Page 38 of The Someday Daughter
I take it from her, flipping open to the article as everyone else settles around me.
Camilla St. Vrain’s given us a lot, the article begins.Yoni eggs, life-affirming Inner Saint retreats, permission to love ourselves just as we are. But as she traverses the country on this summer’sLetters to My Someday Daughteranniversary tour, St. Vrain is giving us something she hasn’t before: an up-close look at the someday daughter we’ve heard about for so many years, a future doctor named Audrey. And if last night’s sold-out show in Chicago proved anything, it’s that Camilla’s eighteen-year-old daughter is impressive in her own right—not just someday, but already. After graduating at the top of her class from Colorado’s prestigious Summit School, Audrey is—
“Take a seat, honey.” I look up, find Camilla watching me from her perch behind Mags. “I don’t want you to fall when we start moving.”
“Come up here,” Silas calls, waving me toward the front of the boat. “Everyone’s in the back, we should balance the weight.”
Balance the weight, I think. Is that some kind of euphemism?But no—it’s just Silas being freakingnormal, sliding over to make space for me next to Puddles on the leather bench seat. I think of him with powdered sugar on his lips and force myself to stop.
“Thanks,” I say, and Magnolia powers up the motor, and Silas holds out a hand.
When I look up at him, he wiggles his fingers. He has to shout over the noise. “Let me see?”
I pass off the magazine, feeling suddenly nervous as his eyes track across it. The thought of Silas reading the wordsyoni eggsandAudreyin the same paragraph makes me want to pitch myself off the front of the boat, but eventually he’s finished reading and hands it back to me.
“Can I ask you something?”
He slides closer when I nod, pulling Puddles into his lap. The Midwest wind whips around us, ripping curls loose from beneath hisGG’s Gardensharehat.
“Why’d you agree to this tour,” he asks, leaning in so we don’t have to yell, “if you thought it would be so horrible?”
I tilt backward, regaining space between us. “Why did you?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Silas grins, the wind wrenching his T-shirt tight across his shoulders, the planes of his chest. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone so comfortable in their own body, watched another person move through the world as easily as he does. “When your mom offered the internships to American, the three of us applied right away.” He waves a hand toward Cleo and Mick, who are already eating Twizzlers at the back of the boat. “A summerlong trip, eight weeks with my friends, work experience to put on my résumé—win, win, win.”
“Résumé for what?”
He shrugs. “Whatever comes next. Making documentaries, maybe.”
“Maybe?” I repeat. “You don’t know?”
Silas studies me. Behind his shoulder, Lake Shore Drive recedes, its high-rises growing smaller and smaller. “Does anyone get to know for sure?” he says. “It’ll be what it’ll be.”
I scoff. “It’ll be what you make it.”
Silas shakes his head, smiling, and looks down at his feet—big and bare on the floor of the boat. “Okay, Audrey. Your turn to answer the question.”
It’s out before I’ve thought it through: “I came because she wanted to spend time with me.” Something I never thought I’d say out loud and yet here I am, saying it. Silas looks back up at me; I know, in the same way I know I’ll draw breath, that he’s a safe place to put this. “Because she doesn’t usually want me with her.”
His lips part, but I look down at my hands. Keep talking so he can’t pity me, can’t tell me how sad that is. “But I’ve always been this pawn, and that’s really what she needed from me this summer. Someone to help bolster her image.”
When he’s quiet, I finally hazard a glance up at him. The high sun’s right in his eyes and he’s squinting at me—like our roles are reversed, like he’s the resting mathematician now. “Can both be true?” he asks. “She wants to spend time with youanddo the public image thing?”
“Is that love?” I say, and his eyes don’t leave mine. “When there’s a transaction involved?”
He tilts his head, and Puddles shifts on his lap. We both look down at her. “Maybe. I think love can probably be a lot of things.”
We hit the wake from another boat, smacking so hard against the water that Cleo screams. We both turn to look back at her, watch her dissolve into a laugh as she leans hard into Mick.
“It’s my biggest weakness,” I say finally.
“What is?”
“The way I am with her.” I meet Silas’s eyes and then look away, out across the water. “Always hoping something’s going to be there.” I press my thumb to my pinky finger, not quite counting but ready if I need to. “I act stupid for her.”
“Doesn’t really sound like a weakness,” Silas says. When I look back at him he’s close to me, leaning in so I can hear him over the motor but also, it feels, so I know he’s there. Listening. “Sounds like you love her.”
I pull my lip between my teeth and we keep looking at each other and the wind lashes around us, somehow both warm and biting.
