Chapter Eleven #2
“Daisy? I mean Jacki, she’s in New York?”
“We can’t say for certain that it’s the same girl, but it’s the only press hit we got.”
Knowing Daisy might be in New York—or that she was, at some point—makes me feel even worse.
It’s like hearing that your future husband is at a party, but going to Red Hook during a snowstorm in March just seems like a pain, and you have to go through life knowing that someone else is married to your hunky Australian husband because the F train was running on the G line.
“So what do I do? How do I contact her?” I say, desperation in my voice.
Holden is fussy. I swoosh a spoonful of baby oatmeal into his mouth, but it’s too hot.
He starts to sob. “Oh, I’m so sorry, koala.
Oh no. Baby. Mama is so sorry.” I try to listen to Amir while also worrying that I’ve burned the roof of Holden’s mouth, setting my child up for a life of therapy and avoiding hot foods.
“We’re gonna try a couple of cell numbers that popped up, put word out in certain circles, try to let this Daisy know that you’re looking for her,” Amir says.
He tells me to post on social media regularly and keep location sharing on.
More crying. “If we find her, we’ll share your exact location.
This type of person, she’s not going to be found unless she wants to be.
Maybe she hears you’re looking and wants to see you, too?
Make it easy for her? Start posting your locations? That way, she won’t feel threatened.”
Holden is cry-convulsing, his lungs performing at least at an eighteen-week level. I try to find his pacifier and tell Amir that I’ve been posting a lot, on Juju Bean.
“Huh? What? I can’t hear you.”
“It’s this app for new moms…”
“You want my advice?” Amir asks.
But after that I can’t hear anything because my baby is screeching like a barn owl during mating season. “I can’t hear you. Hello?!”
The line goes quiet. I hang up. Holden looks up at me; the sides of his mouth curl up, a silent little angel.
—
By the time Roman gets home, I am asleep on the sofa with Bravo on TV. He turns off the Housewives, moves an old copy of Purple People. He doesn’t even glance at the images, never much of a porn, fake-boobs guy. I crack my eyes. It’s nice to see him.
“Hey, what time is it?” I say, still orienting myself.
“Just gone eight thirty.”
How is it eight thirty? To my body, it feels like it is the middle of the night.
To my body, it feels like I downed a handful of barbiturates with Bordeaux.
Roman walks into Holden’s nursery. This is his ritual, the thing I know he looks forward to all day.
He walks in, kisses Holden’s head, squeezes his thigh rolls.
The other night, as I folded onesies, Roman stared into Holden’s crib.
“I feel like I’m missing it,” he said. Part of me feels bad that Roman will never know what it feels like to be a marsupial.
“Gigi needs another surgery,” he says, walking into the bathroom. “It’s never-ending.”
“Rome. I’m so sorry. If you need to go…”
He shakes his head and I can see the unease on his face. When Roman goes silent, I know that he is burying something, and he doesn’t want me to dig.
“How’d it go with the lawyer?”
“Okay. I think Penelope had an affair with him,” I say, still rousing myself.
“Eh. That doesn’t surprise me.” Penelope’s husband, Beau, went to work every day at his dad’s brokerage firm, sat at a big mahogany desk, and played Candy Crush.
I don’t understand the fine print, but I know that Penelope can never—ever—get divorced.
Not because she loves Beau or worries about appearances or thinks a two-parent home is better for the children.
It’s all about money, “joint assets,” something about the prenup and “property division” and “enforceability” of “inheritance.” I don’t know exactly, but it’s rich-people parlance for being stuck for eternity with the emasculated aristocrat who you happened to go down on at a supper-club party your sophomore year at Princeton.
“Any leads on Daisy?” Roman asks as he tosses his wallet on the TV mantel. I clock it for him.
“She’s not dead,” I say.
“That’s big. What a relief.” Roman stops, genuinely bolstered by this news.
“She’s also not necessarily alive.”
“I’m not sure I’m following…” He opens the fridge. Surveys the void.
“I think I’m starting to lose hope,” I say. “If this Michael Clayton guy couldn’t even find Daisy, what are my chances?”
“So, let it go?” Roman has pulled out a half-eaten plate of fried chicken strips that I don’t even remember him ordering. He sniffs the container and then pops it into the microwave. “She obviously doesn’t want to be found.”
“That’s the thing!” I say, suddenly wide-awake. “The whole Amir thing only makes me more determined. Like, what could’ve happened to her to make a person want to just disappear like that?”
“Bad credit?” Roman says, serious.
He doesn’t get it. Maybe he never did. The connection two girls can have at a certain age, at a certain stage in life, the subversive power of sex work to assert autonomy and challenge social marginalization, entirely lost on my rugby-watching husband, who is currently gnawing on week-old chicken tenders.
“What if Daisy ran away because she thought nobody from her old life cared? She thought I didn’t care? ”
“It’s too humid in the nursery,” Roman says.
He checks the Owlet baby monitor app on his phone.
He’s got it set to monitor oxygen levels and sleep trends.
He gets push alerts when Holden’s vital health indicators are outside typical range, calling me from work to make sure his oxygen levels aren’t abnormal.
Roman monitors the humidity because he can’t control that management decided to combine two units next door right when we had a baby, sending who knows what kind of midcentury toxins into the nursery daily.
We won’t asphyxiate on his watch. “Are you using the dehumidifier?”
I don’t want to tell him that I don’t entirely understand the difference between a humidifier and a dehumidifier.
All I know is that we live in a giant apartment complex built in the 1940s, have a screw gun drumming next door, and enjoy a comfortable climate maybe three times a year.
But this is how Roman shows love, so I just shrug.
“Don’t sleep out here again?” Roman says, taking my hand. I pull away.
I hadn’t planned to spend so many nights on the sofa.
I just always seemed to sink into the Crate & Barrel Outlet cushions and then not have the energy to walk the ten steps to the bedroom.
I had no intention of moving even an inch of myself until Holden called out for his night feedings, and when that happened, it didn’t even feel like me.
I was some sleepwalking woodland creature.
I would then go back to the sofa and lie there again, sometimes with Holden in his doughnut cushion, until the sun burst into our windows and the construction crew laid out rosin paper in the hallway and the jackhammers got back to work.
But it wasn’t just that I was exhausted.
I mean, our apartment was nine hundred square feet.
Surely I could’ve motivated myself to walk into the bedroom if I’d really wanted to.
The truth is, if I went to bed with Roman, then he might try to touch me, and if he touched me, if even a stray toe rubbed against my leg, then I would think about the pain.
I would think about the bright lights of the OR and the doctors standing by for a blood transfusion.
“Yeah, be in a little later,” I say.
I close my eyes, pretending to fall back asleep.
My stitches had dissolved, but so had some part of me.
I’d forgotten what it felt like to not feel this way.
To not feel insufficient, broken. After I hear Roman walk into the bathroom, I open my eyes.
I look at the girl on the cover of Barely Legal, at the grinning excavator on the cover of Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site.
I think of Daisy. She isn’t dead, but she isn’t alive.
She isn’t a criminal, but she isn’t a homeowner.
I think back to what she said when she first grabbed the twin bed by the window…
“I have sad.”