The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

by Cherise Wolas

  It was both parents at once two hours later, driving their cars into the garage, the mother waving at Nathan as he rose from a boulder in their front yard.

  “You’re the new neighbor, well, not so new now,” Renata Tabor said, placing a cake box on her car roof. “They had his favorite cake,” Renata called across the garage to her husband.

  When Nathan Felt walked into the garage, Renata was thinking he was handsome, the kind of man she wished her eldest daughter, Phoebe, would date. But Nathan Felt wasn’t saying, “It’s nice to meet you.” Instead he was saying, “I’m so sorry. And I’m sorry, but I don’t know your son’s name—” and he continued on, tripping over the words he had considered how to say, about what he had witnessed—their son leaping off the roof. And what he had done—his immediate call for help. And the aftermath—that Simon had been unconscious when Nathan reached him, but he stayed with him and the EMTs had come quick. He was only part of the way through when Renata pressed her hands over her mouth to stopper her screams. Nathan Felt did not tell the Tabors how it sounded, the roar when their son struck the cement.

  The streetlights were against them. Harry braked hard at the first red, then he sped up and caught yellows all the way, until they blew into emergency parking at the hospital. Renata was desperate, Harry wild-eyed, prepared for more violence in the emergency room, but when they ran in, it was quiet and empty, as if nothing bad ever happened in that long room filled with sick bays. The privacy drapes, green fabric on tracks, every one was pulled all the way back.

  There was silence at first and Renata thought her hearing had been blown out by fear, but then she heard music, an old-fashioned transistor radio on the nurses’ counter, tuned to the oldies station, and Renata recognized the Neil Young song, about a needle and the damage done, and she remembered being with Harry when they were young and unmarried, listening to that song while Harry’s index finger inched down and he tried to find her perfect spot which back then he had not yet found, and Renata roared, “Off with the music,” and the music was gone.

  The emergency doctor on call appeared in front of them, pushing thinning blond hair back from his sunburned forehead. “Tabor,” Harry said, and the doctor nodded. “He’s alive, but several surgeries, to pin and plate together your son’s shattered ankles, the mangled bones of which tore through the skin, to set his broken femurs, immobilize his unhinged clavicle, and his shoulders, which were wrenched from their sockets. We set his broken arm, too.”

  Late Friday night, when the anesthesia had worn off but Simon’s eyes were still closed, the doctor who now had a name, Dr. Miner, had Simon moved into the hospital room so that when he woke, his parents would be with him.

  The Tabors watched Simon from vinyl armchairs once the color of bright sunflowers, now faded and cracked. They watched as the nurses monitored Simon carefully with their adept efficiency. And while there were no guarantees, as Dr. Miner continued to tell them when he checked on his patient, flipped through the chart, rattled the IV linkages, and placed his long surgeon’s fingers atop the chirruping equipment, Simon’s brain was fully functioning. And the news, in general, seemed to be good: his brain had not swelled, and Dr. Miner thought it unlikely that it would swell in the hours to come, and the blood tests showed that Simon’s system was free of alcohol and drugs.

  “He is lucky not to have broken his neck, or his spine, that he will not be permanently damaged,” Dr. Miner told them.

  Amidst all of his no guarantees, Dr. Miner held out hope that Simon would eventually wake and be absolutely fine, “Once we release him, he will be housebound, room-stuck, months of healing ahead of him to mend what’s been broken and split.”

  However, it was now Sunday morning and why Simon had lapsed into something beyond mere unconsciousness, lightly termed a coma by Doctor Miner, was unclear. Renata and Harry listened and nodded. They asked pertinent questions and received middling answers. At the end of every visit, the doctor pressed his hands to their shoulders and left the Tabors to sit quietly, to watch and wait, to absorb, yet again, their teenage son having, perhaps, done something to himself.

  The other stories in “The Rx of Life” were narrated by Nathan Felt, the two EMTs, the two operating room nurses, Judith and Louise, and Dr. Miner. Every one of them was greatly and personally, and in some cases existentially, impacted by the broken boy asleep for such a long time at Desert Memorial. In those spearheaded by the doctor and nurses, Ashby somehow made the medical terminology read like poetry.

