Page 30 of The Someday Daughter
I’m already doing some weird shit I can’t explainnow, but I don’t say that.
“Why do you ask?” Cleo says, studying me a little more closely. “Did he say something?”
“No, I—”
“Audrey?” We both look toward the door, where Mags is standing with a clipboard in one hand. “You’re up in five. Ready?”
I nod, and Cleo nudges me with an elbow. “Try not to dunk on your mom this time,” she says, already turning back to her drawing. “It makes Mick’s job way harder, handling all the social media shit afterward.”
When Magnolia sees me coming she turns on her heel to leave, so I’m all alone in the classroom’s doorway when Silas stops me.
“Hey, Audrey.” I’ve never seen him nervous before, but when I turn toward him he’s tucking loose hair behind his ear in a way that can only be described asfidgety. He takes a step closer to me, a careful distance between us, his voice low. “Look, I just wanted to—what I said yesterday, at the river.”
Everything inside me wants to stop this before it starts.It’s fine!I want to shout, right in his face.Let’s pretend it never happened. Let’s not interrogate it too closely. Let’s keep twenty feet between us at all times.But I force myself to stay silent and let him speak.
“I’m sorry,” he says, eyes meeting mine. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. I’d never want to—” He inhales, stops himself. “I just, it won’t happen again. I promise.”
“Silas,” I say, practically a whisper. Uncomfortable is exactly how I feel around him, but not because of anything he’s done. It’s because I don’t recognize myself when Silas is nearby, because even here in this weird apologetic moment, something about him makes me feel calm. Centered. “Let’s put it behind us. It’s okay.”
Okayisn’t right.Okayisn’t the way to describe this, the six weeks of travel still stretched ahead of us. I’m not okay with how it feels, standing here with him, my mind flickering to Ethan and back. So I take a step away, and then two.
“I have to go,” I say, and Silas nods, and I go.
I’m floating during the show, distracted enough to let it carry me along like a river. They have an English professor moderating. When she asks me what it’s like to know that I’ve inspired a generation ofwomen to be kinder to themselves, I manage to smile and say, “Oh, my mom did that.”
We’re nearly to the end when the moderator says, “This tour is all about getting personal with Camilla and Audrey, hersomeday daughter.” I’m looking at Silas, the dark curve of his shoulder in the shadows just past the stage. “And I’d like to dig into who you were, Camilla, when you wrote the book. What that headspace was like when you were, what, twenty-seven?”
“Oh, I wish it was just twenty-seven,” my mother says, smiling graciously. “Lettersis a hundred-and-twenty-page book that took me three years to get right. I started it when I was twenty-four.”
The moderator’s eyebrows rise, and I turn to look at Camilla. For my whole life, she’s been the person she is now:Letters to My Someday Daughtera thing she created in the rearview, a catalyst for her identity as I know it. I try to picture her at twenty-four, picking away at a manuscript, and can’t.
“Twenty-four?” the moderator repeats. She gestures at me. “That’s practically Audrey’s age.”
I feel myself make a face; I won’t be twenty-four for another six years. By the time I’m twenty-four I’ll be halfway through medical school.
Camilla looks at me; I can tell she disagrees, too, but her words come out on a charmed, diplomatic laugh. “Twenty-four certainly feels closer to her reality than mine.”
“So young,” the moderator says, “to have this kind of wisdom.”
“Well.” My mother shifts a little in her seat, gestures toward the audience like she’s inviting them in. “Life moves differently for all of us, regardless of age. The experiences that mold us comeat different times. I was young when I went through the hardest things, the ones that forced me to learn.”
I think:her parents dying. She says, “Like my parents’ deaths.”
“Mmm,” the moderator intones, casting her whole face into a portrait of sympathetic understanding. “A car crash, wasn’t it?”
“It was,” Camilla says. She’s told me the story maybe twice in all my eighteen years—brief and bleak. A rainy day, a skid into a median, both her parents gone in a flash while she was in college all the way across the country.
The moderator leans closer to us. “And do you feel like that experience informedLetters?”
My mother draws a breath. It’s subtle, the way she hedges—if you didn’t know her, you’d miss it. It’s in the twitch of one eyebrow. How her teeth just scrape the edge of her lower lip before she speaks. “Of course,” she says. “Especially set into the context of the rest of my life then.”
The moderator presses on, tacking into a discussion of grief. But I hear the not-lie, the careful choice of her words. The “context” she doesn’t explain.
And I think of what my dad said, on that humid wraparound porch just a few days ago.
You don’t know everything about her.
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