The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

by Cherise Wolas

  She swam alone, sometimes floating on her back, until the baby rolled over, rolling her over. The Pregnant Six no longer swam, were no longer pregnant. They were nesting, they all said to Joan, when she had driven from one house to the next, delivering identical baby gifts to them all. Each had gone into labor on a separate day, six days in a row, and now their babies, every one had given birth to a girl, consumed them. Watching breasts pulled out at feeding time, listening to the baby talk that came from the new mothers’ mouths, Joan promised herself she would feed her child in private, talk to it in her regular voice, in full sentences that did not rise up at the end, as if everything in an infant’s nascent life was already an existential question.

  Head underwater, swimming back and forth, she spent the seven days considering the theme of her book: The traumatic experience of a child also symbolizes the eternal verities of the human condition.

  As a teenager, she had read all of the short stories by the Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand, but only after Fictional Family Life was published had she come upon an old interview with Anand in which he discussed some of what Joan’s own writing was after. With this first novel, she had sought to wrangle with the concept obliquely, had researched Stockholm syndrome, and the statistics about how many vulnerable people could be persuaded to resist their own morality, how likely people were to be hypnotized. She had been interested in exploring what happened to children abandoned at birth, who were later dropped into a strange alternative world. What happened especially when those children had been well tended by caring foster parents—would the tragedy of their unwanted births and abandonment wipe out the interim temporary love, make them amenable to killing? If they were led in that direction, given the tools and a code to live by, a rationalization tucked into their skin that allowed them to consider the work noble, would they become euthanasiasts for hire? She had liked the underground group of foster parents analyzing the children they sheltered, searching out those with the requisite aptitudes. She had wanted to see what happened with Silas and Abe, if they naturally took to the work because they unconsciously tapped into the early realities of their existence.

  Now, on the couch, the rain sheeting down, their four acres a muddy field, Joan was debating her authorial choices. She’d deliberately begun the book on their eighteenth birthdays, with just a quick summation of their fostered years. She had wanted to get to the crux, to the meat, was most interested in writing about what happened next, the path they were led to discover, whether they had the strength and rectitude to resist, or whether they would give in, welcome the lives chosen for them, the work they were told they were suited to do.

  Had she made a mistake? Should she have begun further back in time, written in depth about Silas and Abe’s entry into the world, the parents who had made them, the nature of that relationship, whether it was abusive or simply bad luck, two kids finding themselves parents too early in their lives.

  The questions she had not had to answer by starting the book where she did raced through her brain: Who had abandoned the infants at the firehouse—the mother, the father, the two of them skulking before dawn to leave the basket at the door? Was the mother all on her own, living in a falling-down shack, pumping her milk to fill those bottles she inked with a pink marker? Or were the parents still a team, with regular jobs and tax returns, but the prospect of raising two at once, and identical, was overwhelming, far beyond what had been anticipated?

  Had she made a grave error by not exploring the twins’ early years, the balance of power between Silas and Abe, how it might have teetered, before settling?

  Perhaps it was the hormones, her brain no longer wholly her own, her intelligence usurped by the baby, but the dismay did not lift away.

  She read on:

  Then Silas and Abe were through the double glass doors. A fat man with stringy black hair and a silver ring through his nose was manning the minimart’s cash register.

  “Come closer, young gentlemen. I’m Milt. No last name needed and absolutely no reason at all to be frightened. I get that it’s a scary time for you, but all will be explained, all will be okay.”

  It was Abe who bravely approached the counter when Milt held out a rolled-up magazine. Abe took it and stepped back and Silas leaned over his shoulder. The magazine fanned out and revealed no name on the cover, no sharply photographed picture. The back and front were completely blank, shiny though, and solidly black, the paper of good quality, heavyweight.

  “You can read the articles later, a fascinating bunch this time around,” Milt said. “Lots to learn in there. But for now, I want you to read the classifieds, really read them carefully, then come back in and talk to me, tell me which one grabs your guts first. Only then will I explain what’s going on, the presents you were given, the reason for the suits, the shirts, the ties. In those classifieds, young gentlemen, is your future. Anyone need something to drink before taking the first step?”

  Abe stepped forward again and nodded. “I’d like a chocolate Yoo-hoo, Milt,” then turned to his brother and said, “Silas, what do you want?”

  In later chapters, they learned to pick locks, to move stealthily, to disguise themselves utterly, to kill gently with their bare hands and not leave a mark. The code the twins would live by was drilled into them: Only by knowing the truth of a person can I guarantee that those I free from pain are dispatched with pure beating hearts, belonging to both killer and victim. Their preparation included boning up on their subjects. They were handed large blue three-ring notebooks that contained the voluminous histories of their targets, everything about their lives, their loves, the people they had cared for or hurt.

  Joan liked the shocking intimacy of the twins befriending those marked for death, the murders paid for in advance by thoughtful family members who wanted their loved ones no longer to suffer from brain tumors and cancers and cirrhosis and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and systemic organ failure and any other disease that broke down the flesh or the mind.

