woke with a start and insisted that she stay.

Nicole checked the hall to make sure the nurses weren’t around, then lit a strawberry-scented candle to help cut the antiseptic smell her mother hated. She faced her mother, eager to fulfill whatever request she might have, anything to ease her pain.

Gwen, rubbing the corner of one eye, spoke in a weak, yet urgent whisper. “I never told you...” she began. What she had told Nicole before about being adopted, she now admitted, differed dramatically from the truth.

Nicole already knew she was adopted. Her parents had informed her when she was ten and it hadn’t surprised her, blending so well with what she had always imagined. She saw that her straight brown hair and tall, angular build did not generate from her father’s blond tousled hair and broad shoulders, nor her mother’s auburn waves and small frame.

“We chose you,” Gwen had explained.

Nicole sat in a chair facing them on the couch, watching their knees press against the coffee table.

“We couldn’t have children and you brought us the greatest joy,” Robert said.

Nicole could tell they had rehearsed the speech; words chosen with the same precise care her father used in selecting his ties. But, she realized, they would not have been able to choose her if someone else had not first rejected her.

Pam, her closest friend, was adopted too. They shared that growing up. Pam, however, had no interest in finding her birth parents. She believed that once they gave her up, they gave up any claim to her. Nicole wondered why the first person in her life didn’t want her. As they inhaled the soapy scent of the strawberry candle, Gwen divulged the truth: Her birth parents were never given the choice.

Nicole sat on the chair’s edge, listening to her mother as if she was in a film portraying someone else’s life. When Gwen finished, she gave a long sigh, tucked her hands under her cheek and curled up into a peaceful sleep, her brow unwrinkled, lips cupped in a smile. Nicole stood by her bed, one hand covering her quivering lip, the other a clenched fist at her side. She stood there, rigidly upright in the diminishing candlelight until she could stop herself from shaking.

The next day, Gwen drifted in and out of sleep. In the corridor, telephones rang, elevators chimed and monitors beeped along to the human noises of coughing and chatter. In Gwen’s room there was no more moaning, only the slow sound of her steady breathing.

“The headaches don’t hurt her anymore,” Robert told Nicole over the phone. His desperately optimistic tone sent her dashing to the hospital.

Nicole tried to talk to her mother. There were so many unanswered questions. Sunlight glowed across Gwen’s sunken pale cheeks and tinted her hair a golden rose. She responded to Nicole’s urgent questioning with a temperate fluttering of her partially closed lashes.

Three days later, Gwen slipped into a coma. Worry and fatigue darkened Robert’s shadowed, unshaven face as he paced the room. His eyes appeared foreign to Nicole, lacking their optimistic gleam. Nicole gripped the bed rails, staring at her mother’s limp hand. Nurses slipped in and out, whispering.

A faint smile lit Gwen’s face and her opaque eyelids crinkled as her mind journeyed. Then, before Nicole could plead, wait, I’m not ready yet, Gwen died.

She left the hospital with her father’s arm around her, pulling her away from the only place it made sense to be. She shivered in the humid breeze. “What do we do now?”

Behind his thoughtful look, Nicole sensed panic.

He wrapped his arm tighter around her. “I don’t know.”

They drove home, up the potholed driveway. The lawn of her parents’ house was as neglected as her father’s disheveled face. Weeds wrestled the rose bushes and the mailbox was jammed with letters. Rolled newspapers had accumulated like logs on the front step. It was the home she grew up in, but she was supposed to have grown up somewhere else.

They sat in the sleek gray kitchen Gwen had redecorated a year ago, before the illness. Robert made arrangements with the rabbi and the funeral parlor, his voice muted on the phone. She half-listened, aching for the aroma of her mother’s percolated coffee.

In between calls to Great Aunt Elka and the Tribune obituary page, he reminded Nicole to see to it that her finals were postponed.

“You should eat something,” she told him.

“I can’t. It’s too quiet.”

“I know, but try.”

She sipped jasmine tea while he scraped charcoal off the toast they had forgotten.

“I’m done with the phone,” he hinted.

Instead of changing the date of her finals, she called Pam. The tremor in her voice was all Pam needed to hear.

“Thanks for knowing without being told,” Nicole said quietly.

The morning of the funeral was cloudy and unseasonably cool. It drizzled most of the day. Only as they stood by the grave did it storm, the torrent drenching everyone.

