She tried hard to imagine Daniel as a dealmaker wielding power, though not the creator. For a boy who once invented a remarkable character, whose imagination allowed him to create all kinds of adventures for the squirrel, his interests then so boundless, Joan could not see him as he saw himself, she did not think that handling the concretized dreams of others would suffice. It was not, she thought, a good fit. He would be better off finding a way to create something of his own, on a smaller scale, and outside the business world, something he could hold in his hands and say, “I made this. This is mine.”
She took him back to the Rhome train station just after the New Year, and she felt his pain and her own. She would miss him dearly, even his false brave face. He boarded and found a seat, found her on the platform and they smiled at each other until the train began to move. She waved and he waved back, and she watched him until he was gone, and then she watched the train gliding by, until the last car was out of view. She did not move as the snow fell harder, as the flakes that landed on her cheeks stuck. Only when the cold seeped into her boots did she return to the car and turn on the heat. She did not want to go back to the house; already she felt the loss of his presence, the quasi-normalcy he had brought with him. She wondered how long it would take for that feeling to dissipate, she hoped there would be a few more days before the swarm descended again.
The house was lit up when she reached it, a beacon on a dark day, the clouds so heavy, the snow falling with specific intent. Through the wide front windows, she saw that in the hour she had been gone, Solve=MC2 had set up shop again, and she exhaled in the car. When she walked in, every room crackled with brainwaves and activity, and Martin, leaning against a wall, watching those hunched at their computers around the long dining table, was smiling, with that delight on his face, a look she had grown to detest, and Joan was instantly angry with him all over again.
“Daniel get off okay?” he asked.
“Yep. I’m going to take a bath,” Joan said, and kept moving. She detoured into the kitchen, took a bottle of wine from the fridge, a glass from a cabinet. When she came back into the hall, Martin was no longer there. She didn’t care where he was.
As she passed all their large and lovely rooms, with the new furniture delivered the day before Christmas—comfortable couches in the living room and den, deep armchairs in the library, the black marble desk in the study—every piece of furniture for the Manning family was inhabited by a Solve minion. She thought how these kids would enjoy it all before she had much of a chance.
She walked into their huge white bathroom, poured wine into the glass, turned on the bathtub faucets, and listened to the roar of the water. Neither she nor Martin had ever locked doors against each other, but now she stepped forward and did so. She did not want him joining her, talking about the ten days of togetherness, about the boys, about all the exciting things in the future. She wanted to drink her wine and soak in the deep tub, in water that was a degree or two below uninhabitable. Since life had turned upside down, she made her nightly bath almost too hot, a failing attempt to detoxify the anger that built up inside of her from hour to hour and day to day and week to week.
She had done everything she could think of to extricate herself from this untenable situation.
She had tried to secure office space for Solve, but under the corporate documents only Eric had the authority to sign contracts. And even if he were willing to move his company elsewhere, which he was not, no landlord was willing to rent to a kid. She told the landlords she and Martin would be guarantors, but they all said, “Sorry, Mrs. Manning, it’s not an issue of the rent being paid. We understand the company has money. We’re just not interested in having a bunch of teenagers as tenants.”
She had hired a kind of babysitter, someone else in the house from morning until night, a trial run for two days, and had endured Eric’s rage.
“It’s Solve’s offices, Mom. Don’t you get that? There’s secret proprietary intellectual property in the house. We can’t work if we’re worried some stranger is going to steal what we’re killing ourselves for.”
“This is our home, Eric. There has to be another way,” she had said, to no effect.
*
The book she was reading for the second time since September was on the bench next to the tub. From the start, it reverberated with nuance for her, the subtext of the writer’s personal life, the way Joan was feeling toward Martin.
She had researched the author—a British novelist and short-story writer still alive and writing, a failed fifteen-year first marriage behind her, a second marriage well past its third decade. In the midst of her arguments with Martin about Eric dropping out of school, about the boarding house they were running, Joan debated whether she would consider their marriage a failure if she ended it right then, if they crashed and burned a few months shy of their nineteenth wedding anniversary. Couples divorced when they could not weather joint tragedy like the death of a child, but how about when they disagreed over a child’s success? She disagreed entirely with Martin, but divorcing him would not solve anything. At least now, sometimes Martin was around, even if his oversight consisted only of waving Eric and the Solve team on. If she were to divorce him, with his travel schedule, she would end up with primary custody. She only had to look ahead to his next months of travel, planned long in advance, to know that it was true: overseas trips to South American countries, Japan, return trips to the British Isles, to Russia and China, the list went on and on of places where he was going to perform his surgeries, leaving Joan to hold down the fort. A spy in her own house.
In her research, Joan had also discovered the endless feud between the writer and her older sister, a writer of equal stature, the winner of a major literary prize. The siblings had waged their battles through “a lifetime of enmity,” the younger avoiding the prize won by the older, citing its negative impact on the winners. Watching Daniel trying to tamp down his jealousy about his brother’s exploits, she had seen the beginning of that sibling enmity, a valid sibling rivalry, the oddity of the much younger brother pulling so far ahead of the elder in the race toward success, a race not intended to be run for years. Daniel would endure additional pain if he tried to conquer a world even tangentially related to Eric’s.