The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

by Cherise Wolas

  Karen peels wide the mouth of the brown lunch sack and blows into it, filling it with an abundance of her mediocre air, and hands it to Evan, who starts to fill and conflate the bag herself, her own air livid and wrathful.

  “So, as your blood’s pH value’s been rising,” Karen says, “the blood vessels to your brain are constricting. And that means oxygen for your nervous system can’t get through.”

  That she, Evan, is experiencing her first-ever panic attack; that Karen labels her own such attacks as anxiety attacks when the well is dry and Evan rubs her best friend’s hands to arrest the spasms that crick her fingers into claws; that when Karen says, “My well is dry,” she means that she and Evan have a deadline for workshop and Karen is without a story to wend and she wants Evan to stop her own work, to open both a bottle of wine and the deep trove of Evan’s memories, and give Karen something to drink and something she can use; that Evan always does tap into her magnanimous nature and willingly hands over those true stories at which Karen grinds away until she has a few pages to pass among their fellow writers-in-training who, inevitably, discuss Karen’s work too nicely, giving Karen license to monkey around for another day or two before she gives up, turns to Evan again, and claims that her well is, as ever, dry; that Karen, the progeny of writers—a paternal award-winner and a maternal best seller—has caused Evan’s first-ever panic attack by waving through the air what Karen says is a contract for her first published collection—Nearly True by Karen Sweet—twelve never-workshopped stories, every one of which originated with Evan when Karen’s well was dry, and who says now to Evan, “You don’t mind, do you? After all, I did write the stories.”

  Evan holds the bag to her mouth, breathes in and breathes out, sees flashes of her past, like slides shown for an instant on a white wall in a black room:

  The babysitter on her bed, removing Evan’s little-girl pajamas, unicorns racing down her legs, across her flat chest, fingers thick as sausages pushed way in, “Ride, little girl, ride. Wait till you see what’s next.”

  Her mother pulling from the garbage half-eaten slices of pizza, rats big as cats leaping out and sinking their fangs into her dirty arm.

  Jethro, five men removed from the father she never knew, chasing after her with a belt in his hand, she bouncing off the walls, beaten for saying, “What?” when he asked her a question.

  She was named Evan for a reason, every single year of her life proved that again and again, and now another betrayal, by someone she has trusted, a friend she has clung to, for whom she finally opened the trapdoor to her heart. Her life splayed out for all to read under another’s name. She wants to pick up the saw-toothed knife and kill Karen. God, if she could catch her breath, Evan would be brave enough to do just that.

  Fuck, I thought, furious to be so instantly hooked, wanting to know more about Evan’s gruesome memories, her life stories stolen by Karen, the publishing contract Karen is waving around, whether Evan will follow through with her intention when her panic attack passes. I knew that feeling this way was unfair and unwarranted, but whenever I had spared the briefest glance at this book in my hands, and at the other one on my nightstand, I hoped to sigh in relief when at last I began to read. There was no sigh as I lay in my bed, lightheaded and suffocating, the dread returning then, viperish and oily, snaking through me. I had to look away from the page, away from Ashby’s words that left me exposed, naked, crushed once again.

  Then I was in my bathroom, hands leaving sweaty palm prints on the mirror, eyes filled with tears because I knew I had wasted years of my life, had fooled myself into thinking I was fine with where I was in the world. The opening paragraphs of “Killing Close Friends” unnerved me, describing an instant hatred that felt natural and familiar. Faced with enormous betrayal, Evan wanted to slice, gut, poison, and smash this former best friend of hers. I could imagine her gnawing on Karen’s bones; an articulation of my own desires back when I was young, when I learned who my mother really was. And I felt mildly insane, fleetingly believing the preposterous—that Ashby had written this story with prophetic knowledge that, far in the future, she would hand over her books and I would read this story and feel certain that it contained a message specifically for me, her son. And I wondered—was I the male version of an Evan or a Karen?

  I stood in front of the mirror until my eyes refocused and I saw that my shoulders were hunched up to my ears, my jaw slack.

  Slack-jawed, is what I thought, slack, shocked, shell-shocked.

