Chapter Thirteen
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You open your eyes on a Wednesday afternoon and the person you’ve been searching for is sitting next to you.
She is not just sitting. She is sketching, with colored pencils on a Strathmore pad, the way starving artists draw caricatures of couples from Ohio, except hers is art.
Cooper Union–scholarship art. She is sketching, wearing cat’s-eye sunglasses that look like either Chanel or Chinatown and a chiffon tank top with spaghetti straps, no bra.
I can see the shape of her nipples, unapologetic and alive.
Natural curls, frizzy, blanketing her back.
You assume that you are dreaming except that you are wide-awake, and this woman is nothing like the woman you imagined.
She does not look like Jacki, the unabashed porn star, or Daisy, the reluctant sex worker.
She is not an addict who needs anyone’s sympathy.
She is not Roxy Love, trying too hard onstage at the Lusty Lady sports bar.
This is not a girl who needs saving. This is a beautiful bohemian with a palatable haggardness.
This is the fairy nymph in Cot’s painting, with a Brazilian wax.
I am too stunned to process that Daisy is really sitting there. Too punched in the gut to realize that Holden has cracked his eyes. He isn’t crying as much as cooing.
“You need to give him the tit or something?” Daisy says, not looking away from the sketch pad.
Those are the first words Daisy says to me since we last spoke, when we were both impossibly young and she begged for money to buy heroin.
I dig around in the Skip Hop Grab & Go Essential Stroller Organizer.
“I have a bottle.” I rub my eyes, reorienting myself. “Daisy? What are you doing here?”
“Where?”
“Here.”
“What are any of us doing here?”
How did she find me?
“How did I find you? You’re the psycho stalker who’s been talking to every member of my kindergarten class,” she says. (Fair.)
“I tried calling. Your email bounced back. Anyway. Hi. Hello. Wow. You’re really here. I just…I missed you. Sorry.”
“I missed you, too, Em. Well…‘missed’ might be generous. I pretty much blocked out that entire part of my life. Don’t take it personally.
” Daisy takes out a cigarette. Camel Lights.
The same brand we used to smoke in our dorm room.
Who still smokes in New York? I take it out of her mouth. What would Dr. Brooke say?
“You can’t smoke.”
“Why not?”
“Because, secondhand smoke? I have a baby…and it will kill you.”
She eyes Holden. “So will that.”
True. Holden had almost killed me, but it was different. I’d almost died creating life. I’d turned food (pretzel croissants, mostly) into a human being. I hadn’t risked my life for a puff of dopamine.
Daisy explains that no matter where she’d traveled—Berlin, Bangkok, Shanghai, Shenzhen—she always called Queenie on Sunday afternoons.
Even when a client locked her in the hull of his yacht off the coast of Montenegro (at least, she thought they were in Montenegro).
She convinced a cater waiter to loan her his cell phone so she could call her grandma.
So, this past Sunday, she called and Queenie told her that Emily visited.
Daisy assumed Queenie was talking nonsense.
But beneath the dementia, Queenie was trying to tell Daisy that her college roommate had visited, that I’d been concerned, hoping to reconnect.
But all she said, over and over, was “I saw Emily.”
Daisy assumed it was just Queenie’s wishful thinking that we’d be friends again.
“She always thought you were a good influence,” she says.
But then Daisy asked Queenie’s health aide, and the aide confirmed Queenie had a visitor about Daisy’s age.
Then she found the note I’d left on Queenie’s bedside table, with my contact information, and gave it to Daisy.
“You actually went to Katy? Crazy bitch,” she says.
It’s a miracle. I am not being praised for being a good mother or for losing weight or for always having a stash of Honest biodegradable baby wipes on me.
Daisy explains that she left her life in Texas behind her.
“It wasn’t a good time for me, Em.” I don’t push.
I don’t ask about her work. I see in her eyes, her giant brown, sad, alluring, sexy eyes, that she does not want to talk about it now.
She might not want to talk about it ever…
and that’s okay. Just as I had associated Daisy with my awkward years in a place that I didn’t belong, and found her to be an inspiration to get out, she had associated me with a time when her life went wildly off the rails.
Sometimes you crack your eyes open in the park on a Wednesday afternoon and you get all the answers.
—
Then Daisy heard from Amir. “First I think, fuck, Dais, you’re being sued again, but he says nah, he’s a PI.
