Chapter Three
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I’d told Roman at least four times that I got a lead on Daisy.
I’d bumped the butterfly wings photo on Juju Bean for a couple of weeks, reminding the moms of this urgent matter.
When no one replied, I decided a more personal connection might tug at the heartstrings: “Trying to track down my sister. She can’t have children of her own, and I want her to know she has a nephew.
I want her to know that there is a baby out there to love as if he’s her own.
He even looks a little like her.” I posted a photo of Holden next to the picture of Daisy with a broken-heart emoji.
Newborns could look like anyone. The messages started to roll in. “Awww. Hope you find your sis! (heart emoji).” “She will love learning she has a nephew! (angel emoji).”
I homed in on the Babbling Babes, a subgroup on Juju Bean to connect local moms in the South Jersey area, and the Cherry Hill Club, which had broken off from Babbling Babes and formed their own splinter group after somebody asked if she could feed her eight-month-old chickpeas and it somehow devolved into a weeks-long debate about whether Israel had appropriated hummus.
Two moms said Daisy’s photo looked familiar.
Another said she used to be a waitress at a sports bar on the boardwalk (“before my kids ruined my tits”) and thought Daisy may have worked there, too.
“Prayin’ for ya, @EstherGreenwood!” she wrote. “(prayer-hands emoji).”
“Babe? What’s in Atlantic City again?” Roman, now clean-shaven, asks again.
“I told you already.”
“But don’t you think it’s a bit weird?” He is soft-spoken and calm. The yin to my bang. Deep breath.
“What is weird about it? NJMommy278 said she sees a girl who looks like Daisy at her nail salon and that she looks like a stripper.”
“Doesn’t every bird in Atlantic City look like a stripper?”
I give him a look. “A Babbling Babes mom said Daisy may have worked at this bar, Lusty Lady something? I’ve identified possible clubs in the radius around Pampered Hands.”
“What is Pampered Hands?”
“The nail salon. My God, do you listen to anything I say?”
He comes out of the bathroom, still flossing.
I don’t know if he is trying to be respectful, or if it just makes him feel like a twelve-year-old boy seeing a tampon, but every day, Roman pushes aside my adult diapers, pretending not to see the bloodied gauze.
I resent that he doesn’t seem to feel any pain ever.
That he has a reason to shower and get dressed every morning.
But I do like the way he looks in his work clothes, crisp shirt, suit pants, never pleated.
“Geez. I forgot the name of the place. Sorry.”
The hammers pound. Holden starts to cry.
I pick him up on my shoulder and milk spurts out from both sides of his mouth.
I’m waiting for his head to spin around, but he is smiling.
That’s it. That’s all he needed. I try to swaddle him, but I could never figure it out and Dr. Brooke says a loose swaddle can suffocate a baby and is akin to child abuse.
ASSB, she calls it. Accidental Suffocation and Strangulation in Bed.
I put him down in his diaper. I’ve hardly left him for an hour, much less a night.
Roman and I had already had a fight, or more like a debate—a “Help me understand this…” conversation—about why I needed to spend the night in Atlantic City to try to track down a friend I hadn’t spoken to in fifteen years.
“I think she was the closest thing to a soulmate I’ve ever had,” I explained.
“Thanks for that,” he said, slightly stung.
I gave him a look. “You know what I mean. She got me in a way that no one else did. I know you don’t get it. Everyone likes you. You still have friends from when you were five. You were student body president—”
“Prefect. I was prefect.”
“Yeah, that. I wasn’t popular. I was a dork, and then I randomly got assigned a roommate—this brilliant, elegant, ephemeral creature—who also loved Faulkner and Frank Sinatra.”
“Don’t you do a quiz when you apply for a roommate?”
I stood up, irritated. He was always finding a practical explanation for everything. “It was fate.”
“What? That’s how it works at American uni, no?”
“Being with her, it was electric. I remember feeling so creative, so in charge…She saw me. Like, really saw me…The universe brought us together and now I need to find her.”
