Page 37 of The Deepest Lake

“Never mind about the clothes. Did you refill all your medications? It’s a long trip. Are you sure you’re bringing enough? And make sure to bring the prescriptions, in case you lose the pills or some border agent takes them away.”

“Mom. I know how to pack. And no border guard is taking away my birth control pills.”

“You never know. Catholic countries.”

“Mom.”

But it wasn’t my birth control she was really worried about. It was my other pills. The ones she has been terrified I’ll stop taking ever since my freshman year, when I was prescribed them in the first place. I’m not ashamed to be on antidepressants. For my mom, it’s like this big secret or this thing she wants to talk about and not talk about at the same time. She’s on them, too. Nana wasn’t willing to try them until she was already old, but she should have, obviously. What’s the big deal?

“I just can’t imagine what would happen if you were in a Third World country—”

“No one uses that term anymore—”

“—and suddenly decided you didn’t need them.”

“Mom. That won’t happen.” We both know how quickly things spiraled the first time. Admittedly, even I don’t like talking about that part.

I knew how sad it made her to remember. It wasn’t like I attempted suicide. I just became lost and strange and deeply disconnected, and the first time she saw me, six weeks after we’d last spoken, she started sobbing—which only made me feel more like a zombie. As if I had, in fact, died. Or worse, become something she could no longer recognize. It was as if I had rejected her—instead of just grown deeply, chemically estranged from myself.

“Okay, so you don’t want the clothes? I’ll return them.” She grabbed the pants and the shirt from my hands before I could say anything more, her eyes filling.

Be nicer, I told myself after that argument. And that’s been my plan: to think harder before I speak the next time I see Mom. To realize I don’t have to spew every last thought in my head. To realize she loves me and does her best, even if it’s not enough, sometimes.

And there I went again. Was my relationship with Mom really not enough? Wasn’t it the kind of relationship anyone my age has, when she’s made the mistake of living in the same town as her parents past the age of eighteen?

My late-night thoughts about Mom were uncomfortable but they were mostly resolved, which made for a boring essay. No journey, no discovery. To find something richer I had to dig harder, further back into the past. What I ended up with—just the first five hundred words—was the start of a short piece about my dad’s marriage to Ulyana. Nearly as lame.

I had been given the gift of an audience and a deadline. I told myself that we all write “shitty first drafts.” It didn’t make me feel any better.

Laptop under my arm, I hurry from the cabin to self-serve breakfast and grab some cut-up fruit just before it’s put away. Popping pineapple chunks in my mouth as I stroll, I find my way to Eva’s balcony, where she’s already talking to someone, as usual.

Phone pressed to her ear, she points to the stacks of paper-clipped pages I see on benches and the little bistro table, the same stacks that have cluttered this space since I first arrived at Casa Eva.

“Copy?” I guess.

She shakes her head.

“Recycle?”

She rolls her eyes.

Eva pulls the phone away from her ear and says, “Just wait.”

Sorry! Okay. Waiting.

Barbara’s face appears on the other side of the closed glass door. Eva flaps her hand, making a “go away” gesture. I raise my eyebrows and wrinkle my nose as if to say, Sorry? But I’m on this side of the door, and Barbara is on that side. I’m close enough to see her nostrils flare.

It’s not like Barbara should be jealous. She lives here fulltime and she knows everything about everything that makes the Casa Eva Universe go around. As Eva said yesterday, “The ideal assistant takes care of messes so that I don’t have to see them.” That’s what Barbara—and Hans, and Trish in Miami—all know how to do. I can only learn.

“Juliet May.” Eva has barely disconnected her call when she points to the paper-clipped stacks again. “Have you read all of the manuscripts yet?”

“I get to read them?”

“Get to? You have to.”

She explains that she wants a five-minute summary for each, plus anything I think she should know in advance about the writer, based on cover emails plus online searches.

“Online searches?”