The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

by Cherise Wolas

  She knew Daniel’s first time home would not be what he rightfully anticipated—college freshman fawned over as the conquering hero, the family eager for every detail about how his first semester had gone, the classes he was taking, how well he had done on his exams, the swim races he had medaled in, the friends he had made. But at least the house could be cleared of the evidence that Daniel’s place as the eldest no longer meant much of anything, that Eric’s pursuits had reformulated their positions, had altered entirely the concept of family life.

  From September through December, both boys had been cloistered, at school and at home, but there the similarity ended. While Daniel was trudging to his classes and doing whatever it was that freshmen did during all those other hours, his younger brother was in the second stage of development for his computer program, managing a team of people, not viewed as the teenager he was, but as a force, the head of a viable company, his age no deterrent to those taking their marching orders from him, or to the investors who wanted to be in early, on the ground floor.

  * * *

  “Hey,” Daniel said to Eric when he came in the front doors with Joan and Martin.

  “Daniel,” Eric called out and flung himself at his brother.

  Daniel allowed himself to be hugged for a few seconds, then stepped back, and said, “I’m going to swim, is that okay?” Joan and Martin nodded.

  “Can I come too?” Eric asked, sounding like the eager younger brother he actually was.

  Daniel shook his head. “Training, buddy. I’ve got a big meet in January as soon as I get back to school. Now’s not the time for me to be fooling around.”

  Despite the snow that was falling, that continued to fall through his ten days at home, that included his eighteenth birthday, which he adamantly refused to celebrate in any way, Daniel spent as many hours as he could swimming in the heated saltwater pool. Joan felt his despair each time he was too worn out to keep racing against himself, came back into the house wrapped in a towel, dusted in snow, showered and dressed, and found himself with his brother. Joan could see his mental calculations, comparing himself to Eric, and Eric, oblivious as he had always been, nattering on to Daniel about what had happened already with Solve, what would happen in the coming months, the additional two million dollars in investments they had received after winning the incubator prize, never once contemplating that Daniel was not as delighted for him as he was for himself.

  Joan found Daniel wherever he was, sitting quietly with him at the limestone island in the kitchen, insisting they go for a drive, or walk in the cold along the Potomac, or have lunch out in Rhome, engaging him in as much conversation as he could stand, asking for more information than she needed about his classes, his roommate and teammates, his professors, the girls he was interested in, the books he was reading beyond the curriculum of his courses.

  Three days in, he allowed Joan to crack him open, and then they talked as they used to talk when he was a boy, about his life and his dreams. Regardless of Eric, he still intended to pursue a degree in business.

  She heard him when he said, “I get that Eric has this inexplicable talent, but I’m just as smart in other ways, right? Plus, I have what he doesn’t have, good instincts about people, I’m sociable and he’s really not. Actually, Mom, I see myself as a dealmaker,” and Joan understood that he was speaking rhetorically, or, if not rhetorically, he wasn’t interested in what she might have to say, was determined to heed no one’s advice but his own. She knew he would ignore her, and so she said nothing, but she wanted to shake him awake, thoroughly discourage him, yell, “Daniel, you don’t belong in that world, you never have. It’s your brother’s world now, so find something else, pursue a different avenue!” But she knew she shouldn’t, and so she didn’t.

  She tried hard to imagine Daniel as a dealmaker wielding power, though not the creator. For a boy who once invented a remarkable character, whose imagination allowed him to create all kinds of adventures for the squirrel, his interests then so boundless, Joan could not see him as he saw himself, she did not think that handling the concretized dreams of others would suffice. It was not, she thought, a good fit. He would be better off finding a way to create something of his own, on a smaller scale, and outside the business world, something he could hold in his hands and say, “I made this. This is mine.”

  She took him back to the Rhome train station just after the New Year, and she felt his pain and her own. She would miss him dearly, even his false brave face. He boarded and found a seat, found her on the platform and they smiled at each other until the train began to move. She waved and he waved back, and she watched him until he was gone, and then she watched the train gliding by, until the last car was out of view. She did not move as the snow fell harder, as the flakes that landed on her cheeks stuck. Only when the cold seeped into her boots did she return to the car and turn on the heat. She did not want to go back to the house; already she felt the loss of his presence, the quasi-normalcy he had brought with him. She wondered how long it would take for that feeling to dissipate, she hoped there would be a few more days before the swarm descended again.

  The house was lit up when she reached it, a beacon on a dark day, the clouds so heavy, the snow falling with specific intent. Through the wide front windows, she saw that in the hour she had been gone, Solve=MC2 had set up shop again, and she exhaled in the car. When she walked in, every room crackled with brainwaves and activity, and Martin, leaning against a wall, watching those hunched at their computers around the long dining table, was smiling, with that delight on his face, a look she had grown to detest, and Joan was instantly angry with him all over again.

  “Daniel get off okay?” he asked.

