45. Daisy
45
DAISY
A fter Harrison ended things, I sat in my car and wept for a full hour. We weren’t supposed to be home for two more days. We were supposed to spend long hours surfing and hideously staining his couch and suddenly we would never do those things again, not together.
The way he ended things—as if I was a terrible mistake, something he was already leaving behind…God it hurt. It made it so much worse.
I found a cheap hotel. Though I could have made up some reason that I ended my supposed surf trip early, I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold it together for five minutes.
Harrison would have been appalled by the room—by the stained carpet, by the long black hair on the bathroom floor. He’d have swept me out of there and taken care of everything, and that thought made me weep too. I never gave a shit about his money, but I loved feeling as if someone had my back. I loved, most of all, that it was him.
After two days spent crying in a disgusting hotel room, I drive home.
I sit while my mom places everything on the table, telling me an absolutely grotesque story about a kid at Dr. Thomas’s office who broke his arm.
She’s made an effort tonight: the table is set with her best plates, lasagna from scratch.
I don’t see how I’ll eat a bite of it.
“So, where were you surfing again?” she asks, setting a massive slice in front of me. I haven’t lifted my fork yet, but it already sits in my stomach like an anchor.
Jesus, why did I have to lie? I don’t have the resilience to lie to her about this and hold my shit together at the same time. I blew four hundred dollars on a hotel just to avoid this, falsely believing I could cry it all out of my system. Those two days didn’t make a dent.
“Asilomar,” I reply. “Near Monterey.”
I close my eyes and picture an overcast day, Harrison grinning at me, the water too fucking crowded and neither of us caring—shivering as we stripped out of wetsuits in the parking lot, me claiming I’d blow anyone who could get me hot cocoa in the next five minutes.
He’d laughed. He’d thought it was charming then, but my charm never lasts, does it?
“Isn’t that called the Ghost Wave or something?”
My mom doesn’t care about surfing. I’ve never understood how she couldn’t care about surfing, growing up here, but she doesn’t, and I want to weep at the fact that she’s trying so hard right now to feign interest in the trip I didn’t actually take.
“The Ghost Wave is off Pebble Beach. Asilomar is cool but nothing special.” I shrug and answer the question before she can pose it. “Just wanted to say I’d been.”
Which is sort of a lie. Asilomar isn’t anything special, but it’s special to me. It was a favorite memory and now it’s piercing and painful. I hate that the end with Harrison makes every fucking thing hurt.
She says she’d like to go back to Big Sur. That she and Scott went once after they started dating and that it was so romantic. I nod, but inside my chest, there’s a cry that’s about to turn into a wail.
Yes, I know it’s romantic. It’s so romantic you could convince yourself the thing you had might last forever if you were young and stupid enough. And when he knows all the lyrics to a Jack Harlow song, filthy lyrics, and buys you eight avocados you don’t need, you’ll feel as if it’s all meant to be. Despite the amazing scenery, when he looks at you, it’s as if you’re now his favorite sight—and he has always been yours.
“Sweetie, why aren’t you eating?” my mom asks.
I glance at the table, at my hand in the exact same position it was in five minutes ago, ready to lift a fork I don’t want to hold, to scoop lasagna I don’t want to eat.
I force a smile. “Sorry. Just thinking.”
My lips are numb. My stomach turns as the first bite hits my throat.
If you’d told me two months ago that I’d be back in school, that they were refunding the money, it would have seemed like magic beyond my wildest dreams. Now I only want to wrap myself in a comforter and stay there until the pain goes away, just like I did last winter.
Except what really crushed me when it ended with Christian was that I was lost—he’d taken things away from me, and I’d taken some things away from myself too—while what crushes me about the end with Harrison is that he felt like home, a home I’d always sensed but never quite found. And I’m not sure how I’ll live without getting it back.
“Are you coming down with something?” my mother asks, and I say maybe simply because I’m not sure I can keep pretending to be well for her sake or my own .
I go to bed. My mother holds a hand to my forehead and brings me ginger ale and promises I’ll feel better by morning. I don’t think I will.
I miss the sight of his head on my pillow, the way his hands would tug at his tie, the slow half-grin on his face when I’d paddle toward him at the break. I miss him because there was nothing I loved in the world that I didn’t love even more when he was doing it with me. I miss Harrison because he made me feel safe, and lucky, and worshipped, but most of all, because he made me more me . The more irreverent, barefoot, sunburned, naked and sandy I was, the more he liked me…and the more I liked myself.
I don’t know what I’m even thinking. I just miss him.
When my mother arrives home from work the next day, she frowns at the sight of me curled up under a blanket on the couch. I should have brought the LSAT study guide out here just so she wouldn’t worry I’d been wasting time.
“If you’re still sick in the morning, I’m taking you to see Doctor Thomas.”
“I’m too old to see a pediatrician, Mom.”
She clicks her tongue. “We see kids older than you,” she says. “She won’t care.”
