"Are you familiar with Greek mythology?" a voice asked from the doorway of Jake's classroom.
Jake choked on his coffee. "Sorry," he said, "I thought I was alone."
Elspeth Mader, the science teacher, smiled and sat down at the student desk closest to him. He was pretty sure he'd had a dirty dream that began like this.
"Greek mythology?" she asked again.
"Oh. Yes. Yes, I'm familiar with it. Why?"
"I came across a reference to 'Hephaestus,'" she said, unsure of her pronunciation. She spelled it out, her hands running over the graffiti scratched in the surface of the desk, then continued, "It's in a book I'm reading. I would've just looked it up, but the internet's down all over the school."
Jake hesitated, straightening the stack of final exams on his desk. "Why would you think I'd know anything about it?"
She looked at him with a confused smile. Jake wondered how anyone could have such perfect lips. "Because you're the literature teacher?��
"Right," he said, mentally smacking himself. "Uh, Hephaestus is the god of metalworking, blacksmiths, and that sort of thing. He's a son of Hera, maker of Pandora's box, married Aphrodite….It might help to know more of what you're looking for."
She smiled. "At least I know I came to the right place. There's not much to it, really, just a line about the living metal of Hephaestus's forge."
"He made a throne that closed itself around Hera and trapped her," Jake said. "He made Hermes's winged helmet and sandals, robot-like creatures to help him in his work…lots of stuff. Does that help?"
"Yes. It's perfect. But why did he trap Hera? Didn't you say she was his mother?"
"She was his mother, but he sent her the chair as revenge for throwing him out of heaven."
"Why would she do that?" Elspeth asked, with concern.
He had to smile at her to keep from laughing at her outright. She was lovely and intelligent, and Jake had once looked for every opportunity to talk to her. Once or twice he even thought she might be interested in him. And he was sure that, given the opportunity, he could find himself very interested in her, but the problem was bigger than just opportunity. He loved his wife. He loved her, and even if, sometime in a future he couldn't imagine, he stopped loving her, there was still the otherworld to contend with. He had already put his mother, his wife, his daughter, and his roommate in danger because they were near him, and Jake wasn't prepared to add to the list.
Elspeth's expression reminded him that she had asked a question. "Hephaestus was ugly," Jake replied, looking down at his desk, "hideous, and Hera was probably ashamed." He was about to add that Hera was the most vain and possessive person he'd ever met, but then he realized that would be an awkward thing to have to explain.
Elspeth looked thoughtful. "I'd never imagined a god being ugly. You know, I guess I'd always imagined them as spirits, without having to worry about all the mundane mortal things like…like haircuts." She smiled, a little self-conscious.
It was that self-conscious look that made Jake say, "For that they have Mr. Kurias, the barber of the gods."
She laughed.
"The gods do have a physical form…according to most myth writers, but they usually only wear it in the holy places, like Mount Olympus, or in emergencies. For travel, they tend to possess people or animals, occasionally an inanimate object. It helps them blend in. Plus, if you're as widely hated as, say, Zeus, it helps to be able to travel incognito."
Elspeth looked at him with interest. "You know a lot about this, don't you?"
Jake shrugged, turning away. "It's everywhere, you know? Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and then there's Homer and Ovid, and Byron and Keats and…." He looked up at Elspeth, then back down at his desk. "I spent a whole summer studying mythology once."
"For a class?"
"Yeah," Jake said.
Lily looked nervous when Jake picked her up on Friday afternoon. He was jubilant, not just because Lily and Zeus were finally meeting, but also because school was out for summer, and he'd never gotten over being excited about that. He had two and a half whole months until he had to walk into that classroom again, and he had lists of movies he wanted to watch and books he wanted to read and places he wanted to take Lily.
"Do you think he'll like me?" she asked as soon as the front door opened.
"What?" Jake said. Rachel stood behind Lily with the phone to her ear, one hand untangling the ends of her long blonde hair. She saw Jake staring at her, rolled her eyes, and walked into the living room.
