We lost touch. I heard she moved to California to make adult art-house films. I blamed myself. If anyone should’ve understood, been able to talk her back, had patience and empathy, it was me. I tried to find her a couple of times over the years, through family, friends, butnobody knew anything. Late nights, I’d stay awake scouring the internet, but whenever I thought I’d finally caught a glimpse of Daisy on some sick corner of the web, I’d click and it’d be gone. She’d be gone.
I graduated early and moved to New York. I did open mic nights. I got a ridiculous nose ring that got infected and lasted a month. I was broke and free and mostly happy. Sometimes, on my way home to the East Village apartment that I shared with Paul and his boyfriend, Tyrone, I would walk past the Cooper Union School of Art, stare at the students leaving with their portfolios and acrylic-stained Dickies, and imagine Daisy and me happy and sharing a cigarette at the big black cube at Astor Place on a warm Thursday night. I’d blink and the image would be gone.
And the summer several years ago when all anyone could talk about was the serial killer who was targeting sex workers on the South Shore of Long Island, all I could think about was Daisy. I’d read everything I could find about the victims, looking for some unidentified girl who fit Daisy’s description. All of them did, and none of them did.
Then I stopped wondering. I stopped doing open mic nights. I got a job in a cubicle in Midtown East. Michelle, who briefly worked in an adjacent cubicle before she moved to San Francisco to take a job at a startup that sold dog food, invited me to a party in Brooklyn. It was March and snowing and I didn’t want to go, but I did. I spotted an Australian guy pouring another girl a glass of Yellow Tail in a red plastic party cup. We went home together, and even though we never talked about it, we both knew we’d never be apart. We didn’t so much fall for each other as melt into each other. Those early days with Roman felt like a hot shower that I couldn’t drag myself out of. We both loved the Pogues and spicy noodles and bad reality TV. We both lived a long way from home and had left part of ourselves behind. Wegot an apartment. We got married on a Monday at the New York City Marriage Bureau, had champagne and eggs in a puff pastry at Balthazar, and then we both went back to work. We had a baby. We named him Holden. Now we worry about our 401(k)s and we are tired. Always, so tired.
I am a member of a mom app calledJuju Bean, “a platform for like-minded women to meet and share interests beyond their children.” It’s basically a dating app for lonely moms. I wear jeans with an expandable waist. I am interviewing caregivers so that I can go back to work in a cubicle in Midtown East, so that I can afford to pay someone else to spend days at the park with my baby, which is what I will wish I were doing as I sit at my cubicle. Maybe in another era I’d leave my baby with cousins, aunts, grandmothers—children raised by many arms. In this one, there are wait lists, security fobs, day cares tucked between office lobbies.
—
Elena pretended not to notice the stack of smut. And I’m not talking aboutPenthouseorPlayboy. I was twelve weeks postpartum, interviewing nannies over a stack ofBeaver Hunt. Juggs. Swank. Lolita. Gent.A German publication titled, inexplicably,Purple People. The last candidate, who came highly recommended, took one look at the porno mags, smiled, touched the crucifix around her neck, and got the hell out.
I’d placed Post-it notes in the magazines, spent months of sleepless nights cataloging, searching. I didn’t want to lose all my hard work just to keep up appearances. I only worked on this project when Holden was asleep, which was most days and hardly any nights. When he started to stir, cracking his eyes or letting out his little cooing sound, I’d tuck the titles underGoodnight, Goodnight, Construction Siteand Richard Scarry’sCars and Trucks and Things That Go.
Roman was too tired when he came home from work to pay much attention. If my poring over skin flicks and porno rags kept me content and stopped me from nagging him,Purple Peopleit was. I’d ignore that he got home after eight, smelling like a sports bar, carrying a bodega bag of overripe grapes and a six-pack of IPA—without ever asking if I needed anything. He’d ignore that I had my head buried in a stack of hard core every time our baby slept.
—
It was an obsessive missing person research project, but how was I supposed to explain that to anyone else? No one would understand that at the same time I had a baby, I also developed an obsession with finding Daisy. An aching burn that I should have been with Daisy this whole time. That I should have never let her vanish. I want to tell her all this, but it has been fifteen years. Fifteen years since we occupied the same world, the same soul. Today, according to the last reference I found on Daisy’s Myspace page on Wayback, before she took it down, she goes by Jacki (with ani). She didn’t appear to have an OnlyFans account, but @OrchidEnigma posted a hazy screenshot of “Jacki” in what looked like a peep show. Or a circus? Hard to tell. There was an elegance to Daisy, a reflection of the landed Texas gentry she was born into. A River Oaks girl. The granddaughter of one of Houston’s upstanding families. Junior League. Quail hunting. Women who put their face on to check the mail. The Cattle Baron’s Ball. Denim and diamonds. Not Jacki with ani. Even though my research suggested she went by a different stage name now, I couldn’t think of her as anything but Daisy.
