Chapter 26
The moment at the restaurant disappeared as soon as it came. Gen slid her knee away and chatted breezily, with such nonchalance that Emily thought she had imagined the flirtation in Gen’s gaze. Emily decided she had seen what she had wanted to see.
For days, she returned to the press of Gen against her inner thigh.
It must have been an error. The clumsy combination of a too-small table and too-long legs.
Or not an error, but the ease of an old friend, a slumber party spirit: we have known each other long enough to show affection without it meaning more.
This didn’t prevent Emily from feeling the memory of Gen’s legs between hers, or imagining Gen’s hand hidden beneath the table, shoving up the hem of her dress.
Are you free? Emily texted. It was a weekend. Hours passed before Gen texted back: Not really. I’m training
Oh ok
Wait. Gen’s text bubbles appeared quickly. Can you make it to the armory in Brooklyn? I know it’s far from you. But if you come around 3 I’ll be cooling down. My coach will have left. You could bring sneakers, join me for a few laps
like old times?
yeah
it was hard for me to keep up even then
Don’t worry, Gen wrote. I’ll let you set the pace
The Park Slope Armory looked like a fortress on the outside and a train station on the inside, with a curved steel ceiling above the red-brown indoor track.
Emily was glad to be indoors; it was sleeting.
Christmas had passed—Jack took the children to Boston, arguing that holidays were for family, and since Emily refused to visit Ohio, he saw no reason to keep the kids from their only true grandparents.
What alternate plan could Emily possibly have?
The three of them alone in her apartment with a rotisserie chicken?
Depressing. He was considerate—she got the kids most of the time, didn’t she?
—but he had to draw a line. Did she mean to take everything from him?
No, he didn’t want to fight about this either.
She could have Christmas Eve with the kids.
That was reasonable. He was being very reasonable.
All he wanted was a holiday with his family.
Did she realize how lonely she had made him?
He added that she was always welcome to join them in Boston.
“Rotisserie chicken is fucking delicious,” said Rory, who flew in from L.A. Emily made cocktails for them, garnishing the drinks with sugared cranberries and sprigs of rosemary. Gen, meanwhile, visited Nella in Ohio.
Emily found the armory’s locker room. She glanced around as she pulled a sports bra over her breasts, though of course Gen wasn’t in the locker room—she had been running on the track for hours already.
And if Gen had been in the locker room, she probably would have looked the other way, immune to Emily’s nakedness.
Gen loped around the track. Lost in concentration, she didn’t notice Emily’s wave. She was so swift that when Emily fell into the lane behind her and tried to catch up, the opposite happened: Gen spotted Emily as she curved the bend ahead and closed the gap between them, drawing up alongside her.
It was like running with a racehorse.
“This is a bad idea,” Emily said, breathless.
“No!” Gen slowed. “You were always good. I love doing this with you.”
“Maybe if I rode a bike while you ran.”
“Don’t be cranky.”
“Realistic.”
“Don’t be realistic. There are too many ways to tell yourself something won’t work. Just run.”
Emily ran.
Eventually, Gen stopped her. She must have been eyeing Emily, because the instant Emily faltered, Gen suggested they walk.
Gen pulled off her shirt, revealing a hard abdomen and a black sports bra tight against her nearly flat chest. She was slick with sweat.
Her hair was dark and damp and stayed in place when she raked it off her face.
Emily thought again that running together had been a mistake—not because she would be sore later (though she would) but because of her painful awareness of Gen’s body.
The lines of it were familiar yet harder and tighter.
When Gen ran, she looked like she was doing exactly what she had been made to do.
Determined, glad. The way she ran was a kind of devotion.
In the locker room, Gen entered a stall to change. Emily did the same.
They stood for a few moments in the lobby, eyeing the sleet. Emily’s lungs were blown wide open; her heart was loud. It kept saying, What did you do to me, what did you do to me. “Was it like old times?” She glanced to see the gladness fade from Gen’s face.
“No,” said Gen. “It wasn’t.”
Friend of my youth
Mistress of disguises
Gray-eyed Athena
Daughter of Zeus who bears the storm cloud
Tireless one
Hope of soldiers
Dear guest, who are you? Where do you come from? Where is your home and family?
Pallas Athena ran like the wind
I shall transform you: not a soul will know you
She who fights in front
Child of Power
Destroyer
Would even you have guessed that I am Pallas Athena, daughter of Zeus, I that am always with you in times of trial?
