Page 49 of The Someday Daughter
I swallow, flick my eyes over to my mother. Hers are open now, surveying her little group. She’s holding one woman’s wrist, and as I watch she squeezes it and then reaches for another woman, taking the hand she has upturned on one knee. The woman’s eyes open, and Camilla smiles at her.
So much of my mother’s life is performative that I’ve forgotten, maybe, she’s an actual human being. She’s a living fifty-four-year-old person. She’s here in this room, where there are no cameras and no lists of talking points, holding some stranger’s hand to make her feel like her inner self is deserving of grace or love or whatever it is.
It hits me in the roof of my mouth, thick and choking. What this reminds me of. It’s GG’s dinner table last night—sauce-stained plates pushed to the side, Apples to Apples cards strewn over the uneven wood, Mick howling with laughter, evening air breathing through the open windows. This feels like that. Warm. A moment carefully gathered to make everyone in it feel like they belong there.
I think of Sadie in Santa Fe:It was you pushing her away. Of Dad in Austin:We’re your parents. We love you. And of myself, so angry at Camilla for so long, so desperate for her to see me as I actually am.
And so unsure, suddenly, if I’ve ever done the same for her.
33
We’re somewhere over Kansas when Sadie nudges my elbow. I have headphones in and my laptop open, scrolling through the Johns Hopkins course catalog. Aside from finger counting, nothing calms me down quite as quickly.
“Hey,” she says. We had to bump up our flight last-minute to accommodate some A-list book club visit in Nashville, so our seats are scattered all throughout the plane. Sadie’s in the window and I’m stuck in the middle next to an eleven-year-old who’s spent the whole flight loudly smacking bubble gum. The interns are in a row at the very back. I haven’t spoken to any of them since GG’s.
I raise my eyebrows at her, pulling out one earbud.
“You doing okay?” she says.
I feel myself stiffen, my spine arcing off the back of the seat. “Why?”
Sadie smiles a little. “Don’t be so suspicious, Audrey, you’ve just been quiet since the bookstore yesterday.”
I blink. I’ve been quiet since the bookstore, or Silas finally said something to her? I’ve been quiet, or she wants to talk about how I literallyteared upduring that bananas meditation situation like some kind of kombucha-drinking earth mother?
“I’m fine,” I say, and when she narrows her eyes I repeat it. “I’mfine.”
“You sure?”
I close my laptop, shifting a little to look at her head-on. “Can I ask you something?”
She waves a hand, like,proceed.
When I swallow it feels cartoonishly dramatic. “What do you take notes on, inLetters?”
I swear I watch Sadie’s pupils dilate in real time. She looks like I just asked her how recently she committed first-degree homicide. Why does this matter so much to her?
“What doyou?” she says.
I tilt away from her. “I told you, I don’t. That was a used copy of the book. Someone else’s notes.”
“Why were you carrying it around, then?”
I blink rapidly. “I just, um.” I think about lying, about making something up. Telling her that I was holding on to it for Camilla, or that someone gave it to me at a show and I’d forgotten to throw it out. But I remember what my mother said, yesterday in that houseboat bookstore:Honor the feeling you’re identifying right this moment.And I feel like I want to tell Sadie the truth.
“I read it a lot,” I say finally. “Letters.To try and understand her.”
The plane hums around us. Sadie holds my eyes. “That’s why I’m reading it, too.”
Before I can ask what Sadie could possibly want to know about my mom, she says, “What are you hoping to find?”
The question settles in me like sand, not so heavy in itself but suffocating in its power to fill me. The way it blankets everything.A sign that I matter to her, I think. But I don’t say that to Sadie. Instead, I ask, “What’s your mom like?”
She stares at me. “My mom?” When I nod, she clears her throat. Looks down at her hands. “She’s, I mean. She’s an elementary school teacher in Grand Rapids. She has bangs and she thinks the only place worth vacationing is Mackinac Island. She’s sixty-five.”
She looks back at me, clocking my reaction like this is some kind of test.
“Okay,” I say slowly. “Are you close?”
