Daisy Jones & The Six - Taylor Jenkins Reid Page 0,45

had too much energy running through me. I tried to call Karen but she didn’t answer. I finally decided I had to tell my parents. For some reason, I thought they would be proud of me. Not sure why. After all, I had the number 3 song in the country just a few months prior and they hadn’t so much as tracked me down to send a note. They didn’t even know I was back in town.

Suffice it to say, heading to their house at 4:00 A.M. was not the smartest idea. But you don’t get high for smart ideas.

Their place wasn’t far—a mile down the road, a world away—so I decided to walk. I started up Sunset Boulevard and into the hills. I got to my parents’ about an hour later.

So there I was, standing in front of my childhood home, and somehow I decided that my old room looked lonely. So I climbed over the fence and up the gutter pipe, smashed the window of my bedroom, and got in my own bed.

I woke up to see the cops standing over me.

Rod: I do wonder what I should have done differently with Daisy.

Daisy: My parents didn’t even know it was me in the bed. They heard somebody and called the police. Once it was straightened out, they weren’t going to press charges. But by that point, the bag of coke in my bra, the joints in my change purse—it didn’t look good.

Simone: I got a call that morning from Daisy from jail. I bailed her out and I said, “Daisy, you gotta stop all this.” And she just let it go in one ear and out the other.

Daisy: I wasn’t in jail long.

Rod: I saw her a few days later and she had this cut on her right hand, from the outside edge of her pinkie all the way down past her wrist. I said, “What happened here?”

She looked at it like it was the first time she’d seen it. She said, “I have no idea.” She started talking about something else. And then out of nowhere, about ten minutes later, she goes, “Oh! I bet it’s from when I smashed the window to break into my parents’ house.”

I said, “Daisy, are you okay?”

She said, “Yeah, why?”

Billy: A few weeks after the tour ended, I woke up at four in the morning to Camila shaking my shoulders and telling me she was in labor. I grabbed Julia out of bed and raced Camila to the hospital.

When she was lying in that bed, sweating and screaming, I held her hand and I put a cold cloth on her head and I kissed her cheeks and I held her legs. Then we found out she had to have a C-section, and I stood right there—as close as they’d let me—and I held her hand as she went in and I told her she didn’t need to be scared, that everything was going to be okay.

And then there they were. My twin girls. Susana and Maria. Squooshed little faces, heads full of hair. But I could instantly tell them apart.

I realized, looking at them … [pauses] I realized that I’d never seen a newborn. I’d never seen Julia as a brand-new baby girl.

I handed Maria over to Camila’s mom for a moment and I went into the bathroom and I shut the door and I broke down. I … I needed some time to deal with my own shame.

But I did deal with it. I didn’t try to bury it in something else. I went into that bathroom and I looked at myself in the mirror and I faced it.

Graham: Billy was a good father. Yes, he’d been a drug addict who missed the first few months of his daughter’s life. And yeah, that’s shameful. But he was fixing himself. For his kids. He was making it right and doing better every single day. It was a hell of a lot more than any man in our family had ever done.

He was sober, he put his kids first, he would and did do anything for his family. He was a good man.

I guess I’m saying … if you redeem yourself, then believe in your own redemption.

Billy: I had this moment there in the hospital, when it was just me, and Camila, and my three girls, and I thought, What am I doing out on the road?

I went on this long epic speech to Camila, I said, “I’m giving it all up,