Chapter 30
Gen described the bus trip from Boston to Ohio after their breakup.
The hills in Pennsylvania. Big-box stores along the highway.
Gen saw everything clearly and then it would blur again.
She used the sleeve of her hoodie to wipe her eyes.
She had left her coat somewhere, maybe in the bus station, she wasn’t sure.
She kept shivering but not from the cold.
At a rest stop, the driver walked up to her.
“Do you have someone you can call?” he said.
Gen told him that she was okay. He nodded but not because he believed her.
He tried to give her two dollars. Gen said, “Don’t worry, really, I’m fine, I have money.
” He said that two dollars wasn’t much and to take it anyway, even if she didn’t need it.
It would make him feel better. She accepted it because you don’t turn down a gift like that.
When everyone got back on the bus, he said, “Even if you’re not okay, one day you will be.
” Gen spent the next few years trying to believe him.
She was reckless. She didn’t behave well.
Candace and Nita, teammates at OSU, told her so.
They knew nothing about Emily and Gen wanted to keep it that way.
She managed heartbreak by ignoring Emily’s existence as best she could, largely by bedding anyone interested.
Nita said, “You don’t have to sleep with everyone who wants to sleep with you.
” Candace said, “Nothing wrong with being a slut, but how about being an ethical one?” What she really wanted to know was when Gen was going to get serious about track.
Two things were obvious to Candace: that Gen loved to run and that it was too easy for her.
Gen should be winning more. It was insulting to Candace that Gen wasn’t, because Candace knew that if she had Gen’s raw talent, she would be training hard to be the best. “Like in the fucking world,” Candace said.
“Me?”
“You, asshole, yes.”
Gen was wary of ambition. That was Emily’s thing.
But running made Gen feel good when nothing else did.
When she won, she felt even better. She began to wonder if her wariness wasn’t actually fear, because ambition is just a word for wanting something badly.
It’s basically getting open-heart surgery while fully awake and looking down at your red, wet torso, thinking, Am I going to make it?
Who wanted that? Not her.
But…
She remembered telling Emily back in high school that they both wanted big things.
Gen had to reckon with choices of hers that screamed ambition.
Graduating early. Acing the SATs. Applying to a prestigious college.
Maybe Gen was the sort of person who needed to put herself on the operating table of ambition over and over.
Maybe, if she had to want big things, she should choose the very biggest thing.
She went to her coach and said that she wanted to train for the Olympics. He told her it was about fucking time.
She won several races at the USATF trials. She set records. She was dating Maiko, a girl she really liked from the OSU track team. And eventually, she was okay.
“I watched you,” Emily told her, “at the trials.”
“You did? What did you think?”
Emily couldn’t think. She had held her breath.
Gen stayed in the pack, hemmed in by other runners.
The announcer didn’t mention her name, not at first. He focused on the women in the lead until Gen worked her way out of the middle of the pack, then tucked herself behind the front-runner.
Emily’s heart was a drum. The announcer, in a confiding tone, mentioned bits of news about Gen that Emily hadn’t known: she had recently changed coaches, she had a promising reputation in the 1500 meters.
The final bell rang. The announcer discarded facts for sheer admiration, his voice rising as Gen tugged past the lead in the home straight.
She dropped everyone behind her. The tape broke across her chest.
She didn’t follow Emily’s life. When Gen went home to visit her grandmother, she avoided driving past Emily’s house.
The hardware store they liked, the one that sold sour cherry pies, had gone out of business.
Washford helped Gen avoid memories by having changed.
The Main Street, where high school students used to go after school, was deserted and on winter days became a lonely wind tunnel.
Most of its buildings were closed. The movie theater where she and Emily had seen Legends of the Fall was open only on weekends, and then not to show movies but to sell discounted items people had returned to Amazon.
Nella went there sometimes. When Gen asked why, saying she would buy Nella whatever she wanted, Nella said she never knew what she might find for sale at the old movie theater, and she liked that the place still smelled like buttered popcorn.
Gen didn’t sleep in her old bedroom. Anyway, during the farmhouse renovation, Gen had made certain to get rid of the twin beds.
But the loft in the barn remained the same.
It had been her mother’s gift to her. If there was another reason hidden below that one, a reason that had to do with a reluctance to erase every last trace of Emily, if sometimes Gen looked at the bed behind the green curtain and felt a dull ache in her belly, as though she’d been hungry for so long that the hunger had become fatigue, she ignored it.
Her mother was the larger loss. It was easy to pretend that it was the only one.
Usually easy.
Last year, Becca came to a charity auction of Gen’s childhood possessions. “Those dioramas are something,” said Becca. “Didn’t figure you as the artist type.”
“I’m not. My mom was, though. She taught me how to make them. Felt I should keep making them after she was gone, as if she could still see them. Of what I liked, what happened to me. What I was thinking. They’re a secret diary, I guess.”
“Am I looking at the complete story of the misadventures of young Gen Hall?”
“Almost. I gave one diorama away.”
Becca peered at the glass box containing the loft with its bed and bookshelves. “What’s that one about?”
“I took my high school girlfriend there.”
Becca adjusted her glasses and looked again. “Lucky dog. Not every teenager has a sex barn.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Okay, sort of like that. But I loved her.”
