Page 41 of The Someday Daughter
Sadie’s cheeks go scarlet. Her eyes flicker down to her lap and stay there. Shame tugs my heart into my rib cage like a riptide, battering it. This is my mentor, the one person who’s buoyed my dream along all summer. I should apologize, but instead I shove the book into the very bottom of my backpack. When I look at Sadie she’s still staring at her hands, pink-cheeked, like she’s embarrassed to know that I saw her writing inLetters.
I should throw my copy away. There’s a giant trash can across the waiting room, but even as I stare at it my legs don’t move; my body won’t let me. I want that book like I want a weighted blanket—something rooting me down.
“Sadie?”
Thankgod. Sadie and I both look up, find a serious-looking woman with dark hair in a sleek bun.Dr. Sun, her name tag says, next to a yellow illustration of a baby footprint.
“Alice,” Sadie says. When she stands there’s something shaken up about her, like nowshe’sthe one on the Tilt-A-Whirl. It takes her a few tries to get a smile on her face, and when she waves a hand in my direction her voice stutters. “This is—um, this is Audrey.”
I stand up, taking Dr. Sun’s hand when she offers it. Shove down what just happened, push my mother out of my mind. “Thanks so much for having us, Dr. Sun.”
“Welcome,” she says, smiling. She leads us toward a back office,weaving past exam rooms. “Sadie told me about your big shadowing position this fall—very exciting. Nothing quite so fast-paced happening here, I’m afraid, but I hope we can still be of some help.”
Hopkins Hospital releases their ICU selection in four days. It’s been the only thing getting me through the aftermath of my unhinged behavior on the boat, knowing that in fewer than 100 hours I’ll be in contact with the hospital, planning my fall semester.
“Oh, I’m thrilled to be here,” I say when Sadie stays silent. I flit my eyes in her direction and she’s looking down at her shoes, her mouth pinched. “I have so much respect for obstetrics.”
Dr. Sun laughs, sitting behind her desk and motioning Sadie and me into seats across from her. “Respect for it,” she says. “But not an interest in the pursuit, yourself?”
I feel myself flush. “Well, I’m not sure yet, it’s still—”
Dr. Sun holds up her hands, smiling. “Obstetrics isn’t for everyone; it hasn’t even always been for me. When I started medical school I thought I’d be a cardiologist.”
She starts to tell me about it, how bringing new life into the world suits her better than fiddling with hearts, and when I glance over at Sadie she’s staring at the wall next to Dr. Sun’s head.
There’s a picture there, framed in matte white like everything else in this neutral office. In it, a woman lies on her side in a hospital bed, draped in a teal gown and smiling in a fully exhausted sort of way. She has one hand reached into the bassinet next to her—a newborn baby sleeps there, its eyes shut.
It makes me think, completely against my will, of Camilla knocking on my hotel room door the night of the Boat Incident. She asked if it was all right for her to take the spare bed beside mine, and I’d kind of just said okay, and we’d fallen asleep inthe same room for the first time in more than a decade. When I woke up in the morning she was already gone, and she didn’t ask to do it again. It was so weird that I’m not entirely sure it actually happened.
Sadie doesn’t look away from that picture the whole time we’re sitting with Dr. Sun. Lips pressed together, hardly blinking. I think of what she told me about Elliott—he was eighteen months old when we adopted him. And I know that there are as many reasons people choose to adopt as there are people. But I wonder if that picture hurts her somehow. She stays quiet for the rest of our visit. I’m not brave enough to ask.
29
Sadie’s still acting weird that afternoon, quiet and window-gazing in the back seat of the rental car we take to Silas’s grandma’s place. I’m too ashamed of my outburst at Dr. Sun’s office to look at her for the entire drive.
We take the road forty-five minutes from Denver at a different angle from the Summit School, a stretch of mountain-ringed highway I’ve never driven before. When Silas told me, back in Taos, that I should come meet GG, it sounded like the most ludicrous idea in the world. But then he saved my life, and when the interns knock on my door to round me up, he only has to look at me once to get me to cave.
