Chapter Thirty-Six
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The next morning, when Roman leaves for work, I throw some of Holden’s favorite toys and pajamas and diapers into the leather tote that I bought at the Brooklyn Flea.
Before we leave, I take a quick look back at the nine-hundred-square-foot apartment, at the stack of smut hidden under Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site.
When we walk outside to get an Uber to LaGuardia, Daisy is standing in an alley at the side of the courtyard. I notice the Mercedes idling outside the complex. I speed up, trying to walk right past her. “Stay the fuck away from us.”
She takes my arm. “Can we just talk about this, please?”
I yank myself away. “Talk about what? You’re a nympho psycho cunt. You always were.” I pull the shade over the Yoyo to try to shield Holden. I walk faster, pretending Daisy doesn’t exist. Pretending she never existed. “I wish you’d never found me.”
Daisy starts to laugh. She is standing there, in the shadow of the redbrick Bolshevik buildings of Stuy Town, and laughing so hard that I can’t help but stop. I turn and look at her, show her how badly she’s hurt me, how she’s hurt Holden, whom she claimed to love. “What’s so goddamn funny?”
“I didn’t find you. You found me. You found me because you needed me. You watched eighty hours of porn and scoured every issue of Beaver Hunt, looking for any hint of me. You are the one who left your newborn to frequent strip clubs…”
“I wouldn’t say ‘frequent.’ ”
“You found that pimp in AC and harassed my grandma and hired a lawyer and put a private investigator on me. Because you needed this.”
“Yeah? I needed you to ride my husband? TO RUIN MY FUCKING LIFE?”
“Oh, I didn’t just ride him. We fucked all kinda ways. He must’ve come six times yesterday, five the day before. I guess it was all built up on account of, you know, you. He really is a superb lay, Em. Very giving. You should try it sometime.”
That is when I punch the living shit out of Daisy. She is shocked, even though I can’t imagine this is the first time she’s been punched. I look at my knuckles. Daisy’s blood. She touches her face, feels if anything is broken, but she isn’t done.
“That make you feel better? You’re welcome. You went searching for me because you needed to feel something. You needed to feel alive, and you needed me to do it. Just like you needed me to save your sad broke ass when you had no friends in Texas.”
I get in Daisy’s face. I want to hurt her like she’s hurt me. “When you called me, strung out, a pathetic whore begging for heroin, I shouldn’t have called your stepdad. I shouldn’t have tried to save you. I should’ve let you die.”
Daisy gives me one last glance with those big eyes of hers, the ones that really saw me. “Bye, Em. Maybe I’ll see you in another fifteen years.”
My heart is racing so fast, it has burst out of my chest, a beating mess on the cracked asphalt with the sidewalk chalk.
I need to get away, to protect Holden. I try to whisk him away, but before I can, Daisy leans her head into the Yoyo to say goodbye.
I am nauseous again, seeing her so close to my son.
I try to push her off, to get us far away, but when I lean down, I hear it.
Holden is looking at Daisy’s smile—that smile—and for the first time in his little life, he says, “Mama.”