And what do I always say to you every single time we talk, every single time you visit me in New York? Get rid of the wonderful husband, abandon those talented sons, you’ve done the domestic, now do whatever you have to do, but please, before you’re dead, start writing again.
Okay, so let me see if I understand. You used Daniel as your stand-in because you wanted to change agents, wanted to publish with someone other than Storr & Storr.
But, Joan, why the pseudonym, why didn’t you just call me directly?
*
Iger doesn’t know. She believes what Joan wanted her to believe—that Joan stopped writing decades ago. She doesn’t know about The Sympathetic Executioners or the Rare Baby stories. Iger knows nothing about the work Joan created in her private castle before the jailing she experienced in that seven-year cycle. Iger would think that J. D. Henry was influenced by Joan Ashby, but nothing more than that.
This is all Daniel, Iger as his unwitting accomplice.
How could Joan have misread Daniel’s secretiveness, think he had a mystery he was not ready to share. He did, though, didn’t he? His oblique glances in November, after telling her how much he liked her collections, he was gauging how she might react to his seizure of her unpublished work, his arrogation of her ambition.
The truncated phone calls ever since, his secret altering the tone of his voice. She had thought he was tired, perhaps pessimistic about the events at Think Inc., discovering that the world was not as he hoped, but what she heard had nothing to do with that, it foretold something else entirely.
Still, it is impossible to believe Daniel would have done this to her. Not this son, who has always been so close, so good, loving, and true. Not this son, with his natural sensitivities, his deep well of empathy, his kindness to others, thoughtful, as Eric has never been. Not this son, with whom she shared 2,555 conversations over those seven years, the voice she needed each day, for however long he could give her, a buoyancy in the midst of insanity.
And his reasons?
She has no idea what Daniel’s reasons could be.
What reasons could there be?
Her brain begins skidding.
J. D. Henry is her son, her golden son.
Joan looks at her hands, riveted together. Has she not been through enough? Jailed by one son she has blamed for her lost time, but this is so much worse. This son is a thief. The thief of her words, robber of her dreams, stealer of her love, and the time lost to the mothering maw, once that tiny thing lodged in her womb that she had not wanted at all. She is thinking these thoughts, acknowledging what she knows must be true, still, it does not seem real.
Where does this monumental transgression of Daniel’s leave her, when Words of New Beginnings, the book so long labored over, is meant to be the door through which she walks to regain entry to the one world where she most naturally belongs?
The choices are all untenable, differing only by degree, the exposure Daniel will suffer, that she will suffer. Eric too, maybe. Her history as a writer out there for all to see, in the midst of a bizarre familial controversy. Her maternal qualifications on trial, judged for her inability to control this son’s egregious, grievous, thieving impulse, judged for not being able to keep Eric on the straight and narrow.
But it is this son, Daniel, who elected to steal the part she so carefully preserved all these years. His actions a symbolic feasting on mother’s milk. Eric cost her seven sacrificial years, but Daniel, he has obliterated her entirely.
Opposing plans crowd her mind. Stay and confront. Confront and flee. Flee then confront. There are even more possibilities lurking. Which one she executes will depend, she realizes, on how she decides to define herself. Joan thinks then that writers have infinite choices and mothers nearly no choice at all.
29
Screaming is not something Joan can do, has never been able to do, not even with Eric. She had yelled, but not screamed, an emotional coloratura once saved for her work, but she wants to scream, to rend her clothing, to hire her own sympathetic executioners, Silas and Abe, to gun down her son.
Eight long hours since she arrived home from the bookstore, spent on a stool at the limestone island, going through J. D. Henry’s books, her novel cleaved in half, her heart ripped from her chest, pulsing madly in her hand. She has not tasted a single drop of the bottle of wine she has emptied, pulled free from the tightly sealed case with fingers that seemed to have grown talons.
Daniel has annihilated her life. Not just her future life as Joan Ashby again, but her past life, all her past choices. She is a statue at the limestone island, waiting for Martin to return.
The night sky has swallowed the sunset when at last he comes in, sweaty and dirty and happy, saying, “We ended up doing ninety miles, and I was close to the front of the pack the whole time.”
He looks at Joan, at the empty bottle next to her drained glass, then back to her face. “What,” he says. “What’s happened? What’s wrong?”
She hands him the articles about J. D. Henry’s books, the quoted excerpts ringed in fluorescent yellow. Then her own loose pages with mad yellow circles around the matching paragraphs. Then the books themselves, the first pages bleeding yellow until she had given up.
“Okay—” he says. “You’re scaring me. What is all this?”
She gestures at the stack piled up in his hands and Martin nods and sits on a stool and begins to read.
Joan retrieves another wineglass, opens another bottle of wine, pours Martin a glass, fills hers back up. She tries to slow her drinking as Martin makes his way through it all. Then he drains his glass and pours himself another.
“More?” he asks her.
“Yes,” she says. No matter how much she drinks, the adrenaline of rage is keeping her sober.
Three hours later, Martin knows everything Joan knows: the swim, the dream, the brief conversation with Daniel, Iger’s email, Joan’s research, her race to the bookstore, sitting here at the island since then, trying to understand what has happened.
Martin wants to storm DC, burst into their son’s apartment, force him to explain himself, then smash him, and throttle him, and threaten him with prosecution.
When he quiets, Joan says, “No. No rampage to Washington. I don’t know what I’m going to do yet, but I have to handle this my own way.”
It takes another hour before Martin concedes, and another thirty minutes before he drags Joan away from the island, from all that evidence of betrayal, forces her arms above her head, takes off her clothes.
When he has tucked her into bed, and is beside her, Martin says, “I’ll reschedule my surgeries in the morning.”
Joan says nothing until he reaches for her, tries to swaddle her in an embrace.