a temporary passport and fly from Oaxaca to JFK.
Daisy asks if she can have a Coke. It feels good to say yes. Even if they’d refused, Daisy would have been fine with it. She’s happy to be with her parents, happy to be going home. She had a good time with her grandmother in Oaxaca, and she’s glad it’s over.
“Sweetheart,” Charlotte says, “you promised.”
“Promised what?”
“You promised to show me your notebook. Our Mexican Adventure.”
“It’s in my backpack,” Daisy says.
“Should we look at it together?” Charlotte’s tone is irritating, even to Charlotte. She’s already turning back into a stifling New York parent. Maybe that’s why she agrees when Daisy says, “How about you look at the book—and I’ll watch a movie on Dad’s computer?”
She’s seen Moana countless times, but Charlotte’s so eager to see the book she’ll agree to anything.
She opens to the first page. It’s less of a diary than a collage of images that caught Daisy’s eye. The pyramid at Chichen Itza. Bananas in a market. She’s cut them from a magazine. Credit card receipts, food packages, wrappers. Small bills, pages stuck together. Random stuff she’d gotten from guests at Mom’s party. Business cards from Chef Basil and a landscaper, cough drop wrappers and matchbook covers, even some puffs of lint.
Charlotte’s about to close the book when she feels a hard rectangle beneath several sheets of notebook paper.
Pasted onto the center of the page is a photo of Daisy and Ruth taken at one of those photo booths you don’t see anymore in New York but must still exist in Oaxaca. Did Daisy go out with Ruth when Charlotte thought she was with Mom? The thought of Daisy and Ruth on the streets of a foreign city is terrifying, or would be, if Daisy weren’t safe beside her.
Charlotte has Ruth’s passport.
Breathe in, breathe out.
Charlotte pantomimes to Daisy: Take off the headphones!
“Where did this come from?”
Daisy looks guilty but confused about what she did wrong.
“It’s me and Auntie Ruth—”
“She’s not Auntie Ruth,” Charlotte says. “She’s not your fucking auntie.”
“Language,” Daisy says. Then she starts to cry.
What’s gotten into Charlotte? Ruth has turned her into a thief and a terrible mother.
She hugs her daughter and whispers, “I am so sorry.”
“Why do you hate her?” Daisy’s voice wobbles.
“I don’t hate her,” Charlotte lies. But it’s true. She doesn’t hate Ruth. She just wishes that Ruth weren’t her brother’s girlfriend. She wishes she’d never met Ruth. She wishes that Rocco had never brought Ruth into their lives.
Stealing her passport was an impulse. She wanted to keep Ruth away forever. But it won’t work. She knows that.
“Where was this taken, Daisy? You and—” She can’t even say Ruth’s name.
“I don’t remember.”
In the photo, Daisy and Ruth gaze calmly into the camera, not bugging their eyes and grinning goofily like people do in photo booths. They don’t look alike—you would never think they were related.
But Daisy doesn’t look like Charlotte, either.
She looks like Eli. Everyone thinks she looks like Eli. Everyone but Ruth.
“Where?” Charlotte’s voice is so cold it scares her. How frightened her daughter must be.
Still crying, Daisy says, “The circus. When I went with her and Tío Rocco. I found the picture with my stuff, so I put it in the book.”
“Why?”
“Because Auntie Ruth was with us at Granny’s. She was part of our Mexican adventure.”
Daisy has never called Mom Granny before.
Granny is what Ruth calls the grandmother she talks about all the time.
Granny Edith. Just the word freaks Charlotte out.
Now Charlotte has the full-on chills. For the first time she wonders if her daughter is lying. If Ruth is teaching her how to lie.
When they get home, Charlotte decides, she will do whatever she has to do to keep Ruth away from Daisy. Ruth and Daisy will never be in the same room together again.
Part Three
April 19
22
Charlotte
As Charlotte runs to meet Rocco at Ruth’s apartment, the smell of hot bread and cinnamon stops her. Looking in the window of what seems to be an old-fashioned Polish bakery, Charlotte pauses to catch her breath again.
Her daughter is missing and she’s looking at cake. No. Charlotte is being guided.
Had the driver found Ruth’s building, had Charlotte come from another direction, she wouldn’t have passed the bakery and stopped to look at the trays of sticky buns. Had the bakery been closed, she wouldn’t have seen the icing on the pastry: the sun with the eight rays and eight mini-explosions that Ruth said were her grandmother’s trademark.
Does Ruth’s grandmother work here? Does she own the