Jesus. A hundred bucks says Dr. Thomas asks me, just like my mother still does, if I’ve been brushing my teeth and eating vegetables at school. Maybe it’s normal when your kid is twenty-one, but I felt like I was twenty-one when Scott came into the picture, and I feel thirty now. The past seven years were long ones, but no one gets that but me.
The next morning, I force myself out of bed and open the LSAT study guide just to tell her I did it but wind up asleep within five minutes. She makes a joke about me living up to my nickname, and I can barely force my laugh.
I don’t think I’ve got it in me to keep faking so many things, to keep pretending I’m the daughter she wants. I rise from the couch and go into her yard, soaking in the sunlight. I’m still not happy, but I sense an answer here somewhere—in the bright light, in the slight breeze, the smell of freshly mowed grass. I’m not going to get better inside. I’m not going to get better by studying for a test I don’t want to take.
On Thursday, I drive down to the farmer’s market, and I sense an answer here as well in all the colorful displays. I’m still so broken, but there’s something I love about the world, other than Harrison, and it’s my job to fucking find it.
I buy impatiens and plant them in the flower beds Mom keeps along the side of the house. I let the soil crumble in my hands, and there’s something here, too—something I’ll be able to love again one day.
I’m still at it when Mom gets home from work. She stops in the driveway and rolls down the window. “You don’t need to do that,” she says.
I pat the soil down in front of me, surveying my work. It brought me such pleasure only seconds ago, all the velvety purple petals dancing in the breeze, and now the sight of them embarrasses me, as if it’s shameful somehow, what I’ve done here.
And that’s fucking ridiculous, isn’t it? Yes. It’s ridiculous. “I like gardening, Mom.”
Her lips purse. “You’re about to have a college degree. You need to keep your eyes on the prize.”
What prize, though, Mom? What if this is the prize I want? Why are the things I love such a problem for you?
She walks inside and I swallow the retort down, putting the shovel and soil in the carport before I follow her in.
“I got some tomatoes at the farmer’s market,” I say, walking into the kitchen. “I was going to make Bolognese.”
She waves me off. “You don’t need to waste your time with that. Go study for the LSAT.”
I grip the counter. You don’t need to waste your time with that. She’s basically said it twice in the past five minutes. She’s been saying it my entire life, except it’s only ever been about the things I love.
Anything outside. Anything domestic. Those are worthless in her eyes.
“I like cooking, Mom. Why can’t you just let me do the things I enjoy?”
She turns toward me as she pulls ground beef from the refrigerator. “Daisy, for God’s sake. I’m just trying to help you focus on what’s important.”
My eyes squeeze shut. Yes, she’s been trying to help me focus my entire life, telling me the things I love are wrong and guiding me toward the correct ones. By last winter, I’d switched majors four times. I’d taken the LSAT thinking I might go to law school and the GRE thinking I might get a PhD, and none of those plans ever made me want to get out of bed the next day.
Maybe it’s because they weren’t my plans at all.
Maybe I’ve been so lost because I can’t live out her dreams for her life, the dreams she gave up for me, without giving up my own to make them happen.
And under normal circumstances, I’d keep all this to myself. I’d wait for a less emotional, more measured moment—one that would never actually come—except I’ve been happy. I’ve been so happy all summer, and I just can’t go back to giving all of it up.
“I’m not going to law school,” I tell her. “I’ll finish my bachelor’s, but I’m done after that.”
Her brows pull together, a flash of confusion there before my words register. “You’re being rash. You can’t give up a plan you’ve had for years to—”
“It was never my plan!” I cry. “Name one time I ever said I wanted to be a lawyer, Mom. Name one . It was your plan. They’re all your plans. And you can still live them. You’re only thirty-nine. You can still go to law school. You can do whatever you want. But please stop trying to live vicariously through me.”
Her eyes well, and the guilt hits the way I knew it would.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly. “I know you gave up everything for me, and Scott was like…this one good thing that came your way, and now you’ve given that up for me too. But I don’t know how to make it up to you without killing myself to see it happen.”
“God, Daisy,” she says, her jaw agape, and just when I think she’s going to scold me, she gathers me up in her arms and holds me tight. “Scott wasn’t my one good thing. You were.”
“You know what I mean,” I tell her, my throat tight.
“No,” she replies. “I really don’t. And you’ve got it all wrong. You were the only magic my life ever needed to hold. The day you were born was the happiest day of my life, and the hundred happiest days after that were all yours too.”
It’s a nice moment, and we hold the embrace for a long time. By tomorrow, she’ll have come up with a new plan for me, however—medical school, broadcast journalism, marine biology—but I’m not taking it back. Maybe I won’t end up with Harrison, but I can build a life out of what’s left. I can build a life that involves surfing, cooking, working in a garden.
I can build a life based on giving myself what I need, even if I’m never going to get the thing I need most.