  In the third section, “Familial Truth,” the final six stories were narrated by Simon Tabor’s parents, Renata and Harry, his sisters, Phoebe and Rachel, the part-time housekeeper, Consuela, and his dog, Scooter. Each debated whether Simon intended serious harm to himself or not, and through all those prismatic interpretations, the Tabor family’s complex history uncoiled.

  Harry had been a stockbroker who engaged in insider trading, and when he feared he would end up in jail, gutted, broiled, and eaten, he gave his ill-gotten gains to charities and packed up his family—then comprised of himself, his wife, and two daughters—and left Connecticut for Bakersfield, because it seemed that living in a city with stifled imagination would rein in his larcenous impulses. Now he was the guy who handed over insurance check payouts, the last best hope for people in the midst of terrible losses.

  On the Friday Simon threw himself off the roof, the entire family was gathering to celebrate his sixteenth birthday. Phoebe, a lawyer, was driving in from Los Angeles, bringing with her a young man she described as her paramour, knowing that word would irk her mother, the paramour apparently some kind of prophet. Renata was hoping he was the kind of prophet who did not predict the future, but noticed the present. Rachel, working on her master’s thesis at the University of Washington and waiting to hear where the Peace Corps was sending her, would, Renata knew, arrive with her strange vibrations all seemingly connected to Rachel’s infatuation with Valentine, who was in her graduate program. It seemed possible to Renata that Rachel, who insisted on being called Rae, had not yet realized she was gay.

  And at the quiet center of everything was Simon, the boy pale and waxy and still in his hospital bed.

  “Bedside” began like this:

  Renata holds her breath and waits for the chirrups, sweet as a baby bird calling out to its mother. There is the first one, then the second, the third, and on and on, an unwavering call Renata wants to believe is a sign from her own baby, calling out to his mother. These chirrups she has been hearing since Friday night are a sign of a sort, or at least a sign from the machines attached to him, aural proof of the steadiness, the durability, of Simon’s fulsome heart. How silent he was, alert to nothing, when as a baby he woke to the slightest noise. His naps had required turning the house into a mausoleum. He could hear anything, everything, the neighbor’s cat treading on leaves one house over, a quiet cough from a stranger out on the sidewalk taking an evening stroll, his sisters, before they left home, talking downstairs in the den about boys, when he was upstairs in his bedroom with the door closed. During this week that led up to she and Harry sitting here by his side, Renata had questioned his formerly remarkable hearing. “Simon,” she found herself saying, then calling out more loudly, “Simon!” then yelling “SIMON!” because her son’s hearing had become selective in that teenager way. There was so much before him, Renata had thought, but how would he get ahead if he refused to answer the simplest of inquiries? When Simon would eventually look up, he had said, “Mom, enough, I heard you. I need time to think.” Think about what? Renata wanted to scream, but she had not, she had kept quiet. Now she wondered if she was to blame for this situation they found themselves in; the beckoning summer a misplaced joke, their world suddenly cold and sterile, their son, unmoving, silent, in his hospital bed.

  Since Friday night, when her head is not bowed, Renata stares at Simon’s black curls, heavy and lifeless on the pillow. Those curls, inherited from neither Renata’s side of the family, nor from Harry’s, made
Simon appear to be running, even when he was still and focused, with an intensity that was stunning: comic books, stamp collections, five-thousand-piece puzzles, the histories of trains, the Southwest, the samurai of Japan, tae kwon do, a year spent writing haiku. Now, nearly every hour, Renata pulls one of his curls straight, then tugs a little too hard, hoping that a bit of pain will jostle loose whatever is clamped shut in Simon’s brain. She imagines her son stuck inside a hole, a big boulder wedged atop, like the one in their front yard, where Nathan Felt had been sitting, waiting to deliver the news, and a mother’s superhuman strength is needed to roll that boulder away, let in the light. She imagines, for some reason, parrots strutting back and forth across that boulder. Each time she pulls, she tells herself to expect nothing. But her heart folds up tighter when Simon’s eyes do not open, when he does not move, reflexively at least, away from the pain. Still, it gives her succor, reminds her that she will always know his scalp intimately, though the days of washing his downy hair in the sink, and then in the tub, are long gone. That instantly recoiling curl shores up Renata’s belief that Simon retains an essential vitality, a life force within, that he will prevail and emerge from this, and she feels her hope renewed. At least for a while. An hour later, when she springs free a different curl, tugs at it hard, she cycles again through fear-hope-fear, and bows her head.