I hadn’t wanted to tell her that I moved to New York or that I met an Australian at a party in Brooklyn and got married at the New York City Marriage Bureau and loved him more than I loved myself. But when I was pregnant—just enough to wonder what I’d gotten myselfinto—I wanted to tell her so badly. I emailed an old Yahoo account, but it bounced back. I tried Daisy’s 281 phone number, but it now belonged to a guy who managed coin laundromats in Montrose.
In addition to the adult magazines I bought on eBay, I am also organizing an epic collection of excavators and secondhand Magna-Tiles in our two-bedroom apartment in Stuyvesant Town, a Bolshevik-style collection of hulking redbrick towers largely populated with other people who moved to New York in their twenties to be broke and happy and get nose rings, and who stayed entirely too long.
—
I had a baby and all of a sudden I started to think about Daisy. I had a baby and I wondered if Daisy had babies. I had a baby and I realized that she had been someone’s baby when she stepped onstage in Lucite stilettos, and called me wanting heroin, and showed up at my twentieth birthday in Wet Seal begging to be saved. I had a baby and I needed, desperately, in my bones, to find out what had happened to Daisy.
Chapter Two
• • • • •
The moms on theJuju Beanapp talked a lot about “mom brain.” This ranged from harmless forgetfulness to full-blown delirium. One mom could not, for the life of her, think of the name of that guy who starred inTop Gun; another reported her car stolen at the Westfield mall in Paramus when she’d just forgotten where she parked it. We were all losing our minds. Paranoia, delusion, mood swings. Half of us had gotten MRIs, convinced we had a brain tumor. The neurologist always said the same thing—“You’re just a new mother.”
One mom physically assaulted a Target employee who told her they were sold out of Happy Baby teething wafers. Another admitted that she had full conversations with the gadgets in her son Aiden’s nursery. She told the Halo SleepSure Monitor and the Hatch Rest sound machine things she’d never told anyone. Then there was @BoyMomBrynn, who misplaced her cell in the microwave. She didn’t find it until she tried to heat up Gerber baby cereal and it exploded. Luckily, she’d been in the bedroom. The baby was fine. She posted a photo of the open-concept kitchen in her Cobble Hill co-op apartment. It looked like Fallujah. @EatinVeganMama warned us all never to heat a baby’s food in the microwave. “The radiation causes autism!”
Growing up, I’d never imagined myself as a mom, and my mother always assumed that if it happened, it would be an accident and we’d have to drive to Mexico. Maybe if we’d been on speaking terms, I could’ve asked her about the night terrors, the blood clots, the engorged nipples. She could’ve assured me that she never breastfed and I turned out fine…well, basically fine. Instead, I became close to @MamaBearlyHangingOn, who thought my real name was @EstherGreenwood. She confessed that after every two a.m. feeding, she’d roam her suburban streets. She’d leave some breast milk out in a cat bowl on the front step of an abandoned home, a ritual to appease the devil. To be clear, she knew this was deranged. She wasn’t even Catholic. But at twenty-seven weeks, after she’d recently watchedRosemary’s Baby, she started to bleed heavily. The ob-gyn told her it was a miscarriage and to get to the ER immediately for a D&C to flush out her uterus. She prayed. Begged that her baby would live. The scan showed a heartbeat, but the doctor warned of “intrapartum death.” @MamaBearlyHangingOn started going to church. She cut a deal. An offering to Satan for a healthy baby.
A whole society of hormonal weirdos, sharing stories about leaky nipples and pelvic-floor therapy. (“It’s finger rape!!!” @Mothera417 wrote, with aHandmaid’s TaleGIF. “Stop screaming,” @ZenMamaLlama replied.) If I couldn’t admit to this group that all I thought about—aside from keeping my tiny, perfect human alive—was finding the exotic dancer who I roomed with my freshman year in college, then who could I tell?
