Chapter 9

“Did she let you administer a vaccine?”

“What?” I squint through the café window, lift a seven-dollar latte to my lips. “No, Dad, that would’ve been super unethical.”

He laughs, low and breathy. “That’s what I remember about seeing the pediatrician—all the shots.”

In our hour together, Dr. Osman told me about her patient load, introduced me to her full staff of nurses, talked me through the business of her business—insurance, billing, the logistics underpinning the practice. Sadie sat quietly through it, pressing for more detail only when I asked a question or expressed interest in something specific. It all felt simple and logical and true: a business built to do something helpful. It felt like Dr. Osman and Sadie and science existed on a different plane of reality from Camilla and Letters to My Someday Daughter. It felt like I could breathe for the first time since I left school.

“When’s the last time you saw a doctor?” I ask Dad now.

“Mmmm...” He trails off and I picture his eyes turned skyward, trying to conjure the memory. “Probably the last time I went to the pediatrician.”

I sigh, forcefully enough that he’ll hear it through the phone. It’s a constant point of contention; my dad hasn’t been to the doctor in years. Healthy as a horse, he’ll say, flexing at me with his hips angled sideways like a bodybuilder.

“I have you,” he says. “My doctor daughter.”

“Someday doctor daughter,” I correct him, then recoil at my own choice of words. “I mean—”

“Someday daughter, indeed,” he says, and my entire body tenses. I walked myself right into this one. “How’s your mom doing, mouse?”

Dad is the only person in my life with the leeway to give me a nickname, especially one so cutesy as mouse. I earned it at five, when I mostly kept to myself but loved to tiptoe around backstage at Dad’s shows, taking it all in. He’s been in the music industry my whole life and worked as a tour manager for most of it, always on the road with his musicians. Hence my life with Camilla, the Summit School, Dad always out of the picture when I need him. But he’d called me his little mouse, all those years ago when I was living in LA and went to his local shows. The nickname stuck, along with nothing else from my life back then.

“How’s my mother doing,” I echo back to him. Stalling. “She’s, you know. How she is.”

“Hmm,” Dad says. “She tells me you’re avoiding her.”

“Does she,” I say, not quite as lightly as I intended. My parents’ relationship is incomprehensible—they met at a concert and loved each other just long enough to have me, a flash-in-the-pan affair that was over before my first tooth came in. But all these years later they’re on the phone twice a week, minimum. Making each other laugh harder than anyone else. Leaning on each other for advice, though their lives share no overlap that isn’t named Audrey. Trading stories about me.

I was seven before I realized no one else in my class shared their mother’s maiden name; we were making family trees, all grainy construction paper and gummed-up glue sticks. You entered this world through my birth canal, Camilla said when I asked her about it. I held up my tree like the evidence of a crime. Not his. So I was Audrey St. Vrain, my mother’s daughter by name—instead of Audrey Ames, my father’s. And he just let her have it.

Their respect for each other is a smooth-faced wall I’m always butting up against, no toeholds for me to grip on to and climb over. Even if I wanted to complain about Camilla to my dad, I couldn’t. He loves me more than anything, I know. But, inexplicably, he loves her, too.

“She does,” he says now. “I know you don’t always see it, mouse, but she wants to spend time with you.”

Doing what?I think. Is she going to quiz me on the terminology from today’s biomedical ethics seminar at Penn? Is she going to comb through Ethan’s notes for me, highlight the concepts I want to come back to later? Of course not. The only way for us to spend time together is for me to twist myself to fit where she wants me. To contort until I’m unrecognizable.

“For me,” Dad says, when I still haven’t responded. “If nothing else. Will you just try, for me?”

“Why does it matter?” I ask. A woman looks up from the table next to me, and I lower my voice. “Why does it matter to you how I get through this summer with her?”

“Because I love you,” he says, and I have to close my eyes. It makes me squirmy, how quick he always is to say it, the open flow of his feelings. “And I want her to know you the way I do.”

“I don’t think she wants to,” I say quietly.

The space between Camilla and me has calcified so solid over the years that it’s nearly opaque. Any time I try to peer through, it obscures everything I know about myself. Back in Colorado, I knew exactly what was important to me. Exactly who I was. But when I come near my mother, I suddenly can’t communicate any of those things—I feel myself folding up into her orbit like a circling star, overshadowed by her light like everybody else.

“She does, Audrey. Of course she does.”

I take a sip of coffee and don’t tell him what I’m thinking, which is that I want a mother who makes me feel the opposite of this. And that it hurts like a needle hitting bone to know I’ll never have her.

“Besides,” Dad says. “This isn’t forever, mouse. You aren’t stuck; it’s just a summer.”

“Right.” I stare out the window, watch the café’s potted hydrangeas waver in the wind. “It’s just a summer.”