” I apologize. It had to be creepy to hear from a PI.
But Daisy is totally unfazed. “Nah. Not at all. He was superpolite, profesh, compared to most of them.” Most of them?
I go to Mr. Pete. Daisy is followed by private investigators.
But finding Jersey? That one sort of freaked her out.
She said she hadn’t seen Jersey since she was barely twenty when she first started doing “private parties on an underground tour.” (I don’t ask.) She’d never worked in Atlantic City—so much for the Juju Bean mom’s investigating—but she did know Jersey.
He’d worked security on a “thing” she did in Philly with the then Pennsylvania governor and his wife and girlfriend and had gotten her out of a tough situation.
What “thing”? What “situation”? She looks at me and I see a flash of mirth.
“You were always an overachiever, Em, real full-body cavity search finding that pond scum.”
Daisy thought about calling. “Then I realized, wouldn’t the manic-pixie-dream-girl move be tracking you down on social media and shocking the shit out of you in the park?
Preferably with a tenor sax playing Coltrane in the background?
” She says she went through a lot of Insta posts in “some nasty-ass playroom” until she got to one in Washington Square Park, a selfie of me and Holden in this exact spot with the caption “Wednesday in the Park with Holden” and our geolocation.
“You never could pass up a Sondheim reference,” she says.
“Thank you?”
We instantly fall back into a rhythm, cultural references, gentle ribbing, art.
At the same time, I worry Daisy thinks I’m boring.
I’ve never been on a yacht, much less been locked in one off the coast of Montenegro.
There is no mystery. No seedy guys named Jersey in my past. My whole life is online, measured in selfies and hashtags.
On the other hand, I didn’t have to have a three-way with the governor of Pennsylvania.
Daisy tells me that she’s been living in New York “on and off” for three years.
First in a condo on Central Park South that a Malaysian businessman bought under an LLC.
That explained Hu, the Malaysian fugitive, and the news story that Amir found.
I pretend I’ve never heard this before, try to seem unfazed.
I’d hate for Daisy to think I am a voyeur.
But I am hanging on every word. She tells me that the FBI learned that Hu had stolen four and a half billion dollars from the Malaysian government.
Hu fled. The condo was confiscated. “It was in The Wall Street Journal and everything. He spent, like, the whole country’s pension fund, some real greedy-ass shit,” she says, shading in what looks like a silhouette in the sketchbook.
“I swear, Em, I would’ve never bought all that Van Cleef if I knew it was, like, Malaysia’s teachers’ salaries…
” I need to track down the Journal stories because although I am biting my lip so that my mouth doesn’t hang open, this is the wildest shit I’ve heard in a long time.
Then she got a new “financial arrangement.” (She doesn’t call it work, but she also doesn’t seem to do any other work.) “Anyhoo, then I meet this Greek guy, Stavros. Yacht, Mykonos, you know. He put me up in an apartment. 527 Park. You know that building?” I don’t say anything.
The first of many coincidences. 527 Park had become something of a fixation for me.
The first thing I saw when I got off the subway at work each morning—a glass-and-steel middle finger to the rest of us.
I’d read an article in New York about how, three years after the luxury tower displaced affordable housing and disfigured my skyline, it remained mostly vacant.
Of all the offensive, over-the-top real estate, 527 Park, in particular, felt like a personal affront. And now Daisy lives there?
“I think he forgot he owns the place,” Daisy says, adding that she hasn’t heard from Stavros in months. “It’s just a useful place to park his money, ya know?…It has a Roy Lichtenstein in it.”
She’s been in New York for three years? We’ve lived in the same city for three years and not known it?
For three years, we could’ve been listening to jazz in the park.
Maybe I sensed she was nearby, trapped in a shell company’s high-end condo.
Maybe that’s why I started thinking about her again.
Maybe it had nothing to do with motherhood and everything to do with proximity.
Maybe we were meant to be reunited. Meant to be sisters again.
You wake up in the park and you have answers. You wake up and she is there.
I wiggle the sizable yellow diamond on my finger.
I tell her that Queenie gave it to me, hoping I’d get it to Daisy.
I do not ask why Queenie didn’t just send it to Daisy, if they talked so regularly.
Why did she need me as an intermediary? Daisy’s demeanor changes.
She looks threatened, then suddenly goes blank, inscrutable.
