As a result, newly anointed adults, aware that people of all ages were hitting jackpots in unbelievable ways, found in my articles some kind of direction and inspiration. Because of me, Think Inc.’s readership soon expanded beyond its stodgy demographics of number-crunching wonks interested generally in how the financial world was going to react to what was coming down the pike, and specifically in the bare bones of how one thing or another would affect investments they had made or might want to make.
I was surprised to find that the actual writing of the articles did not intrigue me as much as interviewing those regular people, rooting through their lives at will, uncovering their tawdry secrets, although never did I expose my subjects’ past frailties in print. The secrets belonging to those I wrote about had no personal effect on me, other than empathy, and I found something comforting in the tales of uninspired lives that once ran amok; that even for those who had screwed up terribly there could be magical redemption, and a redemption that included monetary riches. There was, for instance, the rotund and smiling pie maker, sweet as sugar, who took his grandmother’s recipe and built an empire of pies. What he hid away was his long prison stint in his youth, twelve years for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, a juvenile record long sealed, which I got my hands on. In confidence, he told me that dreaming of his grandmother’s kitchen, remembering how he helped her make her pies, his hands in the dough, the smell of cherry and lemon and peach baking, had kept him alive, the happy thing he thought about when he was staring at walls and bars, fending off even tougher kids in the prison yard, telling himself that with such delicious things in the world he ought to get his head on straight, come out of prison with his eyes on that gustatory prize. And there were the twins I wrote about—two eight-year-old girls with freckles and pigtails who designed bracelets of neon beads that girls in every first-world country wanted. Their marketing man was their father, whose idea was to donate the first monies received to third-world countries, putting the bracelets on par with other kinds of trinkets that had altruistic appeal to shoppers. The father had lost his job as head of marketing at a multinational when his cocaine and prostitute habits were discovered. Although he was not indicted, did no time in jail, he was summarily fired, divorced, and ruthlessly kept from his children. Destitute and desperate, he returned to his parents’ heartland farm, a place he had scrabbled hard to get out of, going cold turkey with the drugs, turning himself into a celibate, finding some peace amidst the squealing pigs. When I wrote about the girls and their beads, the company was a nonprofit; now it’s for-profit, and has expanded into all kinds of unisex kid-centric jewelry, and the father, he built a house near his parents’ farm, runs the $500 million business from there, only goes into town for groceries and to fill up his old Ford truck.
My point is: I became alert to the secrets all people keep, and when I sensed I was in the presence of a secret, I had to explore it. That is what happened on a June summer weekend sixteen months ago, when I was home for a rare weekend visit in Rhome. It was still early on Sunday, and my father was already at the hospital when I went in search of my mother, and found her in the glen, standing at the lip of the pool, ready to dive in and swim her hour of laps. “Can I borrow your car?” I asked. I wanted to take a memorial drive around Rhome. “Of course, love. Keys are in the bowl. Have fun,” she said.
And then I was in the garage, staring at boxes I had never seen before, six large brown boxes in a row, every single one marked Joan Ashby in big black letters.
Of course, I knew it was an invasion of her privacy to root around in her things, but my work had inured me to such breaches. The sixth box was the one most securely taped up, and that was the deciding factor, how I knew where to start. I pulled back the tape carefully, opened the flaps, and found myself looking through hundreds of photographs of people I did not recognize. I dug deeper, and pulled out dozens of colored folders, then a huge stack of orange folders marked Rare Baby Story with titles next to each one. And then, when I reached the bottom, I came upon an enormous manuscript. I gripped it tight and pulled it free.
The title page read Words of New Beginnings. I was sure I was holding another collection of her stories, and I was curious why it wasn’t bound and in bookstores, furthering her remarkable reputation. But when I flipped through it, I realized it was a novel, that Joan Ashby had written a novel she finished long ago, on August 10, 2007, precisely, according to the handwritten notation on its title page, and I wondered if the book had been at the bottom of that box ever since, so many years out of sight, out of mind.
Though it changes nothing, I did not read a single word then, but I was overwhelmed by my discovery, gripped by an uncontrollable need to possess it, a desire, perhaps, to punish my mother for having such an enormous secret, for being imbued with genius and wasting it.
I put the manuscript on the front seat of her car, then replaced everything else in the box, exactly as it had been, smoothed the tape back down, hit the garage door opener, and raced down the hill into Rhome, where I paid a small fortune to have a copy run off. In forty-five minutes, I was back at the house, the original manuscript returned to its resting place at the bottom of that sixth Ashby box, the old strips of tape replaced with new, the copy in my overnight bag, the overnight bag pushed under the bed in my room, and when I reached the glen, my mother was still swimming.
She rose up out of the water with a happy, brilliant smile, and I searched inside of myself for the guilt I thought I should feel, but didn’t. What I felt was a rage I couldn’t explain, and the spectacular falsity of my own responding smile. I remember thinking that any minute she would pick up on the strange emanations I had to be sending out, a regular skill of hers, but she didn’t.
“I’ll dry off and make us some fresh coffee,” is what she said to me, “and we can have one of our great chats.” I nodded and said, “Terrific.”
The subjects of my articles had taught me that there is always a price that must be paid for doing wrong. And I had done wrong: by keeping my mouth shut when I uncovered Ashby’s secret, by making a copy of that unpublished novel for myself, knowing that I intended to spirit her secret work away with me when I left Rhome, and so I set my own price, the harshest penance I could think of to cause myself the most harm: reading Ashby’s collections from cover to cover.
Later that afternoon, I asked if I could read her books, and when I saw her hesitate, I wanted to say, Hey, Mom, I already read “Deep in the Valley,” which fucked my own dreams entirely, and “An Outlaw Life,” so I know you never wanted me, thanks very much, and I know what you’ve been hiding, so what’s the deal with this internal debate I see you going through. But then she nodded and led me back out into the garage, opened a different Ashby box, and handed over two thick, hardcover books.