“What are you doing?” asked Connor, looking over Emily’s shoulder at the notebook she had purchased earlier that day.
“Making a list.”
“That’s a weird list.”
“It’s of things poets called Athena, or said that she said, or what people said to her.”
“Athena’s in the Percy Jackson books. She’s kind of nice and kind of scary.”
“Sounds about right.”
“The Percy Jackson books are awesome. They’re Lucas’s favorite.”
“Are you still friends with him?”
“Yes.”
“I haven’t heard much about him lately.”
Connor shrugged. “We play at recess. Why do you like Athena?”
“I’m not sure I do.” Emily closed the notebook. “But I keep thinking about her.”
“Why?”
“There are lots of stories about what she does and says but not much about what she feels on the inside.”
“But she’s not real. She’s made up. She doesn’t feel anything on the inside.”
“I still care about how she feels. There are real things and made-up things, but the way we care about made-up things is real, too.”
Connor furrowed his brow.
“I wrote a book about her,” Emily said, “when you were a baby.”
“Can I read it?”
Emily chose one of those lies that parents tell to make their children’s world seem safer. “I lost it.”
When Connor and Stella were asleep, Emily looked at the skyline. The sleet of a few days ago was gone; the air was bone-dry. Skyscrapers glittered. She recalled the obvious pleasure Gen took in running, how she loved doing what she had been born to do.
Writing had been like that for Emily. Jack had destroyed one book, but Emily destroyed the other, the one she didn’t write in the lost manuscript’s stead, the one she didn’t pull from her memory and reassemble.
This had been an act of revenge as well as self-preservation.
She hated the office that had once been a nursery.
She hated Jack’s hope that she would blot out his crime by writing over it.
She hated the pens, the pencils, the blank notebooks.
Every page, written in invisible ink, was crammed with Jack’s ideas.
His story of their life lay neatly stacked on the desk.
It was stitched into the binding of each notebook’s spine.
What was there to write? He had already written everything.
Emily examined the list of phrases about Athena.
She no longer liked the project of her old manuscript.
Retelling The Odyssey from Athena’s perspective bored her.
It had been just another way of telling the story of Odysseus.
She also didn’t like what she remembered of how she had written Athena—too stiff, like a talking statue.
Instead, Athena should be like Connor said: kind of nice and kind of scary.
A bit of a witch. Thoughtful and strange.
Clever, but at risk of making mistakes. Hungry.
She should want something badly—but what?
If Emily wrote the book now, it would be different.
She recalled Gen slowing to run beside her. She wanted to witness Gen pushed to her limit. She wanted to know how it felt to be pushed to her own. She wanted oxygen to burn her lungs. She wanted a cramp in her side, to refuse to give up.
Emily wrote a phrase at the top of the page: Daughter of Zeus Who Bears the Storm Cloud. Then she wrote a beginning:
Would you like to know how to kill a god? Think first of how they are born.
Begin with me.
The story told is that I sprang from my father’s head fully grown, sharply adult, bristling with armor and spear. That story is true in the way all stories are—partially.
Think behind the words you have read or heard about me.
Imagine them not merely as units of meaning that carry you through time.
See, perhaps, a ship. Think not of the ship but of its wake, the air that it shears with its prow, the shadow it casts.
Look into that shadow. Know my story: I was born fully grown.
Now guess the story untold: that I grew from a baby in my father’s mind.
I passed my childhood there. I spent an eon of solitude in the whorls of his thoughts.
Zeus loves me best of all his children. To him, I am proof of his omnipotent wisdom. He doesn’t know, though, who he is on the inside.
What was my milk but the flow of his intentions and dreams? What was my cradle but his stratagems? How did I learn to walk but by studying his memories? I know him better than he knows himself.
They say I gave him a headache when I was born. The pain came from the thrust of my spear.
Again, think behind the story.
He was unaware of me until that moment. Occult, I had winked into existence inside him. An infant, I wailed and he did not hear. My childhood unfolded, hidden from the king of the gods.
Would you like to know how to kill a god? First, find out what he doesn’t know.
It’s not surprising, perhaps, that Zeus didn’t recognize the thrust of my spear as a warning. He forgave me the pain of birth. Every child wants to be born. Every birth comes with a pang. He didn’t see me as a threat.
He doesn’t know that I, in the cloister of his mind, grew to hate him. I schemed. I crafted weaponry. At last, I burrowed my way out, buzzing like a wasp, with a plot to overthrow him.
Would you like to know how to kill a god?
Watch me.