“How wonderful that you’ve got a response. And no, I don’t think it would be strange if you wanted to stay here.”
She won’t say anything about having written her own letter to the Dalai Lama, that Kartar delivered her letter to the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, into the hands of the Dalai Lama’s secretary, where all letters addressed to him wind up. She does not want to blur the line, to say Daniel’s name aloud in this garden, to take anything away from Eric, this new life he is creating.
“How many letters did you write before you heard back?”
“Eighteen. A girl I know, Amari, told me how hard it is to get a private audience with him, that he grants very few, and that even if granted, it might be four months or more before you actually meet with him. Amari said he gets hundreds of letters every day and the secretary reviews each case on its merits.”
She wonders if Amari is the girl who uses the second canvas chair by the pond, then thinks she has sent only the one letter, and that if she is serious about trying to elicit the Dalai Lama’s advice, she will have to write many more.
She is forming the words she wants to say to Eric, that she is relieved to find him so well, proud of his progress, gratified that he is alive, when for the second time, he taps into her thoughts.
“My past belongs to me, and yours belongs to you, and unless you need to talk about all that stuff between us, I’m fine if we don’t. I’ve learned it’s best to leave it behind, to keep moving ahead. I know you’ve been badly hurt. I just hope you don’t blame yourself for me. I meant what I said in Oregon, it was all my own doing. You tried to stop me, I know that, but I wouldn’t listen. I thought you wanted to keep me from my destiny. But that was never my destiny. This is.
“I know I can’t snap my fingers to make it all okay for you, to wipe out all these last years, but this is a good place to find the solace you need.”
He has turned into a young Buddha, replete with the wisdom, the truth, that Joan is trying to learn, that she thinks about in Ela’s meditation class and when she is alone on her own. She should tell Eric he’s not responsible for her being here, that she is here not because of what she suffered as a result of him or Solve or his troubles, but because of what his older brother has done.
Would Eric feel better or worse if he knew he was not the compelling reason behind this trip to Dharamshala? That his flagrancy with life and death did not send her in flight from home, traveling across the world, that life-and-death matters had not trumped betrayal? Would a fine parsing of the truth accomplish anything?
He has found insights into himself that she wants to protect. In so little time, in this garden for only a few hours, they are finding a new way of being together, perhaps a way of being together for the first time ever. She wants to keep this afternoon intact, enjoy its unexpected preciousness.
“I think it is a wonderful place for solace,” is what Joan decides to say.
“I’m glad you agree,” Eric says. “There is one thing we ought to talk about. What would you like me to call you?”
She knows instantly what he is asking, and is surprised. To both sons, she has only ever been Mom, or some rendition of that title. In Rhome, everyone calls her Mrs. Manning or Joan, but here in Dharamshala, those names have fallen away, she is never called anything other than Ashby. Never before has Eric cared about anyone’s needs or wants, and the two of them have never been symbiotically entwined, as she thought she and Daniel were. And yet, Eric senses something so essential about her, about who she once was, who she became, who she is becoming again, and has thought to inquire. Somehow, he understands.
She is trying to figure out how to tell him she no longer wants to be called by that universal name, that she wants only to be known as herself, when Eric smiles.
“I’ve figured out a few things and that’s one of them. Joan or Ashby?”
“Ashby,” she says.
“Ashby it is.” Then Eric says, “Why didn’t you ever tell me you used to be a famous writer?”
39
Sirens are blaring beneath the salted rim of Joan’s dream, an ominous whoop-whooping, and she is running through the Rhome house with its smooth mocking walls, the old nooks and cubbyholes and crannies gone, Words of New Beginnings tight to her chest, searching for a safe place to hide her manuscript. Violent pounding at the front doors and she freezes, knows the enemy will soon be upon her. She crests the surface and everything evaporates into an aqueous atmosphere.
She peers around her pine suite confused. The atmosphere in her room is aqueous, the air is misty, and there is clearly a billowy cloud floating up at the ceiling. The sheets are damp. A breeze blows through the room, riffling the curtains, scattering water on her skin.
It takes a few seconds before she realizes she left the windows open last night, the curtains pulled back, and the rowdy noise on the roof is rain. A loud thunderclap scares her upright. Then waves of water are hitting the windows, sending up huge swirls of foam. She’s out of bed and looking at a world underwater. The rain quiets suddenly and Joan leans out into hot air so humid she could scoop up a chunk of it, roll it into a ball. Within seconds, she is soaked straight through.
The sky is cloaked in the darkness of night, but her watch on the nightstand says it’s morning, nearly seven. Angry black clouds encase the far mountains, sit heavily upon the treetops of the forest. The bright-green leaves are bent into open palms, wide-mouthed bowls. The entire shape of the forest has altered to capture the hard splattering drops. There is a sweetness in the air, in the smell of the rain.
No one in Dharamshala seems to pay much attention to the actual calendar, but Joan knows it’s the middle of August. The monsoon season, due in July and everyone said was late, seems suddenly to have arrived.
Joan pulls back from the window, strips off her soaked pajamas, and tosses them into the pine-slatted tub. Lakshmi, Kartar, Ela, and Camille have warned her that when the monsoons begin, the world turns upside down, sheets of water the only thing to see. More days with rain than without, and nothing ever fully dries out. That Dharamshala is the second wettest place in India. Joan forgot to ask what the first one is.
She did not pack for the monsoon season, although Eric had written her and Martin about it, telling them he was looking forward to a world washed clean. When she read that email back in Rhome, she had not thought of herself here. She does not have galoshes, or a slicker, not even an umbrella. She wonders whether, along the hill station’s steep roads, men will spring up, hawking umbrellas, as they magically materialized on New York street corners when she lived there.