She steels him away. “No. Go. Don’t reschedule anything.”
In the morning, when he is gone, Joan finds a wrapped box on the marble desk in the study. Inside is the laptop Martin said he wanted to buy for her, to celebrate her resuming her writing life. She looks at it and wonders what use she has for it now. An invisible being is choking her to death, her lungs straining and straining, and when she pulls in mouthfuls of air, it is the air of a different world, where never again will she draw a nearly contented, nearly happy breath. It is an alarming, discordant world in which Daniel’s true self has been revealed, impossible for her to digest.
*
She has the stamped copyright registration that proves Words of New Beginnings is hers, the attached title page shows Final Draft: August 10, 2007, proving her son’s sedition, his duplicity. But she was wrong—the laptop will be useful, she needs at her fingertips, with a click of a key, an electronic version of her novel.
Her own words, written so long ago, disappear from her mind as soon as they appear on the screen. It’s been seven years since she wrote anything beyond a few scribbled notes she didn’t hang on to, and as she funnels words, sentences, paragraphs, pages, and chapters into the computer, the dexterity in her fingers returns, she is a typing zealot, maniac, fiend, making her way through the original typed pages, following the rhythm of the book’s hard-fought sentences, recalling the stubbornness of her characters who once itched and moaned and sometimes rolled away from her, until she listened to them, let them drag her into the intentional lives they envisioned for themselves.
She retypes Words from beginning to end, acutely aware that Daniel did just this with her manuscript, before he sliced her book down the middle, substituted his encrypted name for hers.
At seven every morning and again at midnight, Martin asks what she thinks her next step will be, and Joan always says the same thing: “I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far yet.”
When she finishes, when she has turned all of Words into a digital manuscript, Martin is in an icy operating room at Rhome General giving sight back to a partially blinded young man. For the first time, she uses the laptop for a different reason, books herself on a flight that leaves the next day.
She picks up the phone and calls their doctor. “It’s an emergency,” she tells the receptionist. “I need whatever vaccinations are required for travel to India.”
She is at the FedEx in Rhome thirty minutes later, sending off a package. She is in Dr. Abrams’s office thirty minutes after that. A cut-and-dry doctor, he never inquires about the personal, except as medically relevant. He does not ask why Joan needed an emergency appointment for vaccinations for a trip to India that surely would have been planned in advance.
“No need to fear measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, diphtheria, pertussis, or polio,” he says. “Your last boosters will protect you against those diseases. Hepatitis A and typhoid, that’s what you need to worry about.”
She tightens up when the needle slides into the skin at the back of her arm. There is an ache at the injection site before she feels the medicine fan out through her body.
When she says, “I already feel it,” Dr. Abrams says, “Joan, that’s impossible. Pull up your other sleeve, better if the injections aren’t in the same arm.”
She refuses the typhoid pills intended to further protect her against that disease.
“You can’t eat lukewarm food, or eat where only locals eat, and you absolutely can’t drink anything that does not come in a sealed bottle. Pay attention, Joan. Getting sick there is a serious thing,” Dr. Abrams warns.
“I’ll be careful,” she says. A million vaccinations will not cure the illness festering within her that Daniel has caused. At reception, she writes out a check for her copay.
It is hard to pack her suitcase with both arms bruised and sore from the shots. But then it is done, and she packs up her carryall—the laptop, notebooks, pens, a ream of paper, her travel itinerary, boarding pass, passport, books she can’t imagine reading, snacks she can’t imagine eating on the plane, her makeup bag, and a pair of pajamas in case her suitcase is lost. It is late afternoon when Martin finds her in the bedroom.
“I canceled my last surgery,” he says as he walks through the open doors of their bedroom, then sees her suitcase on the floor, the carryall on the bed.
“Where are you going?”
“India,” and she watches Martin clamp his long surgeon’s fingers together.
“India?”
“Yes.”
“Now?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Aren’t we going to discuss this?”
“I know what I’m doing,” she says. “Or at least this feels like what I need to do this minute.”
“Let me help you. Let’s work through this catastrophe as a team, the way we always do.”
“We weren’t a team with Eric, and with this, I just can’t,” she says.
“I’ll get a ticket. Right now. We’ll go together.”
“No, I don’t want that. I’m sorry.”
He has always wanted her to explain things about herself, when she thinks he ought to know. How does he not understand her need to be in a place utterly foreign, where the old happy memories of she and Daniel will not tag along, where she can more easily imagine her own son dead.
“How long?”
“Three weeks.”
“Are you leaving me?”
“Martin,” she says, thinking of all she has sacrificed for this marriage, years that affected her as they did not affect Martin, his life continuing apace.
What can she say, when all she can picture is herself at her old desk in the room that had been her study, her mind racing through lists of words, as her new husband instantly abandoned the vow he had made, that there would be no children, that he understood her work would always come first. The underpinnings on which she had agreed to marry him kicked out from beneath her at the very start, forcing her to find ways to live an unwanted life.
She turns away and zips the carryall, ripping up the silence. She hears him in the hallway, the study door click into place.
She strips and pulls on her swimsuit.
Out through the glass door of their glass bedroom wall, down the bluestone tiles, all the way to the glen. She will miss this, she thinks.
Then she is in the water, demonically swimming laps, until her heart feels ready to explode.
*