Chapter 24
Emily switched the phone to her other ear. She looked out the window of Jocelyn’s apartment at skyscrapers. A crane lifted a joist.
“Take me someplace far from the center of things,” Gen said, “but still New York City. I want to see the city’s edges. Where it becomes something else.”
“It’s always becoming something else. From street to street. Like any city.”
“Yeah, but New York usually insists on being itself no matter what neighborhood you’re in. I want to see where it gives that up.”
“Why?”
“I guess because I’m here for a limited time. I travel a lot. I don’t always get the chance to know a place well and I like to. You know a place well when you recognize where it stops being that place.”
Pricked by the reminder that Gen wasn’t here to stay, Emily said, a little sharply, “So you want to play tourist?”
“If that’s how you want to put it. My first teammates teased me. I was wide-eyed when we got on the plane. I had never flown. Did I tell you my first international meet was in Brazil, when I was in college? All I’d really known was Ohio. But you understand what that’s like. Growing up small.”
Emily felt a rush of kinship…and embarrassment that she had resented that Gen would leave at the end of spring. Who was Emily to blame anyone for leaving? “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”
Some people would consider the rivers to the east and west of Manhattan the edges of the city, but to Emily they were still the city, the East Side with its blocks of brown apartment buildings and caged baseball diamonds, the Hudson River with its newly developed piers and cheerful fake grass.
Emily and Gen could go north, but Harlem was part of the city and the Bronx was, too, until it grew mansions with terra-cotta roofs and plush gardens.
Emily didn’t want to go north. It was too close to upstate, where Jack would be with the children for the weekend.
She and Gen went south to the Rockaways.
They took the A train to Ninetieth Street and walked along a strip with a surf shop, a woodworking studio, a deli café, and a Dollar Tree.
They found a short path to the beach. The porch of a weather-scoured house had a seashell wind chime that clicked as they passed.
At the beach, everything was gray. The sky, the sea.
Even the sand. The crooked fingers of stubbed-out cigarettes.
Bottle caps on the boardwalk. The crazy surfers far out on the waves.
Their tilted bodies were the color of slate.
Sometimes they looked like they were leaning into a wave and sometimes like they were leaning away from it.
One got swamped. Emily shivered. Before taking the train, she had looked up a burger joint along the boardwalk but hadn’t accounted for it being closed after the summer season.
She suggested returning to the café by the subway, but Gen asked if they could wait a few minutes, so they sat at a picnic table as the sea pummeled the shore.
Gen nodded at the surfers. “I like to watch them try.”
“Even in November?”
“Especially in November.”
“Why are you here until June? What’s in June?”
“The Olympic trials. They’ll be in Oregon at Hayward Field.
” Gen had decided to train here, so she could be close to her friends.
Nita and Candace had been on Gen’s team in college.
The other friends had been collected over the years.
Most of them had met Gen’s grandmother. Emily tried to ignore a pang of jealousy.
“Last year, I got Gran courtside seats so we could watch Ship in her final,” Gen said.
“She’s an amazing player. Gutsy, fast.” Gen peered at the water.
Without turning toward Emily, she added, “I think she’s into you. ”
Emily scooped a bottle cap from the sand.
She traced its red star. The bottle cap seemed to possess the only color on the beach.
She flipped it in her hand, running a thumb along its crimped edge.
She thought that Connor might like it. No, he would prefer the shells and stones.
The husk of a crab. This bottle cap was trash.
Of course. Emily had thought that he would like it only because she missed him and Stella, and was ready to take anything home with her so that she could give it to them. “I’ve got too much going on,” she said.
“What exactly is going on? You and Jack seemed solid—at least, at the wedding. Like you were made for each other. What happened?”
To answer felt overwhelming, so Emily chose one detail: how Jack sometimes left Connor alone in the hallway as a baby—briefly, she hastened to add.
She didn’t want to appear unjust. Yet even as she acknowledged that maybe Jack had a different parenting style, maybe it was tough love, and even though Gen said nothing, Emily began presenting further evidence to persuade Gen that she wasn’t wrong to be upset.
Around the time that Connor was a toddler, she might come out of the shower or kitchen to find Jack checking his email while little fists thumped on the other side of the apartment’s front door.
Just a time-out, Jack said. All the parenting books recommended time-outs to address bad behavior.
But what had Connor done? What could he have done?
Come on, Emily, don’t be like that. Relax.
But I asked you not to do this, she said.
He sighed. Okay, I won’t, he said, but a few months later, he did.
When Emily was pregnant with their second child, it occurred to her that a house had no public hallways.
Could they buy a townhome? Yes! Great idea, Em.
Anything to make her happy. Their family was growing; they could use more space.
He felt bad that he hadn’t considered this earlier.
Only after they moved in did she realize that a house does have a public hallway: the street.
She prepared for the day Jack locked their son out of the house as a punishment.
She installed an automatic lock with a door code, telling Jack it was for security.
She made Connor memorize the code. She set a stone planter near the door and showed Connor how he could climb up on it so that he could reach the keypad.
