In late February, when she retrieved Words of New Beginnings, the box was sealed up, the manuscript hidden at the bottom, nothing seemed tampered with, but she hadn’t been looking.
She starts the car and catches her reflection in the rearview mirror. Her tan, the faint sunburn from falling asleep in the glen, all faded into the pallor of death. Her hair is wilder than usual. Piled high for the evening last night, she did not brush it out when she and Martin returned home, simply pulled out the pins, and slept on it. Under each eye, traces of mascara not washed away last night, not dissolved this morning in the pool.
She turns the key again and the engine cries in distress. She remembers then her dream out on the chaise—a son killing his mother.
She looks at her shaking hands gripping the steering wheel, then down at her feet and sees she has forgotten shoes. Last night, she and Miranda sat with their feet in the Sumner pool, Miranda’s dozens of golden bracelets tinkling madly as she gestured around the pretty backyard. “I think I’m going to leave Larry soon. Take up the life I’m supposed to be living. I can’t keep pretending this is what I want. See how everything lines up perfectly, every right angle exact?” The lawn was trim, the flower beds neat, the rocks of the waterfall, square and precise. Only the small figure eight pool lacked right angles. “I despise such perfection. I want mess and craziness. I don’t want to have a bedtime. Can you imagine? Larry is in bed, ready to sleep at ten every single night. He wants me next to him. I hate it. I loathe it. I want to stay up all night if I choose to, not lay next to a man already dead to the world.”
Last night is ages ago.
Joan runs into the house for her sandals, then back to the car, guns onto the road, hits the crest, flies down the long drop of the hill.
The Inveterate Reader has posted CLOSED FOR HOLIDAY WEEKEND in its window. The Tell-Tale’s small parking lot is empty when she drives in, but the sign says they open at one o’clock on all holiday weekends, except Christmas and New Year’s.
Finally, someone is at the bookstore doors, unlocking from within. Then Joan is inside, past the shelves with their literary offerings. Handwritten notes by the store staff explaining why they liked this or that book. Kimberly has drawn daisies in a row over her name, Jed’s writing is blocky, Rocco’s nearly illegible, Sue’s letters perfectly formed.
At the table with its sign, RECENT BEST SELLER RELEASES, there is no logical organization, the books are not set out alphabetically, by title or author’s last name. Then she spots them. J. D. Henry’s books, side by side. A large gold label on each proclaiming its phenomenal status.
Joan is alone in the store, but the checkout girl is readying her register. Ears double pierced, a small crystal stud in the curve of her left nostril, she, too, moves as if she is sleepwalking or underwater like Joan.
A ping and the register opens. Metal-on-metal scraping while the girl wrestles with the cash box until it hooks in. Another ping when she closes the register drawer firmly. Finally, she scans Joan’s books through.
“They’re really great,” the girl says.
Her pale cheeks flush, an upward sweep of pink that colors her pallid, doughy face. If the submerged cheekbones appeared, if the nose developed cartilage, if the eyes opened wider—it is a mutable face, Joan thinks, that could become almost pretty depending on the choices the girl makes in her future. Then she thinks that face will never develop character. Not too long from now, when her belly balloons, the girl will leave behind her double earrings and her nose stud, but will remain behind this cash register, pinging and pinking when she speaks shyly, nervously, to paying customers.
“I don’t need a bag,” Joan says, when she is allowed to pay, and grabs the books, leaves behind the girl, the store, the glass doors, until she is out on the hot macadam of the empty parking lot, and then back in her car. She turns on the engine just long enough to lower the windows, puts down the visor to block the sun.
She flips through the pages of Paradise of Artists, looking for the author photo, the biographical data about J. D. Henry.
There is nothing, just a statement that J. D. Henry is also the author of The Blissed-Out Retreat.
She looks for the acknowledgments page.
Three quotes attributed to Lewis Carroll and his two companion books: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Snippets from a master of literary nonsense, another writer’s work appropriated in place of the personalized acknowledgments Joan has never believed in. She reads them. Then reads them again.
J. D. Henry’s choice of Carroll quotes are ridiculous explanations for such a horrendous action.
An explanatory message for aberrant behavior:
“No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.”
A circuitous statement which confounds the notion of oneself, Carroll’s double negatives winding the self into origami:
“Be what you would seem to be—or, if you’d like it put more simply—never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”
Lastly, an apology that negates itself by containing a grandiose rationale:
“Do you think I’ve gone round the bend?” “I’m afraid so. You’re mad, bonkers, completely off your head. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.”
*
At the back of The Blissed-Out Retreat, the same three Lewis Carroll quotes.
28
The knowledge is right there inside of Joan, but refuses to coalesce.
She is studying the author’s name on the covers. Staring at J. D. Henry. And slowly, so slowly, like an anagram clarifying itself, the quixotic pseudonym is revealed.
The surname of Henry is an homage to the squirrel Daniel wrote about as a child.
J stands for Joan.
D, of course, for Daniel.
Her son has stolen her book and masked his identity with a name only she would decipher.
How did Daniel know about Words?
How and when did he find it in its hiding place in her sixth Ashby box?
How did he go about selling the books to Iger, who has known Daniel since birth, has known the course of his life?
She is trying to puzzle it through.
If Daniel had called Iger, Iger would have called Joan to say she didn’t know Daniel was writing fiction. She would have called Joan after reading manuscripts that made her think of Joan’s work, would have asked if the manuscripts were Joan’s.
Joan can hear Iger’s voice, asking and answering her own rhetorical questions:
How long have we been friends? For decades.
And how many times have I asked why you stopped writing? Ever since you published Fictional Family Life, and not once have you ever given me a straight answer.