The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

by Cherise Wolas

  There are no novels on the shelves, which she wouldn’t expect, Eric was never a reader like Daniel, but there are also none of Eric’s computer coding books, his dog-eared bibles that were cherished belongings not long ago.

  Joan realizes she does not know what he has done with his apartment in New York, if he has rented it, or has a Solve employee staying there, or if it stands empty, his bed unmade, everything where it was, the liquor bottles, the pills, the various drugs, when he overdosed, was rushed to the hospital, then flown by private jet to Oregon.

  The kettle whistles and Eric turns off the flame, opens a red tin can, measures loose tea leaves. He prepares the teapot with ceremony, swishing hot water inside, pouring it out, filling it to the top again, before he gently drops in the tea ball. Steam arcs out of the funnel, vanishes in the white light of the room. Joan wonders if he remembers the after-school tea parties Fancy prepared for them, the way he abhorred tea unless Fancy filled his cup mostly with milk, spooned in tablespoons of sugar, the cupcakes and Bundt cakes she made, saving a small bowl for each boy to lick with his fingers. She wonders if he remembers eating dirt, sticks, pebbles, all those baby aspirin.

  The cottage is graceful, proportioned so nicely, a mix of no color and pale dreamy colors. It feels to Joan like a place of perpetual happiness. She can’t imagine voices raised here, charging anger, disappointment, tragedy. A person intent on additional self-destruction would be discomfited by its calm, by the hope carried through the rooms on the slight breeze that travels through.

  “Have you read all of these books?”

  “A lot of them, but only a few are mine. They came with the place. The ones on Kangra and Pahari painting are really cool.”

  Really cool is the first connection between the Eric Joan knew and the one preparing a tea tray. She thinks of telling him about Camille Nagy, how for years she has studied the Kangra Valley School of Painting here. That an upright Englishwoman studies those paintings whose focal theme is largely erotic sentiment—Shringar—which Joan thinks Camille has probably lacked in her life. Camille has taken Joan to the Museum of Kangra Art to see some of those paintings. Lyrical and naturalistic, colors extracted from minerals and vegetables, and although they were painted more than four centuries ago, they have lost none of their enamel-like luster. Faces with porcelain delicacy, soft and refined, female charms on display, their bodies exceptionally beautiful. Standing in front of one such painting, Joan had said, “Our bodies were that lovely at Dal Lake,” and Camille blushed and said, “Well, yours was.” When Joan saw Rama and Sita in the Forest, painted in 1780, with the Kangra landscape of verdant greenery, trees, creepers, flowering plants on fields of hilled grass, brooks and rivulets and springs running through, Joan thought Devata looked exactly that way, the painting so similar to how she described her own arcadia in Words. Though they have grown close in these last weeks, sojourns to Kareri Lake, the Tattwani Hot Springs, the tea gardens in Chilgari and Dari, the daily meditation practice led by Ela that Joan has committed to attending three times a week, Camille still refuses to show Joan her own paintings using the Kangra techniques. Joan would like to share all of this with Eric, but it’s not why she is here in his cottage with him, and she has been here in Dharamshala for far longer than he assumes.

  Eric adds the teapot to a wooden tray, where porcelain teacups already rest. “We’re ready,” he says and she follows him out into the garden, an enclave surrounded by those tall, tapered trees, their leaves like lace, the perimeter lined with a variety of greens in all different shades, filled with haphazard beds from which spring all sorts of flowers, indigenous, Joan thinks, because she recognizes none of them, except for the blowsy, splashy rhododendrons in bright pink and red. There is a wooden bench, small chairs, and the sculptured trunk of a tree cut down long ago. A short distance away is a shallow pond, over which a wooden bridge leaps, snapdragons hovering at the edges. It is very much like the landscapes in the Kangra paintings, until she sees, near the pond, two white canvas slung-back chairs. This is where Eric has acquired his golden tan. She wonders if he has met a girl that he likes, if a young Dharamshalan woman arranges her own bared limbs on that second chair. She hopes so. It’s time. After all, he turns twenty-two at the end of the month. She looks up and there is an immaculate view of the Himalayas, nearly within reach.

  Eric sets the tray on the tree trunk and points to the small chairs, perfect for one of Fancy’s tea parties. “They’re very comfortable,” he says, and the low height makes Joan feel she is emerging from the earth, that she is her very own flower, the way Ela seems to be when she arranges herself on a red silk pillow, her saris in abundant pastels around her.

  Eric pulls the other chair closer to Joan, seats himself, lifts the teapot lid to check on the brewing. “I’ve grown to like tea, but it has to be strong. I hope that’s okay.”

