She could not imagine Stuart’s face when he returned and saw the bloody floor, her dead finger on the counter in a position of accusation and blame. How strange all that sawing had not damaged its fine tapered shape, had not chipped the polish on the nail. Even now, the shade was still pretty, a pale pink color called Princess Fairy Tale—
Joan thought it might not be too late to slip off her own wedding band, tell Martin their young marriage was at an end, that the only conception she was interested in was what she birthed on the page.
Their house was in a new development, some of the roads still waiting to be paved, the market ten miles away, the wine and liquor store next door. Perhaps there was an hour before Martin returned, and imagining him back in the house, beaming, popping corks, making toasts, set Joan panting, her mouth open like the dog they should have gotten immediately. She felt faint, her vision blurring in the middle, as if her blue irises were turning black, a shade dropping over them. She made it into her chair before her legs gave way, dropped her head between her knees, and waited.
When her eyesight cleared, and her heart was only galloping, she sat up and looked at the shelves Martin had hung, stocked with copies of her two award-winning, best-selling books, all the different covers, the titles in myriad languages, proof that she had readers around the globe. She looked at the goose-necked lamp they’d found at a yard sale when she joined him in Rhome; at the old battered wooden dining-room table brought from New York, on which she had written her stories; at her solid typewriter atop, an Olivetti Praxis she loved; at the four hundred pages of her first novel she was calling The Sympathetic Executioners. She wished she could unravel time to the moment before she accepted Martin’s offer of a drink in that Annapolis bar.
She looked down at the narrow wedding band on her finger, the inscription—MM loves JA—hidden underneath, and thought it would be easy enough to place it in Martin’s hand, to separate their belongings, to let him buy the house, or perhaps she would simply give it to him, deed it over as a kind of consolation prize for the end of their marriage. She would return to New York. She had some money now, would not be stuck in the sooty East Village with its pungent streets, its buildings marked with aggressive graffiti. It would take less than a week to pack up and arrange for the movers. While she searched for a new place to live in the city, she could stay with Iger, a senior editor now at Gravida and the new owner of a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side. Joan could accomplish everything, she thought, without losing too much time, without being away from the book for too long. Too much was happening in the lives of Silas and Abe, her young killers for hire, the sympathetic executioners, for her to break stride.
The blare of the ice-cream truck’s tune shattered her hectic silence, the song growing louder as the truck journeyed through the unfinished neighborhood, a man yelling, “Wait, wait! You’ve got two little customers coming!” making Joan think of the lonely, stilted childhoods she and Martin had both endured. His mother dead when both he and she were too young, left with his stern father, ever the navy vice admiral who never wrapped his son in a hug, did not put a warm hand on his head or his shoulder; and Joan’s life, unwanted in her parents’ house, lost and alone unless she was reading or writing her stories up in her bedroom, or tucked away in the town library doing one or the other. How her parents had stared, as if her connection to them, her very existence, was an unsolvable puzzle. She instantly could see her father at the end of his working day, nearly motionless in his chair, the news on the television, a crossword in his lap, a glass of neat bourbon by his side, head turned away from his wife, from Joan’s mother, who stood on the other side of the living room, phone against her well-tended wash-and-set, her lipsticked mouth wide in pretend surprise as she listened to friends’ secrets, to gossip making the rounds. The furtiveness between the people Joan called Mother and Father, when her mother hung up the phone and sashayed over to sit on her father’s lap, a soldered circle of two Joan observed from the fringes, seated at the top of the staircase when she, no matter her age, was done with her reading and writing for the day. How they inclined their heads toward each other in those long minutes in the living room, and later at the kitchen table, telling each other about their days, neither ever asking Joan a question about anything. She remembered those awful dinners of her mother’s calf’s liver, and her father, so pale and bloodless, tearing into the flesh, his knife and fork scraping across the plate.
Martin was not pale and bloodless, she thought, sitting in her Rhome study. He was brilliant, as passionate about his work as she was about hers. He was strong and engaging, good and handsome, always looking as if he were fresh from a sunny day at the beach or from a whirlwind run down the slopes, burnished from the inside out. His days were spent on the campus, in the laboratory, or in the hospital’s operating rooms, but when he emerged he liked music and conversation and an abundance of others, as she did not. Her ability to sometimes be charming made people mistake her for a social creature when she preferred the turning of her own thoughts. She had learned to enjoy the parties they went to by considering them experiential interludes, potential fodder for her work one day.
People sought out Dr. Martin Manning, wanted to be in his presence, thought of him as their best friend. And he was a good friend, caring, considerate, kind, taking under his wing the newly minted doctors doing their rotations. Children flocked to him too. In New York, on his weekends there with her, she had seen infants and toddlers smiling up at him, waving to him from their strollers, as the two of them walked past, she evading the fat wheels of the buggies, he leaning down with a quick hello, saying, “Nice hat, buddy, you going fishing?” or “You’re wearing such a pretty dress, I wish I had a camera right this minute.” He had told Joan more than once that when he was a boy he wished for the impossible—for siblings and cousins to play with at the holidays, for holidays at all, celebrated with laughter and noise. His parents, like Joan’s, had been only children.
