Chapter 57 Daisy - Semantics
DAISY Semantics
I hadn’t slept in two days. I’d worked two straight twelve-hour shifts and, while Maisy was only waking up once per night, instead of putting her back down, I just rocked her and held her.
I knew our time together was coming to an end, and I couldn’t bear it.
So I had decided to savor every second. Tonight, I had picked her up at day care at seven, given her a long bath because she loved it so much—who didn’t love a bath?
—and rocked her for longer than usual after her bottle, holding her close, smelling her head, feeling like I was about to lose everything that mattered.
I was so devastated over Maisy that I’d hardly had time to feel sad about Mason, although, believe me, the thoughts about how I’d good and ruined that did creep in.
It was almost nine at night when I heard a soft knock at my door.
I was about to pop a bag of popcorn for dinner because I was way too tired to cook.
I peered out the peephole and saw something unexpected.
Cheryl—plus Drew, still in his baseball uniform, and Sarah.
I sighed. I had talked to Allison, and I knew they couldn’t just come take Maisy from me.
But, as long as they claimed her within sixty days, she was theirs.
There was nothing I could do. I opened the door.
I hadn’t seen Cheryl since her outburst in my driveway.
I couldn’t text Mason to come save me again.
We hadn’t spoken in days. And I knew Amelia would be busy getting Greer and George down.
I could text Tilley; she would come. But wasn’t she still at play practice?
I didn’t know Elizabeth well enough to ask for her help, and I presumed Olivia wasn’t exactly thrilled with me.
Laura was working tonight. Okay. Enough. I was on my own.
I positioned myself squarely at the front door as I said “May I help you?” directly to Cheryl.
“We just want to talk,” Sarah said.
Drew nodded. I trusted them. It was his mother I was afraid of.
Cheryl put her hands up. “I’m here to apologize.” She looked at Sarah. “And, well, we want to talk to you.”
I was way too intrigued to deny her the chance to explain.
I gestured toward the small sitting area, saying, “Maisy is asleep, so let’s keep our voices down.”
Whatever was coming next, no mother would wake a sleeping baby.
Sarah and Drew sat side by side on the couch. Cheryl took the chair to the left of them, so I took the chair to the right, my stomach in knots.
Drew took Sarah’s hand, and, to my surprise, he talked first. “Sarah and I have been doing a lot of thinking and talking.”
I knew what was coming; nausea washed over me.
Cheryl interjected, “Sarah has been staying with us, so we have had a lot of time to hash everything out.”
Poor Sarah. I couldn’t imagine her parents kicking her out. Although my mother had left me, so I guessed maybe I could understand.
“I know that my actions proved I’m not fit to be a single mother,” Sarah said, looking down at her feet.
I mean, I couldn’t argue with that. She’d left her daughter in a dumpster.
“But once I held my baby,” Sarah said, her voice quavering, “I just couldn’t imagine living in a world where I don’t know her.”
I knew the smile I had pinned to my face looked as awkward and fake as it felt. But how could I smile? Maisy had been my baby. My pulse thrummed as I thought, I have been the one taking care of her. I have been the one loving her. She is mine.
Cheryl leaned forward. “Look, Daisy, this isn’t an easy thing to say. And when Mason came to talk to me, and planted the seed that had we known about all of this, we would have urged the kids to put Maisy up for adoption, he really almost changed my mind…”
I raised my eyebrows. It wasn’t the right time, but my mind stuck on Mason came to talk to me. Mason talked to her? Mason fought for me?
“Daisy, we can’t ever thank you enough,” Drew said. “You not only protected Maisy. You also protected Sarah and me. And we know you could have gotten in trouble for that. We know what a sacrifice that was.”
I nodded, my throat thick with tears, my whole body tingling with that fight-or-flight instinct to grab Maisy, run away, and never look back. I didn’t want to cry. And I appreciated what Cheryl, Drew, and Sarah were saying. But the idea of saying goodbye to Maisy was too devastating to comprehend.
“I think you know where we’re going with this,” Sarah said nervously. “But Cheryl and Andy are going to help us; we are going to all raise Maisy together.”