"Grampa Zoos," Lily said. "Will he like me?"
Jake knelt down and hugged her fiercely. "Of course he will. Who wouldn't like you?"
Lily relaxed a little, and Jake stood up, took her overnight bag, and walked with Lily out to the car without another word to Rachel. Jake hadn't realized how much stress a five-year-old could be under. Maybe that was her gift from the gods, to feel stress regardless of circumstance. "Can I buy him a present?" she asked.
"I think it will be enough of a present just to get to meet you."
She seemed to tense up again. The ignored voice in the unused part of his brain whispered a hint, and for once, Jake heard the whisper.
"Lily?" She looked at him. "What did your mom tell you about Grandpa Zeus?" Aha! Jake thought as Lily squeezed her hands together and looked at the ground.
"She said," Lily took a deep breath. "She said he was like a king, very famous and very dangerous. She said he wasn't very smart but that he could be mean and could forget that other people have feelings."
Jake thought about this. It wasn't nice, what Rachel had told her daughter, but most of it was true. He helped Lily into the car, then walked around to the driver's side. A curtain moved in one of the windows. Jake made sure Lily wasn't watching, then he flipped Rachel off and hoped she saw.
"She called him something else," Lily said when Jake had gotten in the car and started the ignition.
"What?"
"I don't know. A…nipple-gazer?" Jake closed his eyes. "No, a navel-gazer. What's a navel-gazer?"
Jake tried to explain while offering a silent thanks to the universe that he wasn't explaining what a nipple-gazer could be to his five-year-old daughter. "And your mom just said those things about your grandpa because she doesn't like him. He's not quite that bad. He's not mean. Besides, he already loves you. He asks about you every time he visits, and he even has a picture of you."
Lily nodded slowly, taking all this in. "Dad, why didn't he want to see me before now?"
"He has wanted to see you. It's just that…since your mom doesn't like him…."
He glanced at his daughter, who was staring straight ahead through the windshield. She looked at him with an eerily mature "I get it" expression.
"But that's no big deal. You're meeting him now, right? And I'm sure you guys will have a great time."
Lily looked doubtful. They stopped at Wal-Mart and bought a case of Dr. Pepper before heading to the apartment.
Saturday morning, Jake woke to the sounds of cartoons blaring from the living room television. Zeus was supposed to arrive at ten o'clock, but Jake hadn't told Lily. He couldn't stand to see her as bound up and nervous as she'd been the day before, and if Zeus was late, it would be worse. He could imagine her sitting, staring at the little digital clock on the VCR as it ticked past ten, past ten-thirty. Jake didn't even think about what she would feel if Zeus didn't show up, but surely, surely he would.
Lily sat watching the PowerPuff Girls on the living room floor. She had already gotten dressed and brushed her hair. E. E., sprawling on the couch in cutoff sweatpants and a stained and holey t-shirt with "Hole" scrawled across the front, watched with her, two empty cereal bowls on the coffee table between them. Jake went into the kitchen and stood trying to decide between Cocoa Puffs and Raisin Bran. From the living room, he heard Lily ooo over something she saw in a commercial. The Raisin Bran box rattled when he touched it, so he poured a bowl of Cocoa Puffs instead and went to join Lily and E. E. just in time to catch the beginning of The Fairly OddParents.
Half an hour later, E. E. stood and stretched. He went to his room and came out in jeans and a clean but no less ratty t-shirt featuring an equally obsolete band name. "Well, Lillian," he said, "I have an unemployed therapists' meeting in ten minutes, so I better get going. I'll see you later today."
"Have a nice day, Edward," Lily said, grinning. E. E. stuck out his tongue at her, saluted Jake, and left.
At ten-oh-seven, Lily turned away from the television and said, "Dad, when—"
The sharp knock on the door made both of them jump. Jake went to the door and looked through the spyhole. A kind-looking gentleman in his mid-fifties stood peacefully in the hallway. "How do I look, Jake?" the man said through the door, smiling at the spyhole. He looked clean and responsible, like a man with a 401K and a regular tee time.
