Chapter One #3
Then I stopped wondering. I stopped doing open mic nights.
I got a job in a cubicle in Midtown East. Michelle, who briefly worked in an adjacent cubicle before she moved to San Francisco to take a job at a startup that sold dog food, invited me to a party in Brooklyn.
It was March and snowing and I didn’t want to go, but I did.
I spotted an Australian guy pouring another girl a glass of Yellow Tail in a red plastic party cup.
We went home together, and even though we never talked about it, we both knew we’d never be apart.
We didn’t so much fall for each other as melt into each other.
Those early days with Roman felt like a hot shower that I couldn’t drag myself out of.
We both loved the Pogues and spicy noodles and bad reality TV.
We both lived a long way from home and had left part of ourselves behind.
We got an apartment. We got married on a Monday at the New York City Marriage Bureau, had champagne and eggs in a puff pastry at Balthazar, and then we both went back to work.
We had a baby. We named him Holden. Now we worry about our 401(k)s and we are tired. Always, so tired.
I am a member of a mom app called Juju Bean, “a platform for like-minded women to meet and share interests beyond their children.” It’s basically a dating app for lonely moms. I wear jeans with an expandable waist. I am interviewing caregivers so that I can go back to work in a cubicle in Midtown East, so that I can afford to pay someone else to spend days at the park with my baby, which is what I will wish I were doing as I sit at my cubicle.
Maybe in another era I’d leave my baby with cousins, aunts, grandmothers—children raised by many arms. In this one, there are wait lists, security fobs, day cares tucked between office lobbies.
—
Elena pretended not to notice the stack of smut.
And I’m not talking about Penthouse or Playboy.
I was twelve weeks postpartum, interviewing nannies over a stack of Beaver Hunt.
Juggs. Swank. Lolita. Gent. A German publication titled, inexplicably, Purple People.
The last candidate, who came highly recommended, took one look at the porno mags, smiled, touched the crucifix around her neck, and got the hell out.
I’d placed Post-it notes in the magazines, spent months of sleepless nights cataloging, searching.
I didn’t want to lose all my hard work just to keep up appearances.
I only worked on this project when Holden was asleep, which was most days and hardly any nights.
When he started to stir, cracking his eyes or letting out his little cooing sound, I’d tuck the titles under Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site and Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go.
Roman was too tired when he came home from work to pay much attention.
If my poring over skin flicks and porno rags kept me content and stopped me from nagging him, Purple People it was.
I’d ignore that he got home after eight, smelling like a sports bar, carrying a bodega bag of overripe grapes and a six-pack of IPA—without ever asking if I needed anything.
He’d ignore that I had my head buried in a stack of hard core every time our baby slept.
—
It was an obsessive missing person research project, but how was I supposed to explain that to anyone else?
No one would understand that at the same time I had a baby, I also developed an obsession with finding Daisy.
An aching burn that I should have been with Daisy this whole time.
That I should have never let her vanish.
I want to tell her all this, but it has been fifteen years.
Fifteen years since we occupied the same world, the same soul.
Today, according to the last reference I found on Daisy’s Myspace page on Wayback, before she took it down, she goes by Jacki (with an i).
She didn’t appear to have an OnlyFans account, but @OrchidEnigma posted a hazy screenshot of “Jacki” in what looked like a peep show.
Or a circus? Hard to tell. There was an elegance to Daisy, a reflection of the landed Texas gentry she was born into.
A River Oaks girl. The granddaughter of one of Houston’s upstanding families.
Junior League. Quail hunting. Women who put their face on to check the mail.
The Cattle Baron’s Ball. Denim and diamonds.
Not Jacki with an i. Even though my research suggested she went by a different stage name now, I couldn’t think of her as anything but Daisy.
I hadn’t wanted to tell her that I moved to New York or that I met an Australian at a party in Brooklyn and got married at the New York City Marriage Bureau and loved him more than I loved myself.
But when I was pregnant—just enough to wonder what I’d gotten myself into—I wanted to tell her so badly.
I emailed an old Yahoo account, but it bounced back.
I tried Daisy’s 281 phone number, but it now belonged to a guy who managed coin laundromats in Montrose.
In addition to the adult magazines I bought on eBay, I am also organizing an epic collection of excavators and secondhand Magna-Tiles in our two-bedroom apartment in Stuyvesant Town, a Bolshevik-style collection of hulking redbrick towers largely populated with other people who moved to New York in their twenties to be broke and happy and get nose rings, and who stayed entirely too long.
—
I had a baby and all of a sudden I started to think about Daisy.
I had a baby and I wondered if Daisy had babies.
I had a baby and I realized that she had been someone’s baby when she stepped onstage in Lucite stilettos, and called me wanting heroin, and showed up at my twentieth birthday in Wet Seal begging to be saved.
I had a baby and I needed, desperately, in my bones, to find out what had happened to Daisy.