Daisy shook her head. She felt as breathless as if she’d been punched, all the air forced out of her lungs. “No,” she said, an instant before Diana said, “was your brother.”
“No,” Daisy said again, but her voice was barely a whisper. “No, I don’t—I can’t believe that. He would never—Danny’s the kindest person I know!”
“Maybe.” Diana’s voice was grave. “Maybe he’s a good guy now. But, that summer, he saw what was happening, and he didn’t stop it.”
“Oh, God.” Daisy shook her head, back and forth, again and again, and finally managed to open her eyes. “Why are you here?” she whispered. “What do you want?”
“I used to know.” Diana’s voice was troubled. “I can tell you why I found you, and why I came, and what I wanted, and what I planned on doing.” She steepled her fingers on the table. “Except. Well.” A smile flashed across her face before vanishing as quickly as it had appeared. “I wasn’t expecting to like you so much. Or Beatrice.”
Daisy’s chair made a terrible screech as she shoved it back. The mommies at the next table stopped talking and looked their way. She wasn’t sure if Diana would get up, too, if she’d grab her by the arm or the shoulder, if she’d demand that Daisy sit back down or at least hand over her cell phone. But Diana didn’t say a word. She sat, composed and still, her face calm, her eyes watchful.
Somehow, Daisy got herself to the back of the restaurant, and found the ladies’ room. She made sure the bathroom door was locked, and then she slumped back against the cool, tiled wall. She thought of the man who’d carried Beatrice on his shoulders when she was small. Who’d taught Beatrice how to ice-skate by gliding along behind her, gripping her under her armpits, holding her up as she wobbled around the rink. She thought about her Danny, who used to give her five dollars, sometimes, when he came home from school, and walk her to the 7-Eleven on Bloomfield Avenue and let her buy whatever she wanted, Danny, whose home felt like a sanctuary, Danny who’d done nothing but good with his life.
She couldn’t imagine her brother watching a girl get raped. She couldn’t imagine Hal being a rapist. Yes, he had a temper; yes, he could get angry. But not rape. Not that.
Except, even as she tried to convince herself that it had never happened, at least not the way Diana said, her mind replayed a snippet of what Vernon had told Beatrice on Saturday night. Your dad was a wild one. But “wild” didn’t mean he’d raped a girl. Wild could have just meant drunk, or pulling pranks, vandalism and troublemaking. If Hal had been at a party, if he had known a girl—a girl exactly their daughter’s age—was being hurt, he would have stopped it, he would have stepped in and stopped it, and made sure the transgressors were punished.
But was that the truth, or only what Daisy wanted to be true?
Daisy gave her head a shake, and drew herself upright. At the sink, she splashed cold water on her cheeks and let it run over her wrists. She took a few deep breaths, and then unlocked the door. The table that she and Diana had occupied was empty. There were just two egg creams, a ten-dollar bill, and a note, scribbled on a paper napkin. I’m sorry, it read. Diana herself was gone.
Part Five
The Downward Path
29
Daisy
When Diana Suzanne Rosen met Henry Albert Shoemaker, the summer before her senior year at Rutgers, she’d just completed three months of rigorous dieting. She wanted to be as confident as possible by the time the university spat her out into the world, and “confident,” of course, meant “thin.” So in May she’d signed herself up for Weight Watchers—again—and began tracking points, cutting out breads, desserts, and almost everything else she loved.
She’d moved back home for the summer, back to the apartment in West Orange. She slept on the pullout couch, while her mother took the bedroom. She’d wanted to be in New York City, sharing a summer sublet with roommates, with an internship, maybe at one of the food magazines, but she needed to earn money for her books and clothes and other incidentals. Instead, she lived at home, rent-free, and waitressed at a place called the Fox and the Hen, where she tried to avoid the older waiters, especially the one who liked to back her into dark corners and grind himself against her, pressing his mouth moistly against her ear and muttering things he wanted to do to her.
Her dream was to graduate and find a job at a magazine like Gourmet or Saveur or Bon Appétit, or at a newspaper’s features section, where she could write about food. Not restaurant reviews, but stories about trends, different kinds of cuisine, and, of course, recipes. She could solicit them, edit them, test them, suggest substitutions to make dishes healthier, meatless, safe for diners with allergies. She’d taken some photography courses, and had been practicing taking pictures and videos of the cooking process, breaking the recipes down, step by step, and staging scenes of the completed dishes. She knew it wouldn’t be easy to get the kind of job she wanted, but she was determined. She worked five nights a week, from four in the afternoon until two in the morning. On her mornings and afternoons off, she’d give cooking lessons to anyone who’d hire her, and when she wasn’t working, she would shop, and cook, preparing the same dish four or five or six times, adjusting the seasonings or the oven temperature, refining her technique, dreaming of the day when she could live on her own and do the work she loved; picturing every part of the life she longed for: a beautiful apartment in New York City, a glamorous job at a big-name publication. Money in the bank, money that she’d earned; a husband who adored her, and children, upon whom they could lavish their combined attention and love.