"Just fine, Dad." Jake unlocked the door and opened it for his father, who took a cautious step inside and focused immediately on the nervous little girl now standing in the middle of the room. They stared at each other, unsure and eager and, Jake was sure, a thousand other things as well. And Jake…well, Jake felt like a dickweed. He had been excited for days. Finally, these two people who mattered so much to him would meet. Finally, he would have something resembling a family. This day should have happened years ago. And that's why Jake thought someone should kick him in the shins. A grandfather shouldn't have to be introduced to his already walking, talking granddaughter. A granddaughter shouldn't feel half-terrified to meet her relatively normal grandfather. They should know each other from the beginning, and it was Jake's fault that they hadn't.
"I got you a present," Lily said in a burst, and ran into the kitchen. Zeus glanced at Jake, but before he could say anything, Lily staggered back into the living room, hugging five Dr. Peppers to her stomach.
Zeus smiled widely. It was disconcerting to see his father looking so…fatherly. Zeus hugged Lily and thanked her. "I brought you a present too, but I have to run it by your dad first." Zeus motioned toward the door.
Jake was all of a sudden very nervous. He followed Zeus back out into the hall. "Do you think she likes me?" Zeus asked immediately.
In rare moments like this, Jake found it easy to forget that his father was anyone special. This ridiculously confident man was wide-eyed and tense today. Jake wondered if, had his father been in his natural form, the family resemblance would have been easier to see than usual. Jake felt no similarities between himself and the chief god of the pantheon, but he felt all too connected to this unsure man before him. And as much as Jake would have liked to torment Zeus, tell him that Lily had a high standard for grandfathers and he wasn't sure Zeus measured up, the anxiety all over his father's borrowed face made him unable to do it. "She likes you," Jake assured him. "She is just as nervous about you liking her." Zeus looked doubtful. "Now, what is the present?"
Zeus reached for something he had leaned against the door frame—a silver white feather as long as his arm.
"What is that?" Jake said, unsure of whether to be nervous or awe-struck, but unable to keep from being both.
"Feather from Pegasus' wing. He starts to molt when it gets warm."
"I don't know…."
Zeus looked at him seriously, hopefully. "It doesn't have any kind of power. It's just like a feather from a giant bird, except that this particular bird will lick you to death in search of caramel, and he grazes on Mount Olympus. Except in winter, which he spends in Calcutta."
Jake raised his eyebrows.
"He has a penchant for dal," Zeus said, as though that explained everything.
Jake took the feather and turned it over and over in his hands. It was beautiful, and even though it was such an unlikely size, there was something indefinably real about it. Jake glanced up into his father's eager face. "Yeah. Okay," he said.
Lily was thrilled, of course. Zeus presented it to her in courtly style, and she looked as though someone had just handed her a Barbie mansion with all the accessories.
Later that night, after E. E. had come home and resumed his hobby of lying around, Lily got tired of Candyland and moved on to interrogating her grandfather, whom she seemed to like immensely, even asking if she should call him "Grampa Zoos" or just "Grampa."
"Where does magic come from?"
"Life," Zeus said promptly, and Jake looked over into his face. That didn't sound like a made-up answer. "All life is a kind of magic, but in some people and in some places it's stronger than in others. When a person with a lot of magic makes an object, say a book or a sword or a cheesecake, sometimes they can put some of their magic inside of it, and the object is like their child."
"Are there magic animals?"
"Sometimes. But some animals are more likely to be magical than others. Phoenixes are always magical because they were born from the sun, which is such a magical place that no one can live there. Unicorns, dragons, hedgehogs, and chimeras are always magical, too. With other animals it varies, just like with people. Squirrels are more likely to have magical properties than, say, rhinoceroses. You wouldn't believe how much impact the Capitol Hill squirrels have on your politics. They have their own little cosa nostra."
Lily looked at him blankly.
He continued, "People who have freckles are more likely to be magical than people who don't. People who live near the equator are more likely to have magical properties than people who live near the North or South Pole."
