“You’re back. Yay. We weren’t sure—” She stops herself. “We’ve missed you.”
“So Daisy hasn’t been here?”
“She’s always here, and never here, and none of us would be here without her.”
Other moms do vinyasa on the veranda under the heat lamps. I walk outside. Several women stop and look at me. The instructor, I think her name is Madison, bows.
“We’re so blessed that you’re back. We’ve missed you.” All of the women, in their nude bodysuits and sports bras, stop and bow, like I’m a samurai.
“Have you seen Daisy?”
Madison takes a wider stance on her mat, tightens her ponytail. “No, ma’am.”
Ma’am? Why are all these bitches acting crazy?
I find Bianca scrubbing a coffee ring off a marble console. “The office is all set up, exactly as you requested.” Shit. The overdue grants I needed to write for work. Bianca inches closer. “Your matcha and a refill of your medication are in there, too.”
Bianca has never waited on me. “Okay. What the hell is going on?”
“I don’t know what you mean, ma’am.”
“Everyone is acting bizarre—” I stop myself. “I mean even more bizarre than normal. Did something happen when I was away? Where is Daisy?”
“Ma’am, they’re just doing what you told them to do.”
“And what did I tell them?” She lifts an eyebrow. “Please?”
The other women may have looked at me with reverence, but Bianca looks into my soul…and all she sees is trash.
“You said to treat you like you are two women in one body, ma’am.”
I said what?
—
I rush upstairs and into the leather-paneled office to be alone. Two women, one body. Help me become somebody else.
I dig around in the desk drawers, looking for my own journals. I find a Nokia prepaid phone. There’s only one contact: Roman. I scroll through texts. Him: “I’m so stressed at work.” Daisy: “Let me fuck the stress out of you.” I slam the phone shut. I do a side-by-side comparison of Daisy’s journals and my own. A levitating dungeon of debauchery. There is no denying it. The handwriting is identical. I flip back to an early diary entry with the contact information of a pimp in Atlantic City. His name?…Jersey. The full monochrome movie starts to play on rewind. Jersey looked at me with such recognition when he said, “You need a professional.” Maybe he meant a psychiatrist, not a PI. Amir, the in-house bounty hunter for the rich and powerful. Even he couldn’t tell me anything more conclusive than saying Daisy isn’t dead, but she isn’t alive. BeenVerified. Wheels spinning. Error. No Results Found.
I think of how, at work, Veronica had looked at a selfie of Daisy and Holden and said, “You look like twins in this one.” How Audrey called out “Daisy” as she was wheeled away. How I’d spent months pushing the Yoyo around New York, sitting in the sandbox, AirPods always in, in deep conversation with Daisy. The way you could always talk to yourself in New York, as long as you were with a baby or had your AirPods in. How Daisy and I never really had conversations in front of the other moms. How she’d stood us up at the playground. How so often, whenever I was at 527 Park, Daisy was somewhere else, doing something else.
I study the ancient stash of Adderall, prescribed by “Dr. Elaine Horowitz.” The Renoir. The answers.
On the Upper East Side, Dr. Horowitz’s secretary doesn’t evenlook at me. She just shakes her head, staring at a screen, and informs me that the doctor’s next availability is in six months. She can add me to a wait list and give me a call if there is a cancellation.
She squints, presumably at my chart. “And looks like the doctor made an exception and will accept your Blue Cross Blue Shield. But that’s going to require a hundred-and-fifty-dollar co-pay and it looks like you’d need to get a referral from your primary care physician for us to put this through your PPO.”
I lean over the counter. I put both of my hands on her shoulders, not rough, just enough to get her to stop and look at me. I stare at her with a lunatic calm. “I don’t think you understand, Brenda. I need to see the doctornow.”
Fifteen minutes later, Dr. Horowitz is crossing her legs, uncomfortable. I don’t remember any of our sessions, but I know I feel safe. “I saw you prescribed my medication…and…I don’t know who else to talk to.”
I show her the journals, the handwriting. “I’m so confused lately. I have these weird sensations. Not full memories, more like flashes.” I take out the porn mags, the girl in the schoolgirl uniform. I can’t deny that behind the sex-kitten cosplay and the hawkish nose, there is a resemblance. I plant the image down on Dr. Horowitz’s desk, next to a delicate crystal vase of white irises. “Do you think this girl looks like me?”
Dr. Horowitz takes off her glasses. They dangle on a beaded necklace. She doesn’t charge fifteen hundred dollars an hour so that she can look at a ripped page ofCum Drop City. She swivels away from me, speaking softly into an intercom that looks straight out of the 1950s—a shrink who calls in barbiturates for housewives. I stare at a framed photo of three Airedales on her desk.
“I need you to clear my afternoon…Yes…All of it…Thank you, Brenda.”
She turns back to me, and I know now that we go way back. We’ve spent entire days together, talking. The folds of her slim neck, her judgy tortoiseshell glasses, the soft, sunken skin of a woman who always eats lean protein for lunch and keeps a garden. At first, I’d worked overtime to afford the co-pays. But then I became Dr. Horowitz’s pet project, an anonymous case study in an article she published in a prestigious medical journal. I hear the drip of the radiator. I’d never noticed it before and now it is suffocating. Like waterboarding. Like everything.
