Chapter Twenty-Eight
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Holden and I are waiting for Roman. I hand him the Itzy Ritzy rattle teether with a red fox on the end.
“Don’t these bitches know it’s Joan Didion’s Blue Nights season?
Time to put on a tweed blazer, take in the draining of the light—or I’m gonna knock that cold brew right out of your hands.
” Holden glares at the Tribeca moms. He lets out a groan, clearly agreeing with me.
According to Dr. Brooke, “At thirty-two weeks, your baby is busy, busy, busy, trying to talk with gestures, facial expressions, squeals, even stringing together some vowels and consonant sounds.”
One of the best things about having a baby in New York is that you can have entire conversations with yourself without anyone looking at you like you are crazy.
Even better, pop in your AirPods and people don’t even wonder.
I was just a new mom, keeping my baby stimulated with steady conversation, or talking on the phone to another mom between playdates and true-crime podcasts.
“Hey,” Roman says, breaking the spell. I look up.
Holden squeals at the sight of his dada.
He’s saying it all the time now, “Dada, Dada, Dada.” He still hasn’t said “Mama.” Dr. Brooke says this is normal.
“The baby still thinks that you are the same person.” Cyclops and all.
Why would you need another name for your own self?
Still, I tore my twat and had to suction my boobs into a torture device eighteen times a day, and Holden lights up and says “Dada.” The world just works that way.
“Hey. You look handsome.” If Roman had not been my husband and I saw him walking down the West Side Highway on a Wednesday afternoon, amid a sea of men in their flat, well-fitted pants, button-down shirts, no tie, I would think that somebody else’s husband was handsome.
He pecks my cheek and lifts Holden out of the Yoyo. Holden rubs a hand along Roman’s jawline. “Thanks. Where’s Daisy? I have to be back by two.”
Hello? What about your wife and baby, whom you never get to see?
Who share a small apartment with you and your turtle, who smelled particularly reptilian this morning?
“I don’t know. I’ve texted her, like, five times.
Let me call.” First ring, voicemail. Her velvety voice (me with strep), “Hey you’ve reached Daisy. You know what to do…”
“Should we just get lunch? Since we came downtown?” I ask.
He checks the time. He’s anxious to get back.
I wonder if I would need 527 Park if he’d had more than two weeks off work after I gave birth.
In those first weeks, when Sue broke it to us that she wouldn’t be able to come help, Roman had taken care of me.
We put Holden in his doughnut pillow between us in bed, binged a Vanderpump marathon as he slept, marveled at him when he opened his eyes, moved his fingers, as small and sweet as Tic Tacs.
I’d never needed Roman, or anyone, like I needed someone then.
All I remember is screaming in the bathroom, folded over my knees.
Holden screaming in his bassinet. Feeling unable to take care of him.
Dr. Weatherstone’s office telling me to just hold off until my six-week checkup.
They’ve already explained that the doctor can’t prescribe Percocet.
At night, I’d cradle Holden with one arm, attempt to breastfeed with the other, and browse websites, statistics.
Mothers die all the time in these early weeks.
They are mostly not white or privileged.
Article after article. Heavy bleeding. High blood pressure.
Infection. Sepsis. Self-harm. Psychosis. Critical Window. Danger Zone.
Roman puts Holden back in the Yoyo. They have the same nose, sturdy and solid, the same sweep of sandy hair.
But Holden has my eyes, my essence, which is to say he is restless and marvels at everything and enjoys Barry Manilow and would never drink iced coffee in late October.
“I could get a quick lunch,” Roman says. “Chopt?”
I grab the Yoyo out of his hands. “Veronica is already on my ass. I had to sneak out. I don’t want the same nasty-ass salad I eat every day.” Nasty-ass. I must have gotten that phrase from Daisy. I liked that we’d started to speak the same way.
Roman tries to be cool, but keeping your head down means not taking a long lunch with your family or taking personal calls. “Babe, I don’t have a lot of time.”
We end up at Le Pain Quotidien. I get an open-faced tuna sandwich.
Roman just points to a bowl, too harried to care if it’s quinoa or goat cheese.
I break up tiny pieces of a chocolate croissant and Holden’s baby mind is blown.
He’s got two front teeth coming in. It’s absurd how cute they are.
The world starting to happen to him, one bite at a time.
“Daisy is usually very reliable,” I say. “I don’t know what happened.”
“I don’t know, babe. She doesn’t seem that reliable.” He’s pissed.
