Chapter Five
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This may shock you, but Jersey wasn’t his real name.
He wasn’t even from New Jersey. He grew up in Indiana, but he spent summers working as a carny in Wildwood before he got into managing girls.
He told me all of this over a big-boy breakfast at the Comet Café.
He looked much less intimidating under this light.
People were always telling me things. I guess I seem so harmless that just sitting there alone at the skating rink at Melanie’s eleventh birthday party meant her dad could confide in me, slurring his words, that he’d lost his job in pharmaceutical sales and had to steal from Melanie just to cover the Mrs. Fields cookie cake.
Or when I got a soft pretzel at the food court and Jessica Kerry told me she’d blown Quincy Evans in a stairwell next to the American Eagle.
We weren’t even friends. I think she just needed to tell someone.
I was like beige wallpaper, physically small, temperamentally flat.
I didn’t seem like I’d ever tell anyone anything, and even if I wanted to, who would I tell?
Daisy had hardly unpacked her side of the dorm room when she told me about her bipolar disorder, her demons, the pills she had to take daily.
How they didn’t mix well with alcohol, so she mostly stuck to mint tea.
How she’d gotten a scholarship to study art in New York but her dad wouldn’t let her go.
“It’s strange. I feel like I can tell you anything,” she said, sitting on the end of my bed, drinking tea from her Monet’s Water Lilies mug, holding it with both hands.
This ability to extricate people’s darkest secrets without even trying made me want to become a journalist. Why be wallpaper listening to a confessional in a corner at the Fun Zone Ice Arena when I could blast it from the rooftops in a dying print publication?
I wanted to know everything, and I also wanted people to return my calls.
I’d worked at the college newspaper, but no one was particularly impressed with my investigation into the salmonella outbreak at the faculty mess hall.
I needed clips in actual publications, but I couldn’t afford to take an unpaid internship to get clips and I couldn’t get a newspaper job without clips.
I lied on my résumé to temp at BuzzFeed, to organize a fashion closet at Refinery29.
I bombed my interview at Glamour after one of the editors asked if I was a “makeup junkie,” as if looking at my bare face and unshaped brows didn’t answer that question.
I talked my way into the IT department of Vox Media before they realized I thought C++ was a grade.
I made twenty-five dollars an hour fact-checking out of a supply closet at Domino, right before the print magazine folded.
But when it came to applying for jobs, the managing editors all told me that they only hired from the Ivy League.
Really, Domino, you needed a Harvard grad to write captions about the best plastic watering cans for spring?
Maybe in another life, I’d be shouting questions in a White House briefing room or sharing truffle fries with a celebrity at the Polo Lounge.
But instead, I was using my extraction skills to try to get Jersey, the manager at Club Crush, to tell me anything he could remember about Daisy. I want to say “The House of the Rising Sun” was playing on the jukebox, but I may be imagining that.
“And that was when?” I asked Jersey, jotting in my reporter’s notebook.
“Six, maybe seven years ago?” he said, wiping up some ketchup with a piece of white bread.
I flipped back to my earlier Daisy notes. “Strange. I got nothing on OnlyFans. One hit on Myspace on the Wayback. If you’ve got a cell? Or an email?”
He chewed, washed it down with coffee, then said, “You’ve got to change your way of thinking.”
Jersey had been managing Atlantic City “titty bars” since 2012 and fashioned himself a bit of a local legend.
He used to work in hard core. “And I’m not talkin’ online.
Any asshole incel with a dial-up can find hard core on Pornhub.
I mean the high end, the, uh, services your, uh, ‘friend’ was into, or shit, perfected… ”
I listened silently. People always want to fill silences. I noticed two very drunk girls, all lip gloss and Lycra, laughing at the counter.
“Look, this Daisy, or whatever, she’s been through it…
” Jersey said, making a circling motion with his index finger at the side of his head.
“Jesus willing, she comes out of it on the other side. But there are people…” He briefly glanced at the diner’s entrance.
“There are reasons why I can’t tell you anything else. ”
The waitress laid the check on the table. Jersey eyed it. I pulled out some cash, pleading, “Do you know how I can find her?”
“Try her grandma? They were close. She used to call her. I’m a big believer in family.” He stood up, sure that the grandma was in “some old-age home” in Texas.
Queenie. Daisy’s grandmother. Of course. Why hadn’t I thought of that? “Thank you. If you see Daisy, can you tell her—”
He shook his head. “Lady. You need a professional.”
I stopped him, putting my hand on his hand. “I can’t afford a PI. Just tell her I’m looking for her? Please.”
He looked at our hands, touching. A wry smile. He hung on, moving his forefinger a touch on my wrist. I jerked away. Jersey stood up to leave. “Be good, now.”
I sat alone watching the drunk girls, thinking of Daisy. One of them suddenly fell off her stool, sloppy. Her bag spilled on the floor.
—
“Her name was Lola. She was a showgirl. With yellow feathers in her hair and a dress cut down to there…” I was rushing through George Bush Intercontinental Airport toward the Avis counter singing Barry Manilow.
I’d tried Elmo, the Laurie Berkner Band, “Baby Beluga,” “Baby Shark,” the Okee Dokee Brothers, the Kiboomers, and the Wiggles.
The Juju Bean moms sent me playlists. Recorded themselves singing lullabies, playing the harmonica.
But nothing soothed Holden like “Copacabana.”
“Hold up,” Roman said, cutting off my big finish.
