by Brian Mosher
When Daisy called to ask me to pick her up from the rehab center she said, “I’m sorry, James Michael, but I didn’t have anyone else to call.”
The last time I’d talked to her before that was five years ago, the day of her mother’s funeral. She called me from Amsterdam to say she wouldn’t make it to the service. The last time I’d seen her was three years before that. She’d lost so much weight in the meantime I probably wouldn’t have recognized her if it weren’t for the third-eye ruby tattoo on her forehead. She’d gotten that on a trip to Thailand just after her eighteenth birthday, right around the time she’d changed her name from Daisy to Devadip.
“It means I’m the lamp, the light, and the eye of God,” she had told her parents at the time. This explanation didn’t seem to make them any less concerned about her.
Nothing she ever did—the tattoo, the name change, the drugs—ever made me love her any less than I did when we were kids.
Yes, her birth name was Daisy, like Gatsby’s unattainable dream girl. But my Daisy wasn’t unattainable at all. In fact, she was always around. My mother, Sophie, called her Daisy Dewdrop because of her habit of just dropping in unannounced.
The house I grew up in was right next door to the one Daisy grew up in, with a shared backyard. Her parents and mine were very close, spending countless evenings together around one or the other’s kitchen table. In many ways, growing up there was like having two families.
Daisy and I knew each other from birth. She was less than twenty-four hours older than me, and we were born in the same hospital, so oddly enough we spent our first few days in neighboring cribs in the nursery while our mothers shared a room down the hall. From then on, we were almost always together, mostly at my house or in our yard.
Daisy never let me forget she was the older one; and I always looked up to her, followed her lead. To me, she was the most beautiful person in the world, next to my mother. I would have gone anywhere, done anything, if she suggested it. At school and on the playground, she was protective of me. I was always undersized for my age, and painfully shy. The other kids teased me and excluded me. But Daisy made sure I was never alone, even if it meant sitting with me in the corner of the cafeteria, away from her other friends. We were practically inseparable.
On my fourteenth birthday, as I was lying in my bed dreaming, I imagined I heard my bedroom window opening. I looked up to see Daisy climbing in. Like I said, she was Daisy Dewdrop—always dropping in announced. The difference this time was, I was in the middle of a dream about her. It was the first time I’d ever dreamed about sex.
“Hey, what are you doing under that sheet?” dream Daisy asked, laughing.
“Hey!” I shouted.
Before I knew it—and before the evidence had faded, so to speak—she was diving headfirst to join me under the sheet. It was thrilling … and horrifying. But when she put her hand on my erect penis, the horror disappeared and only the thrill remained.
Then I woke up to the sound of my bedroom door opening.
“Hey, what….?” a voice other than Daisy’s stammered.
“Hey!” I yelled, shocked and embarrassed to find that there really was someone entering my room, but she wasn’t coming in through the window, nor diving beneath the sheets. And she wasn’t Daisy.
“Mom!” I cried out, sitting up and pulling my pillow over my lap.
“Sorry, sweetie. I just wanted to tell you I made you your birthday breakfast.”
“Just leave me alone! I mean, give me a minute. I’ll come down to eat. Ok?”
“Sure, sure. Sorry!” I know she was probably at least as embarrassed as I was.
She backed out of the room and closed the door. I lay back and tried to breathe. Once I’d calmed down and my penis was back to normal, I got dressed and headed downstairs. In the kitchen I found my mother and Mickey, my older sister, standing by the stove and giggling. It wasn’t difficult to imagine what they were giggling about.
“Happy Birthday!” they both called out together.
“Thanks,” I mumbled, happy they’d remembered my birthday, but still chagrined about what had just happened upstairs.
“I made pancakes, James Michael. And bacon.”
My mom made the best pancakes the universe has ever known. “Thanks, Mom,” I said, the heavenly scent of fried pork fat erasing almost all that morning’s embarrassment.
“And I got you a present,” Mickey said.
