Page 13 of The Someday Daughter

I watch my reflection the whole way up to my hotel room, my face distorted in the elevator’s polished metal doors. I feel more like that Audrey than this flesh-and-bone one: blurred out, misshapen, being carried upward by forces beyond my control.

Can I call?

Ethan, prompt as a stopwatch. It’s ten thirty on the dot, our scheduled video call time even though it’s one thirty in the morning where he is. He sleeps less than anyone I know and works twice as hard in his waking hours.

Let me just get to my computer, I send. The elevator pings open and I pad down the silent hallway, key into my room. It’s dark and empty, just my black suitcase waiting for me at the foot of the bed. Camilla offered to share rooms this summer, like maybe I was still six and afraid to be alone. But I grew into my solitude long ago—its reliability, the way no surprises waited for me there. Still, the room strikes me immediately as sad. I open my laptop so I don’t have to think about why.

“Nice dress,” Ethan says when he appears on the screen.

I glance down at myself: pale jeans and a white blouse, all pleats and frills. Its shoulders are so ruffled I look like I’m drowning in them.

“It’s a shirt.” I try to smooth down the ruffles and watch them bounce right back into place on-screen. “Magnolia picked all these clothes that make me look like I’m going to my first communion or something.”

“I think you look nice,” Ethan says. He’s in a dimly lit dorm room, face cast pale blue by his computer. “Different.”

Different, certainly. I draw a breath. “Anyway, how was today?”

“Today,” Ethan says, and dips his head to rifle through a notebook. “Today was... ethical.” He glances up. “You have the textbook, right? Page thirty-four is a good place to start. The biomedical ethics professor is this man Oscar Velasquez, he used to be the head of—oh, hey, wait.”

Our eyes meet through the screen and for a moment I think I know what’s coming: How was the show? How are you holding up? Are you going to be okay all summer when you feel this alone?

But Ethan says, “Did you submit your application for the Hopkins Hospital shadowing position?”

And it’s a relief, really. To not have to talk about it. I nod at him and swallow it all down: the woman in the crowd who dredged up my worst memory without knowing, the fraudulent sheen Camilla’s shellacked over my entire life, the desperate way I wish I were there instead of here.

“I did,” I tell him. I submitted it yesterday, my plans with Sadie mapped out city by city like the best version of what this summer’s supposed to be. The version that doesn’t feel at all, so far, like what it actually is. “All set.”

There’s a whoop outside my door, distinctly Silas, and for a split second I think the interns have come back for me. But then I hear Cleo, farther away like she’s waiting by the elevator: “Hurry up, dumbass!” And Silas’s singsong reply: “I just forgot her bedtime meds! I’ll be so quick.”

The door next to mine opens and thuds shut. If I hadn’t heard it at the airport I wouldn’t recognize Silas’s Puddles voice, but it comes unquestionably toward me through the wall that separates us.

“Audrey?”

I turn back to Ethan, blinking.

“When will you hear back?”

“Oh.” I pull up the email from Hopkins, though I know the date by heart. “July sixteenth. About a month.”

“You’ll get it,” he says, and I smile. “Of course you will.” He slides his textbook toward him so I can see its bottom corner on the desk. “Okay, so page thirty-four...”

It’s nearly midnight when Ethan finishes walking me through the lecture. He yawns, wide and wild as a lion cub, and it makes me want to crawl into the screen to get to him. Our visit in Miami isn’t close enough—still six weeks and as many cities away. I’m going to get some sleep, he says. I love you, he doesn’t. But I know this is how Ethan loves me: staying up until three a.m. so I don’t feel like I’m missing out. Bookending my horrible day with steadfast reminders of my real life. His familiar, yawning face.

But then he’s gone, and my screen goes black, and there I am again. Reflected back at myself. I blink and shut the computer.

When I slide it into my backpack, I feel a soft rectangle at the bottom of the bag. I pull out the used copy of Letters I bought at the Denver airport and for a moment we just stare at each other, quiet. The AC kicks on in the corner of the room.

To her, the book’s dedication says. Two words my mother always claims to have written for me, though I didn’t exist for seven more years after she wrote them. But I’ve always known you, she’ll say, in a way.

I take the tattered book into bed, pushing back the starchy sheets and sinking into the pile of pillows. My shoulder ruffles shimmy up around my face and I shove them back down.

I flip to page one and wonder, briefly, if Sadie Stone is reading these same pages in this same moment in her room down the hall. Then I resign myself to it. It’s not like this is anything new for me, like I don’t always find myself here.

Reading the opening pages of Letters to My Someday Daughter is like reciting a nursery rhyme I learned as a child. That’s how well I know it, like it developed as part of me and grew with my brain. I’ve read the book too many times to count: sometimes when I’m spiteful, sometimes when I’m sad, sometimes just to feel like I maybe understand my mother.

I have a lot of bad habits when it comes to her, bred from something dark and masochistic inside me. The airport bookstores, the rereadings, the therapy reviews.

Camilla hasn’t been a practicing psychotherapist since a few years after Letters was published, when the fame and the money took her away from treatment. But the internet holds the proof. There’s a collection of patient reviews from a now-defunct website that I have saved in a folder on my desktop labeled First Semester Syllabi. I pull it up when I feel my worst, even though it only ever pushes me lower.

I glance up from the book, eye the edge of my laptop across the room. I could pull it up now, even. No one would know to stop me.

There are a dozen reviews waiting for me in that folder. Maybe five that actually say much of anything. But I have a favorite: Bobbi from Silver Lake.

I know this seems crazy to say, she’d written. I can imagine her voice exactly: bubbly and sincere, Bobbi with an i. But Camilla’s like the mother I always wished I had.