Roman softened. “Yeah, okay. Maybe it was fate.” He half grinned. “Or maybe it was the bit where you both said no frat parties and an enthusiastic yes to Saturday nights in the library on your questionnaire.”
It sounds like the Blue Man Group is performing next door, but when I check on Holden, he’s sleeping right through the construction, all curled up, my baby koala, in his doughnut pillow with the yellow ducks on it near a window covered in scaffolding.
I stare at the way the light hits his pink face. I could stare at that face all day.
I couldn’t explain it, not even to Roman, what it’s like to feel that connection to Daisy—to anyone—and then watch them just disappear into darkness.
Friendships end, he’d tell me, not understanding at all.
“There was that girl, what’s-her-name? You met in the locker room at Blink and wouldn’t stop talking about her and then you never talked about her again?
” With Daisy, it was different. The one I thought was going to last. We hadn’t grown apart so much as mental illness and addiction had ripped us apart.
I’d spent a lot of years pretending it was just another intense, fleeting friendship, but in my heart, I knew it was more.
I thought of all the emails I wrote to Daisy over the years that bounced back, asking her to tell me where she was, wishing she would appear out of nowhere and tell me it was all going to be okay.
I even started to write to her about my life, how I struggled to write anything new, how I took a job, how I met a guy.
I imagined that if we’d stayed in touch, we’d text seven thousand times a day, send each other memes, FaceTime, and stop ourselves from making regrettable sample-sale purchases.
We’d go weeks, months, without seeing each other and still know the most mundane details of each other’s lives.
The dry cleaner who ruined a favorite cardigan.
The period cramps. The lucky twenty I found on the F train.
I’d laugh at night, texting under the covers, and Roman would ask me what was so funny and I’d tell him he wouldn’t get it.
Because he wouldn’t. No one except Daisy would.
The more the memory of Daisy—and the yearning to have that kind of deep friendship in my life—nagged at me, the more I had to pull it. I sat beside Roman, close this time. He knew me well enough to know that I wouldn’t let this go.
In those first weeks home with Holden, Roman would hear me cry in the bathroom and ask if I needed anything. I always said no. What could he do? But now I needed something. “I need this,” I say. “She was my best friend.”
“You have people,” he says.
“No. I have moms. We share a due date. Not a soul.” Roman doesn’t say it, but my obsession scares him.
It’s all over his face. “You don’t get it.
After you give birth, your brain floods with oxytocin, dopamine—a cocktail of hormones.
They call it ‘mental clarity.’ For me, that clarity is Daisy.
She’s what I need.” Holden stretches his arms, sighing.
I pick him up, kissing his head. “What we both need.”
“Clarity, right.”
“It will be quick,” I say, hitching Holden higher on my shoulder.
“Oh, I really liked the nanny I met today. Elena. She was lovely, so warm, showed up early.” I don’t tell him that I hoped she’d overlook the buffet of porno mags.
Roman is looking for his wallet. He is perpetually looking for his wallet.
“I got a reference from Penelope. One of her fancy Trinity friends swore by her.”
He catches my eye. “Penelope is an heiress.” He says this as if inherited wealth were a terminal disease.
When Penelope had her first baby, she had a night nurse and went to theater and art openings and slept until noon.
She struggled to bond with the newborn—mostly because she forgot she had one.
Penelope has three kids, twins in first grade and a toddler, and is going for a fourth.
Having four kids is a status thing in Manhattan.
Imagine the size of the co-op apartment that can comfortably house four of your spawn.
Private school at sixty-five K a year, K–12.
“She’s thirteen hundred a week for one kid. Time-and-a-half late nights and weekends. Oh, and we’d reimburse her for the subway, Ubers…”
“Fuck me.”
“I did…and now we need a nanny.”
What Roman really wants to say is that unless we win the Powerball, Elena isn’t happening.
I may have thought of myself as having a poet’s heart, but I married a man with an accountant’s heart.
“But why—? Why?” I’d whined the first time he showed me his spreadsheet, told me that a full-time nanny would be a “stretch.” We both have jobs.
