Chapter Forty
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All night, I read. My thoughts are in the air. Am I asleep? Am I awake? Am I suffering from a level of postpartum crazy that would make the Juju Bean moms look sane?
I’m in my bedroom in Texas, but I am also at the Landing Strip. I am making a porn in the San Fernando Valley. I am in Yalta. I am trapped in the hull of a yacht off the coast of Montenegro looking through a porthole at the stars. I count the hours, the minutes, until I can get back to New York.
Holden will be awake soon. You need to get some sleep. But you also need to find Daisy. You need to know that you didn’t make it all up. You need to make her take some responsibility. To undo all the damage she’s done.
I slam the journals shut. That isn’t my handwriting.
These aren’t my memories. I shut out all of it—the diary entries and the accompanying mementos (theater tickets, business cards, the cell phone of a concierge in Dubai) that spill out from the pages.
I tell myself that my mom never knew me.
She didn’t remember that I had a roommate.
She was wrong, cruel even, to say I’d been “confused.” She thinks I’m the one who dropped out of college?
Blood building up inside me. No. No. It couldn’t have been me.
I don’t have a thirty-seven-million-dollar condo.
I don’t have a chauffeured Mercedes and an endless supply of the Jane Birkin of baby bottles and trysts in a penthouse.
I can’t have sex. I can’t even climb subway stairs without it hurting.
I finally fall asleep, and when I wake up, the faint light of a half-moon breaks through the curtains.
The shadow of the oak tree outside. Roman is asleep in a floral chaise in front of a bay window.
Daisy, perched seductively on its arm, wearing the butterfly wings.
“You wouldn’t have found me if you didn’t need me,” she says.
“Shhhh. You’re going to wake him.”
Daisy runs her finger along Roman’s crotch. He squirms in his sleep.
“You’re sick.”
“I’m sick? You’re the one with the personality disorder.
You dreamed me up to cope with your bullshit.
What we built together, 527 Park, it saved your life, you said so yourself.
I solved every problem in your life, turned you into a mother.
A goddamn leader. The type of woman who other hos look up to.
The type of woman who doesn’t work all day at a sad cubicle job just so that you can pay somebody else to take care of your baby.
The type of woman who fights the fuck back. ”
It’s not true. “You made me invite all those moms over. I don’t even like other women. It’s your apartment—”
“Is it?” She looks at a fingernail.
“I didn’t imagine that you’re fucking my husband.”
“Somebody had to.” We both look at Roman.
“The first time I took him upstairs, he was afraid he’d hurt me.
But then I told him, I’m not pathetic, torn Emily.
Call me Daisy—and you can do whatever you want to me.
He was all sensitive at first but, I swear, it didn’t take long before he had his full big Aussie cock in me. ”
“Can you just stop? Don’t ever talk that way around my baby.” I bolt up, making sure Holden is still fast asleep. I want to cover his tiny ears.
“You mean our baby?”
Daisy runs her tongue alongside Roman’s neck, not quite making contact.
Then she crosses her legs, plucks a pencil from her hair, and feigns a nasal voice like Dr. Horowitz.
“The official name is dissociative identity disorder. A condition brought on by past trauma, a way to avoid horrific memories. It can cause blanks in memory, delusions, the formation of distinct multiple personalities.” She shakes her head in Holden’s direction. “Another thing to blame him for.”
“Don’t you dare blame him.”
“What? I didn’t tell you to stop taking your meds.
But you wanted a baby. There goes caffeine, pineapple, your pelvic floor, oh and a host of antipsychotics that had been working really well for a really long time.
” She uncrosses her legs. “I hope he’s worth it and he doesn’t grow up to be an asshole. ”
Daisy is telling me all this, but somehow, I already know it. I’d never much thought about having a baby, but once I got pregnant—and felt his little feet kicking against my insides—I would have done anything to birth a healthy baby. Breastfed the devil. Welcomed back my demons.
“This is a dream. I just need to wake up and you’ll be gone.” Please. Stop. Go.
“Em. Em. Em. You’ve never been more awake than when you are with me.
” Daisy stands. She picks up a tube of Jo Malone lotion off my bedside table, rubbing it on her neck and down her chest. “I’m the survivor.
I’m the hot one who is in control. You’re the sad, delicate flower who came running back to your childhood bedroom. ”
Daisy gets on the bed, straddling my legs. She puts her face against mine, her breath entering my mouth. How can it be true that we’re the same person when I feel her minty nicotine breath? When I look at her lips so close to my own?
“I protected you, just like I always did. Don’t you remember?
I curled up into a ball in the shower after that bachelor party, let the scalding water wash over me thinking of a Jean Rhys novel, so you didn’t have to.
I accepted a closet full of Dior in exchange for a weekend of gang banging at a Miami Beach compound, not sweet Emily.
And then when you hated your existence and had no place to hide and couldn’t fuck, I came back. ”
My phone vibrates and I wake up. Roman calling. The sun breaking through the lace curtains forming a doily pattern on the carpet. Holden starts to stir. It’s just the two of us. “Hello,” I say as if he could be a spam call.
“Gigi died,” he says.