  The systems of my body chugged back to sudden life, an engine turning over, the tears drying up, the dullness in my eyes receding, a weak light emanating from them once again.

  I was exhausted and I had been up for only an hour.

  When I returned to my bedroom, I turned the book over and looked at the author’s photograph. Even in black and white, she was luminous. Cheekbones high and sharp. Thick lashes framing eyes I knew to be a blistering blue, though they were nearly black in the picture. She was wearing the same special gaze she often wrapped me up in when I was young, our silent mode of communication. Her full mouth was shiny, but I couldn’t tell whether she was wearing some heart-dissecting shade.

  I looked away from her face and thought I should have listened to her when she suggested I keep writing about the squirrel, and later, when she tried to steer me away from the hard-nosed business world I had mistakenly chosen for myself. Had I not felt toward her an early animosity, a belief that she had been disloyal to me, had committed a perfidy by being a writer herself, and a famed one at that, I might not have refuted and refused. Sitting on my bed, I was sure right then I did not blame her for the dissatisfaction I felt with my life, with the fact that my future was a complete unknown.

  I pulled up the blinds, expecting to see a late Indian-summer sky, like the one the day before, but something had changed overnight. The sky was the color of cement, of decay, of the bars of prison cells, and high-speed weather was massing rapidly right outside of my window.

  It had remained warm into October, but now I noticed that the gardens in front of the quaint town houses and the refurbished row houses across the street had lost their pep, and the trees that bordered the sidewalk were fraying, their tight leafy summer canopies eaten away. A plinking of light rain all at once, and I interpreted in those slanted drops a harbinger. Rationally, I knew Ashby could not control the natural world, but still I wondered if the escalating weather would end up on her side.

  I walked out into the huge main room of my apartment, into my open kitchen, started the coffee, then stood at my wall of windows. Fifty tessellated panes giving onto a view of distant spires and near rooftops, always a monumental draw for me, a way to calm or incite.

  The light plinking rain converted into a steady drizzle. Water droplets were dancing on the windshields of the parked cars wedged in, puddling on the sidewalk and road.

  I watched a plump girl slowly jog by down below, brushing water from her face. Even three stories up, I could see her ass cheeks crashing beneath her pink sweatpants, as if she had Columbus’s ships lashed together in there, and I saw the ship of my own life cruelly buffeted by a storming sea. At the corner, she slowed, tugged her underwear free from her crack, then sped back up. She was trying to better herself, and what was I doing? It was a short drop to the pavement, but if a person flung himself just right, the fall could inflict rupturing damage, broken bones, a smashed skull.

  I turned away, filled my cup with hot coffee, and returned to my bed, to resume the weighty obligation to myself that I did not want to be fulfilling.

  “Killing Close Friends” was a locomotive on tracks with switchbacks I had not anticipated.

  “What are you going to do with that knife, Evan? Kill me? Oh, come on, put it down. You were never going to turn the experiences of your life into stories. You said, ‘It would be too hard to put all that pain down on paper,’ so why let that pain go to waste, if someone else can gain from it. It’s the way of the world, the weak and the strong, those who a
re battered down, those who do the battering. I’m sorry, but I didn’t make things as they are.”

  The knife was heavy in Evan’s hand, its jagged teeth gleaming under the kitchen light. She could imagine herself sinking it deep into Karen’s belly, one thrust in, then tearing straight up, through her lungs, her heart, into her throat, silencing her forever. She wanted to see Karen’s bright eyes dead, rolled back in her head, limbs twitching, then nothing at all. She wouldn’t get away with it, she knew that, the trod-upon never do rise up, the meek never do inherit the Earth. But at least she would have removed one of the monsters roaming the world making it unsafe for the rest.

  Evan raised her arm, saw herself as a character in a low-budget horror flick, then put the knife down on the counter and turned away. She could not look at Karen, did not want to see her face anymore. She would tell Karen what she thought of her, then pack up and move out. Someone from workshop would give her their couch for a night or two.

  “Good girl,” Karen said, and Evan ignored her, pressed her hand onto the French bread, felt the crust snap sharply.