We have an apartment in Manhattan. We order Postmates more than we open our own fridge.
But math doesn’t lie. Medical bills. Co-pays.
Rent. Debt on his MBA, on the MFA classes I never finished.
I needed to keep my job, which meant we needed childcare.
But we could only afford a nanny if we were both working full time and I picked up freelance work on weekends.
We’d discussed a nanny share, but that would require me having parent friends to share with.
Holden is on the wait list for the free day care at Roman’s office. He’d have facial hair before he got in.
I made three hundred dollars proofreading Car and Driver magazine’s special issue on electric crossovers to fund my trip to Atlantic City.
“The babysitter will be here at noon. My bus leaves at three.” Roman kisses Holden’s forehead.
Holden reaches a hand up and starts to rub Roman’s freshly shaved face, the soothing smoothness.
“I sent you the info—his feeding and sleep schedule, Poison Control, the pediatrician, on the fridge. I’m staying at the Borgata. ”
“Swanky.”
Then I realize, “I’ve never been to Atlantic City!” No one had ever been this excited to take a Rio-to-Riviera Express Bus to New Jersey.
—
When I get off the subway at Port Authority, I send a private message to @NJMommy278.
“Headed to AC, baby! I get in at 5:45. I can Uber to you. Or did you want to meet at my hotel?” I see three dots appear, then disappear.
Appear again, then disappear, then nothing.
Had I freaked her out? We hadn’t exactly planned for me to come down, but it wasn’t like I was asking to stay with her or anything.
We’ve just passed Secaucus, an industrial park out one side of the bus, the Hackensack River out the other, when @NJMommy278 texts back: “Hey girl!!! Sorry. My man lost his disability. His boss is such a DICK. We’ve got a whole lawsuit thing, but our baby needs formula, diapers—expensive little fuckers, riiiiight?
Think you could Zelle me a little $$$ and then we can totally meet up and talk?
I want to help you find your sis!!!! (kiss emoji). ”
Was I really surprised? Half the moms on Juju Bean were trying to recruit me to a pyramid scheme.
Beach Body Juice. Slim Skinny Serum. A rejuvenating facial spritz that was ninety-nine percent pure oxygen.
They were literally selling air. I didn’t need @NJMommy278.
I had the nail salon. I had the photo. I had a lead on the Lusty Lady.
I had a list of sixteen other possible adult clubs in a twenty-mile radius. I had solid leads. I had a plan.
I get to my hotel room, in a casino hotel and “resort” that smells like a Bobby Flay steak house and secondhand emphysema.
I’d done my research. The Borgata is the nicest hotel in Atlantic City.
At one ninety-nine a night, it’s a splurge.
And yet, the black walls, the buffet with a velvet rope, and the smell of a seafood tower that has been out since brunch—let’s just say it does not exude vacation vibes.
From the twenty-third floor, you can’t see the grime or the weed shops, only the Atlantic and nostalgia.
The bed is enormous, a thing of beauty. I rip the comforter off and dive into the California king bed face-first. Ah, sheets stiff with industrial detergent.
Blackout curtains as effective as those solar eclipse glasses we pull out every twenty-seven years.
It may as well be a goddamn Aman Resort.
I spread out my notes, a map of adult clubs in the area, and the only photos and leads I have on Daisy.
I order a cheese plate and a glass of merlot.
I pump with my Elvie breast pump. Holden never latched.
So we never get to share in the magical bond that they tell you about.
I just get to insert my swollen nipples into a leakproof bra and a rechargeable, cordless, hands-free double breast pump with nine levels of smart, hospital-grade suction strength, and, boy, does it suck.
I try to ignore the burning twitch in my nipples, scrolling through photos of Holden, missing the weight of him on my shoulder, the feeling of his tiny feathery paw wisping against my skin. His smell.
Room service arrives just as I finish pumping. I haven’t had wine or soft cheese since before I was pregnant. I don’t even mind that the wine is lukewarm, the cheese wrapped in Saran wrap. I finish every bite, lie back on the pillows, and fall asleep.