“Babe? What’s in Atlantic City again?” Roman, now clean-shaven, asks again.
“I told you already.”
“But don’t you think it’s a bit weird?” He is soft-spoken and calm. The yin to my bang. Deep breath.
“What is weird about it? NJMommy278 said she sees a girl who looks like Daisy at her nail salon and that she looks like a stripper.”
“Doesn’t every bird in Atlantic City look like a stripper?”
I give him a look. “A Babbling Babes mom said Daisy may have worked at this bar, Lusty Lady something? I’ve identified possible clubs in the radius around Pampered Hands.”
“What is Pampered Hands?”
“The nail salon.My God, do you listen to anything I say?”
He comes out of the bathroom, still flossing. I don’t know if he is trying to be respectful, or if it just makes him feel like a twelve-year-old boy seeing a tampon, but every day, Roman pushes aside my adultdiapers, pretending not to see the bloodied gauze. I resent that he doesn’t seem to feel any pain ever. That he has a reason to shower and get dressed every morning. But I do like the way he looks in his work clothes, crisp shirt, suit pants, never pleated. “Geez. I forgot the name of the place. Sorry.”
The hammers pound. Holden starts to cry. I pick him up on my shoulder and milk spurts out from both sides of his mouth. I’m waiting for his head to spin around, but he is smiling. That’s it. That’s all he needed. I try to swaddle him, but I could never figure it out and Dr. Brooke says a loose swaddle can suffocate a baby and is akin to child abuse. ASSB, she calls it. Accidental Suffocation and Strangulation in Bed. I put him down in his diaper. I’ve hardly left him for an hour, much less a night. Roman and I had already had a fight, or more like a debate—a “Help me understand this…” conversation—about why I needed to spend the night in Atlantic City to try to track down a friend I hadn’t spoken to in fifteen years.
“I think she was the closest thing to a soulmate I’ve ever had,” I explained.
“Thanks for that,” he said, slightly stung.
I gave him a look. “You know what I mean. She got me in a way that no one else did. I know you don’t get it. Everyone likes you. You still have friends from when you were five. You were student body president—”
“Prefect. I was prefect.”
“Yeah, that. I wasn’t popular. I was a dork, and then I randomly got assigned a roommate—this brilliant, elegant, ephemeral creature—who also loved Faulkner and Frank Sinatra.”
“Don’t you do a quiz when you apply for a roommate?”
I stood up, irritated. He was always finding a practical explanation for everything. “It wasfate.”
“What? That’s how it works at American uni, no?”
“Being with her, it was electric. I remember feeling so creative, so in charge…She saw me. Like, really saw me…The universe brought us together and now I need to find her.”
Roman softened. “Yeah, okay. Maybe it was fate.” He half grinned. “Or maybe it was the bit where you both said no frat parties and an enthusiastic yes to Saturday nights in the library on your questionnaire.”
It sounds like the Blue Man Group is performing next door, but when I check on Holden, he’s sleeping right through the construction, all curled up, my baby koala, in his doughnut pillow with the yellow ducks on it near a window covered in scaffolding. I stare at the way the light hits his pink face. I could stare at that face all day.
I couldn’t explain it, not even to Roman, what it’s like to feel that connection to Daisy—to anyone—and then watch them just disappear into darkness. Friendships end, he’d tell me, not understanding at all. “There was that girl, what’s-her-name? You met in the locker room at Blink and wouldn’t stop talking about her and then you never talked about her again?” With Daisy, it was different. The one I thought was going to last. We hadn’t grown apart so much as mental illness and addiction had ripped us apart. I’d spent a lot of years pretending it was just another intense, fleeting friendship, but in my heart, I knew it was more. I thought of all the emails I wrote to Daisy over the years that bounced back, asking her to tell me where she was, wishing she would appear out of nowhere and tell me it was all going to be okay. I even started to write to her about my life, how I struggled to write anything new, how I took a job, how I met a guy.
I imagined that if we’d stayed in touch, we’d text seven thousand times a day, send each other memes, FaceTime, and stop ourselves from making regrettable sample-sale purchases. We’d go weeks, months, without seeing each other and still know the most mundane details of each other’s lives. The dry cleaner who ruined a favorite cardigan.The period cramps. The lucky twenty I found on the F train. I’d laugh at night, texting under the covers, and Roman would ask me what was so funny and I’d tell him he wouldn’t get it. Because he wouldn’t. No one except Daisy would.
The more the memory of Daisy—and the yearning to have that kind of deep friendship in my life—nagged at me, the more I had to pull it. I sat beside Roman, close this time. He knew me well enough to know that I wouldn’t let this go.
In those first weeks home with Holden, Roman would hear me cry in the bathroom and ask if I needed anything. I always said no. What could he do? But now I needed something. “I needthis,” I say. “She was my best friend.”
“You have people,” he says.
“No. I have moms. We share a due date. Not a soul.” Roman doesn’t say it, but my obsession scares him. It’s all over his face. “You don’t get it. After you give birth, your brain floods with oxytocin, dopamine—a cocktail of hormones. They call it ‘mental clarity.’ For me, that clarity is Daisy. She’s what I need.” Holden stretches his arms, sighing. I pick him up, kissing his head. “What we both need.”
“Clarity, right.”
“It will be quick,” I say, hitching Holden higher on my shoulder. “Oh, I really liked the nanny I met today. Elena. She was lovely, so warm, showed up early.” I don’t tell him that I hoped she’d overlook the buffet of porno mags. Roman is looking for his wallet. He is perpetually looking for his wallet. “I got a reference from Penelope. One of her fancy Trinity friends swore by her.”
He catches my eye. “Penelope is an heiress.” He says this as if inherited wealth were a terminal disease. When Penelope had her first baby, she had a night nurse and went to theater and art openings and slept until noon. She struggled to bond with the newborn—mostly because she forgot she had one. Penelope has three kids, twins in firstgrade and a toddler, and is going for a fourth. Having four kids is a status thing in Manhattan. Imagine the size of the co-op apartment that can comfortably house four of your spawn. Private school at sixty-five K a year, K–12.
