*
In late November, when Eric should have been studying for a science test or wishing the pretty girls on the Rhome High tennis team would notice him, his computer program was awarded the grand prize in the incubator contest, three million dollars to be transferred into the accounts of his new company, his team yelling and high-fiving one another, fielding calls immediately after from other early venture funding outfits interested in knowing what his program was about.
Joan watched them pile out the front door for whatever celebration was planned. She felt the dread she used to feel as a child in her parents’ house, the sick feeling she had watching them, that there was a story she was to understand, but could not. Martin was as delirious as the Solve=MC2 team, insisting on their own celebration, opening a bottle of wine. Joan refused the glass he offered her.
“How do you not see that this is the worst thing that could have happened to him?” And she walked away from her husband, bundled up in a coat, and marched out to the knoll, where she sat watching her angry breath disappear in the cold air.
*
Later, Joan sat on the old plaid couch in the library, trying to enjoy the room she had rarely entered since the end of summer, pretending she was not waiting up for her suddenly successful son, revisiting the fight she and Martin had about the news, when she walked away from his thrill, his delight in their son’s accomplishments.
It was past midnight when a glass shattered in the kitchen. She ran and found Eric, drunk and befuddled at the fridge, unsure which way to move, the bottle of vodka from the freezer clutched to his chest, his bare feet covered in shards that glittered in the glow from the outdoor lights Joan had left on.
She flicked on the kitchen light and broke the spell. She had hoped the team’s celebration would have been pizza and sodas. Their leader, after all, was only thirteen; no restaurant or bar would serve him. But age no longer mattered in this world of dizzying success, she saw that now, none of the regular limits of life would apply to him.
“Stay right where you are,” she said, and grabbed the vodka bottle from him, dumped it out into the sink, then handed him the broom and dustpan.
“Clean it up, then clean yourself up, and go to bed. In your bedroom.”
He threw down the broom and dustpan, leapt over the broken glass, ran for the front door, grabbed his coat and his shoes, and disappeared into the night.
In the bright kitchen, with the dark night reaching right through the huge windows, she debated getting the car and picking him up on the side of the road. But it was a small town, too late for anyplace still to be open, its crime rate was low, and she, exhausted and furious, let him go.
She shook Martin awake until he sat up. “Are we really going to allow this to continue?”
“What?”
“This insanity. Your son came home stinking drunk and was after more. He ran out the front door five minutes ago.”
“He’ll come back,” Martin said. “Everything he needs for the company is here. Listen, Joan, there’s no turning this train around. He’s got three million bucks now, and there’s going to be more. It’s going to get worse before they all find some balance. I’ve got a surgery at six, I’ve got to get to sleep.” He snapped off the bedside light she had turned on.
Joan swept the kitchen floor clean of the glass, then paced the house until six in the morning, knowing Martin was right. It was no longer relevant what she had wanted in September, last week, yesterday afternoon, for Eric, or for herself. She wore the permanent and indelible identity of Mother, and regardless how it had come about, she was incapable of pretending she didn’t see how things were going, how they would continue to go, how rapid the changes Eric had undergone, a few short months from obsessed teen to juvenile businessman, thinking he was mature, entitled to live as he wanted. She saw what would happen—the way he would argue with her in the future, whether he was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, ill prepared to live somewhere other than under their roof. His brain, despite its bundle of exceptional neurons, was still developing. He might be managing a company, coffers soon to be filled with all of those dollars, but his decision-making was that of a child, would continue to wring her out. There was no way to tell how long it would take until Eric actually fit the role he had assumed.
In the library, she kneeled down at one of the new cabinets, opened the door, extricated her manuscript from its hiding place at the very back, and went out into the new garage. Large enough to hold four cars, though they had only the two. They had made it a well-lit and organized space, shelves with plastic containers marked for clarity—Daniel’s school projects; Eric’s school projects; Halloween costumes; Stuffed animals; Toys; Puzzles; LEGOs.
On the bottom shelf were six large brown boxes, all labeled Joan Ashby in black marker. The boxes held copies of her story collections and all the foreign editions that used to be in their old bedroom closet, the hundred or more composition notebooks she filled up from the time she was seven. Those boxes were proof of how miraculous her life had once been, before the life she had never wanted to experience came to pass.
When Martin was courting her, he told Joan that myopia was the most widespread human eye disease in the world, and she had been surprised to learn that a narrowed vision of the world was an actual medical condition. In the cold garage, with the early morning light sneaking in under the electric door, Eric still not home, she understood that the man she had married, who treated actual myopia, was suffering from a figurative version. One of the country’s premier doctors in his particular healing arts, this top-notch neuro-ocular surgeon flown everywhere to perform what only he could do, was refusing to see beneath their son’s complicated surface, refusing to recognize their son’s race toward the ledge of a cliff.
She ripped open the sixth Joan Ashby box. She pulled out hundreds of rubber-banded pictures of people caught in the act of living their lives, all those thrown-away photographs purchased by a stranger, by Joan, for a dollar a bundle at a junk shop in New York. Then she pulled out several dozen folders in various colors, red, yellow, blue, green, purple, each one protecting a story she had written long ago, finished but never published, or never finished for one reason or another. All of her Rare Baby stories were there too, each one in an orange folder, titles across the front, fifty orange folders in all.
She carefully put Words of New Beginnings at the bottom, then placed all the folders on top of it, the pictures on top of the folders.