Chapter 14

SANTA FE

I thought Camilla would grant a pause on Weekly Flow this summer, considering we’re spending all our waking moments together, but I was wrong.

What’s happening on the hotel rooftop honestly looks like some kind of cult. The mornings in Santa Fe are clear and crisp, 0 percent humidity and not too hot while the sun’s still low in the sky. We’re staying in a hotel right on the plaza and Camilla has the entire rooftop rented out—between potted cacti in tiled planters and pergolas webbed with string lights, the space is absolutely crawling with Saint-branded paraphernalia.

Lilac yoga mats spaced at perfectly even intervals. Foam blocks set just so at the top of each mat. Rolled towels and crystal-at-the-bottom water bottles in every mat’s upper right corner.

I am, intentionally, the last one to arrive. Sadie and the interns have claimed all the mats in the second of two rows, which leaves my mother and Magnolia at the front—and the only available mat is the one right next to Camilla. She waves me over and I quickly count off four fingers before crossing the terrace.

“Morning, honey!” she calls, light and breezy as a song. “Saved you the best seat in the house.”

I force a smile as Mick says, “I think Puddles has the best seat.”

She’s curled into a round, fuzzy dog bed at the edge of the terrace—completely shaded and already snoring. Beyond her, New Mexico spreads hilly and red under a spotless blue sky.

“How’d you land on the name?” Mags asks. I look over at her as I lower myself onto my mat. She’s wearing Saint gear from head to toe and has her meticulously highlighted hair swept into a ponytail. “It suits her.”

“She is kind of melty,” Cleo says, pulling at her cheeks to mimic Puddles’s bountiful wrinkles. “She came with it, right, Si?”

Silas has his legs stretched out in front of him, big hands wrapped around his feet. He’s wearing gym shorts and a faded American University Film Media T-shirt, that same GG’s Gardenshare baseball cap.

“She did,” he says, eyes on Puddles. “How could I change it? Look her at face.”

“One big puddle,” Cleo agrees. “It’s apt.”

“Speaking of apt names,” Mick says, and Cleo groans so loudly Puddles cracks an eye open.

“Don’t start, Mick.” Cleo tips her whole head back. “We know.”

“Audrey doesn’t,” Mick says defensively, gesturing at me. “Neither do Ms. St. Vrain and Magnolia.”

“Mick’s last name is Selinofoto—” Silas starts, and Mick shoves him in the shoulder.

“Steal my thunder!”

“—which means ‘moonlight.’”

Mick grins wide as the horizon, raising his eyebrows at me. “Huh?” He gestures broadly with both arms. “Not bad, right?”

“I’m truly stunned this hasn’t already come up,” Cleo says, adjusting her neon-yellow headband. “It’s the first thing he tells any attractive person. Ever. Every time.”

Mick and I flush in unison, and I get busy unrolling my yoga towel. For what, I don’t know. What are yoga towels supposed to be used for?

“Audrey means ‘noble strength,’” Camilla says, and I stop towel-fluffing to look up at her. She’s sitting cross-legged on the center of her mat, her shoulders set straight. I can see the freckles on them from here, mirrors of my own. “Apt, too, I think.”

The smile she gives me is small and quiet. It feels distinctly like an olive branch, though I have no idea what I’m supposed to take away from her pronouncing my noble strength in front of the whole group. She saw my strength fail, and she covered it up, and she covered it up again during the show in San Francisco. She opens her mouth to say something else, but Silas beats her to it.

“My mom chose my name for its meaning, too.” Sadie is watching him, her expression a mix of sympathy and pride. I think of what he said at LAX—Sadie’s my bonus mom—and the way Dr. Osman talked about him, like he was Sadie’s own kid. “It means ‘forest.’”

“I didn’t know that,” Cleo says, extending an arm to brush his knee with her fingers. They smile at each other, something so intimate passing between them that I have to look away. “Mine’s short for Clementine, but I’m pretty sure my parents just like the fruit.”

“Oh, I love clementines,” Magnolia says, the answer to a question I’m sure everyone was dying to ask. “So much more accessible than an orange.”

“So much more accessible,” my mother agrees, in a tone that means we’re going to move on now. “Is everyone ready to breathe into their body?”

I hear Cleo’s whispered voice, watch her shadow move into Silas’s on the pale stone terrace. “So much more accessible,” she says, but if Silas laughs, I don’t hear it.

“Let’s close our eyes,” my mother says, and as everyone else follows her command I leave mine open. When Silas rests his palms on his knees, Puddles waddles out of her bed and moseys up to the front of his mat, helping herself to the foam block and propping her chin on it like it’s a pillow. She collapses to the ground with a grunt, and Silas opens his eyes. He smiles down at her and then, like he can feel me watching, looks up at me.

