The Office of Historical Corrections(59)
Although she was by most measures more popular, I enjoyed myself more than Genie did when we went out with our classmates. Genie navigated social occasions as she did everything else—strategically, and with an eye toward what social currency they could bring her and what a misstep would cost. I liked the opportunity to surprise people with the less guarded version of myself, liked the rush of getting away with things.
Genie had to tell me when I was about to press my luck too far, when I was too much with the wrong person or in the wrong place. Only once had I needed to be the moderating force. Our junior year of high school, a classmate invited us to watch the mediocre band he played bass in open for a better band, and a group of us went to a club to watch. In the middle of the set I realized I’d lost track of Genie. I found her, in the sticky-floored back barroom, doing a fourth shot of tequila—the first two rounds had been earlier, at the band’s insistence, but the last two she’d done alone. She was drunk enough that it wasn’t worth asking why, so I got us in a cab and held her hair while she threw up on my lawn, and called her parents to say we were having a sleepover, which we were insofar as she passed out inside. In the morning I brought her ibuprofen and water and oatmeal before my parents were awake, giving her a chance to be presentable when she greeted them, which she did with perfect poise.
Alone again, I asked what was wrong. She told me she’d lost a debate tournament, or rather not lost but come in second, and also not lost because she had, by all accounts and measures won, been fiercer and smarter and more polished than the girl who beat her, won by every metric but the judge’s scorecards. Her teammates had sympathetically shrugged it off as one of those inexplicable decisions, and her parents had given her the twice as good for half the credit lecture, when she wanted, just once, for someone to tell her that she was already good enough and it wasn’t all right if the world wasn’t fair enough to reward it, wanted someone to acknowledge that even this trivial thing was allowed to hurt, and that the particularity of the unfairness had a name.
“Genie,” I said. “Fuck those people. You’re smarter than all of them.”
“I am,” said Genie. “But it’s never going to be enough.”
* * *
—
That, I recognized as I watched Genevieve nurse a second morning beer at Andy Detry’s bar, was what had upset me seeing her yesterday. It had reminded me of the only other time, in any incarnation, I’d seen her look defeated. When we’d come in, Andy had been happy to see us and asked how things were going. I told him only the happy version of events—the truth of Josiah Wynslow’s long and full life. He gave us the promised first round on him, and he was pleased to hear how Josiah’s life had turned out. If he wondered why we were drinking so early to good news, bless the state of Wisconsin, he didn’t ask. When we had tucked ourselves into a back booth, Genevieve demanded to know why I hadn’t told him the rest of the story, and I said officially I had no rest of the story to tell—no proof of Ella Mae’s real identity and no official purpose for proving it.
“So now what?” she asked.
“Now nothing,” I said. “I go back to DC and send a request to vital records to pull the incorrect death certificate, and I recommend the city take the sign down, which I assume they will gladly do. I came to answer the question of whether the man survived. I can’t do much with a theory about how.”
“So what’s your theory? Minerva saved his life and kept the property because that’s what he would have wanted, or Minerva was a cold-blooded bitch who would have let her brother die to keep her new life and he ran when he saw it?”
“I don’t know. I’d like to think the former. Either way, the cost of raising her daughter the way she wanted is that she’s got a Black white supremacist grandson running around, so in the end we all lose.”
“The beauty of motherhood is that all the choices are wrong,” said Genevieve.
“Is it terrifying?” I asked. “Being a parent?”
“Yes,” said Genevieve. “It’s like every day since Octavia was born I’ve had to choose between trying to do the best I can for her and trying to do the best I can for the world she has to live in. I wouldn’t forgive her for it, but I understand the choice Minerva made in a way I wouldn’t without Octavia. She’s perfect. She’s doing a summer music camp and she’s lead violin. How much would I give up to protect her from everyone who’s going to hate her just for being there? Look at this. Look at how damn amazing she is.”
Genevieve scrolled through the pictures on her phone for me—Octavia onstage, Octavia in pajamas in a picture she’d covered with sleepy emojis by way of texting her mother good night, Octavia making silly faces, Octavia helpfully screenshotting and circling in red ink an advertisement for the Disney princess salon, suggesting they go when Genevieve got her back next month, Octavia giving her own voice-over guide to a makeup artist’s tutorial on the screen behind her, giving Genevieve advice for how to do her lipstick when she got famous. I hadn’t seen Octavia in real life for a few years, and now, nearly ten, she looked startlingly like Genevieve when I had met her, except she appeared on the verge of laughter in every single picture, and even as a girl, Genie had been serious. In the middle of the slideshow, a new call popped up on-screen, and Genevieve excused herself to take it outside. I nursed my beer and thought about asking for another. When Genevieve came back, she looked tense.