I didn’t even know if Daisy was still a sex worker. Her grandmother had dementia. Her mother didn’t return my calls. Maybe she’d gotten clean, turned her life around. Maybe her mom’s latest husband had paid to send her to a spa-like rehab facility. Maybe she met an Exxon executive named Brad and lives in a leafy suburb with a three-car garage. Maybe they buy art on cruise ships. Maybe she has a couple of kids whom she drives to soccer because football causesconcussions. Maybe she does Pilates and is on theJuju Beanapp: @DallasMomDaisy. My finger toggled over the message button. I posted the photo of Daisy in butterfly wings.
“I’m looking for someone very close to my heart. Does anyone recognize this girl, Daisy Laramie, last seen in Central Texas, but possibly living in California?”
Then I hit send.
Chapter Three
• • • • •
“What’s in Atlantic Cityagain?” Roman asks over the bang of the neighbor’s gut renovation. The jackhammers start at seven a.m. and don’t let up until five p.m., per Stuy Town rules. Roman just took a shower so long it turned the whole apartment into a hammam. He’s shaving now. When was the last time I showered, much less shaved? Can’t remember. I finish feeding Holden and smother every part of his edible face in smooches. “Good morning, nose nugget. Good morning, squish-bean forehead. Good morning, cheeks so delicious I’m reporting you to the NYPD.”Bang!A hammer practically on our heads. A gust of dust. “Good morning, potential asbestos.” I lay him on a mat and hand him the NogginStik Developmental Light-Up Rattle, a multi-activity toy that encourages brain activity and bolsters early milestones, “setting your baby up for life.” It looks like a plastic stick figure of a circumcised penis with a blue light-up head. I spent most of the night awake with Holden, going deep into aJuju Beanside group devoted entirely to Dr. Brooke. Dr. Brooke is a child psychiatrist with three children and five million followers on Instagram. She never wears makeup and is a regular at the 92nd Street Y. She advises that rather than putting our babies down with a pacifier, we swaddle them againstour chests, preferably with our own hair, and hand them a healing crystal. Dr. Brooke has these very specific developmental milestones that we should all memorize. According to this Dr. Brooke subgroup, at twelve weeks old, “your baby needs to grip objects to develop early STEM skills.” Holden has been gripping objects for at least a week, clearly destined for one of those gifted magnet schools with high-achieving kids who play the cello. And because Dr. Brooke says my “curious cutie needs constant stimulation,” I turn on YouTube on the TV. A forty-something woman in pink denim overalls, pink T-shirt, matching headband, and a concerning level of perkiness is cooing into the camera. “Can you be a crab?” “Look at me, I’m a starfish!” I can’t tell theJuju Beancrowd that I sometimes plop my three-month-old in front of YouTube. That might be grounds for an intervention.
I’d told Roman at least four times that I got a lead on Daisy. I’d bumped the butterfly wings photo onJuju Beanfor a couple of weeks, reminding the moms of this urgent matter. When no one replied, I decided a more personal connection might tug at the heartstrings: “Trying to track down my sister. She can’t have children of her own, and I want her to know she has a nephew. I want her to know that there is a baby out there to love as if he’s her own. He even looks a little like her.” I posted a photo of Holden next to the picture of Daisy with a broken-heart emoji. Newborns could look like anyone. The messages started to roll in. “Awww. Hope you find your sis! (heart emoji).” “She will love learning she has a nephew! (angel emoji).”
I got a couple of leads in Orlando and Vermont, but they didn’t pan out. Finally, I got a real bite in South Jersey. @NJMommy278 said the girl in the photo looked just like a woman she regularly saw in her nail salon. “I truly hope it’s her. For you, and your baby boy,” she wrote. I sent @NJMommy278 a private message. “My sister was on drugs when we lost touch. I heard she might have been working at an adult club. Did this girl in your nail salon look…healthy?” Shestarted to type…“Hard to say, hon. Half the girls who go there take their clothes off for money. The other half have no money (hand-raised emoji).” She snapped a photo of the woman at the nail salon in Somers Point, New Jersey. It was blurry, but she was petite like Daisy. The same flowy hair.
I homed in on the Babbling Babes, a subgroup onJuju Beanto connect local moms in the South Jersey area, and the Cherry Hill Club, which had broken off from Babbling Babes and formed their own splinter group after somebody asked if she could feed her eight-month-old chickpeas and it somehow devolved into a weeks-long debate about whether Israel had appropriated hummus. Two moms said Daisy’s photo looked familiar. Another said she used to be a waitress at a sports bar on the boardwalk (“before my kids ruined my tits”) and thought Daisy may have worked there, too. “Prayin’ for ya, @EstherGreenwood!” she wrote. “(prayer-hands emoji).”
