When she left his room, he tried not to blame her, but he did, and it was all desperate anger inside him. And he had thought how Eric always said, “You’re my best friend, Daniel,” and sometimes Trevor was Daniel’s, or at least he would say that when they were getting along, but really, his best friend had always been his mother, so how come, when he asked her those questions, she hadn’t been able to read his heart, or feel his pain, or know his mind was filled with confused thoughts jumping around like rabbits.
And it was then, right then, he instantly understood what he had read in the big books he loved, that when people were hurt down to their bones, it was because they had been betrayed, and he had been betrayed, and betrayal felt like this. The very fact of her had stamped out what made him special, crushed his secret desire to be a famous writer.
And all this past week, he felt rooted to the ground, clenching his hands in fists, saying to himself, “She’s a mother, just a mother, that’s all she is.”
But this morning, hiding in the library reading “Deep in the Valley,” he had realized three things: that her talent was unique, that he could never hope to match it, and that he would never get over it. The fury he felt toward her was blinding and white-hot, because she had destroyed him, completely and absolutely. Why that should be so, he could not explain to himself. He hadn’t been able to read another story, had slammed the book shut, and stayed in the library the rest of the day, his face in his hands.
He looked once more at his mother’s book on the shelf, then turned away, went back outside, sat at the table, and pretended he did not hate her.
* * *
At eight, Eric went to bed.
* * *
At nine, Daniel went to bed.
* * *
At ten, Martin went to bed too.
* * *
Joan did not go to bed. Since Friday night, she had been taking advantage of Martin’s jet lag, continuing to make her slow way through Words. She had one hundred and fifteen pages to go, and a lot of work to do to bring what she had written thus far into being, the ways in which she thought her characters, and their stories, needed to move forward, the new chapters she was keen to write. She still was not certain whether she would start anew, or wind back to the start and first revise all of those pages. But she was working with pleasure, with relief that Eric’s mishap with the aspirin had not harmed him, and that Daniel, while still quieter than usual, had smiled a few times at dinner, even as she sometimes caught him studying her. He hadn’t kissed her goodnight, but he hadn’t kissed Martin either. She was eager for the next day, for Martin to brush the top of her hair with his lips and leave by the back door, to drop the kids off at school, to return to the novel she could feel in her marrow had the poetic heft, the depth, all the sinews and tissues, to be extraordinarily fine.
* * *
At two in the morning, Joan slid naked into their bed. She was no longer angry with Martin, about his comment that he did not blame her for Eric eating all of that aspirin, the bottle left out on the counter. He had meant to assuage, even if his words had had the opposite effect. She settled against him, and he moaned softly, and then his right arm, his right hand, fell across her left thigh, and she, too, went to sleep.
* * *
On Tuesday morning, the world blew up.
15
There was shock and horror and fear. In the future, the events of Tuesday would be labeled with a shorthand name summing up the crashing planes, the burning fuel, the people jumping from the tall buildings, the passengers wrangling with terrorists before dying in a Pennsylvania field, part of the Pentagon sheared away, all the deaths, the family traumas, the country’s trauma, the loss of innocence and invulnerability, the guilt eating away at survivors, the degrees of separation between those who had been spared and those who had not, the recollections of where everyone was when it all happened. There would be nonfiction accounts, political and religious analyses and screeds, wars begun as a result, fighting, supposedly, to regain balance, to right the wrongs, leaving behind more body counts of the dead, the dying, and the maimed. Fiction, too, would be written, novels and short stories that had at their bloody center that Tuesday morning and its aftermath. But right then, on that beautiful blue September morning, everything just halted. There was no school for the rest of the week. Martin’s surgeries were rescheduled, except for the emergencies, the hospital with all of its patients a soundless tomb. The streets of Rhome were empty, as if its population had also been incinerated in an instant. Everyone stayed inside, huddling and crying with their families, with their aging parents, with their young children, with their girlfriends or boyfriends, with their spouses they were considering divorcing, with their cats and their dogs and their birds and their hamsters. Televisions remained on permanently, the voices of newscasters and journalists around the globe settling into every corner of every house. At the end of that long and incomprehensible week, the mayor of Rhome, along with a priest, a minister, a rabbi, and a Buddhist monk—like the start of a bad joke—presided over a candlelight vigil on Strada di Felicità. Thousands of Rhome residents emerged from their homes for the first time in days and listened to their wise, empty words. For a long time, nothing would be as it was.
16
The reverberations continued, but life resumed, and three weeks later, a letter came in the mail from the Rhome Elementary School principal stating that, unless the Mannings objected, Eric would be transferred from his second-grade class with Mr. John to the third-grade class presided over by Mr. Nevins. His score on the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence had been off the charts. The principal had written: Eric is supremely gifted and would benefit greatly by moving up a grade. We considered moving him up two grades, but the age gap would be too great. To hold him back from moving ahead, however, would be a travesty.
At the kitchen table, Eric’s head pinged back and forth, from mother to father and back again, as Joan and Martin debated whether such a move was a good thing for him or not.
