Chapter Forty-One #2
I rush upstairs and into the leather-paneled office to be alone. Two women, one body. Help me become somebody else.
I dig around in the desk drawers, looking for my own journals.
I find a Nokia prepaid phone. There’s only one contact: Roman.
I scroll through texts. Him: “I’m so stressed at work.
” Daisy: “Let me fuck the stress out of you.” I slam the phone shut.
I do a side-by-side comparison of Daisy’s journals and my own.
A levitating dungeon of debauchery. There is no denying it.
The handwriting is identical. I flip back to an early diary entry with the contact information of a pimp in Atlantic City.
His name?…Jersey. The full monochrome movie starts to play on rewind.
Jersey looked at me with such recognition when he said, “You need a professional.” Maybe he meant a psychiatrist, not a PI.
Amir, the in-house bounty hunter for the rich and powerful.
Even he couldn’t tell me anything more conclusive than saying Daisy isn’t dead, but she isn’t alive.
BeenVerified. Wheels spinning. Error. No Results Found.
I think of how, at work, Veronica had looked at a selfie of Daisy and Holden and said, “You look like twins in this one.” How Audrey called out “Daisy” as she was wheeled away.
How I’d spent months pushing the Yoyo around New York, sitting in the sandbox, AirPods always in, in deep conversation with Daisy.
The way you could always talk to yourself in New York, as long as you were with a baby or had your AirPods in.
How Daisy and I never really had conversations in front of the other moms. How she’d stood us up at the playground.
How so often, whenever I was at 527 Park, Daisy was somewhere else, doing something else.
I study the ancient stash of Adderall, prescribed by “Dr. Elaine Horowitz.” The Renoir. The answers.
On the Upper East Side, Dr. Horowitz’s secretary doesn’t even look at me. She just shakes her head, staring at a screen, and informs me that the doctor’s next availability is in six months. She can add me to a wait list and give me a call if there is a cancellation.
She squints, presumably at my chart. “And looks like the doctor made an exception and will accept your Blue Cross Blue Shield. But that’s going to require a hundred-and-fifty-dollar co-pay and it looks like you’d need to get a referral from your primary care physician for us to put this through your PPO. ”
I lean over the counter. I put both of my hands on her shoulders, not rough, just enough to get her to stop and look at me. I stare at her with a lunatic calm. “I don’t think you understand, Brenda. I need to see the doctor now.”
Fifteen minutes later, Dr. Horowitz is crossing her legs, uncomfortable. I don’t remember any of our sessions, but I know I feel safe. “I saw you prescribed my medication…and…I don’t know who else to talk to.”
I show her the journals, the handwriting.
“I’m so confused lately. I have these weird sensations.
Not full memories, more like flashes.” I take out the porn mags, the girl in the schoolgirl uniform.
I can’t deny that behind the sex-kitten cosplay and the hawkish nose, there is a resemblance.
I plant the image down on Dr. Horowitz’s desk, next to a delicate crystal vase of white irises. “Do you think this girl looks like me?”
Dr. Horowitz takes off her glasses. They dangle on a beaded necklace.
She doesn’t charge fifteen hundred dollars an hour so that she can look at a ripped page of Cum Drop City.
She swivels away from me, speaking softly into an intercom that looks straight out of the 1950s—a shrink who calls in barbiturates for housewives.
I stare at a framed photo of three Airedales on her desk.
“I need you to clear my afternoon…Yes…All of it…Thank you, Brenda.”
She turns back to me, and I know now that we go way back.
We’ve spent entire days together, talking.
The folds of her slim neck, her judgy tortoiseshell glasses, the soft, sunken skin of a woman who always eats lean protein for lunch and keeps a garden.
At first, I’d worked overtime to afford the co-pays.
But then I became Dr. Horowitz’s pet project, an anonymous case study in an article she published in a prestigious medical journal.
I hear the drip of the radiator. I’d never noticed it before and now it is suffocating. Like waterboarding. Like everything.
When Dr. Horowitz finally speaks again, I am drowning. “Emily. You’d been doing well. But we talked about this. Symptoms can reemerge postpartum. You were supposed to come back—regular visits after the baby.”
“A shrink? I can hardly make it to my physical therapist.”
Dr. Horowitz exhales, tightening her lips.
“What you’ve been experiencing, it feels real, but it’s like a fugue state.
