“We love you, too, Ma,” Roman said. “Miss you,” I added, and more pure truth couldn’t possibly travel through a spotty FaceTime connection.
Chapter Eight
• • • • •
The Royal Robson Ranchin Katy, Texas, outside Houston, was neither royal nor a ranch. But the high-end retirement community did have the feel of a country club for the aged, complete with tennis courts, a putting green, and a petting zoo. Goat yoga had reached Texas. I’d called around to neighbors, family friends. Toward the end of our freshman year, Queenie took Daisy to lunch at a tearoom with cheese cookies and cinnamon rolls. Daisy wore a floral romper that made her look eleven. I told her this and she said we are like onions. Eighteen, but also, inside, eleven, and twelve, and seven. Sometimes we throw a tantrum, because a toddler is still in there, too, somewhere. Daisy came back with a warm cinnamon roll for me in her backpack.
Queenie had advanced dementia and had lived at Robson for seven years. After Daisy’s grandpa Popo died, Queenie had tried to hold on to the Colonial Revival with the wraparound porch and the giant oak trees on Figueroa Street for as long as she could. She kept Daisy’s room perfectly intact, the canopy bed, the journals with little silver locks, the crimping iron and stacks ofSeventeenmagazine, thinking maybe she would come home, get clean, sleep for a month. But thenQueenie took a bad fall and Daisy’s mom decided she needed to be in a home.
Queenie had a corner suite with a Mexican Talavera vase filled with silk bluebonnets. She had Daisy’s art on the walls. I recognized the paintings immediately—abstract expressionist splashes of color, evocative pops of shapes and textures on top of vague figures etched in charcoal. I brought yellow roses and pralines and told the front desk that I was family. Queenie still exuded the class and posture of a debutante, sitting in a rocking chair under a quilt. It was a real feat to behold, that she could be suffering from advanced dementia in a senior home in the Houston sprawl and still, somehow, look like Helen Mirren.
“Emily…Emily…” Queenie said, searching. “We had an Emily in the family.” I smiled. Everyone had an Emily in the family. I was cursed with one of those 1990s names.
“When was the last time you saw Daisy?” I asked.
Queenie shook her head. I poured her a glass of water. She took a sip. “Who?”
There was a blankness behind Queenie’s eyes. It made me sad, how all of us, if we’re lucky, grow old and forgetful and nobody cares.
“I see my grandbaby everywhere,” Queenie said, staring out the window. I glimpsed a woman in a cashmere set and pearls leading an old man around.
“Has she been to visit lately?”
I stood, cracked the little floral book with handwritten addresses, snapping a quick photo of the page with family contacts. Mostly landline numbers and hotmail.com emails. I wrote my contact information on a slip of paper and left it there, in case Daisy checked in or visited. “Anything you can tell me? Is she still a, um, dancer? I want to help.”
“She moved up east,” Queenie said. In Texas “up east” could mean almost anything—New Jersey, Boston, Chicago.
“Do you know where? I tried Atlantic City, but that was a dead end.”
My desperation washed over Queenie with the gush of the ceiling fan. She looked right past my question, took a yellow diamond ring off her finger, placed it in my hand. “Sell it. Get yourself something nice. Whatever you need.”
I studied the ring. A family heirloom. It looked expensive. I tried to give it back. “I can’t take this,” I said, uneasy. Why hadn’t Queenie just given the ring to Daisy years ago? I remembered how badly she’d needed money. How I’d smuggled food out of the cafeteria when her meal plan got cut off. How we took her gold locket—the one with a photo of Daisy and her mom, looking identical as little girls—to a pawn shop so that she could buy secondhand books.
Queenie insisted. “I said to take the damn thing.”
An aide peeked her head in the room. “Everything okay, Mrs. Laramie?” But she just stared out the window. The aide walked inside, straightened her blanket.
“Hi. I’m just leaving,” I said. “She must be tired. We’ve been catching up for a while.” I put the ring on my finger and whispered in Queenie’s ear. “I promise you, you have my word, I will find Daisy and give this to her. I will get her back to you.” She smelled like Holden, baby powder, and Aquaphor. I kissed her head. And then I left.
Chapter Nine
• • • • •
I paused in thebedroom doorway to watch Holden sleeping on Roman’s chest. They had the same demure snore, sandpaper on a floorboard. I stood in the doorway savoring this chorus, the sight of their chests moving together, waves at low tide. The moment was abruptly cut short when I remembered Dr. Brooke’s warnings about co-sleeping, sudden death, suffocation, SIDS, overheating. Danger Zone. The sleepy father who dozes off, then wakes to find his infant blue. Two boys, beautiful, napping, only one wakes up. Dr. Brooke warned that even if nothing catastrophic happened, your child would never grow up to be an independent adult. Would allowing Holden to nap on his dad’s chest mean that he’d be sleeping on our sofa posting on Reddit and playingHaloin his boxer shorts into his thirties? I couldn’t risk it.
I lifted Holden and thrust him over my shoulder. His body sank against mine, warm and settled. We were both home. I moved a wombat, sat in the rocking chair in his nursery, settling Holden on my collarbone. I kneaded my aching breasts, trying to quiet the thrum. Holden softened into my skin. I wondered if this was what all those marsupials felt like, their babies in pouches. We spent the rest of the night like that, drifting in and out of sleep. Holden, fussy andhungry. Me, grateful, after a day away, just wanting to be food again, but my breast milk never did come on demand. “You deserve better, bud,” I whispered in his ear, brushing his head. “My body’s a lemon, my brain’s scrambled eggs, my bank account’s nonexistent, and I can’t even give you a meal.” That was when the milk finally gushed out into the pumps, more than I’d ever produced. Holden drank…at 11:19…and 12:04…and 2:33…and 4:47…and 5:37…until his lips and cheeks were full and rosy. His lashes fluttering. We both fell asleep, the love in that room scaring me with its crushing weight. We were one koala, nourishing itself.
At 7:17 a.m., Roman pecked me on the forehead. I inhaled his scent, Old Spice and Brylcreem. “The little man slept like a champ…” It’s as if we existed in different worlds. My labor, a dream he forgot about when he woke up. “How was Squeaky?” he asked, wrestling around.
“Queenie,” I corrected him. I didn’t even have to open my eyes to know. “Your wallet’s on the kitchen island,” I said. “She’s gotten so old. It was sad. I couldn’t really get through.”
“Well, babe, it was a bold move.” Roman grabbed his wallet, his eyes scanning a credit card bill. The flashing red balance: $13,942.17. His face tightened. “Sort of like trying to start a family if you aren’t a fucking billionaire.”
I had the sudden urge to grab on to his pant leg. Even when I was a girl, I was terrible at making people stay. My dad. Daisy. Even the basset hound we inherited from the neighbors. I never felt strong enough to stand in the way of the world’s gravitational pull. If you want to chase the neighbor’s bichon frise into a ditch, who am I to stop you? But I couldn’t keep anything inside anymore. “Don’t go,” I said, trying not to cry. “Not yet.”
“We’ve got an all-hands with Asia. But tell me all about your trip tonight?”
Tonight? By tonight, my brain would be calcified, back into mommy-and-me mode. I will have forgotten entirely how to have an adult conversation. Roman opened the door and left. A swell of construction dust blew open my “Daisy” file. I went to the bathroom to pee, to clean up the blood that flows every night. Nothing to worry about, they always say. But it felt thicker that day, more gelatinous. A color dark like port wine. I started to worry. I searched for my phone to ask the internet. Wait, Dr. Weatherstone told me to never ask the internet. I started to text Sue, then I stopped. How to tell my mother-in-law about blood clots in a text? Holden started to wail.