  “Yep. I’m going to take a bath,” Joan said, and kept moving. She detoured into the kitchen, took a bottle of wine from the fridge, a glass from a cabinet. When she came back into the hall, Martin was no longer there. She didn’t care where he was.

  As she passed all their large and lovely rooms, with the new furniture delivered the day before Christmas—comfortable couches in the living room and den, deep armchairs in the library, the black marble desk in the study—every piece of furniture for the Manning family was inhabited by a Solve minion. She thought how these kids would enjoy it all before she had much of a chance.

  She walked into their huge white bathroom, poured wine into the glass, turned on the bathtub faucets, and listened to the roar of the water. Neither she nor Martin had ever locked doors against each other, but now she stepped forward and did so. She did not want him joining her, talking about the ten days of togetherness, about the boys, about all the exciting things in the future. She wanted to drink her wine and soak in the deep tub, in water that was a degree or two below uninhabitable. Since life had turned upside down, she made her nightly bath almost too hot, a failing attempt to detoxify the anger that built up inside of her from hour to hour and day to day and week to week.

  She had done everything she could think of to extricate herself from this untenable situation.

  She had tried to secure office space for Solve, but under the corporate documents only Eric had the authority to sign contracts. And even if he were willing to move his company elsewhere, which he was not, no landlord was willing to rent to a kid. She told the landlords she and Martin would be guarantors, but they all said, “Sorry, Mrs. Manning, it’s not an issue of the rent being paid. We understand the company has money. We’re just not interested in having a bunch of teenagers as tenants.”

  She had hired a kind of babysitter, someone else in the house from morning until night, a trial run for two days, and had endured Eric’s rage.

  “It’s Solve’s offices, Mom. Don’t you get that? There’s secret proprietary intellectual property in the house. We can’t work if we’re worried some stranger is going to steal what we’re killing ourselves for.”

  “This is our home, Eric. There has to be another way,” she had said, to no effect.

  * * *

  The book she
was reading for the second time since September was on the bench next to the tub. From the start, it reverberated with nuance for her, the subtext of the writer’s personal life, the way Joan was feeling toward Martin.

  She had researched the author—a British novelist and short-story writer still alive and writing, a failed fifteen-year first marriage behind her, a second marriage well past its third decade. In the midst of her arguments with Martin about Eric dropping out of school, about the boarding house they were running, Joan debated whether she would consider their marriage a failure if she ended it right then, if they crashed and burned a few months shy of their nineteenth wedding anniversary. Couples divorced when they could not weather joint tragedy like the death of a child, but how about when they disagreed over a child’s success? She disagreed entirely with Martin, but divorcing him would not solve anything. At least now, sometimes Martin was around, even if his oversight consisted only of waving Eric and the Solve team on. If she were to divorce him, with his travel schedule, she would end up with primary custody. She only had to look ahead to his next months of travel, planned long in advance, to know that it was true: overseas trips to South American countries, Japan, return trips to the British Isles, to Russia and China, the list went on and on of places where he was going to perform his surgeries, leaving Joan to hold down the fort. A spy in her own house.

  In her research, Joan had also discovered the endless feud between the writer and her older sister, a writer of equal stature, the winner of a major literary prize. The siblings had waged their battles through “a lifetime of enmity,” the younger avoiding the prize won by the older, citing its negative impact on the winners. Watching Daniel trying to tamp down his jealousy about his brother’s exploits, she had seen the beginning of that sibling enmity, a valid sibling rivalry, the oddity of the much younger brother pulling so far ahead of the elder in the race toward success, a race not intended to be run for years. Daniel would endure additional pain if he tried to conquer a world even tangentially related to Eric’s.

  Joan turned the knob and the hot water gushed like a waterfall, and she considered how she would handle each of the boys.

  With Daniel, she would continue to let him know that her mothering would never end, that she would always be there for him, at the other end of a phone, in person, when he needed her. She knew this trip had set the routine; he would not be coming home regularly. Maybe his winter and spring breaks, a few weeks in the summer, if she were lucky, otherwise he would avoid Rhome as long as Eric was here, doing what he was doing. She would call him more than she knew she should, but if home only meant her calls, then at least Daniel would hear the voice of home several times a week. She knew too that they had established a tacit understanding while he had been home, that they would talk only of things of interest to them both, novels they were reading, movies they had seen, Daniel’s amusing assessments of the young women he had been out with. Eric would not be part of their discussions, and neither would feel guilty pretending he did not exist. Daniel required her love and the certainty that she would not let him down, that Eric might well conquer the world but that Daniel’s place in their family would not disappear in the rush over his brother.

  With Eric, she had no choice but to watch him and watch over him, as Martin would not. Just as he had not needed her for sustenance at birth, and had resented her intrusions when he was a toddler, a young child, they would both have to find ways to deal with it again. There had been only a few short years when she found her thorny child more pleasurable; now she was in the role foisted upon her that she resented, that he resented, to protect him from himself, from his success.

  She tried to read, but it was impossible. She stayed in the tub until the water drained completely, until she was shivering from the cool of the porcelain after the reckless heat. She was dreading walking out into the house.

