Page 39 of The Someday Daughter
“Silas!” Mick shouts, and we both look away. “Where’d you put the—”
Mags cuts the engine, and suddenly Mick’s voice is ten decibels too loud. He dips his chin, quiets down, and finishes, “—sunscreen?”
“Under the seat,” Silas says, pointing.
“Yeah, I can’t find it.”
Silas sighs, holding Puddles’s leash out to me. She’s sitting between us, peering out over the water, and looks up at him when he stands. “Watch her for a sec?”
I take the leash wordlessly, and then he’s gone. I’m distantly aware of Magnolia talking to my mother, an anchor being drawn out from somewhere, a great splash as it hits the water. Anotherboat trawls by and Puddles leaps to her feet, suddenly on high alert. I’m still thinking about the fool I’ve made of myself—about everything that bubbles up out of me when Silas is around, unfiltered and embarrassing, never what he asked for, so much more than anyone should have to listen to—and Puddles is halfway down the bench before I realize she’s moving and think to tighten my grip on her leash.
But I’m too slow, and the leash is slick with lake spray, and it slips through my hands as Puddles climbs onto the boat’s back ledge. Faster than I’ve ever seen her move, spryer than her eleven years would lead you to believe. She’s hopping up, and she’s letting out a croaking bark, and she’s taking a great leap over the water in furry, wrinkly pursuit of the passing boat.
I scream. I move so fast I slip, my knee smacking the hard plastic of the deck. I think of what Silas said at that park in Austin—Puddles can’t swim.
And I’m in the water before my brain’s caught up enough to remember that I can’t, either.
27
It’s like this: the water is cold but itburns. For half a triumphant second I’m lifting Puddles from the wake, but then, of course, I’m not. I don’t know how to tread water; I don’t actually know what people mean when they say that. The water isn’t even saline. It doesn’t buoy me at all. I sink like a stone, something inhuman, all my limbs moving in useless, unfamiliar ways. I gulp for air and it’s liquid. It does the opposite of what it’s meant to, scorches me all the way down.
And it keeps getting denser—like the lake is solidifying around me, going thick between my clawing fingers. I’m reaching for something, I think I am, I’m so sure I’m fighting to save myself but there’s just the walled-in darkness around me and the white-hot gurgle of Lake Michigan down my throat and then the slow blackening, seeping from the outside in, the aperture of myself winding down.
I think of Fallon’s flash of a laugh, the room we lived in together all through high school, the home we made there. My dad’s face in the glow of stage lights filtered through the curtain. The scratch of his stubble under my five-year-old palm. My mother, reaching for me—I’m small, I’m barely walking, I’m barefoot in her livingroom and she’s grinning, unrehearsed, both hands around my ribs to lift me up, holding me so tightly, and I’m laughing and I’m turning through the air and I’m—
Throwing up. Acid wash of it, liquid nightmare, eyes pressed shut.
“Oh, Jesus,” someone says—hazy, hardly there. Something big and solid between my shoulder blades, holding me still while the third-largest Great Lake pours out of my open mouth. “Oh, god, thank fuck.”
I cough, tears streaming from my closed eyes. They’re salty, hit my lips as I retch again.
“Good,” the voice says, clearer. A little calmer. The hand on my back moves along my spine. “Get it all out.”
I open my eyes and instantly close them again, everything too bright—the sunlight, the white belly of the boat, four pairs of ankles attached to four pairs of feet clustered in front of me. And the arms locked around my sides, the hard wall of human person I’m pressed against, the one I just puked lake water all over. It’s too much to look at. It’s Silas.
He pushes wet ropes of hair out of my eyes. “Audrey, can you breathe?”
I nod, eyes closed, gasping for air. It’s the best thing I’ve ever felt—perfect, perfect air. Gusting down my windpipe, expanding my ribs into Silas’s chest. My throat hurts so badly.
“Mick,” Silas says, and I crack my eyes open enough to see him turn away from me, water streaking down his neck. The sun catches it, glinting in the space between us. “Can you grab a bottle of water?”
The boat sways, Mick’s footsteps moving away.
“Audrey,” my mother says. Her voice shakes, and behind my closed eyelids the sun’s flare is shaded by her crouching in front of me. I open my eyes and she’s right there, so close, plain fear on her face. Behind her, Cleo’s covering her mouth with one hand. “Are you all right?”
Am I? I nod anyways, and Mick cracks open a bottle of water. When he passes it to Silas, my mother stands.
“Everyone just—” Silas breaks off, holding out an arm. He’s breathless, panting. His T-shirt is drenched through. “Just give her some room, okay? She’s okay.”
The legs retreat, all of them except for Camilla’s. I feel her move around me, sit on the bench behind my head and rest a hand on my shoulder. Silas presses the water bottle into my palm, curving my fingers around it with his own.
“Drink this,” he says, and when I start to shake my head he cuts me off. “I know you don’t want to, but you’ll feel better. I promise.”
He tilts me off him, helps me lean up against the seats so I can drink. There’s only one reason he’d be this out of breath, that his clothes would be this soaked.
“Did you—” I rasp, and it hurts so much that I stop. I don’t need to ask; I know he jumped in after me. I’m so ashamed that when I close my eyes again there are already tears building behind them. But then I remember, and they snap open. “Puddles.”
He stands, pulling his drenched T-shirt over his head. It hits the deck with a wet smack just as Puddles comes running toward us, traipsing across my legs.