Every time I come within twenty feet of Silas I hear it again—the hazy, half-alive way his voice brought me back from the brink.Oh, god, thank fuck.His hand between my shoulder blades. The betrayed way he looked at me.
We’re going to the mountains, Mick had said, and I’d closed my Penn textbook and that was the end of it. Magnolia was chauffeuring my mother between interviews, but the rest of us would spend the night at GG’s house in Switchback Ridge—a lake town halfway between Denver and Mount Blue Sky.
I texted Ethan that we were going to the mountains for a night, to which he’d said,Camping? You?And obviously not camping, me, but what if I did go camping? All the things Ethan thinks me so incapable of are starting to pile up, making me feel trapped by the idea of myself.Cabin, I’d sent. Just the one word, and still no reply. We lose cell service halfway through the drive, which feels just as well. For the first time this summer, I find myself grateful for the distance between us.
Silas drives, though apparently Sadie also knows the way. They’ve been here before, together—“Once, for Christmas,” Sadie says when Cleo asks. But otherwise, she stays quiet. Guilt grows in me like a seedling, unfurling one green leaf at a time. Guilt, and shame, and fear. Sadie feels like one more person I’ve managed to alienate—even after she’s done so much for me, even after she made room for me at Camilla’s shows. One peek into the truth of my messed-up relationship with my mother and I’ve bungled all of it. But there are three other people in this car with us, and what would I even say? And still, there’s a whispered question beneath the buzz of my regret: What’s Sadie been writing inLettersthat made her so embarrassed?
When we get there, Switchback Ridge is the exact version of Colorado you imagine when you haven’t been here before. Thick with pine trees, surrounded by protected forest land, centered on a lake that’s ringed with a walking path and busy with paddleboarders. The weatherworn sign at its edge readsGossamer Lakein faded white letters. When we roll past, Mick saysOoooooohlike a kid at the zoo.
“This,” Cleo says, checking her lipstick in a palm-sized mirror, “is cute as hell.”
The Summit School is in Boulder, red-bricked against the backdrop of the Flatirons. Well-groomed, imposing, institutional. Boulder’s a college town full of tourists and beautiful people on mountain bikes. Everyone wearing the same brand of two-hundred-dollar windbreaker, applying the same tinted formula of Saint sunscreen. Switchback Ridge feels different: like the manufactured Denver–Boulder corridor hasn’t crept in quite as far. It’s a little wilder—gnarls of pine roots upending the edges of the asphalt, a tiny building at a lightless intersection with a hand-painted sign out front that saysYak meat—if yer brave!
“You should see it at the holidays,” Silas says, and I don’t want to picture it but I do. This small town covered in snow, winter light hitting the tree ice like glitter. And Silas in front of a fire, somewhere—wearing a sweater and laughing his low, easy laugh. My holidays are usually something catered at Dad’s or, last year, in New York City with Ethan’s family. A penthouse apartment on the Upper West Side full of first-edition books, formalwear to Christmas dinner, midnight Mass. That’s what lies ahead of me, holidays like that.
“Annnnnd,” Silas says, hand flat against the wheel as he turns us off the road, “here we are.”
The gravel drive is so choked with trees it seems to swallow us up: a tunnel of green with sunlight glancing through.
“Narnia,” Cleo whispers from the back, and Mick laughs. But when the car emerges from the trees it doesn’t feel like Narnia at all, or anywhere else I’ve ever been. This place is wholly its own: a stone-and-wood mishmash of a cabin with a robin’s-egg-blue door, curved at its top like a hobbit house. The whole thing thick with trellises, blooming vines arcing toward the sun. And thegarden—spreading what must be two acres wide through the flat meadow surrounding the house. Groomed into careful rows, clutches of green radiating in straight lines like sunrays.
