Page 58 of The Someday Daughter
My mother doesn’t check me, though I know it’s obvious to both of us that I’m lying. She crosses the room in her show clothes—silk wrap dress, so pale pink it could be cream—and sits next to me in my filth. Her hand on my forehead is cold as it was two days ago, cold as Dr. Osman’s hand in San Francisco, as comforting and dry as the hand of every doctor I’ve ever met. I remember that my mother is a doctor, too.
“You’re not a child anymore,” she tells me. That’s the hollow, heavy truth: no one is responsible for my deterioration but me.“I can’t tell you what to do. But please don’t pretend nothing happened.”
We stare at each other. My bleary, bloodshot eyes on hers—rose eye shadow, dark mascara. I wonder if she’s thinking about what I’m thinking about: that week sophomore year that I didn’t get out of bed. The Sex Summit. The last time we were here.
“That’s what we do,” I tell her. Her eyebrows twitch toward each other just the tiniest distance, a question she doesn’t ask. I feel, suddenly, like I’m back underwater in Chicago—like my lungs are pressed fully flat under the weight of everything we aren’t saying to each other. “We pretend.”
Her lips part but I don’t want to listen. “Go do your show.” I wave one hand toward the door and it feels unwieldy, not mine. “I’m fine.”
“No,” she says, and the dull headache I’ve had all day throbs against my skull. Right between my eyes, so painful I have to close them.
“Mom,” I manage. “You’re going to be late.”
“So I’ll be late.” Her hands are clasped in her lap and the way she’s looking at me—full attention, basically unblinking—makes me want to hide. I want to be alone, to go back to my internet scroll, to absorb into this mattress and exist here in its cushioned shell. “Tell me what you mean.”
I don’t want to tell her what I mean. I can barely even think straight I’m so dehydrated. I can feel every pore on my body sucking inward; I’ve cried so much in the last two days I’m desiccated and empty. I have nothing left to give her, nothing left in me to have this conversation.
But when I don’t speak, when my throat constricts like aclenched fist, Camilla moves toward me. Her hand brushes through my hair, curls it around my ear. It feels like something I want to lean into, against all my better judgment, and I think of her on that houseboat in Colorado—the way she looked at those women. The way she’s looking at me now.
“Mom,” I whisper. It’s strangled and thin; it hurts on the way out. Her eyes don’t leave mine. “What’s wrong with me?”
“Audrey,” she breathes, and I start sobbing. My own name feels like an offense, something I can’t bear to be associated with. When she hugs me I let it happen; I’m layered in sweat and tears and she presses me directly into her silk dress anyway.
“What’s wrong with me?” My voice is loud somehow. Breathless and wet. “You’re a therapist. Tell me what’s wrong with me.”
“Honey.” Her arms are tight around me, stronger than I know her to be. “What are you talking about?”
“This,” I practically scream, obscene, rearing back so I can motion around us at the squalor I’ve made. This stale room I’m hiding out in like some kind of pox-ridden recluse. “Why am I like this? Why can’t I handle things that other people can handle?”
When I fling my arm into the space between us her eyes track over the fingernail cuts on my forearm. She takes my wrist in her cool hand and lowers it back to the bed, looking up at me.
“Tell me what it is.” I sound like I’m begging; I probably am. “Why do I do this? Tell me what it is. Please.” Her eyes slant in a sad way that cuts right through my chest, breaks every rib on the way to my heart. She pities me. I ask again anyway. “Please, Mom.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you, Audrey.”
The sound that I make is a wail, inhuman. “Don’t pretend. For once, don’t pretend—not like last time.”
“In Colorado, you mean.”
Of course I mean in Colorado. I sniff, wet and graceless. My head hurts so badly it feels thirty seconds away from falling off entirely. “When you pretended nothing happened. When I did this before.”
“I didn’t—” She hesitates, gathering herself. “I wasn’t trying to pretend nothing happened, I—”
“Then why did you do that? Why did you turn that whole entire thing into the Sex Summit story and this big media hit and just fucking ignore—you acted like it never even, I mean, wenevertalked about it, Mom. Never.” When our eyes meet again, hers are as blurred as mine. Shit.
“I’m sorry,” she says. Simply, with no qualifiers. It loosens something inside me. “I knew you didn’t want to share how you were feeling then. I took you to the counseling center because I wanted you to have private space to work through those feelings, away from me and the—” She breaks off, sighs in a way that sounds so, so tired. I watch her struggle to find the words, like this is as hard for her as it is for me. “Everything that follows me. The magnifying glass people take to my life, and yours in turn.”
“But instead you lied,” I say. I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud, finally, after so long. But what do I have left to lose? “You pretended you were there for some Saint sex ed stunt, like what I did was so wrong we couldn’t even speak of it, ever. Like it was so shameful. So—” My voice squeaks off, going so high so suddenly it’s impossible to keep going.
“I’m sorry,” she says again. “Audrey, I’m so sorry, that was never my intention. I thought having a different story about that weekend would give you space to talk about what you’d gone throughon your own terms, or not talk about it, if that’s what you wanted. I wasn’t trying to hide it; I was trying to leave the choice to you. I didn’t mean to cover it up, honey, I was only trying to let you decide.” Our eyes meet, and it all shifts in me like dominoes. Tiles clicking into place. How little we’ve understood each other. “There was nothing shameful about that, just as there’s nothing shameful about this. I’m sorry.”
“There was,” I whisper, breath shaking out of me. “And there is. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Honey.” She pulls me into her again, and this time I can feel her heart hammering. I’ve never, ever seen my mother cry. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”
“Then why am I like this?” I say, straight into her dress.
“I know you want a simple answer.” She pulls away so she can look at me. Wipes a tear from one carefully mascaraed eye. “Something hard and fast, but the truth is we can’t always cleanly categorize ourselves. Nothing is that simple. This is your experience, Audrey. It’s not wrong; it just is.”
