There is a small fridge under the counter in the bathroom, and she opens it hoping to find those little bottles of bliss—vodka, wine, whatever the alcoholic specialty might be of Dharamshala—those benefits of home the young man referenced, that she indulged in on the plane, but it is empty. She opens one of the bottles of water she bought at the Delhi train station, stashes the remaining six in the fridge, and the granola bars she is sick of. Chewing the last of the chocolate, Joan looks at the packaging, bright honey-orange wrapping, and thinks she has butterfingered her own life.
Suitcase and bag in the closet. Novels stacked on the nightstand, but they look wrong, and Joan realizes she has chosen to sleep on the side where Martin sleeps at home, next to the windowed wall. In Dharamshala, she will occupy the side that has never been hers.
She pulls the curtains all the way back, finds that the window is a sliding-glass door that leads out to a small balcony that overlooks the trees. In the reception area, she thought it was a stand of trees, but it is not, it is an entire forest. Joan doesn’t recognize some of the trees, but she can identify the oaks and those that are some kind of pine, and she wonders if the pine furniture in her room came from the trees right beyond her balcony.
Then she looks beyond the forest, up and up, at the sky, and before she reaches the heavens, there are the Himalayas on high.
Her deep sigh needs no interpretation—she wants it to be decades ago, when she was still young, when all the choices were hers, before she birthed children, raised a thief, and a recovering addict here in Dharamshala on a quest, when her love for Martin was not so complicated, when her love for Martin had not existed. She believes the young man now—that this is his best room, a perfectly monastic space, safeguarded for a last-minute guest who requires a special cocoon for her broken heart.
She has been holding on, keeping herself upright for so many days, and then during the seven thousand five hundred miles of travel to Delhi, and Joan backs away from the balcony, finds herself flat on the bed, legs jackknifed to her chest, Martin’s voice from deep in the past saying, “Write and write, and just give me the moments when you want a break.”
And she was foolish to believe him, because later he said, “I’ve never been so happy,” breaking his vow to her at the very beginning. So much blame to spread. Including her own. Her failure to demand her own needs, losing all of her years, sacrificing herself on the altar of motherhood to a son who saved himself from eternal extinction, to a son whose desperation she had missed. Had she followed her own course, she would have sent Words to Volkmann immediately, and if she had, there would have been no unguarded manuscript in a box in the garage for Daniel to find.
Now she is a woman who wants to be alone, a mother finished with that role, a writer unable to acknowledge the famed books are hers, unsure how to remember who she was. When she tries picturing herself writing Words for all of those years, she can’t.
She wants only to leave everything behind, to transcend what has happened, the mistakes she has made. Every fiber of her hopes Dharamshala might be her imagined Devata where her characters came to stay, turning their backs on the outside world, rediscovering the truth of their childhood selves, finding the strength that had ebbed away, allowing their healing hearts to create.
Will this be her actual arcadia, her Devata rendered in three dimensions, where she finds the guidance she desperately needs about what her future might look like?
She needs clarifying golden words right now and wonders if they will fly down to her from the Himalayas, or perhaps one day float to her straight from the Dalai Lama’s mouth, or if she will have to discover them for herself.
Just then she tastes salt. Salt from tears new and old and those formed so long ago they date back to childhood. In an instant, undammed, they are flowing, coming faster and faster and faster, sealing her eyes, cracking her skin, sinking her entirely.
33
There is ringing where Joan is, deep inside the ferocious jet lag, under the red coverlet that is over her head, her skull soldered to the pillow. The ringing keeps on, even when she sticks her head out, opens her eyes, sees her pine suite, feels her curdled pain. She can’t figure out the sound, but it stops, and she thinks, good, and only when the ringing begins again does she realize someone’s calling her cell phone, once, twice, who knows how many times.
Through thousands of layers of cotton, Joan hears a voice say, “It’s Iger. Joan, it’s Annabelle. Can you hear me? Are you there?”
“Yes. I’m here, absolutely exhausted. You got my email.”
“There aren’t enough words to express how sorry I am, to let you know we are mortified by what’s happened, that we’re taking every step to rectify it all.”
“Did everything arrive?”
“Yes, the file with your novel, and the original book and the copyright registration you FedExed. I have in front of me the contract Daniel signed. His signature’s illegible, but no one had any reason to question the author’s signature. But it’s my responsibility. I take full blame. I should have vetted the books, followed my instinct when they reminded me of your work, but for all these years, you’ve told me you weren’t writing, so I never considered the books might actually belong to you.”
“Book,” Joan says.
“Book?
“Of course. Book. Two books now,” Iger says.
“I should have sensed immediately that something was wrong because J. D. Henry—Daniel—wouldn’t meet with me. He refused to provide photos and bios for the back flaps, said he was old-school, that the writing spoke for itself, that who he was and what he looked like would detract, but that he would send me the acknowledgments he wanted to use. It’s so rare these days a writer doesn’t want to be recognized, and I was thinking, how refreshing, Pynchon, Salinger, old Harper Lee, thinking it was time another writer came along who preferred mystery.
“Other things should have tipped me off too, like having to fight for the option to his next book because he really did not want to give it to me, talking about how he couldn’t write on a deadline or with someone looking over his shoulder. And the fact that he only agreed to interviews he could do via email or on the phone. I thought maybe he was shy, or his face was somehow scarred. In the interviews he did give, he refused to reveal anything about himself personally, but he was incredibly erudite discussing the books. I thought he was a different breed of writer and I loved it. Never once was my radar turned on.
“I bought the books for an astronomical sum in a best-bid auction. It was fast, three days to read. It’s no excuse, but I adored them, was elated we got them for the imprint. I hadn’t intended to publish them as soon as I did, but they were ready to go, needed no editing, and now I understand why.”
Iger pauses, and Joan knows she is waiting for her to acknowledge the compliment, but she doesn’t.