  She nods. “I like it dark too,” she says.

  He fills the two cups. “I have no sugar. I’ve given that up, given everything up. Absolutely nothing toxic since back then.”

  “I’m so glad,” she says. “I don’t need any sugar,” although really she does, even just a few packets of the fake stuff.

  The birds in the trees chitter, insects lightly buzz, a wisp of a breeze tickles the blades of grass. It is Edenic here, she thinks, sipping the pungent tea, rough with something soft at its base.

  “Delicious,” she says, and then the words fall away.

  In the past, in their past, she would have filled up the empty space, spoken, inquired, felt responsible for their conversational interactions, and when she wasn’t policing him, or yelling at him, then trying to encourage him to—well, who knows what she wanted to encourage him to do, or to be like. Perhaps more like Daniel, normal in some way, though Daniel has blown that concept away. But she had wished back then for Eric’s normalcy, such a hard wish when his genius was so extraordinary. It had been like hoping a prima ballerina’s legs were chopped off, or a sculptor’s hands mangled, or a photographer’s eyesight lost to an unprovoked acid attack, and when she was thinking those thoughts at the start of the seven-year cycle, she knew if her wish for Eric’s normalcy were granted, she would be the one wielding the instrument of his death, directly responsible for the nuclear fallout. She had made that promise when she put her novel in the box, that he would not die on her watch, and not much later, that he would not die by her thoughts.

  She lets the quiet grow around them, settles into it, into this nascent Joan, a runaway woman who is also, still, a mother to this son. She has worked hard since arriving in Dharamshala to banish mother from her thoughts, to not consider the sons that she birthed, to stay cushioned within the fantasy that she never gave anything up, never married Martin, never left New York, never experienced pregnancy and motherhood, or the sporadic friendships with the Pregnant Six, that she never stepped down from the heights of her powers, that she climbed from peak to peak, each one higher than the one before, and with each leap, from mountain to mountain, realizing more of her dreams, those she had dreamt about and those she had never thought to imagine, never relegating Joan Ashby to a closet, a drawer, a trash bin, a box in a garage.

  When she looks at Eric, there is a bliss to him, not superimposed over his original nature, but altering his nature entirely, fundamentally.

  This is another lesson for Joan to heed.

  Vita would say, “It’s all part of the reason why you’re here.”

  Ela would say, “This awareness means you are concentrating well during your meditation practice.”

  Camille Nagy would say, “Don’t get ahead of yourself. Pay attention.”

  * * *

  At last, Eric tugs quietly at the silence. “Do you remember what I said I wanted to do when I go out of rehab?”

  “I do remember,” Joan says. “You said you wanted to sell Solve and take yourself to a sacred place where you could discover who you might truly be.”

  He looks pleased that she has recalled his words so easily,
and exactly.

  “So, I’ve accomplished two out of three so far. I’m here in this sacred place, and I sold Solve.”

  Then he tucks his bare feet up onto his knees, in a half-lotus position. This son, who eschewed athletics and exercise during his childhood, who spent his teenage years sitting at desks, at tables, on couches and floors, surrounded by his helping ghosts, developing his remarkable computer program, is as flexible as a pretzel.

  Joan wants to ask him what the sale of his company means for him, wants to know when he plans to tell his father. She would have gotten a phone call or an email from Martin if he already knew about it. And she hasn’t.

  Martin will not be pleased by this news. He believes obligations and responsibilities are necessary to form a man, to make him good, to keep him solidly on his chosen road, the tenets of the navy vice-admiral at work. Long ago, Martin turned into a man of blacks and whites, who doesn’t understand those are shades, not real colors, and can’t understand people who know the right thing to do, and then do the wrong thing, inevitably hurting themselves, and others. He has no tolerance for what he views as self-imposed frailties. He sees Eric’s sabbatical, his flight to Dharamshala, as a correctable error, a blip that Eric will soon right, get back to his ship, regain the helm, steer Solve into its limitless future.

  Joan sees all at once that Martin’s years of doctoring, the dreams and nightmares he claims to see when operating on his patients’ eyes, have not shored up his own internal reserves. He is more vulnerable than she, has always been so, the way he wants only to consider the good in others, denies the existence of weakness, of trouble, of conflict, does not view life and its humans through the prism she can access so easily, the dark, the sickly ironic, the tragedies she once mined in her work. He has needed to believe that Eric would be all right, that a crisis was not truly upon them requiring his intervention. She knew though, and she was there: Joan, the most mothering of anti-mothers, has always been there, for both of her sons.

