“Hi, you. Where were you? I was worried.”
“I just needed to walk for a while.”
Roman rolls over and, without being fully awake, realizes that I am in bed again. Nine months later. “I missed you.”
He holds me. He hasn’t held me in so long, and even though he has destroyed me, I forgot how good this feels. I forgot what it feels like to be touched and to not think about pain. To not think about the bright lights of the OR and the forceps and the thirty-five stitches and the possible catheter in my thirties and pelvic-floor therapy. Because tonight, tonight, when my whole body aches with a different type of pain, for the first time since I can remember, I do not feel that other pain.
“Love you,” Roman says, wetting his mouth and rolling over again.
I lie on my side in his arms and stare at Turtly, hidden under her shell. I stare at the gallery wall of family photos that Roman recently installed. Photos of the three of us together, on the carousel in Dumbo, crowded around a Santa in the Winter Garden by the accounting consultancy with more layoffs coming, eating cotton candy on the pier in Coney Island. The three of us, a family. Why had I ever needed Daisy? Why had I ever needed anyone else?
“I loved you, too.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
• • • • •
The next morning, whenRoman leaves for work, I throw some of Holden’s favorite toys and pajamas and diapers into the leather tote that I bought at the Brooklyn Flea. Before we leave, I take a quick look back at the nine-hundred-square-foot apartment, at the stack of smut hidden underGoodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site.
Holden is fussy. He knows something is up. I hand him an airplane toy that he brought home from 527 Park. I notice it is a Pan Am, fitting since that also ended in a pile of carnage. “C’mon, koala. We’re going to go on an airplane. Your first airplane! It’s going to be so exciting!” He starts to wail. I try the pacifier, but I want to cry, too. I can’t lie to him. So I just look at him and say, “I feel that way, too, little bear.”
When we walk outside to get an Uber to LaGuardia, Daisy is standing in an alley at the side of the courtyard. I notice the Mercedes idling outside the complex. I speed up, trying to walk right past her. “Stay the fuck away from us.”
She takes my arm. “Can we just talk about this, please?”
I yank myself away. “Talk about what? You’re a nympho psycho cunt. You always were.” I pull the shade over the Yoyo to try to shield Holden. I walk faster, pretending Daisy doesn’t exist. Pretending she never existed. “I wish you’d never found me.”
Daisy starts to laugh. She is standing there, in the shadow of the redbrick Bolshevik buildings of Stuy Town, and laughing so hard that I can’t help but stop. I turn and look at her, show her how badly she’s hurt me, how she’s hurt Holden, whom she claimed to love. “What’s so goddamn funny?”
“I didn’t find you.Youfoundme. You found me because you needed me.Youwatched eighty hours of porn and scoured every issue ofBeaver Hunt, looking for any hint of me.Youare the one who left your newborn to frequent strip clubs…”
“I wouldn’t say ‘frequent.’ ”
“Youfound that pimp in AC and harassed my grandma and hired a lawyer and put a private investigator on me. Becauseyouneeded this.”
“Yeah? I needed you to ride my husband? TO RUIN MY FUCKING LIFE?”
“Oh, I didn’t just ride him. We fucked all kinda ways. He must’ve come six times yesterday, five the day before. I guess it was all built up on account of, you know,you. He really is a superb lay, Em. Very giving. You should try it sometime.”
That is when I punch the living shit out of Daisy. She is shocked, even though I can’t imagine this is the first time she’s been punched. I look at my knuckles. Daisy’s blood. She touches her face, feels if anything is broken, but she isn’t done.
“That make you feel better? You’re welcome. You went searching for me becauseyouneeded to feel something.Youneeded to feel alive, and you needed me to do it. Just like you needed me to save your sad broke ass when you had no friends in Texas.”
I get in Daisy’s face. I want to hurt her like she’s hurt me. “When you called me, strung out, a pathetic whore begging for heroin, I shouldn’t have called your stepdad. I shouldn’t have tried to save you. I should’ve let you die.”
Daisy gives me one last glance with those big eyes of hers, theones that really saw me. “Bye, Em. Maybe I’ll see you in another fifteen years.”
My heart is racing so fast, it has burst out of my chest, a beating mess on the cracked asphalt with the sidewalk chalk. I need to get away, to protect Holden. I try to whisk him away, but before I can, Daisy leans her head into the Yoyo to say goodbye. I am nauseous again, seeing her so close to my son. I try to push her off, to get us far away, but when I lean down, I hear it. Holden is looking at Daisy’s smile—thatsmile—and for the first time in his little life, he says, “Mama.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
• • • • •
It all started tocome back. They told me that this could happen. Memory. Forgetting. The scorpion in the dorm room. The pulsing strobe lights of a strip club. Baby powder on a pole. The grip of my stepdad’s fist on my arm. Tuition payments on ice. My mom, on her fourth husband, telling me that the best thing about being a woman is that we always have something that we can sell. The splinters and grime that came off in the shower the first time I’d rubbed my naked body against the wooden lacquered floor of the Landing Strip. (Nobody talks about the splinters in your ass cheeks.) The first time I’d snorted cocaine and downed a fruity cocktail to make it through a private dance. The time I sprained my ankle in eight-inch Lucite stilettos. The endless stream of baby wipes. For dirty furniture. For dirty feet. For dirty body parts, his, yours, hers. Amber handed me a bottle of murky massage oil and said I could double my money. All I had to do was smear some oil on my tits and get off the guy in the Wrangler jeans and the bolo tie. Triple if we did it together. That is, if Amber and I did each other—and then him. The guys in jeans and F-150s, she said, were always richer than the guys in slick suits who rolled up in Ferraris.
I was nineteen the first time I danced. I just needed quick money to get away from my stepdad and stay in school. I needed to cover that one semester and then I’d figure things out. I’d convince Queenie to give me the money, or I’d find a higher-paying job, maybe at a law office or a telemarking firm. I showed up backstage expecting to be styled in something black or maybe hot pink, leather and lace, something trashy or burlesque, a feather boa maybe. But the girls handed me a ratty stuffed bunny rabbit and shoved me onstage wearing my jean shorts and a T-shirt from a Tex-Mex restaurant where I worked briefly as a hostess in high school. I thought it would be more like karaoke and I could pick my song, but the speakers blared Nine Inch Nails.
I didn’t know what to do. Help me. I felt so exposed, so outside my body onstage, not just naked but faceless, a girl in an Impressionist painting. Help me get away from myself. I began to rub the bunny between my legs. A guy in a brown suit noddedyeah, a satisfied soccer coach cheering me on from the sidelines. He tossed me a twenty. I want to fuck you like an animal. I realize now he hadn’t been paying for my beauty or erotic appeal but for my youth. My naïveté.