She handed me a package, wrapped in bright red foil with a blue ribbon tied around it. The shape was a dead giveaway; a flat twelve-inch square couldn’t have been anything but a record. I was hoping for the new one by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. They were all over MTV, and I couldn’t get enough of them.
I ripped the present open—and found Elvis Costello’s Spike LP. My sister was a lot more sophisticated than I was.
“Thanks, Mickey,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment. “Is this the guy who did the song ‘Alison’?”
“Yes, dummy. He’s that guy. You’ll love it, give it a chance. He’s a brilliant writer.”
“Daddy and I got you something, too, sweety,” Mom said. “But you’ll have to wait until he gets home from work.”
“Yeah? Is it a car?”
“Ha ha. No, it’s not a car.” Mom piled a stack of pancakes on my plate then. “You can’t drive for two more years anyway.”
I ate my pancakes and bacon. It was Saturday, it was summer, and it was my birthday. The world was my oyster. The door opened and Daisy came in, looking more beautiful than ever.
“Daisy Dewdrop, come on in,” said my mother, with a smile.
Mickey, I noticed, didn’t smile.
Daisy was always a teacher, and I was her student. She knew things—magical, mysterious things which constantly amazed me. During the summer we turned eight, a flock of black birds kept landing in our shared backyard every morning. It seemed to me they were hunting for worms and bugs in the dirt, but Daisy knew better.
“First of all,” she explained, “they’re crows. So that makes the group of them a murder, ‘cause that’s what a flock of crows are called. And when they land in your yard like that, it means someday you’re going to be murdered. Or you’re going to murder someone.”
“Really? I would never murder anyone.”
“I know. Which is how I know in this case it means someone’s going to murder you.”
“Well, how do you know it’s me? Maybe you’re the one who’s going to murder someone—or get murdered.”
“No, James, it’s you, because there’s always an even number of them, which means the prophesy is about a boy. I read about it in the encyclopedia.”
“How can you tell there’s an even number of them? They jump around so much. How can you count them?”
“I have a photographic memory. Plus, I always get one hundred percent on my math tests, you know.”
Both of those things were true. So who was I to argue with the rest?
“Well, how do we fix it?” I asked. “I don’t want to get murdered, even if it’s a long time from now.”
“Easy,” she answered. “We just have to get one of their feathers and bury it in the graveyard on a full moon night.”
Which we did, of course. And it seems like it worked. Twenty-two years later, I haven’t been murdered yet.
Back to the morning of my fourteenth birthday. After breakfast, Daisy and I went to our favorite place, a place we’d been going to since we were old enough to walk about on our own, even before the summer of the crows. There was a giant, ancient maple tree just beyond the stockade fence at the back of the yard. The fence had an opening between a couple of boards, just wide enough to slip through. Once on the far side, there was nothing before us but the state forest, and nothing behind us but the fence, which blocked us from the view of anyone in either of the houses or the yard. It was our place, under the Great Tree, as we called it. It was where she had told me the secrets of the crows. It was also there she had taught me how to tie my shoes, and where she had explained that the two ends of a worm are the same—no head nor tail.
And on my fourteenth birthday it was where she taught me how to kiss.
It didn’t occur to me at the time to wonder who had taught her. This was just the nature of our relationship: she knew things, and she taught them to me.
“Lean in a little closer,” she told me. “Let your mouth open a little, but not too much.”
It seemed very technical, more like procedures in an instructional manual than the passionate dance I’d imagined—or that I’d dreamed of just a few hours earlier. More like an exercise routine than a ballet. Still, it was thrilling. I felt an electric tingling spread from my lips out to the rest of my body. I lost awareness of my surroundings, not even realizing what my hands were doing until she pushed them away.
“Just kissing today, James,” she whispered.
I don’t know how much time passed, but eventually she pulled back and said, with a smile, “Happy birthday. Do you like your present?”
Once I caught my breath I answered, “I really like it.”