  Since Friday night, Harry has watched his wife pull on his son’s curls. He does not understand what meaning the action has for her, or what effect Renata thinks it might have. He, too, has been drawn to physically connect with his son. Every so often, he places a sweaty palm on the sheet that covers Simon’s left calf. The first time he did so, at five in the morning that dreadful first night in the hospital, Harry was startled to find that calf, remembered as matchstick thin, seemed overnight to have turned thicker, nearly muscular. Simon’s failure to fill out had bothered Harry over the last couple of years—he himself had matured early in his own youth—but in that murky early morning hour, there was a new meatiness Harry was certain he would have noticed in late spring, when Simon took to wearing shorts to school. But he had not noticed any such change.

  A nurse entered the room with trays of plastic-wrapped hospital food that she set down on the credenza. “In case you’re hungry. You need to eat, keep up your own strength.” Harry tried to thank her, but he was overcome by wracking coughs. Finally, he said, “Thank you, that’s kind,” and the sound of his voice, so thin and high, that voice from his boyhood, came as a surprise, how much he sounded like Simon. The nurse’s smile was tender as she shut the door behind her.

  Harry again placed his palm on Simon’s left calf and it felt returned to the form he recalled, pliable and juvenile, and Harry was confused. Which thigh of Simon’s was the real one? The thick or the thin? And he wondered if he had lost true contact with his son during the critical years, closed his eyes, and hoped that he had not.

  I was spellbound and rapt, tearing through the pages, through the hours, all the while bringing the book closer and closer to my eyes, until I realized that whatever light there had been in the sky had disappeared behind the black clouds. I leapt up and turned on the lamps in the great room, saw my repeating reflection in the velvety black of my wall of windows.

  I had only the epilogue left to read and I jumped into it immediately. The epilogue brought the book around to the start, returning to Simon Tabor as the hemophiliac who lived those other lives, traveled to faraway places.

  Some may tussle with these disclosures, certain that these pages contain fabrications, and that I, Simon Tabor, am passing along deliberate mistruths to the naïve. Who can say what is true or what is false, when all of life filters through the personal. My own experience has taught me there is no golden ticket at birth; the richest life is stitched with thievery. Take what you need from everyone. Just do right by those stolen gifts. Exhaust all to ashes. If you are brave, you too may experience what I have experienced: a transformed life turned extraordinary, miraculous, and singular.

  With that coda, Fictional Family Life concluded. When I looked up, I felt myself absent, not yet returned home. As I lived the existences of the hemophiliac Simon Tabor, and his imaginary alter egos, and learned the kaleidoscopic truth about the real Simon Tabor who had thrown himself off a roof, day had turned into night, and I did not remember when I last thought about food or drink, or my mother, or myself. I stood up and tried to rejigger back into my body.

  It was four in the afternoon according to the microwave panel. Outside, the world was raw. The trees were stripped clean, branches trembling under the onslaught of water. The gutters were rivers. Across the street, lights were on in the town houses and in the trim row houses. Shadows crisscrossed behind half-opened shutters and shades. No one walked on the sidewalk. Cars did not idle or drive slowly down the street searching for nonexistent parking spots. Perhaps my neighbors had listened to the same Weather Channel report yesterday. Galoshes won’t cut it, better be able to swim, stay home.

