Chapter Thirty-Four
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The next day, I drop Holden off downstairs with Marcela.
Holden loves the soft-play center lately, lifting himself over blocks and bouncing on an inflatable purple zebra.
(“Your baby is at the ideal age to enjoy push and riding toys.”) I watch him hold himself up, studying himself in a fun-house mirror.
Marcela comes up behind with a bubble machine.
I grab his hands in mine and we laugh, trying to swat the soapy clouds.
I kiss him from behind and he clutches a chunk of my hair.
I get a glimpse of myself in the baby mirror.
I didn’t realize how long and untamed my hair has grown.
I don’t have time to straighten my curls anymore.
Between the natural, frizzy waves, the sleep deprivation, and Roman’s clothes, I must look so untamed. A feral avatar of my old self.
I go upstairs to Daisy’s condo. Viktor is overseeing the installation of heaters on the mezzanine. I search the apartment, trying to find Daisy so that we can welcome everyone. She calls out, “Em? That you?”
I find her in a guest bedroom. “It’s a full house. You ready?”
I never noticed how beige and soulless it was in there, the Z Gallerie of luxury bedrooms. Daisy sits at the end of the bed, touching herself just a little between the legs.
She didn’t seem to ever leave the building anymore.
She stands to put on a fresh pair of terry-cloth hotel slippers. “You know what? I think we’re good.”
“ ‘We’re good’? What does that mean? Don’t the new moms need to be reminded that motherhood didn’t erase them? That it’s okay to ask for help?”
“Eh. I dunno, Em. It’s such a downer. Maybe we just try to enjoy ourselves, shall we?” she says with a prickly tease. “In the safest, most self-care-y way possible.”
Is she making fun of me? “So, what? We don’t even have a message? Don’t even pretend to give a shit? This is just some levitating dungeon of debauchery now?”
“Feel free to go home, Em, if you’re not getting what you need here.” She smirks. “No judgment.”
The veiled threat that she’d banish me, strip me of a community whose power rests on our commitment, sends a chill through my entire body. As long as 527 Park existed, I needed to be an integral part of it.
Daisy lies back on the bed, playing with the tassel on a throw pillow, her mind somewhere else.
Maybe upstairs in the penthouse? I sit at the end of the bed and grab her ankle, her skin smooth and snowy.
“I’m sorry about last night. Olivia—it just, it freaked me out.
I don’t want to shut it down. This is home. You’re home.”
Daisy crunches her neck up to look at me and smiles. “Good.” Then she lets her head fall back down and she pats the side of the bed for me to lie down next to her.
Daisy recites my words. “ ‘A levitating dungeon of debauchery.’ That is so poetic. You have to write that one down, Em. Write it all down.” She’s morphed from bossy to flirty in seconds, just like she did when we lived together. “You’re so talented.”
She pops up with the levity of an inflatable bop ball and walks to a dresser, retrieving something and walking back to the bed, tender again.
“I’m headed upstairs, but here, this will help.
” Daisy knows that I stopped pumping months ago.
She hands me an Adderall. As if she’s done it a million times, Daisy splits the blue pill in two with her front teeth, slurping down one half and offering me the other on the tip of her tongue.
I pluck it from her mouth. She hands me mint tea in a clay mug shaped like one of those Easter Island faces.
“To wash it down.” A David Bowie song playing in the background.
It’s exactly what we did in the dorm room, only with a higher thread count.
Even when Daisy infuriated me, she still had a hold over me.
She’d pulled me out of myself, given me the courage to not let random men drop doors on me or look at my body.
Maybe she was right about this, too. After all, Holden was almost thirty-six weeks.
Juju Bean says everything changes at thirty-six weeks.
They start to crawl and then cruise. They become mobile.
(“Your baby still needs you but is becoming more independent.”) At thirty-six weeks, they start to leave you.
Maybe I didn’t need affirmations anymore.
Maybe I just needed Adderall and a peppermint tea and a quiet office with emerald-green walls and Japanese pens.
Daisy and I walk next door to the study.
I sit at the desk, and before I forget I write that line down.
From there, I feel the rush, like waking up after an afternoon nap in a Mexican hacienda, except it’s happening inside me.
“Happy writing,” Daisy whispers in my ear before she vanishes.
The words start to flow. Pages and pages of my notebook filled, until I am immemorial, exhausted.
The sun is getting low and the pill is wearing off and I don’t know what I will do with all these words, but they now exist on pages that were blank before. Everything was blank before Daisy.
I am spent, my body wrecked in a series of run-on sentences.
I walk downstairs, but Holden is busy sculpting a miniature Rodin in his clay class.
So I go back to the office. I crack open the envelope from Veronica to do some actual work.
The Adderall is a distant memory. I have the attention span of a baby looking in a mirror.
I drink a matcha with an extra shot and stare at the stack of grant letters.
It strikes me as ironic, ridiculous even, to be pleading for twenty thousand dollars for Roofs for the Displaced, forty thousand dollars for the Radiant Smile Foundation, fifteen thousand dollars for Happy Cat Trust, from a thirty-seven-million-dollar condo.
That is the last thing I remember.
I must have fallen asleep in the grant letters.
I bolt awake like a passenger on an airplane that hit turbulence.