  Their first target, an elderly lady named Ginny Sauvage, pink-fleshed and white-haired in her retirement community bed, looked innocent in old age, held out her hands when the twins introduced themselves, after slipping past the guards, evading the nurses roaming the floor. But with those hands, now crippled and clawed, Ginny Sauvage had once beaten every one of her children.

  Now that Ginny Sauvage had been found, her location determined, her mobility assessed, the twins made their way out of the retirement community and waited at the leafy entrance for their ride.

  Abe said, “She was a brute, Silas, you’ve got to remember that, when we return to do the job. I’ve found what I need, something black in my pulse, and I’ll teach you how to find it in yourself, how to feel it moving through you, the way you can harness it, and let it do the work for you.”

  Hours later, when Joan finished reading, the manuscript pages were out of order, no longer neatly sequential, but it didn’t matter. It seemed to her there was something all wrong about the book. Was it too dark and deadly? Did it suffer from the lack of that unwritten familial history and backstory? Whatever it was, she had not found her way in.

  She huffed into a seated position, then up off the couch, and made her slow way down the hall, into her study. She dropped the manuscript on her desk, turned away, then turned back. One by one, Joan dropped the four shelved dictionaries onto the five-hundred-page manuscript, listening to the booms of those tomes, feeling the reverberations in her body, until her work was completely hidden from view.

  She thought about calling Volkmann, asking her to read it, as a reader, not as an agent ready to deliver the anticipated book to an eager publisher, having Martin read it as well.

  In the novels of others, Joan always flipped first to the acknowledgments page, read the names of those who had provided the author with immeasurable help, essential help, critical help, guidance, love, good meals, a place to write looking at the ocean, a lake, a pond, a sand dune. There were no acknowledgments listed in Joan’s
collections; she had not sought input from others, had relied on her own instincts to determine when the work was complete, exactly as she wanted it to be, had fought against the editors assigned her and won. She had not felt anyone deserved to be thanked.

  She would not alter her methods now, she decided, she would stay true to herself. She would not give The Sympathetic Executioners to Volkmann or to Martin, their thoughts and impressions were irrelevant. She knew how she felt about the book. Intended to further the tremendous trajectory of her literary career, it would not have that effect; she would not be turning it in.

  There was a niggling thought that Joan erased in an instant. The baby inside of her had done nothing wrong, had not leached away something vital in her, had not thinned her out as a writer. For a brief moment, the tumult lifted; that she did not apportion blame to the baby, that she considered the faults of the book all her own, seemed as good a start to motherhood as any.

  In the nursery, she turned on the light, a small chandelier she and Martin found at another weekend yard sale. At night, when it was lit, the teardrop crystals threw magical floating shadows at the walls, dappled the ceiling. The room was now painted a pale yellow, the color of buttercups, a neutral color because Martin did not want to learn ahead of time whether it was a boy or a girl. It had been furnished for weeks. Crib against the far wall, with colorful mobiles hanging above, changing table across the way. A large bookcase against the long wall, already filled with thick books, none meant for children.

  She sat down heavily in the recliner, put her feet up on the ottoman, and opened to where she’d left off the previous afternoon in Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? She had been reading aloud to the baby for months, had already read it Anna Karenina, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, the stories in the Portable Faulkner. She had thrown out all of Hemingway. The words he used to depict his narrow range of characters, his adoration of machismo, felt wrong on her tongue, too salty and hard-bitten, and if the baby was a boy she did not want him to turn out that way, that view of women congealed in his brain. She had replaced Hemingway with Jane Austen.

  Joan hoped the baby would sense from the womb that she was treating it like a whole person, that by initiating it early into a life of books, she might create an embryonic connection between them, smoothing away any jagged edges in advance of their introduction to each other, or at least make the initial introduction smoother than it might otherwise be.

  She still could not imagine holding a baby, her baby, in her arms. When the no-longer Pregnant Six had offered, lifting their babies into the air, ready to hand them over, Joan had demurred, rubbed her nose, and said, “I think I’ve got a touch of a cold.” The bonding she knew she would have to do, it could only occur with her own.

  “Okay, we’re picking up near the top of page 376, in the Penguin Classics edition—

  She gave him her hand, and muttered some word which was inaudible even to him; she gave him her hand, and immediately endeavoured to resume it, but he held it clenched within his own, and she felt that she was his prisoner. He was standing close to her now, and she could not escape from him. She was trembling with fear lest worse might betide her even than this. She had promised to marry him, and now she was covered with dismay as she felt rather than thought how very far she was from loving the man to whom she had given this promise.

  ‘Alice,’ he said, ‘I am a man once again. It is only now that I can tell you what I have suffered during these last few years.’ He still held her hand, but he had not as yet attempted any closer embrace. She knew that she was standing away from him awkwardly, almost showing her repugnance to him; but it was altogether beyond her power to assume an attitude of ordinary ease. ‘Alice,’ he continued, ‘I feel that I am a strong man again, armed to meet the world at all points. Will you not let me thank you for what you have done for me?’