  “I can’t believe—” Evan began to say, and then it didn’t matter. She looked down at her side, at the blade that was through her sweater, her T-shirt, deep inside her flesh, at Karen’s hand on the hilt, at Karen’s arm, taut with strength, holding the knife steady, pushing in and in and in, at Karen’s eyes, so close to Evan’s own face, the thrill she saw in them, pupils all dilated, her nose quivering with excitement, her mouth moving, saying words, saying, “Just give in. There’s no coming back from this. It will be better wherever you’re going,” and then Karen jacked the knife upwards and Evan shut her eyes, thought of her name, wondered for a split second if she would finally end up a young warrior in that other world, felt her legs give way, then she was gone.

  I thought: She is a ruthless motherfucker, unsure whether I was referring to Karen Sweet, or to Ashby. It took me a long time to release my trapped breath while I tried thinking about nothing at all. An empty mind, I decided, was not always a terrible thing.

  Then I began “Nina Disappeared.”

  John met Nina in the Literary Fiction section of their neighborhood bookstore. He saw her neck first, slim as a reed, her head lowered over a book, her hair a golden waterfall. When she straightened and turned, her face dislocated his heart. Pale as an ivory cameo.

  He thought of rosebuds when he took her mouth. She had sharp nipples that pricked. Decorative ears that heard words he did not say. She owned an impossibly tiny cunt in which he plunged to glory.

  Before she entered his life, John had skated with women along the cool lake of misperception. He had believed that falling in love was meant for literal translation—an ecstatic high dive into despair, destruction, dissolution. Nina made him realize he had been all wrong; he felt now that love was a chord that retained a steady hum, not a cliff from which he needed to jump, a crash that left him, always, with bloody wounds. When they were naked in bed, John contemplated the unknowable cosmos, puzzles with missing pieces, trees that stayed evergreen, all of it reviving his belief in true and everlasting love. He said to her, “Move in with me,” and she did.

  During the first days of summer, before the heat blanched life down to white bone, Nina was swinging in the hammock John had strung up for her. Looking into the distance, she said, “You know, that forest makes me think of desiccated breadcrumbs and witches with surly red eyes.” He looked, saw only old ash trees and shade, but nodded anyway.

  When she said, “By fall, either we’ll marry, which would be good for you, or I’ll be dead, which would be bad for me,” she didn’t blink at all.

  John was used to Nina’s declamations, the charming way she spoke in either/or and true-or-false constructions, but he could see, in the way she draped a hand around her throat, that the idea she might be dead by the fall surprised her as much as it did him.

  When the trees whispered, leaves a bonfire brew, the air still humid and enveloping, one of those two things was, indeed, true.

  John went looking for Nina in early November. She said she was off to take her regular walk, but she had been gone for an hour, then two, then three, and John put on his shoes, and followed the path she always took. Down their street, then left, left, left, right, four long streets to the outdoor Olympic-size pool at the community center, where she touched the fence and turned back.

  He walked slowly, feeling the autumnal breeze, expecting to see Nina in a second, her face lighting up when she spotted him, running like a gazelle to close the distance between them, wrapping her arms around him, sticking her tongue deep into his mouth.

  He turned each corner, walked down each street, and she wasn’t there with her smile.

  He reached the pool and the gate was open, and he saw Nina’s sparkly pink shoes atop the ten-meter diving board, upright at the very edge, as if a sudden wind had lifted her clear out of them.

  Then he was running and climbing and crossing the springy plank, cradling her shoes to his chest. And it must have been a trick of the mind, because when he looked down, he saw only that the pool was drained of water.

  Standing at the lip, he looked in, and saw what his mind had refused to take in: Nina’s body on the chalky bottom.

  His single thought: how did she manage to fall so neatly? Her summer dress was gathered nicely around her, her eyes were open and clear, her lips curled in a smile, the rhinestone tiara she put on that morning still perfectly poised on her head. A princess who went for a walk ended up in an infinite nap.

  He entered from the shallow end, lifted her pale feet and slid her shoes back on—

  It took me fifty minutes to read a story that raced from love to death. Every sentence I read made me wish, again, that I could write as Ashby wrote. I thought of how I had transported my Henry stories from Rhome to Silicon Valley, back to Rhome, and then here, and had never looked through any of them since I abandoned him when I was eleven.