The condo is empty. Marcela texted that she took Holden home and put him to bed.
She’d stay there until Roman or I got back.
She sent a photo of Holden, his chupete and the gray quokka that Grandma Sue sent in her latest care package. His sing-along mobile rotating above.
I check the time. Almost eight. I text Roman that I got stuck on some grants and will be home soon.
I haven’t felt an Adderall high or crash or written that many words since I was nineteen.
But I am not nineteen again. I need to leave.
To go home. To my baby and my husband, who brought me spicy noodles and offered to take the night shift.
I gather my things and walk to the elevator.
Claire is just…there, like she grew out of the wallpaper.
“There you are,” she says, her smile a little too stretched. “How’d the writing go?”
How dim is she to ask a writer how the writing went? “You’re here late,” I say.
“Yeah. Daisy asked me to stay and lock up.”
“She did?” Why couldn’t Daisy lock up herself? And why did anyone need to lock up with twenty-four-hour security downstairs? We never locked up before.
“But I can stay? If you need something else—” There’s a weird eagerness in her voice. Not helpful. Hungry.
“All good.”
The elevator arrives. Claire gets on. She holds the door open. “Going down?” she says, a forcefulness behind the pep. I want to shake her off my leg.
“You know what? You take this one. I forgot that I have to ask Daisy something.”
Claire’s smile wobbles. Just for a second. Then her hand moves—fast—trying to swat mine away from the up button. “Oh, I think she went out.” But the elevator doors are already closing on her outstretched arm.
“Claire? Go home.”
The doors close. Silence. A surge of discomfort as I wait for the next elevator.
The security cameras watching. Ignore it.
Go home. It’s nothing. Just awkward timing.
Too much Adderall. Too little food. Except then I remember my cell phone.
Still plugged in, charging in the kitchen. I go back inside.
When I unplug my phone, I notice the iPad that Bianca passes around for everyone to sign.
When I pick it up, it unlocks. No password?
No facial recognition? I swipe through a standard nondisclosure agreement, getting to a Personal Liability Waiver.
I swipe through each page, my heart punching holes through my chest with each disclaimer.
I am voluntarily participating in the activities at 527 Park…I understand the risks associated…physical and psychological injury, pain, suffering, illness, disfigurement, temporary or permanent disability, economic loss or death.
I keep swiping, eventually landing on archived security camera footage.
It’s Brit, hurrying out of 527 Park with Quinn, looking over her shoulder, spooked.
Molly’s voice slices through me—“If she’s trapping you here against your will, I can help.
” All at once, I am dizzy, flooded with warnings…
The gut pulls that I’d ignored, dread in my chest. Roman drinking his IPA.
“You’re not leaving my son with a hooker…
” and “I just don’t think it’s a good idea…
” Jersey, making circles at his temple, warning me that Daisy is not well in the head.
“Jesus willing, she comes out of it on the other side.”
What if Daisy hasn’t come out of it on the other side?
What if she’s come out of it as the madam of a commune of unstable moms who’ve become embroiled in whatever she’s selling?
Who’ve become so dependent on a luxury condo tower and quality childcare that we’ll do whatever she asks of us?
Ignore the decay beneath the decor? Drink all the matcha latte Kool-Aid?
Had I mistaken safety for a cage? Nobody joins a cult.
They follow a friend into the woods and wake up too far from the road to turn back.
It’s this alarm that tells me not to go home.
The one that tells me that if I can move mountains to locate Daisy, if I can wean myself off Percocet while keeping a tiny human alive, if I can blackmail my boss and keep my flex spending, and collapse my stroller on the M14 crosstown bus, then I can do anything. I can stop being afraid.
I can find out what happens in the penthouse.
—
You need a secure code to take the elevator to the ninety-eighth floor, to the eighty-two-million-dollar condo allegedly owned by Atlantis Investments LLC.
But due to red tape, the developer hasn’t yet installed the same high-security system in the stairwells.
Turns out, fire safety rules even apply to anonymous billionaires.
So I walk upstairs and open the door. The stairwell spits me right into the staff quarters.
I try several doors, eventually landing in a mechanical room.
Grainy CCTV security footage on a slight delay from the main bedroom shows Daisy’s naked back.
She is on top, riding a man. I can’t see his face.
Is he the Greek? Another client? Is she running a brothel up here?
The black cube spits me out into a wine room.
From there, I enter the 8,255-square-foot unit’s sterile kitchen.
I wade deeper inside, past six bedrooms, a library, a gym. Why does anyone need six bedrooms? I walk down a long white hallway toward the main bedroom, a cantilevered glass box floating high above Manhattan.
What exists after that lives in my mind only in moans, and that is where I will leave it.
By the time I finally force myself to enter the bedroom, it is empty.
The Egyptian cotton sheets tangled. La Perla panties crumpled on the floor.
The shower running. An urge overcomes me, pulls my body closer to the marble bathroom and then inside.
It’s all steamed up. But behind the mist, and the smell of eucalyptus oil, I can make out a man’s nude figure.
He is alone. No trace of Daisy. I walk closer until I see it.
I walk closer until everything that came before that is gone, washed away, and there is only one thing that remains. “Daisy, that you, babe?”
It is Roman, naked, in the shower.