“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.
She closed the door to her and Martin’s room and sat on the bed. A golden light came through the windows, its undertone slightly blued. The chill and cold would soon settle in. Most of the trees on their property had already shed their leaves, just a faint red haze still remained on the maples.
She, who’d last cried at the age of seven, who did not cry the day she realized she would have to have a baby, nearly cried. Daniel once cared about how commas, and colons, and semicolons affected the meaning of a sentence, linguistic tools now reduced to separators of information on applications, in essays in which he articulated his dreams, the adventures he said he wanted to experience in his own life, so distinct from what he used to have Henry experience, undertake. Daniel’s were so safe.
She wasn’t aware her hand was pressed against her throat until she saw herself in the large bathroom mirror. She and Martin had recently been to a party where a palm reader in a turban had read the palms of all the partygoers sloshed on margaritas. The woman, Madame Something-or-Other, had read Joan’s, identifying the health line (very good and not crossing the life line, so she should not expect ill health, inherited illnesses, digestive problems, or a lack of stamina, good information to have); the sun line (long and vertical, denoting many blessings); the hard worker’s line (curving toward Joan’s thumb, a truth she already knew about herself); the heart line (a curved line some distance from her fingers that revealed her generous, sensual, and loving nature, not true as a young writer, now mostly true as a wife and mother); the head line (touching both sides of her palm, indicating a focused individual, although Madame said it also suggested someone self-centered, which Joan took to mean her work on Words); the life line (mostly long, but there were two breaks, suggesting more than one change of direction in life, easy enough to interpret); and the fate line (a double line foretelling two careers, again easy enough to interpret).
But now that palm, with all of its positive affirmations, was clutched around her own neck. It seemed improbable that one could strangle themselves in this way, the autonomic nervous system would kick in, the implement meant to bring death would fall away, the lungs pulling in air, but there was a residual red hand print against her throat, any harder and she might have been able to see all of those lines in a map across that fragile skin.
She leaned in close and appraised herself. Forty-two now, in that vast middle section of life, past the chronological bloom of youth. In terms of her writing, it didn’t much matter, the nature of her stories had saved her from being viewed as an ingénue. But she was vain enough that looking a full decade younger than she was, satisfied, even delighted. Her hair remained black and lustrous, loose curls still poured down her back, trimmed since she was pregnant with Daniel, of course, but she had never hacked it off, as the Pregnant Six had, going shorter and shorter each year, until their butterscotch bobs had lightened into short bright blond hair tight against the shapes of their heads. Joan’s haircutter knew not to take more than an inch at each four-month visit. The eyes Daniel inherited from her were as blue as ever, the finest fan of crows’ feet at the corners, one light line running across her forehead when she was stressed. Her body slender as it had been at twenty-five, lithe and toned from her ritualized two days of yoga every week, though no longer on the weekdays—devoted as religiously as possible to the novel—but a sacred hour each Saturday and Sunday. Those weekend mornings, over in Starborough, she was a purely physical being, torqueing and twisting herself in and out of the poses she had come to know so well, while the Manning men bonded at the Rhome Diner over pancakes and waffles and bacon, talking men-talk, whatever that might be, when one was twelve, the other sixteen, the father forty-nine.