The nature of your crime is more important than the punishment, but the punishment cannot be avoided. You must purify yourself, come clean, own up to what you have done, tell the truth—not to me, for I know the truth.
It is primal, what you need to do, but it is the only way you can scale your limited horizon, see beyond it. This isn’t a story you need to write, it’s a story you need to finish. You still have the potential for a long, good, and fulfilling life, but you must have the strength to do what’s right, acknowledge your theft publicly, atone for the sins of J. D. Henry; only then will you be through to the other side. And I promise, if you make it there, I will be waiting. Still your mother. Still a mother who loves her son.
*
She reads it over several times, satisfied with what she has written. She attaches the letter to an email, types in Daniel’s email address, writes in the subject line: “It Is Up To You,” and looks at the computer’s clock.
It’s three in the morning in Dharamshala, only five thirty in the evening in DC. She will wait to send off her letter when it is the dead of night there, when Daniel will likely be sleeping. In three hours, there will be soft footfalls in the hallway outside her pine suite, Kartar placing her morning tray at the door. She’s drunk nearly the entire bottle of good French Chardonnay, and she could use some strong barley tea, a bowl of steaming lentils.
Joan sits up straight in her chair at her pine desk.
In Daniel’s recording, isn’t there a delivery boy named Kartar with an apparent ability to forecast the future, who intrigued, and then frightened, him? A boy who worked at a place called Lucky Star? Joan has a Kartar, and although he has never forecast her future, he knew she needed a special place in which to pine, and was the first to call her Ashby, and offered her a guidebook she still uses daily, and drew the map that took her to Eric’s cottage, and lent her an umbrella stamped Lucky Star, and extolled Willem Ackerman’s character, which sent her on the journey to the bird sanctuary, and has hand-delivered the three letters she has written to the Dalai Lama, and is it possible that she and Daniel have shared the same Kartar, that this young Indian man has figured in both of their lives in subtle but immeasurable ways?
52
Joan sleeps deep inside a dream. Martin and Daniel are at the edge of a vast snowfield, cross-country skis racked against their shoulders, and Daniel has shaved his brown curls clear off his skull, turning him monkish. Father and son are debating which path to take across the untouched infinite white, and she watches them set off. There is a cottage in the distance, mountains rising behind it, and Joan knows it belongs to her. Instantly, she is inside, and finds the white walls entirely covered in words. Someone she doesn’t recognize passes by and says, “Wonderful story,” and Joan reaches out a fingertip and finds she can smudge everything away, leave nothing behind.
The prophetic dream stays with her even when she wakes. She’s been asleep only a few hours, but the world outside her window has altered completely, the forest blanketed in unexpected snow, the tree limbs and boughs already heavy under the sudden white weight that glistens and gleams. In the distance, the snowy mountains are lit up by the November sun rising over Dharamshala, thin and brittle and bright.
She brings in her tray. A snowy white flower in a white vase, as if Kartar knew what weather would happen today. It is only two in the morning in London, and Camille will be sleeping, but Joan sends her an email Camille will understand. “I’m ready to tell you about what brought me to Dharamshala.” She looks at the stick Daniel sent her, filled with his memories, thinks of tossing it out into the snowy forest, imagines it sinking beneath the layers, lost forever, then leaves it next to her laptop, next to Paloma Rosen deep inside.
While the pine-slatted tub fills with hot water, Joan drinks her barley tea and eats every last lentil, finds what she’s looking for in Kartar’s guidebook, and makes notes.
It is odd to be in the bath hours earlier than usual, hours before her writing for the day is finished, but she soaks for a long while, and then dresses in the warm clothes and sturdy boots Martin sent her in the care package.
From her pine closet, she pulls out the backpack she has not used since her trip with Willem to the Pong Wetland. The notes she made from Kartar’s guidebook, bottles of water, bags of dried apricots and sunflower seeds, two apples, a set of warm pajamas, extra socks, fresh T-shirt and underwear, toothbrush and toothpaste, face soap, moisturizer, lipstick, a roll of toilet paper, identification, a stack of rupees, Willem’s letter to her, and the photograph he took, her notebook and pen, all go in.
It is eight now. There is no time difference between Dharamshala and Udaipur, and she hopes Vita Brodkey will be awake. A single ring, and Vita is saying, “Hello.”
“Vita, it’s Joan. How are you?”
“Darling, I am simply marvelous. Alive for another day. And like I promised, I am painting away like an old, happy nut. I decided that my idea of painting small watercolors was nonsense, I need huge canvases, ten feet tall, to capture all that I am. Who knows, perhaps I’ll paint only a few before my demise, but I have ten of them leaning against the walls in my second guest room. Enough of me, a call this early feels important. So darling, tell me everything.”
It would take too long to tell Vita Brodkey everything, but Joan tells Vita her immediate plans, and Vita says, “How wonderful, darling. I knew you would get there, and really, I’m as proud as if you were my own. We need to talk about you coming to Udaipur for a while. Winter is the best time here, the desert heat is gone, just a lovely tropical climate. So different than real winter in Dharamshala. So think about it and call as soon as you’re back. Have a marvelous time, and remember, I will not tell you to be safe, safety is for fools, but remember everything, because that’s what I’ll want to hear.”
Joan says, “I will and I will,” and then Vita is gone.
She looks at the email to Daniel on her computer screen, her letter attached, hits Send, and there it goes, Daniel’s own future flying to him in Washington, DC, from India. He might still be up, it’s only going on eleven there, but it won’t matter if he reads it, she will be gone.