Page 40 of The Someday Daughter
“Jesus, Audrey, she had a life jacket on.” Silas looks down at me and then away, a muscle flexing in the corner of his jaw. Hesounds angry, the words crackling like heat on metal. “What were you thinking?”
Puddles is fully in my lap now. She’s soaked, too—she sits right on my stomach and I just let her stay there, panting. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking at all.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, and the anger breaks from Silas’s face. Like a cresting wave, like an exhale of relief. He lowers himself to the floor in front of me and when he draws a huge breath I watch it move through him—lake water beading clear between the thin bones of his ribs. Tracing wet lines down his torso.
“Audrey,” he says quietly. His eyes low, looking at Puddles instead of at me. “Please don’t—”
He breaks off, jaw tensing again. When he looks up at me there’s water in his dark eyelashes. “Please don’t ever do that again.”
“Of course not,” I whisper, and when the sun hits his eyes they go gold-green at the centers. His eyebrows twitch together the tiniest distance, half a wince, and I’m sure he’s going to say something else. But suddenly Cleo is there, and when she drops to her knees beside me she pushes Silas out of the way. Her arms close around my neck, squeezing so tightly I let out a wet cough.
“I know I called you borderline horrible,” she says. “But that was before you risked your life for a gross old pug.”
28
DENVER
“Ouch,” Sadie says, eyes on my leg as we step out of a rideshare onto the sidewalk. “You’ve got a whole rainbow happening there.”
I look down, clocking the gruesome bruise on my knee. I should’ve worn pants; I wore an ankle-length dress to last night’sLettersshow even though it’s in the mid-nineties here in Denver.
In the days since Chicago, the side of my knee I smacked on the boat’s deck has phased through the entirety of the color wheel, transitioning from a maudlin purple to a pukey kind of green, and now to this hellish yellow bordered with pink splotches. It looks like I have some kind of flesh-eating disease. Like I’m being consumed from the inside.
Which isn’t so far off, really. The whole spectacle on Lake Michigan was so mortifying—so unthinkably idiotic—that it’s been licking through my insides like hellfire ever since. I almost didn’t tell Ethan about it at all. But on video chat that night, before running through a Penn lecture on emergency medicine, Ethan had interrupted my description of an idyllic and entirely fictionalized boat trip to say that my voice sounded weird. “Hoarse,” he’d said. “Are you getting sick?”
In the head only, I could’ve told him. But instead it all camepouring out of me—how Puddles made a break for it, and the intolerable thought of her tiny, old body sinking to the bottom of the lake, and how I’m fine, really, completely fine, just kind of shaken up, but that’s to be expected.
Ethan listened to the story with his mouth half-open, blinking rapidly. And then he said, “Why would you do something like that?”
TheI’m so glad you’re all rightwas implied, I’m sure. But it was Silas’s voice echoing in my quiet hotel room as he said it—What were you thinking?—and the way he looked at me on the boat, terrified and accusatory, breath heaving out of him. What he’d said to me in Austin:I can’t do hospitals after what happened.And that I’d scared him, maybe.
“Because I thought the dog would die,” I told Ethan. It sounded defensive, and it was. I knew I was bristling; clearly it had been an idiot move, but was it really so hard to imagine a single reason I’d do something like that? The question made it sound like saving a dog from certain death was a choice completely off the table for someone like me. Like I was some kind of heartless monster. Ethan didn’t know Puddles had been wearing a life jacket, and I didn’t tell him.
“But you could have, too,” Ethan said, his brow furrowing. “Audrey, that’s so illogical. You can’t—”
“Okay but I’m fine.” It came out as one word, loud and graceless. The truth was ithadbeen illogical. It had been completely instinctual, screaming from some primal part of me I didn’t recognize. I didn’t know how to explain that to Ethan; I didn’t think I even could. But I hated how he was looking at me, like I’d somehow let him down by doing something he couldn’t understand. I couldn’t understand it, either, and his reaction only made it worse.
“You feeling okay, otherwise?” Sadie asks now. We’re standing in the lobby of an obstetrician’s office in downtown Denver, surrounded by pregnant ladies. “Silas said you were pretty shaken up.”
Oh, just throw me back in Lake Michigan. Just pitch me off the top of the Willis Tower. The thought of Sadie and Silas discussing howshaken upI was, like a four-year-old on a Tilt-A-Whirl, is the most humiliating thing I can imagine.
“I’m fine,” I say stiffly, and when we drop into waiting room seats side by side, my open backpack slides straight onto the floor, fully upside down. Of course.
I’m reaching to collect my truly enormous collection of scattered pens when Sadie leans down next to me. She picks up the used copy ofLetters to My Someday Daughterthat I bought in the airport, somehow already a month ago, the last time I was in Denver. Between all the unpacking and repacking this summer, I’ve left it at the bottom of my bag.
I watch as if from behind glass as she stares at it. That picture of Camilla on the cover, the dedication—To her—all the annotations in the margins. Similar, maybe, to the secretive notes she was taking in her own copy at Dr. Bautista’s office in Chicago.
“Audrey,” she says softly. “Did you take all these notes?”
I snatch the book out of her hand, hating the way she recoils like I hit her. “Of course not.”
“Who did?”
“A criminally insane person, clearly.”
She hesitates, and my cheeks are burning too bright to look at her. How senseless of me to carry it around like this, like someonewouldn’t see. I feel like a teenager in a summer blockbuster, like my parents just found my porn stash or a giant bag of weed under my bed.
“I know thatyoudo, but I don’t take this book seriously enough to take notes on it.”
