Couple haunted by mistakes of youth

The Lost Daughter

By Lucy Ferriss

(Penguin)

If all the bad choices people made as teenagers returned to haunt them as adults, the world would be filled with fearful and guilt-ridden people.

Most people get away with those bad choices with few repercussions, but in Lucy Ferriss’ novel “The Lost Daughter,” they come back big for Brooke O’Connor.

Brooke lives in Connecticut with her husband, Sean, who is from a big Irish-Catholic family. But Brooke and Sean have only one child, a daughter named Meghan, which sets them apart from Sean’s brothers and their ever-growing families. Brooke is determined not to have another child. She tells Sean it’s because of her difficult pregnancy with Meghan, but the truth is it’s because of the unplanned pregnancy and delivery she went through in high school with her longtime boyfriend, Alex.

The baby was stillborn ― or so the young couple told themselves. But Alex, now divorced after losing his young son to illness, returns to Hartford, meets with Meghan and tells her he is determined to do the right thing. He thinks he killed their newborn baby, and he wants to confess to what happened. But Brooke has never told anyone about the pregnancy and events in a Pennsylvania motel.

As the author introduces a smart young teenager named Nadja, it becomes clear that there was no death: Nadja is the daughter that Brooke delivered at that motel.

A woman with Down syndrome found the newborn abandoned and claimed her as her own. (Apparently the overworked social services system in Ferriss’ version of Scranton, Pa., has no time to investigate this far-fetched scenario.)

The baby was struggling to breathe and obviously impaired, so Luisa and her Polish immigrant family wind up raising a disabled but smart little girl.

After leading us through a few improbable situations, Ferriss sets up a compelling story of the impact Brooke’s secret has on her family. She’s built a protective wall around her life, but Alex’s return puts everything at risk. Brooke’s husband may be the character with the most to lose: Sean thinks Brooke married beneath herself and fears he will lose his wife to her high school boyfriend.

As a couple, Brooke and Sean are believable because they know so much about each other, yet both also harbor secrets with the power to damage their marriage. And Ferriss, to her credit, sheds much light on the struggles in their partnership as well as the strengths.

Although her sixth novel seems, at times, implausible, it features believable characters: Families who argue, parents who occasionally drink too much and people who struggle to face their pasts. (MCT)