Page 8 of The Someday Daughter
There’s a pause. When Ethan speaks again, his voice is clearer, like he’s moved the phone closer to his face. “They didn’t hold your place ahead of applicants who were wait-listed?”
“I know.” I rub my forehead, wrap my sweater farther around myself in the whip of a wind gust. “Camilla pulled the tuition, apparently, so I’m back in the general pool.”
“Okay,” Ethan says. His voice is even; in all the time we’ve been together I’ve never seen him upset. “Okay. So it’ll have to bethe tour, and studying with Dr. Stone, and we’ll talk through the Penn coursework together as we planned.”
“Or,” I say, drawing a breath, “I could come anyways.”
He’s quiet. I turn around to squint over the ocean. It looks angry, churning navy and gray.
“What do you mean?” he asks finally.
“I could rent an apartment.” It’s the plan I’ve cobbled together while pacing the beach for the last hour. “In Philadelphia. Maybe a long-term vacation rental? I could talk to my dad. And study with you between classes. Go through the coursework together, like you said.” I pause, tuck loose hair behind my ear. Swallow. “Or I could stay with you, even.”
“What about the ICU shadowing position at Hopkins?” Ethan sounds confused, but his voice is patient.Help me understand, he always says. When he’s tutoring at the student center. When we’re working as EMTs and someone’s hurt in a way we can’t see. And now, apparently, to me. “Isn’t the application due next week?”
“It is,” I say.
“If you come here but aren’t enrolled at Penn, how will you describe your work this summer?”
I close my eyes, feel the storm wind in my eyelashes, try to breathe around the truth. Which is that he’s right, like so many times before. When I don’t speak, he keeps going.
“I don’t think they’ll choose you without something tangible on your application. The physician visits you have planned along the tour with Dr. Stone make more sense—and, I mean, if they’ll write you recommendations?” I hear a rustle from his end of the line, picture him reaching for his computer. “I looked into Dr. Stone, too. Did you know she published in theNew England Journal of Medicine? The research coming out of her lab is...”
I let his voice wash into the sea, the rising wind. Ethan is the one person in my life who consistently knows what I need and makes sure that I have it. If he thinks I should stay, I should stay.
I open my eyes. Wish for the ocean to swallow me whole.
7
The noise coming from under Silas’s seat can only be described ascroaking. Low, gurgling, somehow both wet and crackling. When I finally rip my gaze from the reading Ethan’s sent me to glare at him, he has headphones in and his eyes closed.
“Silas.” Magnolia is sitting a few seats past him, Google Calendar pulled up on her tablet. She’s not having any of this, either. “Silas.”
“Mmm?” He pulls out one earbud and raises his eyebrows at her. The croaking sounds again, melancholically determined, and he jumps a little.
“Oh, shit. Puddles.”
Half the people at our gate watch as he doubles over, pulling a soft-sided dog crate from underneath his seat. In all the commotion his phone slips from his lap onto the floor, plane ticket illuminated there on the screen: SILAS ACHESON. The croaking intensifies when he crawls onto the nubby airport carpet and sits cross-legged in front of the crate’s zippered flap.
“Hey, girl,” he says. His hair’s tied back again, mostly hidden under a green baseball cap withGG’s Gardenshareembroidered on it. He nudges up the brim and unzips the carrier. “We don’t need to share our bad attitude with the whole airport, do we?”
With one mollified little croak, a hopelessly wrinkled animal emerges from the bag. It’s—um. I watch Silas lift it to his chest and run a hand over its back. Okay, it’s a dog. It turns its furrowed face toward me, cloudy gray eyes finding mine from beneath the canopy of a prominent forehead wrinkle.
“Hey,” someone says, a pair of white leather sneakers appearing next to Silas. We both look up to find Dr. Stone reaching down to pat the dog, backpack slung over one shoulder.
“Oh, hey,” Silas says, glancing at me in the same moment Dr. Stone says, “Have you met—”
They stop simultaneously, looking at me and then at each other, and I realize they were both about to introduce me.
My eyes flick between them. “You know each other?”
Silas glances at Dr. Stone and unfolds himself from the carpet, one hand on the dog and the other held out to steady himself. “Sadie’s my bonus mom,” he says incomprehensibly, offering absolutely no context.
When he reclaims the seat next to me, she settles on his other side. I’m mortified about how Dr. Stone and I met, especially now that I’m staying on the tour for real, and more mortified still when she says, “I used to look after Silas and his sister when I lived in Michigan.”
“Like a babysitter?” I say, and Silas looks at Sadie.
“Sort of,” she says, and the dog lets out another rickety yowl that makes me physically recoil.
