I find her in a guest bedroom. “It’s a full house. You ready?”
I never noticed how beige and soulless it was in there, the Z Gallerie of luxury bedrooms. Daisy sits at the end of the bed, touchingherself just a little between the legs. She didn’t seem to ever leave the building anymore. She stands to put on a fresh pair of terry-cloth hotel slippers. “You know what? I think we’re good.”
“ ‘We’re good’? What does that mean? Don’t the new moms need to be reminded that motherhood didn’t erase them? That it’s okay to ask for help?”
“Eh. I dunno, Em. It’s such a downer. Maybe we just try to enjoy ourselves, shall we?” she says with a prickly tease. “In the safest, most self-care-y way possible.”
Is she making fun of me? “So, what? We don’t even have a message? Don’t even pretend to give a shit? This is just some levitating dungeon of debauchery now?”
“Feel free to go home, Em, if you’re not getting what you need here.” She smirks. “No judgment.”
The veiled threat that she’d banish me, strip me of a community whose power rests on our commitment, sends a chill through my entire body. As long as 527 Park existed, I needed to be an integral part of it.
Daisy lies back on the bed, playing with the tassel on a throw pillow, her mind somewhere else. Maybe upstairs in the penthouse? I sit at the end of the bed and grab her ankle, her skin smooth and snowy. “I’m sorry about last night. Olivia—it just, it freaked me out. I don’t want to shut it down. This is home. You’re home.”
Daisy crunches her neck up to look at me and smiles. “Good.” Then she lets her head fall back down and she pats the side of the bed for me to lie down next to her.
Daisy recites my words. “ ‘A levitating dungeon of debauchery.’ That is so poetic. You have to write that one down, Em. Write it all down.” She’s morphed from bossy to flirty in seconds, just like she did when we lived together. “You’re so talented.”
She pops up with the levity of an inflatable bop ball and walks to adresser, retrieving something and walking back to the bed, tender again. “I’m headed upstairs, but here, this will help.” Daisy knows that I stopped pumping months ago. She hands me an Adderall. As if she’s done it a million times, Daisy splits the blue pill in two with her front teeth, slurping down one half and offering me the other on the tip of her tongue. I pluck it from her mouth. She hands me mint tea in a clay mug shaped like one of those Easter Island faces. “To wash it down.” A David Bowie song playing in the background. It’s exactly what we did in the dorm room, only with a higher thread count.
Even when Daisy infuriated me, she still had a hold over me. She’d pulled me out of myself, given me the courage to not let random men drop doors on me or look at my body. Maybe she was right about this, too. After all, Holden was almost thirty-six weeks.Juju Beansays everything changes at thirty-six weeks. They start to crawl and then cruise. They become mobile. (“Your baby still needs you but is becoming more independent.”) At thirty-six weeks, they start to leave you. Maybe I didn’t need affirmations anymore. Maybe I just needed Adderall and a peppermint tea and a quiet office with emerald-green walls and Japanese pens.
Daisy and I walk next door to the study. I sit at the desk, and before I forget I write that line down. From there, I feel the rush, like waking up after an afternoon nap in a Mexican hacienda, except it’s happening inside me. “Happy writing,” Daisy whispers in my ear before she vanishes. The words start to flow. Pages and pages of my notebook filled, until I am immemorial, exhausted.
The sun is getting low and the pill is wearing off and I don’t know what I will do with all these words, but they now exist on pages that were blank before. Everything was blank before Daisy.
I am spent, my body wrecked in a series of run-on sentences. I walk downstairs, but Holden is busy sculpting a miniature Rodin in his clay class. So I go back to the office. I crack open the envelope from Veronica to do some actual work. The Adderall is a distantmemory. I have the attention span of a baby looking in a mirror. I drink a matcha with an extra shot and stare at the stack of grant letters. It strikes me as ironic, ridiculous even, to be pleading for twenty thousand dollars for Roofs for the Displaced, forty thousand dollars for the Radiant Smile Foundation, fifteen thousand dollars for Happy Cat Trust, from a thirty-seven-million-dollar condo.
That is the last thing I remember.
I must have fallen asleep in the grant letters. I bolt awake like a passenger on an airplane that hit turbulence. The condo is empty. Marcela texted that she took Holden home and put him to bed. She’d stay there until Roman or I got back. She sent a photo of Holden, hischupeteand the gray quokka that Grandma Sue sent in her latest care package. His sing-along mobile rotating above.
I check the time. Almost eight. I text Roman that I got stuck on some grants and will be home soon. I haven’t felt an Adderall high or crash or written that many words since I was nineteen. But I am not nineteen again. I need to leave. To go home. To my baby and my husband, who brought me spicy noodles and offered to take the night shift. I gather my things and walk to the elevator. Claire is just…there, like she grew out of the wallpaper.
“There you are,” she says, her smile a little too stretched. “How’d the writing go?”
How dim is she to ask a writer how the writing went? “You’re here late,” I say.
“Yeah. Daisy asked me to stay and lock up.”
“She did?” Why couldn’t Daisy lock up herself? And why did anyone need to lock up with twenty-four-hour security downstairs? We never locked up before.
“But I can stay? If you need something else—” There’s a weird eagerness in her voice. Not helpful. Hungry.
“All good.”
The elevator arrives. Claire gets on. She holds the door open.“Going down?” she says, a forcefulness behind the pep. I want to shake her off my leg.
“You know what? You take this one. I forgot that I have to ask Daisy something.”
Claire’s smile wobbles. Just for a second. Then her hand moves—fast—trying to swat mine away from the up button. “Oh, I think she went out.” But the elevator doors are already closing on her outstretched arm.
“Claire? Go home.”
The doors close. Silence. A surge of discomfort as I wait for the next elevator. The security cameras watching. Ignore it. Go home. It’s nothing. Just awkward timing. Too much Adderall. Too little food. Except then I remember my cell phone. Still plugged in, charging in the kitchen. I go back inside.
When I unplug my phone, I notice the iPad that Bianca passes around for everyone to sign. When I pick it up, it unlocks. No password? No facial recognition? I swipe through a standard nondisclosure agreement, getting to a Personal Liability Waiver. I swipe through each page, my heart punching holes through my chest with each disclaimer.