How did she miss so completely that Martin might want people who belonged to him through bonds more durable than friendship, that being a surrogate big brother to scared medical residents might not suffice, that waving to the children of others would not heal the hole in his heart? He had vowed to her they would not reproduce. Perhaps he had been honest when he swore to it, perhaps not. Regardless, Joan had proof that he wanted a child, he wanted this child.
She looked at the clock on her desk. An old-fashioned thing that had belonged to Martin’s father, one of the few items Martin kept when he sold everything in the Annapolis house, sold the house itself. It was bulky like Martin’s father. The hands sluggish, as Martin’s father had not been, its tick-tock loud when Joan’s writing was difficult, otherwise she didn’t hear the noise at all. She was surprised Martin had held on to it once she heard how fearfully he watched that clock when he was growing up, counting down the hours, then half hours, then minutes, then seconds, until his father was home from the academy. Before dinner, he pushed Martin out of the house, into the backyard, yelling out the navy calisthenics Martin was to do: “Get down, boy, give me forty push-ups.” And after they had eaten their dinners in silence, Martin watched the clock again. It was always ten minutes after Martin cleaned up the kitchen that his father demanded to see his finished homework, a red pen clutched between the vice admiral’s thick fingers.
Looking at the second hand’s slow sweep, Joan couldn’t figure out how many minutes had passed since Martin’s departure in pursuit of libations for an illusory celebration.
The day before, her knowledge of the clock’s history did not alter the tick-tocking of their glorious future ahead. But now she felt as Martin must have felt waiting for the hands to reach the dreaded hour. Out of time. The expanse of their expected life together seemed suddenly reduced to nothing.
If she had this baby, it meant a second baby, Joan understood that now; the only discussion would be one of timing. Martin would want to create a foundation of family, Manning children who
would be their responsibility to nurture through the years, though Martin would view them as a gift. Manning children who would grow up and have their own children, and their children would have children, and on and on, until no one would be left on their own. The opposite of how Joan lived her life, the opposite of what she required for her work. She knew that other women managed both, had for centuries. But most of those women desired motherhood and they came to it, Joan imagined, with a set of beliefs about what it would be like, a faith even, in their maternal abilities, their qualifications. Their faith and belief in the worthiness of motherhood providing them with answers, with succor and calm, about navigating it all. She was not like those women; she did not want motherhood, had no underlying faith in her ability to negotiate the enormity of the obligation, had no interest in the supposed majesty of the experience. She had always felt differently, had never yearned for marriage or for a child, had never played make-believe house, had never played with the doll she received on her fifth birthday, so lifelike with its soft skin, its gurgles and giggles and cries when its middle was squeezed hard. She had no answers because those domesticated questions had never interested her, and her only belief was knowing, as her mother used to say regardless of the situation at hand, she was not cut from the right cloth. And she hadn’t wanted to be.
If Joan extinguished the thing inside, she would have to leave Martin, or he would have to leave her. The joy that lit up his features, that timbred his voice when she told him the horrendous news, belied their vow, was clear evidence that such a break would be required. Dilation and curettage, grinding away at the cells rapidly multiplying inside of her, that soon enough would form into a face, a heart, two tiny feet, would puncture their happiness if she made such a drastic choice.
She could be fine without Martin. She would holster her love for him and rely, as she always had, on the exceptional traits mined during her unloving childhood. Those traits—detachment and heightened abilities to perceive and observe—had guided her through those awful years, had turned her into the writer she was. Without Martin’s love, her current engagement with the world would fade, but living at a remove had served her work well, and she was fierce enough to adapt. Returning to her original life, the one she had planned on, would not be a problem, but when she looked down, her own palms were curved protectively around her belly. Instantly, she clasped them together.
She sighed. It was true that she was infinitely happier with Martin than she had been before, without him. But was holding on to this love worth suffering the mammoth changes that would upend her life if she nurtured this microscopic speck through all the following months, ate right, did not drink, thought good thoughts—which could not include hoping she miscarried—and brought forth into the world a baby that would be theirs forever? Was she actually considering freeing Martin from his vow? Having this thing?
What would it look like if she did, hypothetically? What did people typically worry about in such a situation? The sanity of the mother, the fitness of the father, the health of the fetus, the amount of money in the bank, the grandparents and what they would want to be called—stupid names like Marmie and Pappy—postpartum depression, C-sections versus natural births, genetic defects, ancestry, history, time.
What would she worry about? The regularity of her routine, her writing hours, her reading hours, how seldom she allowed herself to be pulled off course. Her ability to be as present in this world as she was in those she invented, among characters more real to her than most of the people she knew, than the people she used to know or observe in New York, strangers she now analyzed in the bookstores, in the library, at the market, on the streets, and in the restaurants of Rhome.