Something hit me: “Maisy?”
Sarah nodded. Her chin quivered as she said, “You and Mason saved her. She should be named for you.”
My eyes filled, but I nodded bravely, a heat rising through my chest like I might explode with sorrow. “What about baseball?” I asked quietly, trying to control a sob.
“Sarah is going to go to Chapel Hill as planned this fall and will come home on weekends to see Maisy. And Drew will join her the next year, as planned,” Cheryl jumped in. “Andy and I will visit them as much as possible, but we’ll have our granddaughter.”
Our granddaughter. She was theirs. She had never really been mine. My tears were falling faster than I could wipe them away. I didn’t want to fall apart, but how could I not?
Even in my devastation over not seeing Maisy every day, I knew this was right for her.
I was proud of Drew and Sarah. Their lives were going to change immeasurably.
It would be a hard road, but they would have plenty of support.
I was about to tell them I was happy for them, that I would do all I could to expedite the process of getting Maisy back to them, as difficult as it would be for me.
But then Drew said, “Daisy, you’re the only mother Maisy has ever known. You’ve been there since the hour she was born, taking care of her.”
My heart gripped again, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. But I was a caretaker. I was made for hard goodbyes. I just never imagined one quite this hard. “Well, thank you. And I will do everything I can to help you guys—”
“We always, always want you to be in Maisy’s life,” Sarah said. Her voice broke as she said, “Daisy, I can’t imagine how hard this is for you. I’m so sorry.”
I put my head in my hands, trying to control the sob that came out of me. But I couldn’t. I was breaking into a million little fragments, every loss, every challenge, every hardship that had ever befallen me colliding into this one moment.
Sarah hugged me, crying on my shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so, so sorry.”
She was just a girl. And she was making a huge decision that was going to change her whole life.
And it was the right decision. I knew that.
Even so, it took me several minutes to regain my composure enough to speak.
I pulled away from Sarah and cleared my throat.
“Kids, you don’t know much about me. But my birth mom died, and, after that, the woman who had always been my mother left me.
So I spent years feeling unloved and abandoned and fantasizing about what my life could have been if only…
Or thinking that maybe my birth mother hadn’t actually died; maybe she would come back to rescue me, and I would be loved again.
” I took a deep breath. “So believe me when I say that I want nothing more than for Maisy to know her whole life—” My voice cracked, and Sarah, still perched on the edge of my chair, put her arm awkwardly around me.
“I want her to know the parents who loved her enough to step up for her even if they weren’t quite ready.
” I turned my head toward Cheryl. “I want her to be so flooded with love and pink bows and Christmas presents that it is nauseating.” Cheryl nodded, wiping her own tears.
“And I can tell you from experience that if I could go back and have my mom in my life, everything would be different for me. So, I’m really sad for me, and I can tell you that I would have done my best for Maisy in every moment.
But I’m happy for her that she gets to grow up with her biological family. ”
I thought about Robbie then. About how blindsided he must feel over just learning the truth about his life now, how angry he must be that everything was a lie.
But, then again, maybe he wasn’t. Because Robbie and I weren’t the same.
He grew up drowning in love. So maybe the truth of it all was just semantics to him.
And I couldn’t judge Tilley and Elizabeth for their choices.
I sort of understood them, actually. I just wanted something different for Maisy.
Cheryl wiped her eyes. “I had no idea that you had been through all that, Daisy. I’m so sorry.”
It shot through me with fresh pain that she had no idea, that her friend Julie, the one she had likely spent most of the weekends of the past few years on a baseball field with, had never mentioned me.
But that was my cross to bear. All there was for me now was to be better, to do what was best for the girl I loved like she was my very own.
I looked at the beautiful kids that had made my girl.
I thought about how Sarah would be leaving soon.
Mason would be leaving soon. And I would be here with a job I loved, sure—but also a former mother who I’d bump into all the time, like it or not.
Nothing was tying me here. Not really. And, while I wouldn’t say it out loud yet, that gave me an idea.