“What do you think,” Joan said to Eric as Daniel stomped into the kitchen, dragged a chair out from the table, and sat down hard.
“I don’t know,” Eric said.
“I don’t understand. I bring home all A’s because I work hard, but no one’s moving me up a grade. And Eric, he never opens a book, doesn’t read a thing, barely does his stupid homework, unless you force him to. He only likes LEGOs and numbers and Dad’s office computer, and now supposedly he’s some kind of genius?”
“I’ll still hate school, even if they put me in third grade. Does that make you feel better, Daniel?” Eric asked.
It did not.
“So, Eric’s a genius, and Dad has a surgery named after him now, and you, Mom—” Daniel pushed his chair from the table and stormed away, slamming the door to his bedroom.
* * *
In mid-October, when the leaves on the trees were hinting at fall, pale reds, oranges, and golds shimmering among the green, the typewriter was humming, a fresh page rolled in, Joan’s fingers poised above the keyboard. This was her first day back. Since that Tuesday morning, in the harsh light of what had occurred, she had questioned writing about a blissful arcadia, about artists and their dreams, their desires to create eminent lives, filled up with as much virtuosity and brilliance as their talent and personalities permitted. But weren’t people ultimately and irrevocably lost if they abandoned those dreams, ceased trying to create a rich alternative world, for themselves and for others? Wasn’t the beauty of art found in the uncovering and discovering, in being taken, or led, to the line, the step, the curve, the color, the note, the word? Wasn’t the ability to start anew, again and again, the very definition of human endeavor? Words of New Beginnings was about all of that, and about what was good in the world, about collaboration, and collective creativity, about individuals striving for something grand, about finding ways to protect themselves and one another as they pursued what their souls commanded. She pressed down on the keys a
nd saw the black words stamping into the white. She already knew what she was going to write.
Anton is all tender veins, fresh blood, a smacked and small beating heart, and she must help that little heart to grow, cannot do a thing that might break it in half, or into tiny pieces, or into any pieces at all. Lila feels how she holds his heart in her hands and must safeguard it, an obligation she understands she has taken on, has made herself responsible for him, and although he does not realize it, he is counting on her to shepherd him into the next stage of his life. He has taken the first steps, Anton is here after all, in this place they all now call home.
Joan leaned back and thought the act of writing had never felt as exquisitely important, so much like prayer.
17
Eric moved into Mr. Nevin’s third grade, and other than playing with different kids at recess, it made no difference to him, except that his father bought him a computer and set it up in his room. He spent hours figuring out how the thing worked, how he could make it work in different ways, and one Saturday morning, he said, “Mom, will you take me to the library?” Surprised that this second child of hers was finally expressing an interest in reading, Joan said, “Sure. We’ll go right now.” On the drive over, she asked what kind of books he was looking for, and Eric said, “Coding,” and Joan had no idea what he was talking about.
Daniel made the swim team, the only seventh grader to do so. When the swim season officially started, and the team began attending meets, his events would be the 100-meter individual medley, swimming butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, and freestyle, and the fifty-yard freestyle. Joan bought him special shampoo and soap to wash away the chlorine, but it stuck to his skin, the scent entering rooms before he did. He did his homework with his usual attention and continued to get top grades. He still read big novels that he took off the living-room shelves or checked out of the library, but he didn’t often want to talk to Joan about what he was reading. And gradually Joan became aware that she no longer heard the plunking of the manual typewriter keys in his room, that he did not mention the squirrel at all.
* * *
It was the day after Christmas. The house was quiet, their land brown beneath the cold sun, and Joan and Martin were in the living room, the coffee in their mugs cooling, reading the New York Times. Eric had disappeared into his room, reading the books they had given him for Christmas, six coding books recommended by one of Martin’s Johns Hopkins friends, who’d been told that their seven-year-old was fixated on computers and had been reading serious books intended for those already in the computer science field. Though he had never opened a children’s book willingly, Eric read perfectly well when consumed by the subject, and when Joan finally returned the oft-renewed library books, the pages had been frayed. Daniel was at the community center, as he usually was, in the pool with the swim team.
Joan put down the paper and said, “Something’s wrong with Daniel. He’s stopped writing about Henry.”
Martin rubbed his eyes. “He’ll start up again, if that’s what he wants to do.”
“I don’t think he will. He’s doubting himself for some reason.”
“Isn’t experiencing doubt part of growing up?” Martin said. “A useful way to test your limits and surpass them?”
“True, but give me one example where we wouldn’t try to shore up our sons’ doubts, would just allow doubt to hang in the air, pretend not to notice the struggle.”
When Martin could not, Joan said, “You don’t have a lot of experience with doubt. But I do. When the writers I edited faltered, I kept them from falling down. In my own work, there were many times I had to push through. We—I—have to do that for Daniel. I think he’s giving up on something vital, that thing that makes him who he is, and he’s too young to know he will suffer in the future from the actions he’s taking now. We need to help him.”