“I already told Queenie, so many fucking times, I don’t want it.
” It’s jarring, how she drifts from easy bonhomie to enigmatic hostility.
What Daisy doesn’t say, but I assume that she is thinking, is that Queenie could’ve given her the rock our freshman year of college.
Or she could’ve sold it, given Daisy the money to pay her tuition, to stay in the dorm, to not have to wave her butterfly wings and bare ass over a high school chemistry teacher’s erect lap.
But she didn’t want to interfere. She’d raised Daisy from when she was a little girl.
She was eighteen then. Did it ever end? Or maybe she was too proud, too proper to admit that she needed to pawn her engagement ring.
I remember it well. Queenie said mixing money and family was “too messy.” She didn’t like it.
Daisy’s stepdad, who thought of himself as a self-made businessman, hadn’t wanted help.
Her mom needed to hoard the inheritance for herself.
But it doesn’t matter now, because that was a long time ago.
But that is what I suspect is going on behind Daisy’s eyes, which have now forgotten about the diamond ring entirely.
She signs Daisy at the bottom of the drawing and tears it out of the sketch pad, handing it to me. “There.” To my amateur eye, it is good enough to hang in the MoMA. To be auctioned off at Sotheby’s. “It’s for the nursery. He has a nursery, right?”
“Yeah,” I say. “He has a sweet room overlooking a playground.” I do not tell her that right after we rented the apartment because of the sweet room overlooking a playground, construction started.
I tell her that we decorated the nursery in earth tones because we didn’t want to know the gender, “but I always had a feeling he’d be a boy…
” I start to talk like a mom and then I stop myself.
She just told me she was living with a Malaysian fugitive on Billionaires’ Row.
I am about to tell her about the Tiny Love Day-at-the-Zoo Sing Along Mobile and how we’d gone to a garage sale on Long Island and scored a used SNOO.
This is a sixteen-hundred-dollar bassinet that Dr. Harvey Karp, author of The Happiest Baby on the Block, designed to scientifically respond each time your baby cries.
Even the SNOO is no match for a jackhammer.
Instead, I look at the sketch, filled with joy that Daisy is really here, that she is still a true artist, as talented as I remember. “I love it,” I say.
“Good.” Daisy closes the Strathmore pad. She puts her pencils away in a simple canvas case and begins to stand. There is a ballerina buoyancy to the way she moves. From legs akimbo to stretching upward in a blink. I try not to stare, rolling up the drawing and putting it in the bottom of the Yoyo.
“Well, that was a nice little college reunion on a patch of grass that stinks of piss.” Did it smell like piss?
To me, that grass is perfect. Daisy picks up her Loewe bag.
Is she leaving? Blowing away as fast as she breezed in?
She turns, looks back at me and Holden. “So? You gonna introduce us or what?”
I am taken aback by the question, as if until now I’ve regarded my baby as an appendage and not an actual person. “Oh yeah. This is Holden.”
Daisy peeks over her sunglasses to get a good look. He has wide olive eyes and a sweep of sandy hair. A beautiful baby.
“It was Roman’s grandpa’s name, and I always loved Catcher in the Rye, but I guess it’s sort of a weird name and Salinger got canceled.”
Daisy reaches to pick up Holden. “Who gives a fuck? It’s a dope name.
” Unlike with Penelope and the pediatrician, and, well, everyone, Holden doesn’t cry.
He melts into her arms, and I don’t try to stop her.
I hover my palms under his bum, expecting Daisy to be unsteady, but she is a natural.
She is holding Holden above her head, making silly faces and softly singing a Serge Gainsbourg song.
Holden is making his silly, googly-eyed giggle face that he only ever makes with me. “Je t’aime…”
Daisy is holding my baby and singing in French and smiling.
It’s the same smile that I had seared into my frontal lobe, the one that takes up her entire face.
The one that believes in me the way I used to believe in myself.
The one that has the exact impression of me that, at my youngest and most idealistic, I’d wanted to project.
I softly recite e.e. cummings, poetry suddenly back in my brain: “twice I have lived forever in a smile.”
Daisy looks at me.
I am folding the swaddle and packing up, still in Daisy’s shadow.
For those few golden minutes—the jazz and the slight trace of marijuana and the afternoon sun slipping behind the West Village—it feels like everything is perfect.
I want to say something profound, but all that comes out is “I am really happy to see you again.”