Page 44 of The Someday Daughter
“You absoluteturd,” Cleo says, pulling her soaked-through bucket hat back over her hair. “My sunscreen hadn’t even set yet.”
“You loved it.” Mick grins wickedly, reaching for his ant towel and dragging it over his wet face. “Audrey, you next?”
“Very funny,” I say flatly, and Cleo nudges me with her foot.
“You going to at least take off your clothes? Or too scared to even be in a swimmie these days?”
I sigh and stand up, shimmying off my pants. They’re long and gauzy, specifically selected to hide my—
“Killer bruise,” Mick says, letting out a low whistle. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I say, pulling the hem of my T-shirt over my head. “It looks worse than it feels.”
Cleo lets out a theatrical gasp. “What aboutthose?”
I follow the line of her gaze to my rib cage, where—oh. Right. I try to lift my balled-up T-shirt to hide them, but Cleo’s quicker than me and bats my hand out of the way. For a minute all four of us stare at them in silence: the five mottled bruises pressed to my ribs. Blue-green and tender. I’ve been sleeping on my other side, wearing wireless bras. This morning, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and lifted a hand to line them up with my own fingerprints.
“Did I do that?”
When I look at Silas his lips are pressed together. He reaches a hand toward me and I imagine it landing on my skin, his palm in the empty space between the bruises, his fingers fitting them just right. But then he lets it fall and looks up at me, his eyes dark.
“Firm grip,” I say. He looks back at my ribs, and I spread the shirt around my torso so he can’t see. “Silas.”
“Does it hurt?” he asks. It does, but not as much as it hurts to imagine the bruising itself—the act of it, Silas dragging the dead weight of me out of Lake Michigan.
“No,” I tell him. He’s still staring at my side, like he can see his fingerprints on my skin even through the T-shirt.
“Jesus, Si,” Cleo says. “You really grabbed her, huh?”
He swallows, and when his eyes move to Cleo I hate how guilty he looks. “I mean, I really didn’t want her to die.”
Cleo snorts. “Fair.”
“Audrey,” Silas says, quieter, and when he takes a step closer to me his hand lifts again. Like a reflex, like he’s not quite aware of it. “I’m sorry.”
“Silas,” I say. “Without you I’d be at the bottom of that lake.”
“Don’t say that,” he tells me, and I know he means the lake part. That it hurts him, maybe, to imagine me underwater. But that’s not the part that scraped my throat on the way out, the part that felt painful to articulate.Without you.I make myself think it again. Like exposure therapy, like an idea I’ll maybe get used to if I think it often enough. The way I will need to be, after this summer. For the rest of my life.Without you, without you, without you.
When we get back to GG’s house, everyone smelling of lake water except me, Sadie’s at the kitchen table with a glass of wine. Shesmiles as we trudge in, everything about her easy and relaxed. Like the rest of this day didn’t happen; like GG flipped some kind of switch to bring her back to herself. Like maybe I won’t need to unearth that moment at Dr. Sun’s by apologizing to her after all. GG stands in front of the stove stirring a pot of pasta sauce.
“Showers!” she calls, hardly turning to look at us. “All of you. Dinner’s in twenty.”
It twinges in a way I’m not ready for, the expectation that I’ll be at a table at a certain time for a meal someone’s made me. At the Summit School dinner is from six to eight, three entree options and open seating and a conveyor belt that swallows your tray open-mouthed when you’re done. At my dad’s, dinner is takeout on a counter and maybe an overlap in our schedules but more likely me eating alone, forking lo mein while the Pacific sun sets through the living room windows. I can’t remember eating dinner at Camilla’s even once since going to school. The rare occasions I’m home we go to restaurants with Laz, with loud packs of her friends who fill up private back rooms and don’t ask me any questions.
“Audrey,” Cleo says, and when I look up I realize I’ve stalled out by the kitchen table. Mick and Silas are gone; she’s halfway down the hallway to the back of the house. “You coming?”
I nod, catching GG’s eye before I go. She smiles at me, like she knows.
By eight thirty Mick’s roped everyone into a loud game of Apples to Apples, which he inexplicably callsApp-lays to App-lays. When he wins Cleo’s “Graceful” card with “Swimming,” I excuse myself to go to the bathroom. Ethan still hasn’t texted me, though weusually video chat around this time. Waiting for me, maybe, to reach out first.
When I leave the bathroom, Silas is waiting in the hallway.
“It’s his love language, you know.” He’s leaning against the slatted-wood wall, arms crossed, barefoot in shorts and a hoodie. At first I think he means Ethan, which of course he doesn’t, and what would that imply, even? That Ethan’s love language is silence?
“What is?” I ask.
“The teasing,” he says. The hallway is growing dark with the sunset and smells like shampoo, the same one from GG’s guest bathroom that both of us used. Our hair’s still wet. “Mick. You scared him, in Chicago. He has to make a joke out of it or he’ll just start crying.”