But—had Jack noticed her efforts?—he didn’t do what Emily dreaded.
At least, he didn’t do that exact thing.
This had been a great flaw in their marriage: Emily’s failure to anticipate what Jack might do.
Emily fell silent. The beach was mostly empty.
A man threw a ball to his dog. A teenage girl jogged along the surf.
Gen’s gaze was trained on the horizon. She didn’t say anything for a long time.
The jogger passed Emily and Gen’s picnic bench and kept going.
“Maybe that’s not the right way to explain,” said Emily.
“I’m just having a hard time speaking.” The surfers paddled out, their wetsuits black. Gen stuffed her fists into her coat. Emily turned the bottle cap in her fingers. A gull banked toward them and then cut away, seeing nothing to steal. Gen said, “I don’t get how you go back to someone like that.”
It was what Emily’s friends had said. They dismissed the obvious reasons: her child, her pregnancy, her fear of a legal battle.
We can figure it out, they promised. What she couldn’t articulate was the spell of Jack’s love for her.
Sometimes it seemed like he might obliterate everything she cared about in order to make her his.
But that’s horrible! Yes: its horror captivated her.
The horror was proof of his need. He needed her so much.
Only she could alleviate his suffering. He would do anything for her forgiveness.
She was a god. At least, for a week or so.
A few minutes. A day. The lottery of her tenure of power was also part of the spell.
“That’s fucked up,” Gen said.
The teenage jogger hesitated by a stone jetty, then turned back.
“Maybe I asked the wrong question,” Gen said. “What made you stay?”
This, Emily thought, Gen would understand even less.
She told Gen about her miscarriage. Her baby had died, but he hadn’t been a real baby to the rest of the world.
He had been an almost-baby. He hadn’t counted.
Not his sealed eyes, not his tiny fingers.
His body had been lightly covered in hair.
That was normal, the nurse said, at this stage.
He would have lost it by the end of a full term.
He reminded her of a hibernating animal.
A creature waiting for winter to be over.
He had come out of her but people acted like he hadn’t, as though he had been reabsorbed into her flesh.
Gone with no trace. As though he had been—or should be—swallowed by everything that was everyday: the ATM on the corner, enrolling Connor in preschool, recycling a bottle as green as a hyacinth’s blade.
It piled with the other bottles in the truck.
Did it break or slide whole, unseen, to the truck’s bottom?
Such a question—commonplace, did it need an answer?
—was supposed to cover the fact of her baby’s existence.
His non-existence. He had never existed—except for her, and for Jack.
Jack was the only one, besides Emily, who had known their son.
He and Emily were the only ones who knew how real their baby was. How much he mattered.
Gen rested a hand on Emily’s shoulder. She had never touched Emily like that. There had been times, like now, when Emily knew that Gen understood exactly what she was saying, but this was the first time that this understanding came from a shared sense of loss. Gen’s hand was warm.
“It bothered me,” Gen said, “at the bar, with my friends, when they asked what you did and you said ‘nothing.’ I know that being a mom isn’t all you are, but it’s important.”
“?‘Nothing’ is what a lot of people think.”
“Not me.”
The jogger ran up the beach toward them, then slowed. When she was close enough that Emily could see that her lips were chapped, she stopped and bent to untie and remove one sneaker. She walked to them, sneaker in hand. Wordlessly, she held it out to Gen.
“Oh,” said Gen. “Yeah, of course.” She patted her coat pockets and found a Sharpie.
As she signed the sneaker, she chatted with the girl, asking where she went to high school and what kind of track she liked best. The girl mumbled her answers, eyes glossy with adoration.
She took the signed sneaker and held it with both hands.
“Put it on,” said Gen. “Let’s see how fast you can go.”
The girl sprinted toward the water. Gen shouted encouragement. Emily joined in, clapping. Her palms stung. It felt good to shout. When the girl reached the wet sand, she turned back and waved both arms overhead. Emily and Gen waved back, then walked to the deli café to get warm.
A few days later, a package came for Emily as she helped Stella with her math homework. It was a box of Honeybell oranges. There was an unsigned card: I remembered how much you hate the cold. Hope this helps.
Emily lifted an orange to smell its vivid skin.
The children clamored for some. She gave them the box but took one orange into her bedroom and shut the door.
She wanted to be alone with how good this gift made her feel.
The orange set her hand on fire. She thought to text Gen, but decided she would thank her when she saw her next.
Emily woke up wet between her legs. She didn’t remember what she had been dreaming but she could guess.
She slipped a finger inside and it came out slick.
She traced herself, nudging her ready clit.
Her breath grew short. She was wet enough that it was easy to pretend that her fingers were Gen’s sliding mouth. The flick of her tongue.
Too quick. She pushed herself almost to orgasm, then stopped. She didn’t want the disappointment that would come after. She clamped her thighs together, hand pressed flat between them, and throbbed.
She was in a sporting goods store looking for a pair of cleats for Connor, who had outgrown his, when her phone buzzed with a text from Jack.
Did you like the oranges I sent?