"What about Santa?"
"He's from Peru."
"Do I have magic?"
"Probably some. But there's magic in millions of people. That's why the beacon we talked about, the one that makes your dad crazy because the magical world notices him—"
"He found a baby hippocampus in his wine cooler yesterday," E. E. interjected.
"—that beacon shines a little from you because you're my granddaughter, but it's unlikely that you'll ever have hippocampuses in your wine coolers because thousands of people are just as bright as you, and millions of people shine at least a little. Some of them even have secret powers that they don't know about."
"I want to be invisible," Lily said. Jake made an effort not to glare at his father.
"We'll talk when you're older," Zeus whispered with a half smile, and Lily beamed.
Jake realized that he was clenching his fists and tried to relax. He'd survived growing up as Zeus's son, so surely Lily would make it through as his granddaughter. He just hoped her growing-up years would be a little less exciting and painful than his. She was probably more in danger of being spoiled by him than anything more sinister. Zeus loved to bring Jake gifts when he was a child. Jake remembered getting an Arbor Day present one year. Jake had tried to reciprocate for a while. He'd even made up a birthday for his father, since Zeus claimed not to have one, but Zeus never looked happier than when he was pulling a wrapped present from behind his back.
By the time Jake was eighteen, he felt too old for presents. He didn't even look at the trinket Zeus brought to him the morning of Delilah's funeral. He put it in his pocket, and for all he knew, it was still there. The pants were in a Goodwill store somewhere or smashed between other sets of long unused clothes in the back of the closet at the house on Lime Street, where he was no longer welcome.
Of course, presents had been the last thing on Jake's mind that day. He stood by the graveside, near the casket. Zeus stood beside him, saying nothing and ignoring the questioning stares from the service's few other attendees. There was no wind and no rain, though the clouds waving their thick hands in front of the sun made the day seem to move back and forth between afternoon and twilight. It was good funeral weather.
Jake, nineteen and in the habit of wearing his hair almost to his shoulders, stood beside his father, trying not to feel so sad that he couldn't keep himself from crying, but sad enough that he didn't feel the relief that had come over him twice since he heard that his mother had simply stopped breathing walking across her living room one morning. Relief was not the thing to be feeling. It made him sick when he realized what he felt.
Jake tried to clear his mind and see just the casket, just the outline of his father out of the edge of his eye. He hated the people who stared. He hated them for their melancholy masks and their clasped hands. None of them had ever stopped in or called to check on them. None of them came for dinner or invited them to the movies. The grass grew knee-high when Jake was too busy to mow. The car had fallen apart months ago, and nothing but a wide oilspot marked the driveway, but no one called and asked if she needed a ride. Jake carried groceries home on his bicycle, a bag hanging from each handlebar and his backpack so heavy on his shoulders that his shirts stretched and his lower back ached for days.
So he didn't care about their solemn sympathetic blathering. They were here to relieve some guilt or acknowledge some debt to a woman they had never acknowledged in life. They were dementors, feeding on the grief, and yes, the guilt, of Delilah's son. They were liars, too, because in their thoughts and in their conversation for as long as they remembered her name, they would make her into some kind woman whom they knew so well, who didn't deserve to go so young, who left behind a son, a fine young man, who was so very close to her.
Part of him wanted to snarl at them, slash with his claws.
Zeus put a hand on his shoulder when the service was over. "I'm sorry," he said, and Jake knew that it was a much broader apology than just sympathy, and he felt a love for his father that he hadn't felt since he was a little boy.
Now, Lily and Zeus sat together on the floor, the discarded fragments of Candyland spread across the floor between them, talking about the cool things she could do if she were invisible.
"Can you be invisible?" Lily asked
"Not when I'm in this thing," Zeus said, pointing to his chest. "When I'm in my other body, my real body, I can."
"Because you're imm…?"
Jake was sure that she was about to say "immoral," which would have been pretty funny, and he was waiting for it, but Zeus jumped in. "Immortal," he said. "And that's sort of the reason, yes."
