Ryke digs in his jacket pocket for one.
“You don’t need that,” Garrison says. “Just let him stand in front of the trees.” He nods to Connor.
Connor looks almost bored. “I’m six-four. That’d be inaccurate.”
Garrison shrugs. “Close enough.”
“No it’s not,” Connor says, “and I’m investing in you, which means you should be beyond elementary math.”
Garrison rolls his eyes.
Ryke points his axe towards the fir tree. “It looks around seven feet.”
Rose will be happy that the girls found a taller tree last year, and Connor must be okay with that ending because he nods to Ryke. My brother starts swinging, chipping at the base of the fir.
I yawn again. Jesus Christ. I blame having a new baby. Lily just had Luna in November. I want to be with them, but I have to suck it up. All the sisters like spending time together without us, and I can’t always be around Lil.
Connor sidles next to me. “How’s the six-week no sex going?”
My expectations: me being hornier than Lily.
My reality: me being hornier than Lily.
With a little kid and a baby, she’s too tired to even think about sex. She won’t have sex to combat stress either, so it’s made her resilience sky-high. When I’m not with her or the kids—when I’m at work—I think about sex. I miss fucking my wife, but if a sex addict can grow the courage to shut-it-down for six weeks, I can too.
“Great,” I tell Connor with a dry smile. Then I add more seriously, “It’s not as terrible as last time.”
“Because we all had to suffer,” Sam chimes in.
“What does that mean?” Garrison’s face contorts. “You don’t…I mean…” He tugs down his black beanie. “I thought Lily was monogamous.”
“What?” Sam’s eyes pop out. Garrison is implying that they all had to abstain from sleeping with Lily too.
Connor laughs into a billion-dollar grin. “Clarity is key, my friends.”
Sam’s distress is the best part of this. I nod to Garrison. “Lily is monogamous, but when Maximoff was born, the sisters made a pact that they wouldn’t have sex when she couldn’t.”
“Fucking…insane.” Ryke grunts as he swings the axe hard, the tree crashing down.
“Just be glad it didn’t happen this time, bro.”
Garrison stomps on his second cigarette. “You all are weird as hell.”
I gape at my brother-in-law, the one with the self-righteous Captain America complex. “Look at that, Sammy, you were included in our circle of weirdness.”
Sam smiles. “But I’m the normal one.”
“Normality is relative,” Connor says. “To someone somewhere, you’re as strange as the rest of us.”
2020
“Being away is difficult, but the hardest part is the physical act of leaving.”
- Willow Hale, We Are Calloway (Season 2 Episode 06 – Probabilities & Whatevers)
< 17 >
January 2020
Frederick’s Office
New York City
DAISY MEADOWS
I stare at the breathtaking views of New York City from Frederick’s office, my fingers on the glass like I could step right off and fly. Weightless—but then maybe I’d fall.
I back away and drift towards the figurines on a bookcase, a porcelain ballerina next to a swan. Frederick watches from his leather chair, adjacent to a matching couch. I spend most of my time wandering around instead of sitting down, but he never seems to mind. I don’t think Frederick has many patients besides Connor and me.
Just a theory.
“Did you ever think Connor would be famous?” I wonder, my fingers skimming the bookshelf as I amble past.
“Not in the same sense that he is now,” Frederick says truthfully. “I thought he’d be revered among people in his profession, not the entire world.” He only ever answers these opinionated-based questions about Connor, never anything about his personal history or topics they discuss in his sessions.
I’ve grown to understand what I can and can’t ask. I also like when the focus shifts off of me for a while.
Anyway, Frederick has to know what happened yesterday. It was all over the news.
I never slept last night. Not one hour. Pressure refuses to leave my chest. I want to sink to the floor but then I want to run through every door and never come back.
“What kept you up at night?” he asks me the first hard question.
“I wasn’t scared.” It had nothing to do with PTSD, which hasn’t plagued me in a long while. I drift and drift, examining his nameplate on his desk. “People, the media—they can’t hurt me anymore, but she’s just a baby. And then she’ll be a kid. Then a teenager. Like I was. Sometimes I wonder if I’m meant to watch her go through everything I went through.”
“What happened yesterday isn’t a prelude to your worst fears for Sullivan.”
I face Frederick from across the room. “We didn’t want the tabloids to have tons of photos of her. I knew eventually she’d have some, but not like this—and not because of me.”
I took Sulli to her swim lesson, and I don’t know who was hiding and where they were, but they captured ten photos. She went from having blurry, crappy images online to being in high-res, picking a wedgie. And in the span of two hours, she became an internet meme. All before she turns two next month.
Sullivan Minnie Meadows First High-Res Baby Pictures! People photoshopped…well, it doesn’t matter does it? People can be creative without realizing a real person is on the other side of the picture.
#RaisyBaby is still trending, and so are all the jokes attached.
“It’s not your fault,” Frederick says, “but you’ve heard that already. Haven’t you?”
I think about my support system. Ryke, he didn’t blame me. Not a single time. He was more upset that I was upset. Rose, Lily, Lo, Connor, and even Garrison all came over last night to be there. Willow also dropped in via Skype.
I nod, my eyes glassing. I walk towards a potted fern.
“Your daughter will have the same support system, Daisy. She has people her own age in the same boat all around her.”
Moffy. Jane. Beckett. Charlie. Eliot. Luna.
“She’s not destined to be you,” he continues. “She’s going to be Sullivan Minnie Meadows, and she’ll experience the world in a different way and in a different time.”
I draw closer to the center of the room, facing him again. “Rose told me it’s always been easier when the tabloids focused on her and not Jane, but I never really understood the feeling until now.” I rock on my feet and set my hands on my head. “I’d give anything to have them yell at me.”
We Are Calloway helps, every day, with the venom and violence directed towards us, but like all things, there’ll always be cynics. Thankfully nothing like the flour-bombers era.
“What would they yell?” Frederick asks.
I see what he’s doing. Every weighted word on my chest screams to be released.
“Daisy Calloway is too stupid to live.” I stare at him strongly, hearing all the voices I’ve heard. All the ones I squashed before. All the ones I could stomp out again. “An annoying brat. Attention seeker!” I shout it. “She never acts her age! How could Ryke love someone like that? WHAT AN IDIOT!!” I yell so loud that something heavy explodes inside of me, obliterating. Less cumbersome.
What if she can’t fight back like this? What if she’s sad and lonely? What if she cries herself to sleep? What if she can’t sleep?
Frederick must read the questions in my eyes because he rises to his feet, power in his stance. When he becomes this wise yet unrelenting figure—just by posture alone—I can see why Connor chose him as his therapist. Why he’s known him for so long.
Frederick tells me, “No one would ever wish your experiences on another person, and we all hope she won’t have them, but if she’s ever sad, Daisy, she has a mother who has experienced pain beyond some human comprehension and who has continued to persevere. A mother who has the ability to empathize with lows that appear for no reason at all. Lows that some will never understand. You understand them.”