  On top of my desk, under the detritus of magazines and unopened mail, were folders of new stories I tried writing after fleeing venture capital and before being hired by Think Inc. Not long before I went home to Rhome that pivotal June weekend and found my mother’s secret, I had read a few paragraphs of one, the whole of another, half of a third, the beginnings of two more, thinking they mirrored my life: strong out of the gate, stuck in the rustic middle, failing to find an exit, as if I were nothing more than some cud-chewing cow too dumb to find the pasture with succulent, nourishing grass.

  Then rain cracked through my thoughts. The sky was black. The trees were shuddering. Water was sheeting the street, jumping the gutters. Smoke coiling from the town house chimney across the way disappeared instantly into the clouds. Something dropped on the hardwood floor above my head. Some nights, most weekends, I heard something heavy being rolled, pushed, or pulled up there. That morning it sounded like a rolling pin flattening a dense object into submission. It ceased a few minutes later. I had no idea who, or if anyone, lived above me. I never heard footsteps, or traveling sounds, like water in the pipes, a hammer against a wall, television or music too loud. From the turn of the century, until gutted to the studs and refashioned into luxury apartments, this building had been a Catholic girls’ school, and I wondered if one of the schoolgirl ghosts had stayed behind, the noises telling me when she was at some hurtful form of play.

  One more story, I said to myself, then food, before I pulled out the bottle of good eighty proof. “Away from Home” opened like this:

  Robbie thought she would love their Bora Bora honeymoon. She and Luke spent their days on the blinding white sand, their nights in a thatched hut surrounded by azure water, attained only by rowing out from the beach. The days were fine; she was happy in the light. But once Luke was asleep, there was a nightly whir of thousands of tiny wings in the air—she imagined protruding eyes, thin-as-thread legs searching for a way in through the net that hung like a crown over the bed. She could never tell whether she slept, but at sunrise she was str
angely alert, listening to Luke’s snores and searching for torn-away wings in the fine mesh, but she never found any.

  In those solitary dawn hours, Robbie drank cups of strong coffee out on the balcony and watched the fish below in the sea. Childhood visits to an aquarium had terrified her; she had been certain the fish would drown. In this paradise, it disturbed her again, seeing their gills riffling open, their mouths gasping for the sky. She knew now, of course, that fish turned water into oxygen, but the process still struck her as painful.

  In the late afternoons, Robbie put on her sunglasses, and Luke laced up his running shoes, and she watched his long legs splash through the white foam at the edge of the water until he was gone. Then she stared at their honeymoon hut out in the water and wondered why her need to live in small spaces had not translated to that small island space. The hut was no larger than her current home, than the other minute places she had inhabited.

  Luke did not know her reasons for living what he called her nesting-doll life; she had never told him how she fled to New York as instinctively as fish convert one element into another, a critical oxygenation for the still-vital pieces of her that remained glued together, wanting only from that new city a small space in which to live, a place so small that people, love, and words could not be misplaced, would never disappear, where her secrets would always be within reach. She had not moved in with Luke before the wedding, and even while he toasted their future night after tropical night, she wondered if she ever would.

  I looked away from the page and wondered whether Robbie’s new husband would ever see beneath her surface, understand the mangled, tangled reasons for her anxious self-containment. And whether anyone had ever seen beneath mine.

  My family members, with their magical brains that allowed them to fashion complex works of art, impossible surgeries, inventions spun out of gossamer thoughts, could not fathom how I felt, knowing I was not one of the lucky ones, deprived of supernatural gifts to springboard me into their realm of the rarefied, missing the resplendent power to make something lasting. I am certain they never sensed my pain, the jealousy that left tracks across my heart, that scalded the blood in my veins. It is a long-borne burden, knowing what you lack, and I knew what I lacked. My wrath toward them, and toward all those who soared high in their lives and accomplished the unbelievable by creating eternal works, was boundless. And I could not fathom how anyone could put their gifts in a box and walk away. My father was finding new interests, my mother had never published anything after her two collections, my brother was talking about selling his company, while my future was at a standstill, my book proposal dead. Where, I thought, was the lost and found for discarded genius, from which I could select what I desperately wanted and needed?