Martin shook his head. “Sometimes a forceful push can have the opposite effect. Maybe he’s just taking a break. He’s certainly found a new area of interest with swimming. And anyway, isn’t writing something he can choose to do or not?”
“Daniel’s compelled to write, he has been since he was little, just like I am—” she said, feeling heat in her face, on her chest, wondering if Martin noticed the slip. “If the compulsion has disappeared so quickly, something’s wrong.”
Martin hadn’t noticed her slip, and it struck Joan again, as it had occasionally over the past several years, that he had never questioned her, or worried, when she said she stopped writing. That to him, her writing was something far in the past, as if she had never been a writer at all.
“Maybe, but let’s not say anything right now. Let’s give it time. Everyone’s still reeling, no one feels sure about the world anymore. Why should an eleven-year-old be any different?”
“Twelve in four days,” she said.
“Right, but in four days he won’t suddenly process what’s happened any better.”
Joan wasn’t interested in hashing it out, in revealing the existence of Words, so she allowed Martin the last word and they went back to reading the paper. For the rest of the day, she debated about whether she ought to press Daniel. If he had stopped writing, there was something that needed to be aired out and discussed.
In bed that night, she thought how Daniel seemed happy enough, with the swim team, with keeping track of his times, with his books, and his friends, blushing a little when he talked about a girl in his class. In the morning, when no clear answer had revealed itself, Joan decided to default to Martin’s suggestion for just a little while, to see whether Daniel started plunking away again.
* * *
In early February, she leaned against Daniel’s door. “So, I was just wondering what new adventure you’re considering for Henry.” Daniel looked up from his desk and shrugged. “I’m not.” She saw the hemming in his eyes, there was something he wanted to say, but he shrugged again, swallowed once, twice, then said, “Mom, I’m too busy with everything else. I have a history quiz tomorrow and I have to study. Okay?”
She wanted badly to push, to make Daniel speak, but instead she said, “Let me know if you want me to test you, or you get hungry and want a snack.”
Daniel nodded and dropped his head back down into his history notes.
Perhaps Martin was right. Her son, always an open book, always talking to her about whatever was going on in his life, was closing his covers, with secret thoughts of his own, and perhaps she needed to wait for him to reach out to her, to bring up whatever was on his mind.
* * *
For a long time, she thought Daniel would, when he had been thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and came to find her out in the gardens, hoeing or raking or reseeding or deadheading the flowers, the gardens still her creative outlet when the family was around and she could not write. He would join her, help out for a while, and she would wait for him to say something, that he missed writing, mention the name of his squirrel, but he did not. He talked of other things: school, friends, the girl he did have a crush on, the swim team, filling Joan in, disclosing details, still as close, even if he had cut one of the ties that bound them together.
She left it in the past, tried not to think of Daniel the writer, until the fall of his senior year, when he was studying for the SATs, filling out college applications. He said he wanted to major in business, to make money, to be rich, to be powerful. Such a completely different future from the one she had thought, hoped, believed he should pursue. It wasn’t so much that she had an expectation of who and what Daniel would become, but an assumption, and that assumption had not included him tossing away the talents and promise of his childhood, allowing them to flag, wear out, and die.
* * *
It was late October when she found Daniel boxing up his stories, most of them between the sparkling covers she had made.
“I need more room on my shelves,” he said, and she saw the huge hole where they had always been.
She watched him place the last few into the overfilled
box. “Those bring back such wonderful memories, you writing and reading them to me, or me reading them to you.”
He nodded. There was a pause, and then he said, “Me too.”
“How many did you write before retiring him?”
Retiring seemed a better choice than failing, abruptly stopping, giving up without explanation. She knew exactly how many he had written.
Daniel nodded again. “Ninety-nine.”
He was right.
She wanted to say, Don’t you feel you shortchanged yourself by not writing that hundredth story?—perhaps if he had written the hundredth, he might have continued—but she said instead, “What an accomplishment.”
Daniel put a hand on the top book, ran his fingers down the cover, said, “Thanks,” then bent into the mouth of his closet. Out flew tennis shoes, flip-flops, hiking boots, snow boots, and the dress shoes he had worn only once, in July, to a girl’s Sweet Sixteen, a very mature sixteen-year-old who had not wanted an all-girl celebration. Those shoes probably no longer fit him. When he had carved out space, made an empty cave, he pushed the heavy box to the back of his closet until it hit the wall.
He stood up and looked at her. “I have one more application to finish, the one I really want. The undergraduate business program at Wharton, at UPenn.”
All summer and now into the fall, he had been talking about how that school, with its courses in finance, analytics, innovation, and entrepreneurship, was the place for him to go.
“That’s great, love. If you need any help, want me to read over your essays, you know I will.” She had helped him do that for all the other colleges he was applying to.
She left him organizing his shoes in neat rows, wondering if she had done the right thing four years ago, or whether she had made a serious mistake. If the loss of the squirrel would mark Daniel, had already marked him, in some way, for life. There was an enormity to it that Martin had discounted, that Daniel had seemed not to consider at all.
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby Page 17