Page 45 of The Someday Daughter
I pull one sweatshirt sleeve over my knuckles. It’s incomprehensible to me, that Mick could care so much after half a summer together. That Silas could. That I’m standing here, silent in this hallway, choking on how much I care.
“Can I show you something?” Silas says.
My voice comes out quiet. “What is it?”
“A surprise,” he says. “I know you don’t like surprises, but I think you’ll like this one.”
For a moment we just look at each other. When I finally nod he steps around me, the fabric of our sleeves touching and nothing else. I check my phone one last time, but Ethan still hasn’t reached out. I follow Silas toward the back of the house.
There’s a door there, pale wood with a curtained window in its middle. Silas holds it open behind him and I step through, the air cool with dusk. The garden is a storybook in the falling dark—moths moving through the rows of vegetables, the whole meadow ringed in trees that move gently in the wind. He steps into the grass and I hesitate.
“My shoes.”
He looks down at my bare feet, then his own. “You can’t go barefoot?”
Bare feet are for the beach, and even then—with sandals waiting on my towel. The garden is all dewy grass and rich-smelling earth. I showered not even two hours ago.
Silas laughs, a breathy noise that sounds like it’s at my expense. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
We look at each other, and it pops right out of me. “An earthworm touches my toe.”
There’s a short, surprised silence, and then Silas starts laughing in earnest. Head tipped back, mouth open so I can see that crooked canine. His whole face changes when he laughs, a version of him that looks even more like himself.
“I will personally ensure that no earthworms touch your toes,” he says, looking at my feet and then up at me.
“You can’t promise that.”
He smiles, soft, close-lipped. “I can promise, Audrey.”
“Okay,” I say then. And I step into the grass.
31
It turns out to be a tree house, tucked in the woods at the end of the garden. One tree-layer deep, so you’re mostly in shade but can just see the house through the pine boughs. There’s a little ladder up to it, rope that feels rough and frayed on the soles of my feet.
“This is maybe more unpleasant than an earthworm,” I tell Silas. But he just grins and lowers a hand down from the tree house to pull me the rest of the way inside.
“This is my favorite place in the world,” he tells me. It’s small, a platform with three walls and one open side looking out over the garden. The walls are covered in pencil drawings, tangles of messy kid handwriting and hangman games and stick-figure scenes. I think of Cleo’s dragon on that chalkboard in Austin.
“The whole world?” I say, and he looks over one shoulder at me. Sitting at the edge of the platform with his feet dangling over, framed by the meadow of GG’s garden.
“The whole world,” he says, and I come to sit beside him. Our arms are a few inches apart. He points to the ceiling, the far corner where a drawing of a flower stands out from the pale wood in fat black lines. “My mom drew that one. She grew up here, with GGand her siblings and my grandpa when he was still alive. Her name was Daisy.”
He smiles at me, and I study his face in the soft dark. “That’s why it’s your favorite place?”
Silas shrugs. “It’s part of it—imagining her here, that small. So long before she got sick that it wasn’t part of her at all.”
I nod. “It must have been hard to see her like that.”
His eyes move over mine, and he hesitates before finally saying, “It was, yeah. I try to, um—just try not to remember her that way. It was such a small part of her life but it feels like the biggest part sometimes, because it was at the end.” Silas lets out a rush of breath and glances back at the daisy. “But that’s not fair. And when I’m here, it’s easier to remember the rest about her, too.”
“Like what?” I say, and when he looks back at me I wonder if I shouldn’t have asked. But eventually a smile tugs at one corner of his mouth, shy and lopsided.
“Like she desperately wanted GG’s green thumb, but she didn’t have it. And every summer in Michigan she’d plant tomatoes and we’d wind up with literallyonedime-sized tomato that she’d make this big show of ‘harvesting’ in August.” He shakes his head, and a moth flits between us. “She’d use this fancy steak knife to cut it into fourths so we could all try it. It was this stupid ceremony every year.”
“That’s not stupid,” I say. I’m picturing it: Silas, younger, standing next to that woman from the dining room pictures. His dad there, too, a middle-aged man with his same face. A kitchen island in the Midwest, summer sun slanting through the windows, Silas’s little sister hanging off his elbow. “That sounds really nice.”
He smiles at me. “Yeah, it was.” He looks down at his feet, swinging slowly through the dark. “What’s your favorite place?”
