Sometimes you crack your eyes open in the park on a Wednesday afternoon and you get all the answers.
—
Then Daisy heard from Amir. “First I think, fuck, Dais, you’re being sued again, but he says nah, he’s a PI.” I apologize. It had to be creepy to hear from a PI. But Daisy is totally unfazed. “Nah. Not at all. Hewas superpolite, profesh, compared to most of them.”Most of them?I go to Mr. Pete. Daisy is followed by private investigators. But finding Jersey? That one sort of freaked her out. She said she hadn’t seen Jersey since she was barely twenty when she first started doing “private parties on an underground tour.” (I don’t ask.) She’d never worked in Atlantic City—so much for theJuju Beanmom’s investigating—but she did know Jersey. He’d worked security on a “thing” she did in Philly with the then Pennsylvania governor and his wife and girlfriend and had gotten her out of a tough situation. What “thing”? What “situation”? She looks at me and I see a flash of mirth. “You were always an overachiever, Em, real full-body cavity search finding that pond scum.”
Daisy thought about calling. “Then I realized, wouldn’t the manic-pixie-dream-girl move be tracking you down on social media and shocking the shit out of you in the park? Preferably with a tenor sax playing Coltrane in the background?” She says she went through a lot of Insta posts in “some nasty-ass playroom” until she got to one in Washington Square Park, a selfie of me and Holden in this exact spot with the caption “Wednesday in the Park with Holden” and our geolocation.
“You never could pass up a Sondheim reference,” she says.
“Thank you?”
We instantly fall back into a rhythm, cultural references, gentle ribbing, art. At the same time, I worry Daisy thinks I’m boring. I’ve never been on a yacht, much less been locked in one off the coast of Montenegro. There is no mystery. No seedy guys named Jersey in my past. My whole life is online, measured in selfies and hashtags. On the other hand, I didn’t have to have a three-way with the governor of Pennsylvania.
Daisy tells me that she’s been living in New York “on and off” for three years. First in a condo on Central Park South that a Malaysian businessman bought under an LLC. That explained Hu, theMalaysian fugitive, and the news story that Amir found. I pretend I’ve never heard this before, try to seem unfazed. I’d hate for Daisy to think I am a voyeur. But I am hanging on every word. She tells me that the FBI learned that Hu had stolen four and a half billion dollars from the Malaysian government. Hu fled. The condo was confiscated. “It was inThe Wall Street Journaland everything. He spent, like, the whole country’s pension fund, some real greedy-ass shit,” she says, shading in what looks like a silhouette in the sketchbook. “I swear, Em, I would’ve never bought all that Van Cleef if I knew it was, like, Malaysia’s teachers’ salaries…” I need to track down theJournalstories because although I am biting my lip so that my mouth doesn’t hang open, this is the wildest shit I’ve heard in a long time.
Then she got a new “financial arrangement.” (She doesn’t call it work, but she also doesn’t seem to do any other work.) “Anyhoo, then I meet this Greek guy, Stavros. Yacht, Mykonos, you know. He put me up in an apartment. 527 Park. You know that building?” I don’t say anything. The first of many coincidences. 527 Park had become something of a fixation for me. The first thing I saw when I got off the subway at work each morning—a glass-and-steel middle finger to the rest of us. I’d read an article inNew Yorkabout how, three years after the luxury tower displaced affordable housing and disfigured my skyline, it remained mostly vacant. Of all the offensive, over-the-top real estate, 527 Park, in particular, felt like a personal affront. And now Daisy lives there?
“I think he forgot he owns the place,” Daisy says, adding that she hasn’t heard from Stavros in months. “It’s just a useful place to park his money, ya know?…It has a Roy Lichtenstein in it.”
She’s been in New York for three years? We’ve lived in the same city for three years and not known it? For three years, we could’ve been listening to jazz in the park. Maybe I sensed she was nearby, trapped in a shell company’s high-end condo. Maybe that’s why I started thinking about her again. Maybe it had nothing to do withmotherhood and everything to do with proximity. Maybe we were meant to be reunited. Meant to be sisters again.
You wake up in the park and you have answers. You wake up and she is there.
I wiggle the sizable yellow diamond on my finger. I tell her that Queenie gave it to me, hoping I’d get it to Daisy. I do not ask why Queenie didn’t just send it to Daisy, if they talked so regularly. Why did she need me as an intermediary? Daisy’s demeanor changes. She looks threatened, then suddenly goes blank, inscrutable. “I already told Queenie, so many fucking times, I don’t want it.” It’s jarring, how she drifts from easy bonhomie to enigmatic hostility.