“So she flaked on lunch—”
“It’s not just the lunch.”
“Are you trying to imply something?”
“I’m not trying.”
“Why don’t you just say it, then?”
“I don’t have time.”
“You don’t have time for what?”
“I don’t have time to tell you how fucking weird this whole situation is. It was fine when you were on leave and needed a friend, whatever, but now they’re alone together all day…”
“Yeah, I have a job, kind of like the one you’re rushing to get back to.
I’d love to quit…” We both know that I can’t quit.
We need the money and Roman needs to work twelve-hour days because if he lost his job, we’d lose our health insurance—and even if it isn’t exactly the Cadillac of coverage, it’s better than CObrA or Elevate’s subpar benefits.
“Well, you’d have more time for kombucha and napping pods,” Roman says.
“You think it’s funny that I’m finally taking care of myself?”
“No, I think it’s fucking terrifying.”
“You don’t get it. You get dressed, get beers, talk balance sheets—”
“Who even are you right now?”
“—You still get to be…you.”
“You never used to give a shit about any of that materialistic bullshit. What happened to the girl who used to drag me to open mic nights in Greenpoint and thought brunch was a capitalist scam and shared a fifth-floor walk-up with a mime and his Grindr dates, and wanted us to both quit our jobs so we could ride motorbikes around Cambodia?”
I wait for him to finish and then I say, “She bled out in childbirth.”
The food arrives. I smile too brightly at the waiter, then let it fall the second he’s gone.
I can’t tell Roman that the only good thing I’ve had since I had Holden is the thing I have with Daisy, with the community we’ve built at 527 Park.
Daisy isn’t some kind of childcare bargain basement.
She is a blessing. Not just to me, but to Holden, to all the moms and babies who have found refuge in that Sing Sing for the superrich.
He should thank me. I found another way.
Holden has free quality childcare, stimulating classes, social interaction, wooden Montessori toys—all the milks.
Roman touches my hand, barely there, like he isn’t sure he should. “I didn’t know it was that bad.”
“Yeah, well, you wouldn’t.”
He picks around at his salmon bowl, does his Roman thing, trying to find a solution.
“Maybe my mom could come, if Gigi…” He trails off.
Two weeks after Roman went back to work, he flew to Melbourne to say goodbye to Gigi.
That’s when I really started my Daisy search—when the days bled into nights and I was all alone with a newborn who never napped, a pump that felt like an iron lung.
Throbbing pain. A renovation on my head.
Seven months later, Gigi was still slowly dying, and I’d still be unraveling if I hadn’t found Daisy.
Roman has that look on his face again, a chamber I’m not allowed to enter.
We feel too sick with guilt to ever say it aloud, but I know that he wants his grandmother to die.
We both do. But she won’t die, and Sue couldn’t live with herself if she wasn’t at her mom’s side when it happened. So here we are.
The tension between us lifts as quickly as it came.
That is when I notice Roman noticing me.
He is looking at me in his Levi’s, which I folded up and cinched with a brown leather belt, balloon pants that hang just beneath my hip bones.
On top, I’ve got on a holey rugby jersey that he’s had since college, tied tight with a scrunchie in the back.
He is looking at me in a different way. He is looking at me like he wants to plow me hard right there on the communal table over the quiche lorraine and tuna tartines.
“You look like a teenage rugby thug,” he says. “It’s hot.”
I wink at him. The fight is forgotten.
On the way back to his office, we park at a pocket-sized playground wedged between two office buildings.
For a moment, Roman forgets the time. He places Holden at an activity board bolted to the playground wall, showing him how to twist the jumble of bright gears, the sliding beads through a maze, until they solve the puzzle.
They’re both locked in fierce focus, Holden still babbling “Dada. Dada.” One thing about Roman is that he is good with his hands.
He built an actual working drawbridge when he was seven that Sue has assiduously preserved in the backyard, so that his own son could play on it one day.
If Roman weren’t an accountant, he’d make bespoke furniture in a shed in the Hudson Valley, or somewhere even farther afield. Maine? Appalachia?
I watch the two of them together, and for the first time, I see that Holden has inherited this gift—and what a gift to inherit. To be able to fix anything. To solve the puzzle. To be able to get back to the basics. To work with your hands. Something no algorithm can do.
Roman looks up, startled. “Shit. What time is it?” He checks his phone. “I was supposed to be back ten minutes ago.”