  She must speak to him! Though the doing so should be ever so painful to her, she must say some word to him which should have in it a sound of kindness. After all, it was his undoubted right to come to her, and the footing on which he assumed to stand was simply that which she herself had given to him. It was not his fault if at this moment he inspired her with disgust rather than with love.

  Joan read to the baby until she had finished the chapter called Passion Versus Prudence.

  * * *

  The day before her water broke, before she knew that day would be remembered that way, Joan trashed The Sympathetic Executioners. She ripped up the pages until her hands were worn out, crumpled up the rest into loose, crinkly balls, stuffed it all into a trash bag, stuffed the trash bag into the garbage can at the side of the house. She would never revisit the work, had no need or desire to keep the book, not even for posterity, not even as proof that she had gone beyond the short-story form for which she was so praised. She would have to start all over again, a new novel from scratch.

  Martin had not noticed when the typing stopped a few weeks before, had not been aware that she’d finished the book, had not noticed when the manuscript was no longer visible on her desk. He was out early in the mornings and home late. Major eye surgeries to perform every day, research that filled up the breaks. She knew he wasn’t aware that he had stopped asking to read the pages in progress, unwittingly giving her space and peace. Of course, it was no longer relevant.

  She could not sleep that night, thinking of the loss of all that excruciating effort that had been so pleasurable. At midnight, when she still hadn’t found a spot in the bed that suited both she and the baby, she gave up. Martin was sleeping deeply, his arms and legs starfished, the way the newborn daughters of the no-longer Pregnant Six sprawled in their cribs. She could not recall ever seeing Martin in such a position. He looked boyish and she felt far away from anything girlish.

  She did not flip on the light switch in the nursery. She walked across the cool wood floor and stood at a window. The sky was black, no moon or stars. She could see nothing outside, and it was as if nothing existed beyond the house in which a despondent, frightened woman was wide-awake and a contented man asleep. She had failed Silas and Abe. She had failed herself. She was not in the place she wanted to be, with a finished first novel that would pre-date the child.

  When she lifted her nose off the cold glass and stepped back from the window, the low hallway light reflected her faint outline, and she locked on her eyes. She tried to catch herself blinking, but couldn’t. She wondered how she would handle it all, how she would be as a mother, when she would again have blocks of time for herself. The baby would keep her from immediately starting something new.

  She looked out into the void, into the invisible distance. She would have to develop the narrative of real life, but already she missed her submergence in those other worlds, within the only narratives that had ever mattered to her, with her very own people, the fallow time worth nothing at all.

  4

  Joan was propped up in the hospital bed, feeding their newborn son. Martin was on the bed with the two of them, his thumb and index a circle around both tiny ankles, above the tiny blue booties. The baby slipped off her breast and Martin took the infant into his arms.

  Childbirth, and seeing the baby for the first time, and feeling his heart beating against hers, the suction between his slimy, steaming skin and her own, which had been mottled and wet, did not miraculously change Joan’s worldview, as the no-longer Pregnant Six said it would. She did not suddenly feel it was her responsibility to solve war, genocide, disease, famine, hunger, low literacy rates, drug overdoses, the overcrowding of prisons. But she felt love, more than she thought she would, even though she was still not prepared, as other new parents seemed to be, to lay down her life for him, or for anyone.

  She did not glow immediately after, but the baby did, not wizened at all, not old-man wrinkled. He did not emerge splotchy and crying. Instead, a light shone from his eyes, which he instantly opened, and when she looked down upon him, his eyes caught hers and did not let go, the two of them staring
directly at each other, a kindling of sorts, until he fluttered to sleep.

  And he was beautiful, a beautiful baby with blue eyes that matched her own, and a full head of downy dark-brown hair like Martin’s, curls at the ends, for which she was responsible. He was good, too, rarely crying in these first few days, and when he did, it was as soft as a kitten’s, and lasted for barely a minute. And he ate well. She had heard stories from two of the no-longer Pregnant Six about their own infants who hadn’t figured it out, who didn’t take to the breast, no matter how often an engorged nipple was stuffed into their mouths, who had lost a few precious ounces of birth weight before the mothers had resorted to formula.

  The lactation specialist who came into Joan’s room with pamphlets said it had been a long time since she had seen an infant latch on so easily, as Joan’s did with her, that really, for now, there was no instruction she needed to give. And Joan felt a sense of pride, that at the start, she managed to do something right. She had not cursed it while it was baking inside of her, and he had emerged unscathed, with all his fingers and toes, with lungs that rose and fell, with a rosy mouth, with perfect lashes and brows, and the tiniest little bud between his legs that made both she and Martin laugh.

  Martin cradled the baby against his chest and said, “We really should figure out what we’re going to call him.” On the table next to her hospital bed was the baby name book Martin had packed into her bag at the last minute, after she left a puddle in the kitchen, before he helped her out the back door, into the Toyota, racing out of Peachtree, down, through, and out of Rhome proper, to the campus where Martin spent most of his hours, Rhome General ablaze at four in the morning.