Daisy always had a problem with authority—and with accepting things other people just took for granted. She preferred to figure things out on her own. Like the International Date Line, for instance. She couldn’t understand how the entire world would just choose to believe an artificial, imaginary line could carry such significance. Instead, she worked out her own system, which she explained to me one summer night in the year we both turned seventeen. As usual, we were sitting under the Great Tree. We were both naked, having just had sex. This was something we’d been doing almost every night for a week, more as a biology experiment than an act of love or even lust.
“James, it’s ten p.m. here now, right?” she asked.
I found my watch in the pile of discarded clothes. It read precisely 10:00 p.m. “Yeah. How did you know?”
“I just know. That’s not the point. It’s Wednesday evening, ten p.m. Now, imagine you start traveling west, and I start traveling east, OK?”
“OK. How come?” I stood and pulled my shorts on.
Daisy remained as she was, lying naked on the blanket we’d brought with us, too deep in thought to care about anything as mundane as clothing.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Just imagine it. Imagine we can both travel at the speed of light. The further you go to the west, the earlier it gets, right? Because the sun is still up on the West Coast, for instance, and it gets earlier and earlier the further you go.”
“Sure,” I agreed. I decided to not ask any more questions, I could see she was working toward a point, and I’d have to be patient and let her get to it.
“And as I go east, it gets later and later, for the same reason. The sun set in Europe, like, seven hours ago, or something, so it’s already the early hours of tomorrow morning there.”
“Yeah,” I agreed again, pulling my T-shirt on over my head and sitting back down beside her.
“So, since we’re both traveling at the same speed, we’ll be exactly half way around the earth from here when we meet. I don’t know where that is, China or someplace? Doesn’t matter. We’ll arrive there at the same moment, which will be practically no time at all from now, really, since we’re going at the speed of light, like I said before. Exactly on the opposite side of the earth right now, it’s ten a.m., right?”
“Ummm, yeah, that makes sense.”
She sat up and looked me in the eye. “Ok, but what day is it?”
“It’s Wednesday, I think.”
“Yeah, for you. But for me, it would be Thursday. Remember, the further east I go, the later it’s getting. So, it must be ten a.m. tomorrow.”
“But if we’re both there together, at the same time, it can’t be today for me and tomorrow for you. That’s not possible.”
“Of course not. But there it is. For me, it’s Thursday morning, for you it’s Wednesday morning. Except, since it took us no time at all, we’ll both still feel like it’s right now, Wednesday evening—except the sun will be halfway up the sky.”
“So, it’s Wednesday evening, Wednesday morning, and Thursday morning, all at the same time, depending on how we look at it?”
“Exactly.” She stood and slipped back into the dress she’d been wearing earlier, then sat back down beside me. “Now, imagine the same thing, but we travel slower this time. Let’s say it takes us a whole day to make the same trip. Twenty-four hours to travel half way around the earth is still fucking fast, but not as fast as the speed of light.”
“Totally,” I said, still trying to figure out the last thought experiment—and not ready for another one.
“Ok, so we leave here at ten p.m. on Wednesday, and it takes one day to make the trip. When we get there it’s ten a.m.—the same time it is there right now, since it’s exactly twenty-four hours from now. For both of us, it’s one day later than when we left, so we’d each feel like it was ten p.m. Thursday, right? Twenty-four hours from now. But the sun will be up, because it’ll be morning there when it’s evening here, just like right now. For me, it’s got to be thirty-six hours later than it was when we started—twenty-four hours of traveling, plus twelve hours of time difference, so that makes it ten a.m. on Friday. You’ve got the same twenty-four hours of traveling, but this time we subtract the twelve-hour difference because you were traveling west, so it’s ten a.m. on Thursday. So no matter how fast or slow we go, when we meet up on the other side, we’ll be one day apart from each other.”
“But we’ll be both be there, together, at the same time.”
“Right. You understand completely.”
“No, I really don’t. Is it one day after we left? Or a day and a half later? Or half a day earlier? I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me.”
“Only this,” she began, as she stood, took my hand and pulled me up. “It doesn’t make one bit of fucking difference what the clocks or calendars say. All that matters is our experience. If we’re here together, and then we’re apart for twenty-four hours, and then we meet again someplace else, that’s what matters. We both lived through a day apart before we came back together. No matter what the clocks and calendars say, no matter what Einstein says, no matter what Mr. Doofus taught us in physics class last year.”
