Chapter 36
“Rory?”
“Hello! You’re on speakerphone. I’m eating a taco. It’s so spicy it’s dissolving my eyeballs but I like it.”
“I got a date in court.”
“Emily.” Rory was earnest. “That’s great.”
“It’s not until late September. Jack and his lawyer refused to do it any sooner.”
“Tweedle-dick and Tweedle-dicker are the worst. Still! You got a date! Did you tell Gen?”
“She asked me not to contact her.” Gen had been so careful about leaving no trace of herself at Emily’s apartment that nothing remained of her, not even a dirty T-shirt.
“She would want to know,” said Rory, “even as a friend.”
“It could distract her. The trials are in a few weeks. This is probably her last chance to make the Olympics. I think she’s afraid of what comes after. She loves running and competing so much. I want this win for her.”
“Ugh, fine! But your most annoying habit is how you make choices for others. Use your words! Stop disappearing on people!”
“She said she couldn’t bear friendly check-ins.”
“This is not a friendly check-in! Getting in front of a judge is major fucking news!”
“Can I ask a favor?”
“No. You’re too annoying.”
“Do you know any literary agents?”
“Your book!”
“I finished a draft.”
“Yeah, I know literary agents. I can hook you up, but that’s it.
I love the sweet nectar of nepotism and am happy to share, but no one will sign you unless the book is good.
Or unless you’re an ex-president or a seamy cult leader.
Or you escaped a cult. Cults are a thing right now. Did you write about a cult?”
“The pantheon of Greek gods was kind of cult-y. There was sex and murder and the worship of a fucked-up patriarchal leader.”
“Nice! Is your book good?”
“ I like it.”
“Tell me the story.”
Emily did, Rory constantly interrupting her.
“Sounds weird,” said Rory after Emily had described the premise.
“I know.”
“Maybe good weird. What happens in the end?”
In Emily’s manuscript, Athena tricked Zeus by tempting him to live inside a mortal’s mind, just as she had grown up inside his.
He changed into mist and flew up the nose of the sleeping Odysseus.
Athena chopped off her mortal friend’s head.
“I’m not saying it made me feel good,” confessed Emily’s Athena, “but Odysseus forgot a cardinal rule: never trust a god. Know what else about gods? It’s hard to kill one, but not so hard when you make him mortal. ”
It was a bright day. She had taken the children to the park near their school. They were climbing on a play structure. Their shadows were cutout puppets on the ground. A bee droned near the take-out cup next to Emily on the green bench.
Jack texted, You’re crazy if you think you’ll get full custody.
Her throat was dry. She tried to ignore her phone.
There’s no way you’re getting around the prenup
You get nothing
Accusing me of abuse? That’s fucked up, Em. I can’t believe you’d lie like that.
She walked unsteadily to the edge of the park and called him. “You hurt me.”
“You fell.”
“You made me fall. I have photographs.”
“My lawyer showed me photographs of a bruise you got when you slipped and fell. They don’t prove anything.”
Emily had the sense of being made entirely of paper. She felt very light.
“It was an accident,” he said. “You have no proof it wasn’t. No witnesses.”
His words made everything unreal. Her own reality seemed to fall away from her. She became a schema of a person, a drawing of a mother standing in the park while her children played.
That night, while Connor and Stella were sleeping, the intercom buzzed. Voice crackling through the static, Jack said, “Can I come up?”
She recoiled from the intercom. The buzzing continued, then stopped.
Her phone rang. After it stopped ringing, the texts came.
Do you really want to go to court?
I dont want things to get nasty
We can still turn this around
Will you please let me up?
I pay for this fucking apartment
How are you paying for this apartment
You have no money
Em come on
I have something for you
He didn’t write anything for a few moments, which led Emily to hope that he had given up and gone away. There was nothing he could have that she would want.
He texted a photo. It showed a set of notebooks in his hand, the closed lobby doors of Emily’s building in the background. Jack held Emily’s manuscript: the first version of her book, the one she had written years ago.
Frost crept over Emily’s lungs. She almost dropped the phone. She wrote, I thought you destroyed it
No you assumed that. You blamed me for something I didn’t do
you’ve had it all these years?
I just found the notebooks. You must have misplaced them. They were in a box of old things from when we moved
There was a time when she would have believed him if only because not believing would make her life untenable.
She would have believed him in order to prevent the shame of having married someone who could do and say what he did to her.
She was shaken by how easy it would have been to ignore an obvious lie.
Keep them, she told him.
She made sure that the front door was locked and bolted. She slept on the floor of the children’s room. When they woke in the morning for school, they were tickled to find her there. Stella, excitedly, asked if she knew how to sleepwalk. “Will you teach me?” Stella begged.