Amnesic barriers in the hippocampus cause memory deficits.
It’s like pseudo memories, cognitive inhibition.
It’s very common for people with DID to have trouble determining if an event is actually part of their personal history, part of reality, or whether it’s something they’ve learned. ”
“ ‘Did’?”
“It’s short for dissociative identity disorder. You remember that.”
“I don’t remember anything.”
“You will. You need to be prepared for that.”
—
She was right. Several hours of talk and hypnotherapy and by the time I left her empty office, I started to remember, slowly at first and then all at once.
The flat black scribbles I’d read in Daisy’s journals?
Those were my stories, alive in vivid Bic ballpoint color.
It had been over fifteen years since I’d created Daisy, a symbol of indulgence, charm, the allure of the rich.
The nymph who resisted Apollo’s advances before being transformed into a laurel tree.
Fifteen years since I’d been desperate and climbed onstage in cutoffs and a Burrito Barn T-shirt.
Then Daisy came back. To help me cope with the crushing strangeness of new motherhood.
The loneliness and isolation, the loss of self like an aftertaste I couldn’t shake, the styrofoam flavor of tiny surfboard-shaped teething wafers.
Because maybe some things can never be erased.
Maybe they’ll always leave a rot that festers beneath the baby registry.
—
That night, Holden is so happy to be home, with his sing-along mobile and the solar system of glow-in-the-dark stickers that Roman stuck on his ceiling, making sure Aries, Orion, Hydra, hung accurately.
It occurred to me that this nine hundred square feet in Stuy Town is Holden’s universe.
After I count forward to three hundred and back, rocking Holden to sleep, I sit on the sofa holding my breath.
I forget what time Roman’s flight lands.
With the time difference, we’ve hardly talked.
I tell myself that if he came home before I fall asleep, I will tell him everything.
If he comes home after I drift off, I will go back to sleep.
I will live in the before times for one more night.
The sound of luggage, keys and cuff links tossed on the table.
I crack my eyes. What time is it in Australia?
“Yeah, babe. Missed ya. Sorry I bailed. It’s a proper shit show back home—my uncles and Lucas are out of work again.
He’s actually moved into Gigi’s, but my mom already put it on the market.
We might have to get a fucking restraining order…
” He’s talking so fast that he’s hardly looked at me.
“We met with a lawyer. Oh, and Belinda is pregnant again…” He stops.
He walks toward me, before he walks to the nursery, to the crib, to squeeze his favorite thigh, which is less chubby every day.
“Shit. I’m an arse. I haven’t even asked you what happened with your mam.
You took off to Texas fast. I missed you. ”
We hug. “We missed you, too.”
Again, he says how sorry he is for having to work so much. He walks into the bathroom. “Mam says she’s booking a flight to New York next month even though my sis is now saying she might be put on bed rest. I swear to fucking God, it’s her third kid. The whole family just keeps piling shit on Mam.”
“When do you think she’ll come visit?” I ask, trying to ignore that Daisy is there, spread-eagled on a chair. “Can you please fuck off?” I mouth.
“Yeah. No.”
I can’t look at Daisy, so I walk to the kitchen and dig around in a Target bag that Roman picked up on his way home.
Formula, diapers, two packs of organic banana and sweet potato Happy Baby puffs.
Not a grape or an IPA in sight. Roman comes out.
He starts to unbutton his shirt. Daisy stands behind him.
“Of course they shitcanned half the team while I was gone, and right before the P and G audit. I’d be gone, too, but I guess they need someone to crunch the numbers.”
Daisy is barefoot, sitting on the floor, her skirt spread wide. Sirens roar outside. “Hey, babe?” I say, a shadow of my voice. “We need to talk.”
Roman walks into the living room and looks out the windows. But there is nothing to see, just another siren.
Daisy rolls her eyes. “Does he ever listen to a word you fucking say?”
“Hey,” I say with more punch. “Can we talk?”
Roman turns to look at me, his eyebrows lifted. “What is it?”
But all I can say, eyeing the Target bag, is, “You got his favorite flavor.”
“Huh?”
“The Happy Baby puffs.”
“Figured we were out,” Roman says.
Daisy is gone. Roman sits next to me on the sofa. He flashes me a crooked smile that makes me wish he would take me right then. He rubs his finger against my wrist. I stiffen. “What’s up?” He picks up the remote. I take it out of his hand.