At noon, on the eleventh of August, Joan was at the post office, a heavy package in her arms. Addressed to the United States Copyright Office, the package contained a copy of Words of New Beginnings and the copyright registration form she had filled out. The form had been so nondescript that she had signed her name with an absurd flourish. Storr & Storr had copyrighted her collections in the normal course, but it seemed right that she herself put this administrative exclamation mark to the long years spent writing the novel that neither publisher nor agent knew about yet. An insignificant but personal way to cap the achievement.
When it was Joan’s turn, she stepped up to the counter and smiled at the large man behind it, but his small red lips did not rise up in return. She placed the package on the counter, watched him drop it onto the scale, weigh it, tap in the zip code, tell her the amount she owed. She reached for her wallet, thinking that such a historic moment demanded something more momentous than this prosaic exchange.
Her cash disappeared into the register and she accepted her change and receipt. With more grace than he seemed likely to have, the man pivoted neatly and threw the proof of her accomplishment into the mail bin with a practiced underhand toss.
“Next,” he called out, and she stood there until he held up his hand to the customer behind her, and said, “Lady, you need something else? You need stamps?” She shook her head and relinquished her spot.
Walking out into the sunshine, Joan thought that certain moments in life just had to be perfect the way they were.
Twenty minutes later, she was driving out of Rhome, headed to the computer camp at the college a hundred miles away to retrieve Eric. Later in the afternoon, Martin would collect Daniel from the house of one of his friends with whom he had camped out across the country.
At four, as planned, Joan, with Eric, and Martin, with Daniel, met on their street. They wanted to unveil the new house together, to say a few words, but the boys bolted from the cars, raced up the walk, turned the handles of the new double-height frosted-glass front doors, and stepped inside.
“Hello, hello, hello,” they called out into the sharp whitewashed spaces, their own echoes welcoming them home. Then they yelled out their names, imprinting themselves on the fresh wood and plaster and paint and pale hardwood floors, alerting the house to their existences.
The family ate at the old kitchen table, wandered the house, swam in the saltwater pool, finished packing Daniel for college in short increments. He suddenly did not want to leave. “I want to stay forever,” he said, following it up with, “I’m just kidding,” but there was an undercurrent of truth.
They were all out by the pool when Daniel said again that he wanted to stay in the new house, stay with them all, and Joan said, “We don’t want to interfere with the fun you’ll have, but come home every month for a weekend. If you want to. We’ll all be waiting for you at the train station. Come and stay in your great new room, the new beds will be in soon. And you can swim in the pool, we’ll get you a timer so you can track your times, and you and Dad and Eric can watch movies on the flat-screen that will be in the den, and it will be great.”
Across the prone bodies of his father and brother, Daniel smiled at Joan, then came to her side and flopped down. Looking at him, she thought she ought to start swimming again seriously, was about to say she would follow his example, but then he picked up her hand and held on for a long, long time.
Eric was a motormouth since computer camp, wanted everyone to listen to the endless details of the beta program he had built there, which none of them understood, asking Joan and Martin over and over, “When does school begin again for me? When does Daniel leave? When can I talk to you both?” “Later,” they kept telling him, “once Daniel’s at college, we’ll focus entirely on you.”
Then Daniel was at school, in his dorm room, grinning away, telling his family he was fine, that they could leave, that he wanted them to leave.
“Please go already,” he said, and he walked them down the hall, past girls and boys as young and fresh-faced as he, all at the university early for team tryouts in their various sports, their families unpacking bags and boxes, and when Joan and Martin and Eric were back in the car, Daniel said, “I’ll call you after I race, tell you if I made the team or not, and thanks for the new cell phone.”
He turned on his heel, waved at them without looking back, then jogged to the front door of his dorm and disappeared inside. Joan watched him the whole time.
They had stayed in a Best Western the previous night and now had a four-hundred-mile trip back to Rhome. Martin turned on the engine, then turned to Joan. “I didn’t expect to feel like this.” When she looked at her husband, his cheeks were wet, tears falling from his eyes. She leaned over and kissed him and said, “I know.”
Martin reversed out of the parking space, put the car into drive, and slowly headed toward the gates that led beyond the campus, into the busy streets of Philadelphia.
At the first red light, both Joan and Martin looked back, one last glimpse at where their eldest son would be living for the next year.
When the light turned, Martin accelerated and Eric said, “So this is what I want to tell you guys. I’m not going back to school.”
20
The computer camp PhDs had attested to Eric’s skills: an extraordinary anomaly; unlimited gifts; a certifiable genius with a rare talent; his computer program revolutionary. Traditional schooling, they said, would do nothing for him.
“I told you,” Eric said.
“Absolutely not,” Joan said. “No way are you dropping out of school at thirteen.”
Over her protests, Martin reached out to additional experts who reviewed the developmental program Eric had designed at camp.
“I don’t know many kids interested in overhauling an industry, most of them just want to design games or apps,” an MIT professor named Marecks said. Levinol, the chair of the graduate computer science program at Harvard, said, “It will make him a fortune. If he were my kid, and God I wish he was, I’d let him go his own way. Screw school. It’s not the place for him. Let him do what he’s doing. Won’t cost you a thing to have him working at home. Maybe a couple more computers, but that’s no big deal. There’s a tangible, realistic company to be built on this program, he’s found a niche no one else has yet. Its uses are potentially limitless.”
And just like that Eric’s formal schooling ended. Their original small house had become a fraternity for those ghostly boys; the new house was headquarters for a whole different crew—three, five, then ten boys, all eighteen years old, followed Eric from computer camp to Rhome, as if he were the Pied Piper. They had no place to stay, no money with which to find a place to stay; like Eric, their minds were filled up with ones and zeroes. They were cockroaches or termites, Joan thought, the way they spread themselves over the thousands of new square feet, using Eric’s room, Daniel’s, the study, the den, the library, chargers plugged into every outlet, the dining-room table stacked with dozens of computers. Cords slinking through every room had to be avoided.
Daniel was speechless when Martin told him what Eric was doing, what he was being allowed to do.