  The silence settled. But Simon Tabor’s last words in his epilogue were pounding within me. It was nuts to heed the final command of a narrator who had pitched himself out into space, and then reimagined himself as a hemophiliac, as a way to somehow both distance himself from and understand his motivations, who had easily created a host of wild characters living lives he—they—wanted to experience. But there was so much power in the truths underlying Fictional Family Life, and I felt how those truths were arranging my thoughts, how Ashby’s ultimate sentences presented a potential road map to my own future.

  In my mind, I suddenly heard Johnny Cash singing in that gravelly voice deepened by hurt, perforated by longing, recorded maybe a year before he died. A line returned to me, Johnny’s tumultuous voice digging deep—If I could start again, a million miles away. Perhaps I was wearing blinders, as horses do, or seeing what I wanted to see, or just confused, but Ashby’s work was leading me toward the path I had long wanted to travel, showing me a way back to my past.

  I called Lucky Star again. “Is this Kartar?” I said, recognizing his voice.

  “Most certainly. The one and only.”

  “You delivered breakfast to me yesterday,” I said, and reminded him of where I lived.

  “No need to tell me, sir. You are the good man with the home that is comforting. Do you not ever visit the supermarket?” I heard shouting erupt behind him. The way Mr. Patel sounded when he yelled at Rajeev in the school parking lot. “A mixture,” Rajeev said to me all those years ago, “of Hindi, Marathi, and some pidgin English words, all of it like guns firing when my father is pissed with me.” I could translate the words shouted at Kartar without any problem.

  “Apologies, sir. There is no need for supermarkets. None whatsoever. What may I bring to you?”

  I gave him my order and then he asked me something strange. “Sir, do you have any siblings?” I said that I had a younger brother.

  “I have no sibling,” Kartar said. “My mother says with great pleasure that she and the world can handle but a single one of me. You have a brother, so your mother must not say such a thing about you. I ask about your sibling because I could not feel him in your home. This brother of yours, is he the sheep?”

  “The sheep?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir, you know, the sheep, the one who lollygags around, always making trouble, never listening to his elders.”

  “You mean the black sheep,” and for several awful moments I wanted to say, “Yes, yes, he is.” But could Eric be defined as the Manning black sheep when he was rich as Croesus?

  He had begun calling late that summer and engaging me in long conversations, which he had never done before; our previous conversations had always been shorter and took place in his bedroom or mine, or out in the glen, when we both lived at home in Rhome, before I went off to college and he became who he was.

  In our last one, just a few days before, he told me he was researching Dharamshala, where the Dalai Lama lived in a compound, a place of monasteries and st
upas that Eric said were sacred monuments symbolizing enlightenment. Telling me that people stayed in Dharamshala for months on end, meditating, learning, making treks to all sorts of places imbued with healing properties. Telling me that people wrote letters to the Dalai Lama, hoping to be granted a private audience. And when I said, What’s this all about? Eric said, I’m thinking I want a new life. I’ve done this one, and even though I’ve done really well, I’m not sure it’s good for me. Don’t most of us wish we could start over again? People say they would beg, borrow, and steal to change their lives. I just have the cash to do such a thing in my own way.

  Then he was talking logistics, that the flight to Delhi took fifteen hours, and from there, he would make his way to Dharamshala. Though most visitors apparently took a thirteen-hour bus ride, the option of an overnight train from Delhi to a place called Chakki Bank intrigued him.

  Like that movie we saw, he said, about brothers in India on a train, reuniting with each other and searching for their runaway mother. The Darjeeling Limited, I said, and I wondered if he wanted me to go with him, and I went through a rapid analysis of what it would be like to be in India with the younger brother I sometimes loved and mostly loathed because of his genius and his wealth and his besting a world I could never be part of. He did not feel the break in my thoughts, was talking then about how he’d take the overnight train from Delhi to the Pathankot small railhead gauge station, and from there take another train up the Kangra valley. I had no idea what a small railhead gauge station was.

  Then Eric was saying, This is what the Internet guides say, and he read, “The ascending trip takes no less than six hours up through a beautiful valley and one should expect delays. At Kangra, you will make your way to the station for the final leg of your trip, a bus to McLeod Ganj in Dharamshala.” Once there, I’ll be on foot the rest of the time, he said.