Chapter 33
“Mommy!” screamed Stella. “Mommy!”
Emily, who had been taking a shower, came dripping into the living room, a robe flung on and hastily tied, to find Stella throwing things at Connor. She pelted him with markers, a book, her backpack. Emily snatched a plastic bowl out of Stella’s hand.
“She hurt me!” said Connor.
“You ruined it!”
“Ruined what?” said Emily.
Connor had ransacked Stella’s fairy museum.
Aluminum foil fairy wings had been torn.
The black Play-Doh cat was missing. The royal family gallery was graffitied, with black pointy hats drawn on the fairies’ heads and cackling grins drawn on their faces.
“It’s because the fairies stole the witches’ cat,” said Connor.
“It is not their cat!” said Stella.
Emily pulled Connor into the kids’ bedroom. “Why did you do that? You know how much that museum meant to her.”
“I made it better.”
“That’s not true and you know it.”
“Before it was just a fairy museum. Now it’s a story .”
“If it’s a story, it’s a mean one.”
“ You’re mean!”
“Tell her you’re sorry.”
“I’m not sorry!”
“Tell her anyway.”
“This is your fault! I miss Daddy. I’m bored here. I hate it here! I want to go home!”
Cold water had seeped from Emily’s hair into her robe. Her pulse was electric—in the unsteady way of old houses, as if a circuit might break. “You do go home,” Emily told him, “every weekend.”
“Without you.”
“That’s just how it is.”
“I want you to come home. Daddy’s better now. He’s nicer. Come home, you’ll see.”
“Baby, I can’t do that.”
Connor began to cry.
Emily said, “You have to apologize to Stella.”
When he did, in a timid voice, Emily believed that he meant it. He told Stella, “I’ll help you fix it.”
“I hate you!” Stella threw the bowl at him.
Emily couldn’t sleep. The dark space above Gen’s bed was cavernous. The high ceilings went on forever.
Gen shifted beside her but slept deeply.
Emily worried about Connor. She didn’t think that he believed her when she told him that the separation wasn’t his fault.
Maybe his efforts to persuade her to mend the marriage came from a conviction of his guilt.
She hadn’t told the children that she had begun divorce proceedings—and neither, as far as she could tell, had Jack—but the other day, Emily had opened the manila envelope to look at the divorce papers, mostly to reassure herself of their existence, because Jack was continuing to pretend that she hadn’t filed.
The papers were upside down in the envelope.
They hadn’t been that way when the document had arrived.
Had she slipped the papers back into the envelope upside down—or could it have been one of the children?
Emily left the bed and entered the fanatically clean living room with its wall of windows.
Manhattan glinted. Connor and Stella were upstate with Jack.
The daffodils that she had planted last fall must have come up.
The upstate house was still full of her things—her pajamas, her face cream.
She imagined Jack opening her tin of tea and couldn’t help a wave of pity.
She struggled to escape her sense of responsibility, but couldn’t, because she had been trained by him—had trained herself—to accept responsibility.
I shouldn’t have lost my temper, he would always say, then explain how she had provoked him.
If she didn’t agree with his narrative, didn’t share the blame (she hadn’t trusted him, she kept secrets, she lied, she refused to speak with him, she leapt to conclusions, she didn’t love him enough), he became worse, so it was important that she accept blame to prevent him from becoming worse.
She understood how powerful Connor’s guilt might feel even when he had done nothing wrong.
Emily heard the tread of feet. Gen touched the nape of Emily’s neck. “Can’t sleep?”
Emily shook her head.
“Bad thoughts?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
“Who’s the clean room and who’s the mess?”
“I’m not a clean room, and you’re not a mess—or if you are, I am, too. And I love your mess. Won’t you tell me what’s wrong?”
When she had heard what Emily had been thinking, Gen said, “I get that you don’t want to feel guilty, but I don’t see your alternative.
To have stayed with him and let him hurt you?
To exist in a state of half peace that’s only half peaceful because he’s on his best behavior out of hope that you’ll come back to him?
You might feel better if you just admitted to yourself that a divorce means it’s him or you.
Choose yourself. He’s fucking around with your lawyer and taking forever to answer her requests for bank statements?
Fine, take him to court. Have a judge force him to negotiate. ”
“It’ll get ugly.”
“Let it get ugly. Are you worried it’s going to scare me off? I keep telling you I’m right by your side, and you keep not believing me.”
“But you’re leaving New York.”