"What's it like?" Lily asked.
"It's like…" he thought, then smiled widely. "Like a light." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette lighter and clicked it. An orange flame appeared, waving from Zeus's breath. Then he took out another lighter, a dull silver one covered with runic letters, and lit it, but instead of fire, there was a flame-shaped darkness bursting out. Jake didn't want to know what that one was for. And where had it come from? Jake sat up straighter. Either the old man who'd been body-snatched had had it in his pocket, or Zeus had just done a trick Jake hadn't seen before.
Zeus touched the two small flames together, and they made a strange, half light, half dark flame, like a swirl of vanilla and chocolate pudding. "Like your dad," Zeus told her. "He's mortal/immortal. He has some of the benefits of immortality, but not all. He'll live a very long time unless he starts smoking or steps in front of a bus. He can even live in my hometown, Olympus, if he chooses, like some of my other children."
"How many children do you have?" Lily asked.
"Oh, hundreds. Many of them aren't alive anymore," Zeus said, his voice low. "And some don't want to have me as a father, but some of them live with me and some of them I can visit as often as I want, like your dad."
Lily was looking at the flames again. "Do I have a light?"
"Sure," Zeus said. He clicked his lighters again, and there was a dark flame and the normal one. He touched them together briefly, the released the normal lighter's button. The flame that remained was mostly dark. Bits of light like snow falling could be seen, but no real light. "You are almost as mortal as most people," Zeus said. "But you are a dark flame with diamonds inside. That's the best kind of mortal." Zeus clicked the lighters and made Jake's light again, the pudding one. "Now, look at this. You see how half your dad's light shines out so you notice it a lot more than the dark places? That's what your dad's trying to get rid of. It's like the beacon we talked about earlier. Other immortal and half-immortal people and creatures can see it or sense it, and they want to come close to it and say hi to the owner. This world isn't friendly to the immortal world anymore. We have to make friends where we can."
Lily then asked if she could have a pink flame, and the conversation deteriorated from there. But Jake was sure the talk hadn't been completely for her anyway.
Before Zeus left, he asked how the box was doing. Jake assured him that it was fine and resisted the impulse to ask for more information about it.
One of the earliest questions Jake could remember asking his father (not the usual, why is the sky blue? or even, where do babies come from?) was a question like Lily's: "Am I immortal?" Actually, he'd been around her age, so it had probably been more along the lines of, "Will I be a god someday?" or "How can I change into a turtle with a fire baton?"
But he remembered Zeus's answer clearly. His father had put an arm around him and told him that he was a child of a god and a mortal, like many of Zeus's other children, and like them, he could expect to live an exceptionally long life and to have certain abilities. "Some of your half-brothers and half-sisters are Olympic athletes. Others are unusually successful stock brokers, womanizers, and magicians. More than half of them live in Vegas. You have a half-brother in Arizona who's a talented automobile mechanic."
"I have a lot of brothers and sisters?"
Zeus said, half smiling, "Birth control isn't foolproof."
Jake accepted this. There were three things he didn't know. The first was what a womanizer was. The second was what his special ability could be. The third was whether Zeus was being completely truthful.
Years later, his special ability still on his mind, Jake stood before a room of high school students for the first time, writing "Mr. Foster" in large letters on the board. He turned to the class, who were chatting with friends, sending text messages, touching up nail polish, reading Sports Illustrated (or just looking at the pictures, or just looking at what was concealed within the pages), or napping.
Near the end of the class, after he had passed out syllabi and discussed his plans and goals for the semester, they were all still chatting with friends, sending text messages, touching up nail polish, reading Sports Illustrated, or napping. The only difference was that many who had been awake in the beginning were now snoring audibly over the babble.
When the bell finally, finally rang, Jake too put his head on his desk and thought that he could, at least, mark teaching off his list of possible abilities. Of course, by this time, he could also mark off scuba diving, electronics, sales, and definitely womanizing.
And he knew that Zeus hadn't been entirely truthful because the truth was that Jake had no abilities at all.