“Why won’t you ask me what the matter is?” she asked finally.
“Because you’ll tell me in your own time, or you won’t,” I said. It would do no good to show her how afraid I was for her. Instead I smiled to take some of the sting out of my words, and she let go of my hands to touch my cheek. I flinched a little from her chilly fingers, but she pressed them to my face, cooing at how warm I was.
“It’s from Jay,” she said. “From Camp Taylor. You remember.”
I swallowed. I did. I remembered pale eyes. I remembered a hand that reached out to touch Daisy as if he barely believed he could be worthy of her. I remembered how the heat of that summer two years ago put a haze over both of them, as if I were seeing something strange and a little otherworldly, something I wasn’t meant to be seeing.
“He’s back. He lives. He wants me.”
My heart shivered at that. It was like all the stories we had been told in the movie palaces were trembling just outside the door. I saw a single packed bag, an arrival to some distant bus station where Daisy’s heels would clack against the concrete, slowly at first and then running to meet—
She sat up slowly, moving from the tense muscles of her core, not using her hands to push herself along. There was something eerie about it, something unseeing in her eyes.
“Come here, darling,” she murmured. “Hold me for a little while. I feel ever so chilled for June. It is June, isn’t it? It’s so strange. Why, it seems like just yesterday it was Christmas and Mother had those splendid little gold and silver ornaments out for the tree. I wonder if she would be angry if I asked her to send them to Chicago to me next year. Why, I’ll be a married lady then, won’t I, with my own house along the lake, oh maybe even a little bump to house a dear little baby for Tom and me…”
She shaped her aimless hands over her flat stomach, and we both shivered a little.
“Daisy…” I said, because perhaps part of me wasn’t ready to give up on the fantasy of her and Gatsby. “You said you changed your mind…”
“And then I changed it back,” she said, her voice brutally practical. “After all, all of the relatives have descended, haven’t they? All the hotels are full, and the hyacinth are coming at the very crack of dawn. Can’t disappoint, darling, never can … and that is all that Jay Gatsby will do.”
For a moment, just a moment there, she had sounded like Mrs. Fay, but then she burst into tears, so hard that I had to help her to the bathroom. She was sick again, but there was nothing to throw up anymore. She was just retching until the blue veins of her face stood out in vivid relief. Her face was a porcelain dish with cracks through it, showing the unglazed portion inside.
I emptied the bath, and ran merely cool water in it this time, but this time instead of getting in when I told her to, she grabbed me by the hand.
“Get in with me,” she urged. “I’ll be so lonely if you don’t. I’ll drown if you don’t.”
After a moment of hesitation, I stripped and followed her into the water, yelping a little as the cool seeped into my skin and as we made the tub overflow. The water sloshed onto the blue tiles, and I leaned back into her arms, her legs on either side of mine, my head back on her shoulder.
She played with me fitfully like she would a doll, her hands light and fretful, me holding my breath because this was too much. This was Daisy, the flower of Louisville. While my brain buzzed like a paper nest of hornets, she sang to me, her voice low and rolling out the words of “Loch Lomond” as if it were a dark blue ribbon pulled out of her hair.
“Daisy,” I murmured, “what are you going to do?”
My voice was small and childish in the echo of the bathroom. She was only two years older than me, but it felt as if somehow, she had sprinted far ahead. I thought that it must have been love that changed her, that gave her a faraway look in her eye, the soft and hollow tone to her voice. She felt almost unspeakably grown up then, nothing like the girl who had begged me to go into Fulbright’s for her. I wondered how she had done it, or if it had come down upon her all at once, like some kind of sacrament that I had forgotten to take.