“Can you just stop? Don’t ever talk that way around my baby.” I bolt up, making sure Holden is still fast asleep. I want to cover his tiny ears.
“You meanourbaby?”
Daisy runs her tongue alongside Roman’s neck, not quite making contact. Then she crosses her legs, plucks a pencil from her hair, and feigns a nasal voice like Dr. Horowitz. “The official name is dissociative identity disorder. A condition brought on by past trauma, a way to avoid horrific memories. It can cause blanks in memory, delusions, the formation of distinct multiple personalities.” She shakes her head in Holden’s direction. “Another thing to blame him for.”
“Don’t you dare blame him.”
“What? I didn’t tell you to stop taking your meds. But you wanted a baby. There goes caffeine, pineapple, your pelvic floor, oh and a host of antipsychotics that had been working really well for a really long time.” She uncrosses her legs. “I hope he’s worth it and he doesn’t grow up to be an asshole.”
Daisy is telling me all this, but somehow, I already know it. I’d never much thought about having a baby, but once I got pregnant—and felt his little feet kicking against my insides—I would have done anything to birth a healthy baby. Breastfed the devil. Welcomed back my demons.
“This is a dream. I just need to wake up and you’ll be gone.” Please. Stop. Go.
“Em. Em. Em. You’ve never been more awake than when you are with me.” Daisy stands. She picks up a tube of Jo Malone lotion off my bedside table, rubbing it on her neck and down her chest. “I’m the survivor. I’m the hot one who is in control. You’re the sad, delicate flower who came running back to your childhood bedroom.”
Daisy gets on the bed, straddling my legs. She puts her face against mine, her breath entering my mouth. How can it be true thatwe’re the same person when I feel her minty nicotine breath? When I look at her lips so close to my own?
“I protected you, just like I always did. Don’t you remember? I curled up into a ball in the shower after that bachelor party, let the scalding water wash over me thinking of a Jean Rhys novel, so you didn’t have to. I accepted a closet full of Dior in exchange for a weekend of gang banging at a Miami Beach compound, not sweet Emily. And then when you hated your existence and had no place to hide and couldn’t fuck, I came back.”
My phone vibrates and I wake up. Roman calling. The sun breaking through the lace curtains forming a doily pattern on the carpet. Holden starts to stir. It’s just the two of us. “Hello,” I say as if he could be a spam call.
“Gigi died,” he says.
Chapter Forty-One
• • • • •
One. Two. Skip afew. I couldn’t tell you how long I lay there, paralyzed under the weight of the journals, cut loose from the cadence of whatever was going on in the outside world. But for the first time, my mother had given me what I needed—time.
With Roman in Melbourne for Gigi’s funeral, I had a week to pretend that he didn’t exist. I didn’t sleep for two days, frantically poring over pages upon pages of poetry, daily entries. Things would begin to come into focus and then fade, a stroke victim learning to speak again. The stanza of a poem about period blood? That sounded like something I wrote. The tally of tips earned at what appeared to be some kind of oral-sex game night? I’d never do that. I don’t even particularly enjoy blowing my own husband. I examined an image in a German porn rag with a full view of Daisy’s face. Athletic socks, school uniform skirt. I have brown eyes. This girl has aquamarine contacts, a bleach-blond job, a different nose, breast implants. Pretty, with sleepy, sad eyes. We looked nothing alike. I kept reading, answering the lingering questions I had about Daisy’s past, but still not convinced any of this had anything to do with me, or why I had kept all of these. The journals I didn’t get through, I’d take home.
When I finally fell asleep, I found myself dreaming about things I’d forgotten. Escaping in the middle of the night. Climbing into a car on Melrose. Lights flashing beneath a luxury high-rise. Spread out on a mattress on the floor of an empty house in the hills. A man with his hands covering my eyes, directing me into a walk-in closet. Voices outside in a hallway, like they wanted to ruin each other. It’s not safe. Run.
By the time I woke up, it was afternoon of who knows what day. I had a text from Roman saying he’d be back to JFK late the next day. He missed us.
I heard my mom humming a Loretta Lynn song to Holden downstairs, ice jingling in a crystal tumbler. She’d invited a neighbor over, a woman who always had a flowering, nosy smile and at least a dozen grandchildren. She’d spread out all over the living room, a borrowed Pack ’n Play, press-and-go race cars shaped like earthworms, a hungry fish game. She tossed a burp towel over my mom’s silk shoulder pad, showing her how to feed Holden, how to change him, how to love him.
Even days later, knowing the things I now know, I still can’t see the way things really were. Holden is napping. I sit on the patio with my mom. It smells like citronella and fertilizer. “I put a pizza in the oven,” my mom says. Microwave pizza, my mom’s version of a home-cooked meal.
“Thanks.”
“Daisy. Daisy,” my mom says, a long exhale. “Oh, do I remember her.” She tucks a curl of my hair, matted and dirty, behind my ear. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“I don’t.” I pull my head away, more abruptly than I mean to. She’s trying, but I can’t let myself notice any maternal instinct.
“I read everything,” I tell her. “I still think it’s bullshit.”
She scrunches her lips, broadcasting her doubt. “Whatever you say, sweetie.”
I bolt up. “What? You don’t believe me? You think I’m batshit? You know what?Fine.I’ve got a flight to catch.”
She opens a Dr Pepper and hands it to me, a peace offering. She can’t drive us to the airport. “I’ve got Fabiano on Thursdays.”
I know she expects me to protest, but I just say, “Cool, cool. Your roots are a mess.”
My mom picks a weed out of the cement and twirls it around her finger. “I thought you were dead.”
“I guess I just needed to sleep.”