What Daisy doesn’t say, but I assume that she is thinking, is that Queenie could’ve given her the rock our freshman year of college. Or she could’ve sold it, given Daisy the money to pay her tuition, to stay in the dorm, to not have to wave her butterfly wings and bare ass over a high school chemistry teacher’s erect lap. But she didn’t want to interfere. She’d raised Daisy from when she was a little girl. She was eighteen then. Did it ever end? Or maybe she was too proud, too proper to admit that she needed to pawn her engagement ring. I remember it well. Queenie said mixing money and family was “too messy.” She didn’t like it. Daisy’s stepdad, who thought of himself as a self-made businessman, hadn’t wanted help. Her mom needed to hoard the inheritance for herself. But it doesn’t matter now, because that was a long time ago. But that is what I suspect is going on behind Daisy’s eyes, which have now forgotten about the diamond ring entirely.
She signsDaisyat the bottom of the drawing and tears it out of the sketch pad, handing it to me. “There.” To my amateur eye, it is good enough to hang in the MoMA. To be auctioned off at Sotheby’s. “It’s for the nursery. He has a nursery, right?”
“Yeah,” I say. “He has a sweet room overlooking a playground.” Ido not tell her that right after we rented the apartment because of the sweet room overlooking a playground, construction started. I tell her that we decorated the nursery in earth tones because we didn’t want to know the gender, “but I always had a feeling he’d be a boy…” I start to talk like a mom and then I stop myself. She just told me she was living with a Malaysian fugitive on Billionaires’ Row. I am about to tell her about the Tiny Love Day-at-the-Zoo Sing Along Mobile and how we’d gone to a garage sale on Long Island and scored a used SNOO. This is a sixteen-hundred-dollar bassinet that Dr. Harvey Karp, author ofThe Happiest Baby on the Block, designed to scientifically respond each time your baby cries. Even the SNOO is no match for a jackhammer. Instead, I look at the sketch, filled with joy that Daisy is really here, that she is still a true artist, as talented as I remember. “I love it,” I say.
“Good.” Daisy closes the Strathmore pad. She puts her pencils away in a simple canvas case and begins to stand. There is a ballerina buoyancy to the way she moves. From legs akimbo to stretching upward in a blink. I try not to stare, rolling up the drawing and putting it in the bottom of the Yoyo.
“Well, that was a nice little college reunion on a patch of grass that stinks of piss.” Did it smell like piss? To me, that grass is perfect. Daisy picks up her Loewe bag. Is she leaving? Blowing away as fast as she breezed in? She turns, looks back at me and Holden. “So? You gonna introduce us or what?”
I am taken aback by the question, as if until now I’ve regarded my baby as an appendage and not an actual person. “Oh yeah. This is Holden.”
Daisy peeks over her sunglasses to get a good look. He has wide olive eyes and a sweep of sandy hair. A beautiful baby.
“It was Roman’s grandpa’s name, and I always lovedCatcher in the Rye, but I guess it’s sort of a weird name and Salinger got canceled.”
Daisy reaches to pick up Holden. “Who gives a fuck? It’s a dope name.” Unlike with Penelope and the pediatrician, and, well, everyone, Holden doesn’t cry. He melts into her arms, and I don’t try to stop her. I hover my palms under his bum, expecting Daisy to be unsteady, but she is a natural. She is holding Holden above her head, making silly faces and softly singing a Serge Gainsbourg song. Holden is making his silly, googly-eyed giggle face that he only ever makes with me. “Je t’aime…”
Daisy is holding my baby and singing in French and smiling. It’s the same smile that I had seared into my frontal lobe, the one that takes up her entire face. The one that believes in me the way I used to believe in myself. The one that has the exact impression of me that, at my youngest and most idealistic, I’d wanted to project. I softly recite e.e. cummings, poetry suddenly back in my brain: “twice I have lived forever in a smile.”
Daisy looks at me.
I am folding the swaddle and packing up, still in Daisy’s shadow. For those few golden minutes—the jazz and the slight trace of marijuana and the afternoon sun slipping behind the West Village—it feels like everything is perfect. I want to say something profound, but all that comes out is “I am really happy to see you again.”
Chapter Fourteen
• • • • •
“You should’ve seen themtogether. They had such a natural connection. I am telling you, she is like a baby charmer…And this apartment. I don’t know if I can even call it an apartment…” I am talking so fast, trying to tell Roman about how I found Daisy. Or, more accurately, how she found me, about our afternoon together. He does his nightly stroll into Holden’s room, noticing Daisy’s sketch, already hanging near his crib. “That from today? It’s lovely.”
“Daisy drew that for him. Can you believe it? Just like that, sketched it in the grass at Washington Square Park. It was like watching Picasso in Montmartre.”
“I gotta give it to you, babe, you don’t give up easy,” he says, sprinkling food in Turtly’s aquarium. “I’m really happy for you.” I know that he means it, but I also feel like he wants to end the conversation. He’s hoping this reunion means I can get rid of the stack of smut. That I’ll come to bed at night and stop talking about porn stars and private investigators. That we can go back to talking about the things we talked about before, though I don’t entirely remember what those things were except that we sent each otherDaily Mailarticles and complained about the mayor a lot. Roman hopes that finding Daisy means I can be myself again.
