*
The end of Eric’s seven-year cycle was marked by his landing $400 million in venture funding for Solve and moving to New York, buying an apartment in a luxury building in the East Village, where Joan had lived and written her books when it was tenement walk-ups and railroad flats. His forty employees set up Solve’s new offices in an old factory in Tribeca. Seven days of blissful silence in the Rhome house that December, and then, a few weeks before the end of the year, he called Joan from a rehab center in Oregon. She had flown there immediately, was with him in group meetings led by counselors, chairs in a circle, the afflicted slouching, their spines collapsed, hands gripping their pale, tortured faces, parents, like Joan, and other loved ones, ramrod straight, their feet hard on the floor, their eyes flickering everywhere, unsure where to land.
On a bench in the Oregon fog, Eric told Joan that the connection he made between his accomplishments and his willingness to put himself far out into space was an explanation, but not a rationale, for his reckless behavior.
“I’m sorry,” he said to her, words he had refused to say as a child.
The overdose had been drastic, but it could have been tragic, had she not sacrificed herself, stayed home as he built Solve, said to him again and again, “Whatever you’re doing to yourself, you need to stop.” She had seen what was coming. He hadn’t suffered from pica as a child, but he had been addicted nonetheless, eating all that grass and dirt, chewing on all those stones, and one of the theories about pica had stated it demonstrated a tendency toward addiction. She had not been wrong in her assessment of him. Her diatribes must have gotten through, because he was getting help, but she could easily imagine him decrepit and wasted, friendless and homeless, rotting his insides with alcohol, puncturing his skin with needles, his teeth nubbed and yellowed, his laughter unhinged. He swore there had been no needles, mostly pills, a lot of pills, and a lot of alcohol, a good amount of weed.
When he said, “You’re off the hook, Mom,” guilt had heaved up within her because despite all she had done, he must have felt the equivocal nature of their relationship over his lifetime, sensed her resentment toward him in the last seven years. She had not always hidden it well. What else could she have done when his genius wouldn’t be ignored, his ascendency an uncontrollable force, and she powerless to counteract what Martin enabled. As devastated as she was, each time Eric said “You’re not to blame,” the guilt eased the littlest bit. She stayed in Oregon for a month, called Daniel each day when she returned to the hotel, breaking their pact, talking about Eric.
After ten weeks at the Oregon rehab, Eric was taking a sabbatical, thinking about what kind of life he wanted to live in the future. While Solve ran in his absence, he had taken himself far away. Of all the places her brilliant, wealthy, younger son could have gone, he chose India, the place she had never been to but considered her own. He sent her emails that said, “You and Dad should come visit.”
*
Being married for so long to a doctor, she knew it was a fallacy that every seven years a person becomes entirely new at the cellular level. Each type of cell has its own life-span—months, days, weeks—dying and being replaced all of the time, except for brain cells, which must endure for a lifetime, and are never replaced when they die. But Joan did not care, she liked the idea that every cell in her body was fresh and new, because she had survived those seven unbearable years.
23
There was the cyclonic aftermath of Eric: the brutal discussions and arguments she and Martin had about him, his overdose, her time with him in Oregon watching him shake and shiver while Martin performed surgeries in Hungarian villages without cell service. She and Martin were barely talking when Joan finally pulled Words from the box in late February. And then, having endured so much, she could not turn past the title page, fearful that the gorgeous book she had written would not be as she remembered.
Sammy Treeling, the boy who held her hand at naptime in kindergarten, who peed during piano hour in first grade, his puddle soaking the flipped ends of Joan’s flowered dress, who gave her a candy necklace in second grade and bit off a bunch with his buckteeth, saved her. They had never seen each other again after Sammy’s family moved away, but he popped into her mind like a gift and she had typed his name into the computer in the study, shocked when his obituary appeared. In the ground, or his ashes thrown to the wind, or dissolved in some body of water two years before. The undisclosed cause of his death like a story untold. He left behind a wife and three daughters and his position as chief of oncology at an Arizona hospital, and she saw pictures of his family at one of their daughters’ weddings. When she figured out the dates, she realized he was dead within a year of that happy day. Joan hoped that his ending was unforeseen, that he died in an instant, that he was not ailing when the family posed for that picture.
She had thought about what she wanted her own obituary to say. The personal in a penultimate paragraph, the lede that a substantial writer was dead, followed by a lengthy list of her works: the miraculous and long-lived story collections, Words of New Beginnings, the other inchoate novels waiting for her to mix and deliver, a list of the awards and prizes her achievements had earned. Why not gild her death notice? She would only ever have one.
Standing at the tall study windows, she had stared out at the frozen white landscape, the trees wearing icicles, thinking no one knew when they would cease to exist. She sent out prayers then for Sammy and his wife and his daughters, for Eric’s continued recovery, for Daniel’s contentment, for Martin, and for herself and the novel waiting to be freed, the other work she would one day leave behind. An hour later, she set the title page of Words aside. A hard eye over the next months on the book she spent nine years writing. In the end, euphoric that the novel’s power and prescience had not been diluted, the story not made redundant by its seven years in the box, she made no changes at all.
*