Nicole stood next to her father. Seated at her side in a lawn chair, was Gwen’s Aunt Elka, who had come all the way from Brooklyn despite her phlebitis.

“She was a gut girl,” Aunt Elka intoned above the rain, handing Nicole a tissue. “She always knew what she wanted and how to get it. And such a nurse. Why, the whole hospital depended on her...”

I need her now.

The rabbi started the prayers. Aunt Elka held an umbrella with one hand and dabbed her eyes with the other. Robert covered his face with a large white handkerchief.

Aunt Elka resumed her litany as soon as Robert finished reciting the transliterated Kaddish. “And such a mother! She was so happy to be a mother.”

Who could ever imagine such a mother? She had no right to die then.

When Pam arrived at the shivah house that evening, Nicole was looking out the window, her fingers pressing into her cheek.

“There’s no moon tonight,” Nicole told her.

“Don’t just think about her being sick,” Pam said. “Think about the special times too.”

Special times? The very best time was the first trip to the fairy castle at the museum. A tall four-year-old on tiptoes, fingers pressing against the ledge, Nicole had peered up at the miniature chandelier.

“There are diamonds in it,” her mother whispered.

Nicole gaped at the swan-shaped canopy bed and the tiny fairy wand. She imagined shrinking like Alice, ’till she stood no taller than her mother’s eau de cologne bottle, just the right size to take a bubble bath in the jade bathtub.

This world was magically altered; it held possibilities that soared far beyond her own day-to-day life.

“The life I lead is not my real life,” she told Pam a few years later as they played hopscotch during recess. “I have another life, somewhere else.”

Now Pam reached her arms around her. Nicole’s high cheekbones toned her eyes down to scale, made her look beautiful in her own quirky way. “Here, have some tea.”

Nicole continued to gaze out the window, her fingers pressing the flesh of her cheekbone up, forming creases around her eye. It made her face appear distorted, a contradiction: the left eye smooth, the right eye wrinkled with complication.

At the fairy castle there were silver skates, a glass slipper, a tiny chess set, and an emerald clock. How she loved going there. How patient her mother had been, leading her through it again and again. They never saw the rest of the museum. “It’s a good thing they don’t charge for this exhibit,” Gwen commented as she led Nicole through for “the very last time this time.”

Her father sat opposite the window on a mourner’s cushion.

Friends and neighbors kept coming, hesitating at the door before they entered. Robert gave them a social smile, lonely and anxious. At the fairy castle there was an enchanted garden. It had a weeping willow tree that shed real tears.

Nicole worked a few strands of hair into a braid. Her mother had been her anchor, her father an exacting blueprint. They worked undercover, vitally, to influence her life.

There had been a cookbook the size of a child’s wide eye, a hair brush with silver fox bristles, a rosewood and ivory grand piano, golden guitars, a lyre, and a harp. Shaped, she suddenly realized, like a severed heart.

“What are you going to do about school?” Pam was asking her.

“Shhh.” She looked over at her father. He was shaking hands with a neighbor, Harry Reed.

“I’m sure they’ll let you make your tests up,” Pam whispered.

“I’m not going back to school,” Nicole heard herself say.

Pam leaned forward. “Why not?”

Nicole continued to braid her hair, all the way down to the fine wispy threads at the end.

“What will you tell your father?”

Nicole sighed. She knew he would be devastated. How could she hurt him now? “I’ll tell him I’m too grief-stricken to study. He’ll understand.” “I know it might be hard, but don’t you think it would be better to keep yourself occupied?”

The thought of doing nothing did terrify her. “I’m going to be very busy now.”

Pam’s eye’s widened. “With what?”

“Why, everything I never have time for. Lots of things.”

“Name one.”

“I’ll go to the museum...” She paused, the fairy castle aglow in her mind’s eye. But what would it be like without her mother?

“And do what?” Pam prompted.

What could she do there? Once, the castle had held possibilities for her, a separate, enchanted world. The wave of a wand to grant a girl all her wishes. Nicole glanced over at her father, still speaking with Mr. Reed. She knew what her father would say. Something about the human mind being the greatest wand. She would use her mind, but not for homework and tests. For dreams and wishes. Plans for the future began reeling in front of her. She pressed her lips so that they were almost touching Pam’s ear. “I told you I had another life, somewhere else. I’m going to find my birth parents.”

Buy The Lost Daughter at an online discount at www.targum.com