I clenched my teeth, anticipating the fight.
He was cool with one night in Atlantic City, but I don’t think Roman had grasped my full commitment to this missing person search until I booked the next flight to Houston to chase down a lead from a New Jersey pimp.
“Roman,” I said slowly, trying again to explain why the trip to Katy, Texas, was life-or-death. “Jersey said that Daisy is alive, and her grandma is the only person she kept in touch with.”
I scanned the board of Avis Preferred members. I love few things in life like a loyalty program. I found my name assigned to a space in the parking lot.
“This was supposed to be a bus ride to Atlantic City. Now you’re flying all over the country—”
“All over the country? It’s a three-hour flight. Booked it on miles. I’m back late tonight.” I walked outside. The humidity hit me like a steel-toed boot to the belly. One blast and I was transported back.
“It’s another day away,” Roman said.
“Oh, right, but you can fly to Australia—with a two-night stopover in Bangkok!”
“It was cheaper with a stopover.”
“Who knows what goes on there? But I can’t fly to Houston—”
“You think I wanted to leave? I had to go home.”
“And visit James might-be-a-sex-tourist Townsend in Thailand?” Holden’s whimpering grew louder in the background. “Did you change him?” I asked. “He’s probably dirty.”
“He’s not dirty…” I heard Roman sniff. “He might be dirty.”
Last week, at Holden’s three-month checkup, Roman helped get his diaper off to do the exam. As he untaped the Pampers, the nurse smiled and called him a “hands-on dad.” “You’re lucky,” she told me.
This laughably low bar totally inflated Roman’s ego and his sense of how much he actually contributed, rendering it impossible to have a rational discussion about the division of labor.
That same day, I’d fed Holden seventeen times, wheeled him around to six different public parks, even though it still hurt to walk.
I swapped out exactly four onesies, reapplied sunscreen three times, changed who knows how many diapers, one of which led to a big flood of piss in my face in a Starbucks bathroom in SoHo as French tourists banged on the door.
When Holden finally took a nap at home, tan lines from where his onesie had been, even with SPF 50, I used the time to sit in an Epsom salts bath to soften the pain and rub hemorrhoid cream on my asshole before trying out a postnatal perineal scar massager—and trust me when I tell you, this doesn’t feel like a massage.
I even got to take a new cracked-nipple soothing spray for a whirl.
I washed the onesies and a BuyBuy Baby’s worth of bottles, and, when Holden woke up, we read twelve board books about tractors, three of them bilingual. Roman untaped the Pampers.
Roman slept through the night and worked all day.
I lived in a constant jet lag–like state in which the days and nights never started or ended.
Roman organized balance sheets. The only organizing I did was of the Baby Essentials Plastic Baby Diaper Caddy.
He delivered PowerPoint presentations. I went to pelvic-floor therapy and my only adult interaction mostly happened on the Juju Bean app.
I was bored, exhausted, and very dumb. But it was much worse than that because I had to pretend to be blissful.
A blissed-out new mom enjoying this special time with my baby.
I’d read all the books—Cherish the First Six Weeks and Bringing Up Bébé.
Nobody wrote about how you might find yourself feeling so weary and restless—without a second to rest—that you dive into a quixotic pursuit to find a long-lost friend.
But I think what really bothered me was that Roman still knew exactly who he was, whereas I’d completely lost who I used to be, misplaced somewhere next to Roman’s wallet.
Now, where did I put her? Each morning, on my way out with Holden, I’d catch a passing glimpse of myself in the mirror. I’d squint—who’s that?
“I miss you guys,” I said, trying to reassure Roman. “I didn’t want to come here, but if anyone will know, her grandma will. They were so close. Daisy worshipped Queenie.”
“That’s a name?”
“It was Eleanor, but everyone called her Queenie. I don’t know. It’s River Oaks.”
Roman kept asking questions, and I kept answering.
Him: “Do you want the babysitter to bathe him?”
Me: “Yes, I left her all the instructions in the Skip Hop Moby Bath Bundle, and I left the Noodle and Boo newborn shampoo. That’s his favorite.”
Him: “What time is Mandarin story time at the library?”
Me: “Noon, in the little garden on Elizabeth Street. It’s all taped to the fridge.”
Him: “Should I defrost another bottle?”
Me: “What? No. I labeled each feeding. You have plenty. I’m not a goat.”
Him: “Where is his library class?”
Me: “The little garden on Elizabeth Street.”
…and so on, as I walked to find my Nissan Altima.
But all I could think about was how hot it had been when I first met Daisy.
How she smelled so crisp, so adult. How she rubbed oil all over her legs so that they glistened in the beating sun.
How cool and light it felt to be eighteen and under the heavy AC of a buffet of bad cafeteria food and literature classes and a dorm room at the end of the hall on the seventeenth floor, all paid for by our absent parents.
How breezy and easy and spoiled we’d been.
I’d gotten into the Nissan Altima and turned on the air when I heard the babysitter ring the doorbell. Roman unlocked the door, Holden in the background. “Hiya,” Roman said, oozing charm. “I’m Roman. Christine, right? I think you spoke to my wife—”
“Catherine. The babysitter’s name is Catherine,” I yelled.
“Let me pay you…Where is my wallet?” I imagined him scrambling. Every. Single. Morning. The wallet, conspicuously missing.
“Rome. You got this. I gotta go. Love you,” I said, and hung up. I pulled onto the access road of I-10, open road and one step closer to Daisy.