  She pulled on yoga pants and a sweater and looked at the shoebox on the floor of her closet. She and Martin had gone to Delaware in July, a beach weekend to belatedly celebrate his fiftieth while the boys were gone, while the construction was under way. They were happy together then, just six months ago, and she had been giddy because Words was going well and the end was in sight.

  She lifted the shoebox lid. Nestled on top of the tissue paper were golden sandals intricately beaded with gold, copper, platinum, and clear crystals. She bought them because they made her think of all the Indian writers she read when she was a girl, because she could imagine wearing them down to the Ganges after Words was published. She looked at the sandals and vowed she would not wear them until she was actually in India, even if she did not get there until she was an old, old woman. She stuck the top back on and toed the box out of sight.

  The arc of tragedy Joan had always known her story would require, it must be this tortured irony. That Eric’s meteoric success meant her own veritable jailing, the imprisonment of her book in the dark, the loss of the life she had intended to return to, now so far out of sight. A caretaker for this second son who had never fully conquered her heart.

  She stepped into snow boots and slid open the glass door of their bedroom. Their land was a white field out into the distance. She lifted her face to the sky, felt the heavy snow settle on her hair, cling to her eyelashes. When would Eric be prepared to fend for himself, leave home, take himself away? At eighteen, nineteen, or older than that? She hoped he would be in one piece when that day finally arrived. She hoped she would be as well.

  22

  The Seven Seas.

  * * *

  The Seven-year Itch.

  * * *

  The supposed seven years of economic cycles.

  * * *

  The number seven in numerology—a magical force for the activation of imagination, and the manifestation of results in one’s life through conscious thought and awareness.

  * * *

  The number seven in dreams—signifying inner self and rebirth, health and spiritual growth, the need for enlightenment, the good to come, that a person is on a divine path right for them, that obstacles have been overcome, that fruition of one’s wishes and true desires is near.

  * * *

  The seven essential chakras that align with the body—root, sacral, solar plexus, heart, throat, third eye, crown—one chakra dominates each seven-year cycle, according to the Vedic Treaties Chakravidya.

  * * *

  The seven-year cycle of life—1–7, 14–21, 21–28, etc.—and its attendant focus. “The seven-year cycle from 49–56 is a good time to take stock of your life: what you have accomplished and learned from your experiences, which will help you raise your state of consciousness. A raised state of consciousness is what you take with you when you return to the world of the spirit. This is a good time to consolidate your life and gain true lasting value from the time and energy you have invested.”

  * * *

  Each year of a person’s life has seven distinct cycles: first, a period of opportunity; second, good for travel; third, requires the exercise of discrimination and good judgment; fourth, the mental and spiritual nature is awakened; fifth, great success is achieved in personal affairs; sixth, rest, relaxation, and amusement; seventh, the most critical, when elements no longer needed in one’s development fall away to make room for new and better elements.

  * * *

  Joan looked all of that up.

  * * *

  She also noted that for seven years, during each seven-day week, each of her days had but two bright spots: her hour of yoga each morning and her hour of conversation with Daniel each afternoon. She calculated it: seven years equaled 2,555 days. Of those 2,555 days, she took approximately 2,500 yoga classes (excepting Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, or being sick with a cold or the flu). Of the 2,555 conversations with Daniel, in 2,525, Eric was never mentioned, but in thirty of them, at the tail end of the seven-year cycle, he was. She felt lost during those seven years, and doubted herself as a mother during those 2,555 days, but her instincts about both
of her sons turned out to be right.

  * * *

  Daniel’s seven-year cycle spanned college, a very short-lived career out west in venture capital, and then his position as a monthly columnist for Think Inc. For the last four years, if he chose to, he could hold up those articles and say, “I’ve made these. These are mine.” Although he didn’t say that at all. Still, Joan was convinced that his ninety-nine stories, shipped to Silicon Valley, then back to Rhome, then to his DC apartment, were responsible for how well he was doing in the world, finding where he belonged; being a dealmaker was never going to work.

  * * *

  The end of Eric’s seven-year cycle was marked by his landing $400 million in venture funding for Solve and moving to New York, buying an apartment in a luxury building in the East Village, where Joan had lived and written her books when it was tenement walk-ups and railroad flats. His forty employees set up Solve’s new offices in an old factory in Tribeca. Seven days of blissful silence in the Rhome house that December, and then, a few weeks before the end of the year, he called Joan from a rehab center in Oregon. She had flown there immediately, was with him in group meetings led by counselors, chairs in a circle, the afflicted slouching, their spines collapsed, hands gripping their pale, tortured faces, parents, like Joan, and other loved ones, ramrod straight, their feet hard on the floor, their eyes flickering everywhere, unsure where to land.

  On a bench in the Oregon fog, Eric told Joan that the connection he made between his accomplishments and his willingness to put himself far out into space was an explanation, but not a rationale, for his reckless behavior.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to her, words he had refused to say as a child.