Chapter 37

But I do need help, is the thing.

In the crowd at Lady June’s it felt like morning wouldn’t come. That’s the lure of it, I understand now—a suspended moment, colored lights, how a night like that makes a world of itself. It convinces you it’ll last forever. But it’s so short, and then it’s morning.

When I wake up, life feels nothing like it did last night, dancing anonymously in the dark. It feels realer. And much, much worse.

There’s the email, for one thing. No subject line, just a blue hyperlink to the research position Ethan brought up on the phone. The line of text beneath it: I think we should take a break until Miami so we have space to think about what we both want from this. The way I read it as: I don’t want this. And the white-hot humiliation of how quickly I click the link anyways, apply for the job, wait for it to take some kind of edge off.

There’s Sadie knocking on my door at ten o’clock. The epidemiology lab we’re supposed to visit at Vanderbilt. The way I can’t get out of bed to speak and how I text her instead. The fictional fever I fabricate. How every time I breathe, I feel more like a coward.

The day seeps darkly by: the shades drawn, the sheets at my chin, my eyes dry and bloodshot. The clack of my laptop keys and the ache blooming in my lower back from how my body’s twisted, propped awkwardly on one elbow as I submit the lonely PDF of my résumé over and over and over. I apply to six more on-campus jobs and I get up to pee and I mouth tap water from my cupped hand in the bathroom.

Food?Silas texts me at two, and the hot shock of shame sucks my lips between my teeth. It’s day now: stark and sure and indisputable. This isn’t Broadway at midnight. This is the world I need to occupy forever, the one where I let him see me the way that he did. I keep my eyes closed for thirteen whole, slow minutes. When I open them I can’t even read the one word of his text message through the blur of my tears. Later, when he knocks on the door, I pretend to be sleeping.

I run the hotel room TV all night long. Every time I wake up someone’s talking: strangers playing out fictions who have no idea who I am or the depth of my humiliation. I order room service when they open at six o’clock in the morning and pick at cooled, rubbery eggs from under the comforter, the fork feeling foreign in my hand.

When Cleo slips the ice eye mask under the crack of my door I’m on a deep dive of the Hopkins ICU website, searching for any crumb that’ll tell me who they picked. I can’t find anything, any evidence of what this person has that I lack. Cleo doesn’t say anything; I watch the shadows of her feet disappear and finally pull myself out of bed. There’s a handwritten note on top of the mask, instructions for how to use it scribbled on a Post-it. She’s drawn a little lopsided heart. I stare at it until the AC kicks on and my legs get cold.

It’s nearly evening again when Camilla knocks on the door. Ten minutes to five, still hours from that safe zone when the sun sets and it makes sense for me to be in here like this.

“Audrey,” she says. We’re due at the War Memorial Auditorium in thirty minutes, I know. All two thousand sold-out seats. Camilla St. Vrain’s Valedictorian Daughter.

I say nothing, and she says my name one more time. And then the door clicks open.

I have my laptop next to me, power cord draped over the lump of my body under the covers. I haven’t changed my clothes or run a hand through my hair since Sunday night, nearly forty-eight hours ago. The ice eye mask is pushed up onto my forehead, room temperature and useless. I’m disgusting. She doesn’t flinch.

“Have you eaten?”

I gesture to the room service cart, motionless at the end of my bed, silver dome covering the picked-over remains of the breakfast I barely ate twelve hours ago.

“Can you eat now?”

I shake my head. When I pull up the words they scrape my throat; I’ve hardly spoken since Sunday, either. “I’m sick.”

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 a clenched 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, we never talked 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 through on 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.”

“It feels wrong,” I say, straight down at my fingers twisted in my lap. “I thought I’d fixed it. I thought—I worked so hard to become an EMT, and I never messed up like that again, and I just—I thought I was better than this but here I am, again, doing the same thing.”

“Honey,” she says, ducking her chin so I’ll look at her. “There is no value judgment. No better, because you are not bad.” I feel the tears rise in me. “And no matter how much you’ve learned, how smart and impressive and self-possessed you are, you can’t white-knuckle yourself out of anxiety. You can’t pretend a panic attack away.”

I close my eyes. Anxiety. Panic attack. When I open them, Camilla is blurred by my tears. “I wish I was different,” I whisper.

“No,” my mother breathes. “Audrey, I don’t wish you were different.”

My throat is too tight to speak through.

“You’ve always pushed yourself so hard,” she says. “And your perfectionism, it—it motivates you to excel but it also comes out this way sometimes. It tells you things that are untrue. That certain losses are a reflection on you.”

I think of Silas: That’s too much pressure for anybody. This doesn’t mean anything about who you are.

“I’m so embarrassed,” I whisper.

“There’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”

“There is.” I swipe my eyes with the backs of my knuckles. “Right after I got the email, I went to the wrong room by accident.” I swallow, trying to dredge up the words, but my mother just nods.

“Silas,” she says.

I wince; I can’t help it. “I made a fool of myself.”

She cocks her head to the side, eyes never leaving mine. “By showing him how you really feel?”

The memory floods me with thick, licking heat. “I didn’t want anyone to see me like this.”

“Audrey,” she says slowly. “Needing help is part of what makes you a person.”

It rises in me so fast, a deep-coded response: I don’t need help. But I do. God, I do.

“We aren’t made to manage our emotions all on our own.” My mother takes my hands and squeezes them. “We need each other—it’s in our brains, in our DNA. Needing help from the people around us, and giving that help back to them in turn, isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s what makes us human.”

I look down at our fingers locked together, maybe the first time in my sentient memory that we’ve touched each other like this. Maybe she’s right: maybe what happened between Silas and me was normal, the natural order of things. Maybe I only imagined how enormous it felt. Overestimated both how horrifically I imposed on him and the weight of the gift he gave me in handling it how he did. His hand pressed over his eyes, his elbow jutted out beside him. His arms locked tight around my rib cage. The wet mess of his shirt collar.

But I’m thinking, too, of Sadie on that airplane. The way her whole body tensed the minute I tried to open up to her about Camilla. How uncomfortable she became the second I showed her the scared, unsure part of me.

And I know that even if my weakness is what makes me human, not everyone wants to see it.

Not Sadie, not Ethan. Not even me.

“Audrey?” The voice is muffled, but I’m so on edge it makes me jump. My mother and I turn in unison to look at the door. “It’s me. Um, Silas.”

Camilla makes to stand, but I stop her. When she looks at me, I shake my head sharply and she lowers herself back onto the bed.

“I just wanted to make sure you’re okay,” he says. “Will you open the door?”

My mother and I stare at each other, holding our breath. Neither of us move.

“Okay,” Silas says finally. “We’re, um. We’re about to head out for the show and it—it feels weird to leave you here. I get it, if you want your space. I just—” He breaks off, and I feel a sharp twinge of guilt. I picture him standing in the hallway, speaking to my closed door, and hate myself. “I just hope you know I’m here. And I hope you’re okay. There’s something I need to tell you, so, um. I’ll try you again in the morning.”

I close my eyes. There’s something I need to tell you.

“Puddles is in my room,” he says. A flat white rectangle slips beneath the doorframe—his room key. “If you need her, okay?”

He taps a knuckle on the door, soft echo in the quickly falling dark. “Okay. See you soon, I hope.”

His footsteps retreat. I tip my forehead against my mother’s shoulder and cry.