“Breathe in through your nose,” Camilla says, and we keep looking at each other. “Out through your mouth.”

Silas smiles. It’s crooked and goofy, everything about him like a gasket that fits just a little too loose.

“Let’s find our centers,” she continues, and he points to his stomach. Then he points to Puddles’s. “Breathe deeply, letting your belly expand with every inhale.”

We’re still looking at each other—the only living things on this rooftop with our eyes open—when my mother says, “Let’s center ourselves before tonight’s show. Let’s become grounded in our bodies so we don’t feel the urge to flee, or to clam up when the moment calls for our presence.”

I press my eyes shut, cheeks flaming. She’s calling me out, barely any coding to it, right here in front of everyone. I can’t believe her—except that of course I can. This is the story of our whole entire relationship: there is the outward language, and there is the subtext.

I know Silas is still watching me, but I keep my eyelids pressed shut and hope the darkness behind them will swallow me alive.

“Let’s honor our own wholeness,” my mother says. And one last drive of the knife: “Let’s remember who’s relying on us to show up tonight, just as we are.”

So I show up as I am. And I am raging.

Because when Camilla says “as we are,” she means: Camilla St. Vrain, beloved wellness guru, and her doting, openhearted, here-for-the-psychobabble daughter. She means: let’s show the world how perfect it is, up here where we sit. She means: let’s preach about self-love when we can’t even be honest about the broken way we love each other.

But that’s not as we are. We are as unknown to each other as two people can be. I know the freckles on my mother’s shoulders and the blue of her eyes and all the parts of her that are mine. But I don’t know what that book dedication means—To her—and I don’t know why she brought me here.

There was no her named Audrey back then. There is no part of me she knows well enough to speak to unless it’s in a social media caption. I realize, sitting under the stage lights in yet another floral dress, that I didn’t say a single word to anyone during this morning’s yoga session. That I’ve let all of this happen to me; that I’ve been letting Camilla just happen to me for my entire life.

“Audrey,” the moderator says. We’re at a packed theater dripping in Spanish tile. It’s the most beautiful space I’ve ever been in, and the last place that deserves my anger. But it’s where I am. As I am. “What’s it been like for you to be a part of the Letters tour so far? To join this movement publicly for the first time?”

I look at Camilla before I say it, think of her big inhale in her Saint-logo’d yoga outfit, imagine how it felt walking out of my dorm room sophomore year to find her in that hallway, turning the worst time of my life into a publicity stunt. I look back at the moderator. I show up as we are.

“It’s been absolutely horrible.”

The truth is like a free fall: for a moment there’s nothing to hold on to, just the euphoric rush before the concrete rises up. Saying it out loud feels like releasing a dam in my chest. Everything rushes out, wrathful, a relief.

Behind the moderator’s astonished expression I see Silas at the edge of the stage, camera in front of him. He ducks out from behind it to look at me, his lips parted in surprise. Cleo and Mick stand in the half-dark just past him, but I don’t have time to clock their reactions before my mother’s hand falls to my wrist. Her laugh is like wind chimes, warning of a coming storm.

“Oh, Audrey, honestly.” She smiles at the moderator, at her adoring fans. “She doesn’t mean that. She means—”

“I do mean that.”

We look at each other, and it’s like I’m watching her scramble, play catch-up, figure out how to fix me.

In the held-breath pause, I keep talking. “I had plans for this summer, but instead I’m ‘joining this movement publicly.’”

“The public piece is hard,” my mother says slowly, her eyes still on mine. I watch the shift: something in what I’ve said has given her an idea, and she’s turning this around. She faces the moderator.

“There’s a big difference between living a private life and suddenly feeling like a public figure. We’re human, too.” Her hand is still on my wrist, and she squeezes it. “This is Audrey’s first experience with the blurring of that line, the careful tightrope walk of a public life when we are all inherently private people.”

This isn’t my first experience—it’s not even close to my first experience. My first experience happened before I could form memories, when my baby picture racked up over a million likes on her social profiles. My second was a day after that. All my others in all the years that followed. My whole life has been a careful tightrope walk that I’m one swift breeze from toppling off of.

But Camilla built the tightrope herself, and nothing I can do, it’s clear, is enough to knock her off-balance. She’s already running at full steam, regaling her audience with a psychotherapeutic exploration of what it means for us to have public and private personas. She’s already buried me in my one attempt to gasp for air.

When my eyes drift to Silas, he’s back behind his camera. But he lifts his free hand and points to his stomach. Let’s find our centers. I close my eyes, and I count my fingers, and I do.