That was the moment when I knew, no matter how much I loved her, and no matter how close we’d always been, we were just too different from each other to ever have a life together. Daisy would always be at least two steps ahead of me, no matter what day it was.
Now, twelve years after that conversation about time, I pulled my Prius away from the rehab center and asked her, “Where to?”
“Can I stay with you tonight, James Michael? I don’t really have any place else, and I need some time to figure out what’s next.” There was a hollowness in her dark eyes, and her voice was thin and shaky.
“Sure, no problem. You can stay in the guest room.”
“Thanks. You know,” she told me, playfully. “I’m a whole week younger than you now.”
“Huh?”
“I’ve circled the world eight times over the last twelve years—always traveling west, backward through time. I started out a day older than you, now I’m seven days younger.”
I laughed. “You’ll always be older than me, Daisy. If anything, you’ve lived more than I have, not less.”
“You finally understand,” she said with a smile that made her look younger than her thirty years. Then the smile faded and she looked much, much older. Worn out. Like she’d lived a couple of lifetimes in those thirty years. A couple of lifetimes of trying to travel backward through time.
“What were you trying to get back to, Daisy, with all your time travel?”
“It’s hard to remember what I was thinking then. At first, it was more about just trying to see the world, experience everything there is. And I figured if I could keep gaining days, eventually I’d buy more time—time to see everything, go everywhere. Of course, the drugs didn’t help my thought process, I guess. Well, maybe the acid did, but not the heroin.”
I drove in silence for a while, not knowing the right thing to say. One of the things I’ve learned from my mother is that sometimes saying nothing is the best thing. Eventually, I asked “Do you remember my fourteenth birthday?”
She smiled again. “I do. Kissing lesson.”
“Yeah. You were a good teacher. It was a beautiful present. I never listen to the record my sister got me anymore, but I still kiss the way you taught me.”
“Yeah? Who are you kissing lately?”
“Her name is Rose. Another flower, like Daisy. Mom says she’s too young, but she’s mature.”
“Besides kissing, I hope I also taught you that age is not what we think it is. Time is not what we think it is.”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what I was just thinking.”
“So how young is your Rose anyway?”
“She’s twenty-two.”
“How long have you known her?”
“A couple of months. She just moved here from Chicago.”
“Do you love her?”
“I might. She’s a good person.”
After a pause, she asked, “Are you happy, James?”
“I am.” And I was.
“Then that’s worth more than anything.” She looked as though she were as far from happy as it’s possible to be.
We were silent again for a while, until we reached my apartment building. I think she might have slept for a few minutes, because when I parked, she jumped a bit, like she was startled. She stretched and yawned, and I saw the eight-year-old Daisy again for a moment.
“Here we are,” I said. “Home sweet home. Let me get your bag.”
She followed me up the stairs to the apartment. “Two-B,” I said, turning the key in the lock.
“Or not,” she said with a little laugh. It’s the same joke I make to myself every time I open the door, no matter how obvious it is.
I led her into the spare room, left her bag on the floor. She crawled into the bed and fell asleep instantly, without a word. The sleep of the innocent, my mother would have said—if it was anyone other than Daisy.
I stood there for I don’t know how long, watching her sleep. She was still my Daisy, my first love, my teacher. But she wasn’t the same person, and neither was I. Whether she’d lived more than I had in our thirty years or not, whether she’d lost time when she’d thought she was gaining it with her westward travels, none of that mattered. We’d spent too many days moving away from each other.
In the morning when I woke up, she was gone. Her bag was still on the floor, and her body was still lying in the bed with a needle hanging from her arm. But Daisy was no longer there. I don’t know if she had scored the heroin before I picked her up, or if she had snuck out during the night while I slept. I don’t know if now she’s traveling west around the earth, trying to go back in time to the days before she shot up the first time. I don’t know anything at all.
© 2024 Brian Mosher All rights reserved.
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