Gen was glad when the diorama sold to a stranger.
Once—only once—Gen looked up Emily on Facebook.
The first photograph was of Jack kissing Emily on the cheek.
Gen scrolled through photos of glitzy vacations.
Emily with Rory and Elizabeth at brunch, clinking mimosas.
The twins wore matching diamond tennis bracelets, outshone by the one on Emily’s wrist—bright as a comet.
Jack on a ski slope. Scenes from college.
Emily and her friends at graduation. Emily, Florencia, and Violet at Fenway Park, wearing baseball caps.
Jack on a boat in Positano. Gen shut her laptop.
“It looked like a pretty great life,” Gen told Emily, her voice echoing in the large apartment. They had taken the duvet from the bed and brought it to the couch, watching the sky over the East River go gray with the coming dawn.
“I had to make it look good.”
“I know that now.”
Gen and Maiko broke up when Gen was twenty-two. “Can we stay friends?” Gen said. “Fuck you,” said Maiko, which Gen decided she deserved, though now she wondered. Was she obligated to marry her college girlfriend even though she knew it would be a mistake?
Gen threw herself into training. She rose to national prominence in track and field.
Sponsors came calling. Her agent counseled for Gen to keep her relationship with Shira, a sportscaster, quiet.
“I’m not asking you to lie about your sexuality,” the agent said.
“Just don’t confirm it.” Gen fired her agent and came out to The Advocate .
Sponsors dropped her. Shira lost her job.
“It has nothing to do with your relationship,” the network told Shira when she asked. “We know you’ll thrive elsewhere.”
Then came the 2004 Olympics in Athens, where Gen lost a race to help a fallen runner…and Nike made Gen an offer.
Gen winced and looked away from Emily, who reached over the duvet to touch her knee. “What is it?” said Emily.
“The ads.”
“I’ve seen the ads.”
“They made me into more than I am.”
“You are talented. You were brave.”
“Stopping to see if someone’s okay isn’t bravery.”
“Why not?”
“My gran was watching. If I hadn’t stopped, I couldn’t have faced her.”
“Right. You put your self-respect first.”
“It got blown out of proportion.” Gen rubbed the heel of her hand against her forehead. “It was a rough time.”
Although Shira had supported Gen coming out and had believed she was prepared for the consequences, she hadn’t anticipated that their fates would look so different.
Gen was a star. Shira was nothing. “Why does everyone call you courageous while I’m unemployable?
” Shira said, and told Gen that their relationship couldn’t continue.
It was too hard. Gen said, “But I care about you.” It didn’t matter.
Gen told Emily, “After that, I decided to accept that maybe some things weren’t meant to happen for me.”
“Your mid-twenties is early to give up on relationships.”
“It didn’t feel early. And I was never, you know, normal.
Not as a kid. Not when we were together.
Your dad saw that. Then I got famous and that is really not fucking normal.
It made sense that I wouldn’t have a normal relationship.
And there were all these women. I’m not saying I made good choices.
I had the feeling I was cursed. Like because I got to win so much in track, I had to lose in some other way.
It felt…fair? Or not fair, exactly, but inevitable.
Like if I was cursed, I might as well become the curse.
Face it. Organize around it. Be as bad as I inevitably would, and as good as I could.
Have rules. Take my losses. Sorry, I don’t think I’m explaining it right. Remember Dirty Dancing ?”
“Yes.”
“Remember when Johnny told Baby about sleeping with women at the resort, how they stuffed money in his pockets and he couldn’t say no?”
“But you weren’t poor, not after the Athens Olympics.”
“I’m not talking about money. I felt like Johnny because I was missing something that other people had and they were offering it all the time. They gave me hope and then I lost it.” Gen moved under the duvet to rest against Emily. “I’m tired.”
“Do you want to sleep?”
“I want to watch the sun come up.”
“This couch is horrible.”
“It’s nice.”
“It’s uncomfortable.”
“I like it.”
“Come here, you masochist.”
They shifted so that they were stretched out together on the couch as though it were a bed.
They barely fit. Gen lay her head against Emily’s chest. Emily pulled the duvet up to Gen’s chin.
“Better,” Gen said, and was quiet for long enough that Emily thought she had fallen asleep.
The skyscrapers grew pink, the water orange.
Gen murmured, “Then I saw you at Jocelyn’s party. ” She sighed. “Trouble.”
“Why?”
“You know why.”
“Because I have children?”
“No. I mean, yes, in the sense that your kids make the stakes really high. I don’t want to mess with their lives. I want to be really careful about them. You’re trouble because you’re married.”
“Separated.”
“Emily. I’m just saying what’s true.”
“Recently separated,” Emily admitted, “with a history of going back to him.”
Gen nodded. “And you’re you . You’re trouble because of everything you’ve always been for me. I tried.” Her voice slowed. “Tried to be good…to myself. To stay away. But like I said, I’m cursed.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“It’s not so bad. Look at me. In your arms. Lucky.”
“I thought I was trouble.”
“The best kind.”
“Gen, the sun’s up.”
But Gen was asleep.
A buzz woke Emily. Gen murmured and shifted under the duvet but kept sleeping. Emily reached for her phone. There was a text from Jack: I had such a great time with you and the kids.