Daisy lifts Holden out of his Yoyo and puts him in this usable art. “There,” she says, giving him a little swing. He makes a brand-new humming noise that sounds like heaven. I check that the ropes are secure. “I got Viktor to pick up some baby stuff, for when you come over. I didn’t know what he likes so he got a little of everything,” she says, walking toward the kitchen. “It’s all organic, non-GMO, obvi. Viktor can get us whatever you need. Just let me know.”
Yes, looking back, I guess I should’ve asked more questions. Maybe even just one question. But I was too happy to be with Daisy, too happy to be hanging at a Greek oligarch’s fully stocked, well-air-conditioned, money-laundering condo. So instead, I just said, “Thank you so much.”
Yes, please, Daisy, rescue me from public restrooms and Mommy &Me classes and organizing diapers and pelvic-floor therapy and moms who talk about nursery schools as “pipelines to the Ivies.” Deliver me from collapsing my Yoyo on the M14 crosstown bus and an apartment with a scaffolding exoskeleton. Deliver me from medical debts and a boss who expects me back in my cubicle in Midtown East. Deliver me, Daisy, back to some semblance of who I used to be.
We work out a schedule. Monday to Friday, seven a.m. to seven p.m., Daisy agrees to watch Holden. We will spend as much time together as possible before I go back to work, so she can learn the things he hates (thunderstorms, hand dryers in public restrooms, pigeons, hats of any kind) and loves (foot massages, the F train, grass, shadows).
Daisy digs around in her Goyard wallet, and pulls out a spare AmEx Black card. “You can use this if there’s anything else he needs.” I hold the card in my hand, thinking of the debt on my own credit card. We still owe tens of thousands in hospital fees that insurance didn’t cover. And weekly co-pays so that Carleigh can finger fuck me at pelvic-floor therapy. So that I maybe don’t have to use a catheter. So that maybe I can have sex again.
“Anything you need, it’s taken care of,” she says.
I would just need to do Daisy one favor.
Chapter Sixteen
• • • • •
Outside, the horizon lookslike orange sherbet. Daisy touches a keypad. Neil Young. “Harvest Moon” comes on. We step out onto the expansive mezzanine, leaving the door cracked so that we can hear Holden, who is still sleeping. Daisy looks inside, checking on my baby—our baby. She softens. I have no idea what this means to her, to have us in her life. She riffs on a Sylvia Plath poem—“I need this, I need someone to pour myself into”—then she takes out Camel Lights. I double-check that Holden is still asleep and signal for her to give me one.
We are smoking cigarettes on a balcony. Daisy asks about my family. I tell her how I texted my mom the ultrasound and she called to warn me that a baby would ruin my life and my marriage, “speaking from experience.” I was twelve when my mom tried to get me on the pill. I hadn’t even gotten my period yet, but I came home from ballet and she was sitting on the stairs with the little pink plastic compact, adamant that she did not want to be a grandmother. Three weeks after Holden was born, I finally told my mom to stop calling me. She put on this whole phony hurt act. Drama. But she didn’t even want me to have a baby. Didn’t think I’d be a good mother. Imaginetelling your pregnant daughter that and then saying, voice quivering, thatI’vebrokenherheart. She invites us all to Texas. She wants to meet the baby. It’s hard for me to not say yes. To not forgive her and book a ticket and rush into her arms and hope that she has changed. That she can be a mother. But I know better.
“I told her that we needed to stop talking for a while,” I tell Daisy. “It was always a fight and I just don’t have it in me. Sometimes I feel guilty and text her a photo.”
“Em, you did the right thing. You have to protect yourself, your family. Your mom was always a menace.”
I shrug. “She’s not that bad. She bought us the Tripp Trapp high chair off our registry. It’s pricey, but it grows with the baby…” I stop myself. Who fucking cares? Point is, my mom had actually made an effort the only way she knew how, an olive branch in the form of a five-hundred-dollar high chair that he can take to his dorm room at Stanford one day. “But who needs her, right? I still talk to my grandma. Oh, and Roman, Roman has the world’s best mom. She’s like a mom out of a 1950s sitcom except not all trad-wife lame. She’s cool. You can, like, talk to her about stuff, you know?”