If she went through with this, hypothetically, she would have to be present for the baby, could not do what her own mother and father had done to her, what Martin’s father had done to him. There could be no coldness, no isolation, no distance, no disaffection, no paltry pretend-love. The baby would have a right to a joyous childhood, which meant she—they—would have to give it that joyous childhood. She would have to find within herself additional love and patience, admirable traits she doubted she possessed in sufficient quantity, flawed as she was, consumed with her imagined human beings, the often grievous or heartrending situations she wrote them into and out of. She would have to willingly give all of herself, or at least most of herself. And the sacrifice new parents so loudly and proudly proclaimed themselves willing to make, willing, they said, to lay down their lives for the good of their offspring … could Joan do that, sacrifice herself, if such was required? These days, for years really, in service to her work, she sacrificed others, but never herself.
Only the day before, her future had been so clear, but it was suddenly impossible to see into the distance, all because an accidental breach had left her undefended.
She swiveled in the chair and stared out the large window that faced her desk. The undulations of their vast acreage, humps of dirt that rose and fell over the four solid acres, rolled out into the distance; she could not see to the end of their property. She and Martin weren’t gardeners, and who knew if they had green thumbs, but she could imagine the dirt gone, the land vibrantly green, an emerald carpet of soft grass, a swing set, a sandbox, a jungle gym. The kid could have a playground all its own, they had that much land. But wouldn’t playing in a public park be better for it? Wasn’t engagement with others a socializing force?—what Joan had avoided as a child by never leaving her desk or walking out of the public library she had visited most days after school. Being unloved had turned her into a writer, and her writerly way of living, alone most of the time, had not harmed her at all, or not much. Until this stealthy attack by Martin’s swimmers, look at all she had accomplished so far.
Her sudden laugh was hollow and high, collapsing quickly, then trying to rise back up through her throat, tearing at her vocal cords, some inhuman wail wanting to be released, that she forced back down. How ridiculous, planning a termination and the resumption of her solitary life one minute, and in the next, designing a personal, private playground for an undesired child.
She closed her eyes and thought it was a perfect time to cry. She had not cried past the age of seven, when she found a pen and a notebook and began conjuring up her own people, people she could control and direct, living the complicated lives she chose for them, the good and the bad they were forced to endure.
When she opened her eyes, the late-afternoon sun had shifted, throwing her typewriter into a cone of warm light. The platinum band on her finger sparkled. If she were writing this as a story, if Joan were one of her own characters, would she see the movement of the sun, the gleam of the ring, as an omen or a blessing, something to be heeded or ignored? Her characters often suffered the sudden fall through a floor they had mistakenly believed was solid, a demarcation point between then and now, a point from which they could not retreat, when the before of their lives changed in an instant. She had written their devastations, then watched their brave resolutions to see it through, to welcome the after, regardless of what actions they ultimately took. She had never imagined it happening to her, or that it would feel this way, as if there were no ground at all to stand on, nothing within sight, the sky so far away.
This could be one of her own stories—a woman facing what was, for her, the unthinkable, and her love over the moon because of the news. What would she have the character do? After the anguish of discovering, too soon, her good husband’s fallibility, would that woman pull herself out of the abyss, open her heart more, not abandon love, or eliminate the fledgling life within; would she welcome the quickening, become a wondrous pregnant woman, a loving mother, bask in the adoration of that flawed husband, their home a place where the good outweighed the bad, where eventual childhood hurts were magic-wanded away? That character might, Joan thought—and in the process discover her untapped abilities to live a full life, in real life, outside the pages of the stories she wrote, the novel-in-progress she was working on. T
hat character would never abandon her own work, her reason for living, would remain a serious writer no matter what life threw at her, would finish her first novel, and the novel after that one, and the one after that, and all the novels that would follow, as she wrote and loved her unexpected child, and the second one too, through the run of delightful years. Of course, the woman’s story would need some tragedy, some arc of calamity and catastrophe and misfortune and heartbreak, but this was not the time to ponder that. She knew she could write such a story, but could she write herself into it, become that eponymous Joan?
She heard Martin’s car rumble into the driveway, the engine’s long whistle of relief when it found itself at rest, and Joan thought, I guess I’m going to try.
“Joan Ashby Manning, where are you?” Martin called out, and immediately she wondered why she agreed to take his last name, even if its use was limited to their personal life, the name on their joint checking and savings accounts.
She heard him rattling paper bags in the kitchen; noise traveled fast in a house so small and contained, three bedrooms and two baths. Just right, really, for an incipient family. They had not yet figured out what to do with that third room, which echoed in its emptiness.
From her desk, she heard the pop of a cork, the whoosh of liquid poured into a glass, then the crinkle of foil pulled free from the bottle of sparkling apple cider, what all newly pregnant women seemed to drink, the faux elixir of celebration.
Joan looked at the hard-written pages of The Sympathetic Executioners and wondered whether it would be possible to finish the book in time.
“I’m still in here, Martin, but I’m coming,” she called out.
She joined him in the kitchen. The sparkling apple cider in the fluted glass he handed her looked like a test tube of urine, but it was frothy, its bubbles fizzy, with a surprising, delicate sweetness she held for long seconds on her tongue. They walked out the back door and stood together on their land. When he reached for her hand, she allowed it, felt the way his swallowed hers whole.
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby Page 4