“Well, yes, I’ll go to Oregon for the trials in June and then, if I’m A-graded, to London. But the Olympics won’t last forever. I’ll come back to New York after that.” Gen searched her face. “Do you want me to?”
Emily stepped into Gen’s arms and rested her head in the crook of Gen’s neck.
She remembered holding Gen in this same way, when she had stepped off the bus in Boston’s South Station.
Gen smelled clean, like cut grass. Emily felt a kind of wonder.
She wasn’t sure she deserved it: this luck, this person. “Yes.”
“Hey,” Gen whispered, “what if you came to London?”
Emily tried to read Gen’s expression in the dark.
“The kids will be out of school then,” Gen said. “You could bring them with you. I’d love to have you there. All three of you.”
“And the press?”
“What’s there to see? A friend supporting a hometown friend. So wholesome. And taking kids to the Olympics is, like, educational.”
“Doesn’t it bother you, being ‘friends’?”
“It’s not forever. It’s for a good reason.”
“What are we doing, talking about going to the Olympics?”
“Figuring out what a future together could look like.”
The morning opened Emily’s eyes. A huge slice of sun lay on the bed.
It fell over Gen’s back. Gen slept, face buried in the pillow.
She wore an old T-shirt and thin cotton boxers.
Emily wasn’t sure if she’d ever seen Gen so still, or the limbs of her body this clearly.
Gen was someone who worked her body hard and it showed, but in sleep there was a softness to her.
Gen’s eyes opened a fraction, then closed again. Emily started to slip from the bed, but Gen stopped her. “No, no, come here.” Gen pulled her close. “I’m awake, too.”
“Not really.”
“Go on, ask me something.”
“What’s my middle name?”
“Trick question. You don’t have one.”
“Astrological sign?”
“You hate that shit.”
“Gen…can I think about London?”
Gen opened her eyes. “Of course.”
“I want to go, I just—”
Gen nodded against the pillow. “It’s a big thing. Anyway, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. I might not make it to the Olympics.”
“You will.”
“I wish I didn’t want it so much. I get to do what I love for as long as I can and that’s more than a lot of people get. But it’s hard. I don’t know who I’ll be when I can’t compete anymore.”
“You’ll be you.”
“You don’t know that.”
Emily was silent because Gen was right: no one knows who they will become. “Maybe just let yourself want the wanting. It’s not like you can help it.”
“Ugh! I want it so much that I’d have to get hit by a truck to stop wanting it.”
“You’d have to be kidnapped by a bear?”
“An ocelot. I’ve always liked ocelots.”
“You’d have to be sent into space to find an inhabitable planet.
Your body hibernates on board the spaceship for hundreds of years.
You land on a planet and it looks exactly like Earth.
Same oceans. Same continents. You look up at the moon and it is the same moon. You’re not sure if you ever left home.”
“You’re a good writer.”
“You’ve never read my writing.”
“Only because you won’t let me look at your novel.
But I still have your letters. I loved getting them.
You think your talent wasn’t obvious? Isn’t?
Listen to you: making stuff happen with words.
You made me happen. No, I mean it. Making me take the PSAT.
Telling me to go back to practice when I was ready to quit.
It’s like you told a story about me and it came true.
Hey. If you can’t come to London, it’s okay.
I asked you because I wanted you to know that I’m serious about you. About us.”
“You are?”
“Yeah.”
Emily kissed her.
“Mmm,” said Gen, turning onto her back. She reached to stroke Emily’s hair and pulled her into another kiss. “Do that again.”
Emily did, slowly. Hope opened inside her. Maybe this was possible. She remembered thinking, Not yet, not now, sure that nothing with Gen would last. But what if it did? What if it lasted their whole lives?
Gen drew Emily on top of her, so that Emily was astride Gen’s hips. Gen touched Emily between her thighs and Emily gasped at the delicate pressure. But she took Gen’s hand and rested it on Gen’s belly. Gen raised a questioning brow.
“Show me,” said Emily.
Gen knew what she wanted. Gen reached into her boxers and touched herself. Head thrown back on the pillow, eyes tightly shut, she shivered as her hand gained momentum.
“Show me more,” said Emily.
Gen looked at her hazily, then pushed down her boxers.
Emily watched Gen’s fingers slip over herself, diving in and out, then return to the point where she concentrated speed.
Emily grew hot with need. Gen said, the words caught in her throat, “I want you.” Emily lowered her mouth to her.
Gen cried out. Emily let her mouth rove over Gen’s folds, the fruit of her.
Sun blazed on the sheets. Gen shuddered.