“I love that for you.”
I step on the cigarette butt. “Yeah, well, she lives like a million miles away in Melbourne with the rest of Rome’s family, so it’s almost like she doesn’t exist. It’s just us.”
“What about your stepdad?” Daisy asks.
I take another drag. “That one is tough. What aboutyours?”
She tells me that he paid for rehab. “Six hours of therapy a day at this crumbling house in Laurel Canyon, but I haven’t touched junk since.” I remind her that she always wanted to live in Joni Mitchell’s backyard. But I don’t understand. “Why would he pay for rehab but not just pay for you to stay in college?” Daisy says it’s always been about control. “College, art school, it meant I could do whatever Iwanted. Live my own life. Be my own person. But rehab—oh, rehab!—that meant he’d saved me, that I’d always need him. I think he secretly hoped I’d relapse.”
“That is dark,” I say.
Daisy twitches her lips. “It’s done…We don’t need men to save us ever again. We have each other.” She says this as we look out at New York, on a thirty-seven-million-dollar wraparound balcony owned by a Greek oligarch.
It happened so fast, this treasure I’d hunted and then found. I feel a rush. Daisy’s scent, tuberose and jasmine with a white floral undertone (Le Labo, maybe?) and the Camel Lights and all that matcha. We can do anything. Create, travel the world together, accomplish extraordinary things. We have nothing to be afraid of. My fingerprint had unlocked the door. I just had to push the Yoyo inside. I inhale the cigarettes and the rarefied New York air of a high-net-worth altitude. Daisy yawns, and suddenly I feel tired, too. The tangle of life below, all of Manhattan, a dark ocean with a mean undercurrent. It isn’t Joan Didion biting into a peach, but I think I always knew that this moment, our friendship, would cost me something. That sooner or later, I would have to pay this debt.
I ask what Daisy wants me to do. She takes a final drag. “I want you to invite all your mom friends over.”
—
The way Daisy put it, 527 Park was the perfect building for theJuju Beanmoms because it was basically empty. During the day, we’d have the entire eighty-seventh floor and the two floors above and below us to ourselves. These condos, with hidden staircases and Toto toilets, had owners somewhere, but for all intents and purposes, they were owned by limited-liability shell companies with names like Columbus Skyline LLC and West Lake Properties LLC and 25CC ST74B LLC. The tax code’s loss is our gain.
It was pouring. I’d covered Holden’s stroller in the Babylo Universal Raincover, but the Velcro got so wet that the plastic kept flying up in the wind. Everyone was too busy with their own upturned umbrellas to help us down the subway stairs. The elevator smelled of vomit. Holden yelped at the thought of getting on. I crouched down to lift the stroller down the stairs. A girl talking loudly on her cell kept trying to pass us. (“I mean, I don’t, like, like his music—Uh, excuse me?—but I’d totally go and just, like, hang in the desert—Hello?—OMG this mom won’t fucking move…”) She knocked the stroller as she slunk past. Two subways and an hour later, I backed into the emergency exit to open the heavy gate, triggering an alarm, and pushed Holden, wet and wailing, out into the ether of Midtown East.
The sun came out and the rain turned to a light drizzle as we walked toward Park. The air had a soupy feel. I had sweat circles under my arms. My thighs rubbed together, damp and irritated. I held a cold bottle of Poland Springs against Holden’s beet-red face to cool him down. “There you go…” The plastic rain cover was a mess, smelling like a deflated pool toy at the bottom of the Yoyo.
Daisy was waiting for us, sitting on a sculptural bench in the tower’s Zen front garden. When she saw us, a couple of wet rats walking toward her, she raced to us with open arms. She gave me the warmest hug and lifted Holden out of his stroller into her arms. I remembered, watching her walk to us that day, the feeling I had in college, that my life would be so much fuller—of love, creativity, spontaneity—with Daisy in it. I had that same late-teenage feeling, like Daisy could tell me what to do and I would always do it, because she would always be right.
“How’s my little angel?” she says, snuggling with Holden.
“Soaking wet and fifteen pounds overweight.”