  She wants to ask Eric so many questions, but then he says, “I’m practicing yoga every day. Like you always have.”

  She is here in India, the birthplace of yoga, and she has not sought out a class to take, and there must be dozens, has not, even in her pine suite, gone through the series of poses she knows by heart.

  “It’s been a while since I’ve done yoga,” she says, wondering if Eric will find that strange, when its daily practice was her only enduring constant, a saving hour away from home, away from him and his cohorts, their equipment and meetings, her fears about what he, or the others, might be doing in secret.

  “There’s a yoga place that I like. We’ll go together,” is all he says.

  This son of hers is remaking his life, proof that such can be undertaken, that she might do the same with her own. She has the opportunity right this moment to reconfigure their relationship, to leave behind the old labels and their usual roles, to enter a new way of being that has little to do with her past as his mother, with his past as her troubled, intractable, brilliant son to whom she has never felt especially close, whose absorption of every atom in her world was so intolerable.

  She wonders what she ought to say to him, how much she ought to tell him, whether they need to clear the air, say all that has never been said, if she should confess everything.

  What would she say?—I am here in India because Daniel betrayed me; I’m sorry I loved him more than I loved you; I’m sorry he was so much easier to love than you were; I showed you my love when I sacrificed seven years of my life for you.

  Eric has changed, by choice, lit up from within, with the kind of self-reflective wisdom she thought his genius would refuse. She is different too, even in just six weeks, though her own ultimate path is still murky and unclear.

  There is no need to tell Eric how long she has been here; with that light in his eyes, he might already know. Why not begin anew in this beautiful place, by allowing him to take the lead, to follow wherever he wants to take her, to cede her role as battle-ax, detective-mother, battalion chief.

  “I want to tell you how I got here,” Eric says.

  She looks at him directly.

  This might be the first time since his birth that their thinking is in sync.

  He holds her eyes, which he never used to do, and says, “I started at the beginning with the Dalai Lama’s book The Art of Happiness. What I should say is I came upon The Art of Happiness by accident or The Art of Happiness found me. Do you remember the bench we always sat on in Oregon, when there was a break between therapy groups?”

  Joan nods.

  “Well, the day you left, I went back to our bench and found The Art of Happiness underneath it. It was just there on the ground, and I picked it up and started reading it. And I couldn’t stop reading it, and when I finished it, I researched it and learned it was the first book the Dalai Lama wrote. And somehow, through serendipity or luck, I had started at the beginning.

  “Then I read his other books while I was at the center. How to See Yourself as You Really Are, The Good Heart, The Wisdom of Forgiving. I decided to skip Advice on Dying. Even though I was in rehab, I really hoped that’s not where I would end up.”

  He looks at Joan to see if she’s caught his small joke. She has and he grins.

  “Then I read Transforming the Mind. The strange thing was that just before I ended up in Oregon, I was researching the Dalai Lama. Everything about where he lived, Dharamshala, if it was a place I should come to, and then I found those books.

  “As soon as I began reading his teachings, I knew I had to change everything in my life, sell Solve as I told you I wanted to do, figure out how to dedicate my life to others in a meaningful way. That’s why I came here, and why I started writing him letters as soon as I got here. I want help in making my intentions real.

  “It’s great you’ve come here now, because earlier this week, I got a reply. I’m going to be meeting him. I don’t know when yet, but the letter said sometime in the next several months.”

  “So you’re planning on staying here for at least that long?”

  “Yes. But I might stay longer. Maybe forever. Would that be strange?”

  Joan leans over and touches her hand to his cheek.

  Did she last touch him in this intimate way the summer he went off to computer camp?

  In Oregon, she’d kept her distance. Buying him the candy he wanted, new clothes from a local store, participating with him in the counselor-led meetings, participating in all the ways demanded of her, sitting with him on that bench while he talked, it seemed, about everything that had ever been in his mind since he was a child. She had been desperate for him to come through it, to have her fears assuaged about her own culpability. She had hugged him, and held his hand, but those touches, during those weeks they had been together, were still somehow removed from intimacy.

  She realizes suddenly that Eric has ceased thinking of her as the enemy who wanted to hold him back, that he sees her now as a mother who wanted to save him. It is a stunning realization, and not anything she had imagined.

  “How wonderful that you’ve got a response. And no, I don’t think it would be strange if you wanted to stay here.”

  She won’t say anything about having written her own letter to the Dalai Lama, that Kartar delivered her letter to the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, into the hands of the Dalai Lama’s secretary, where all letters addressed to him wind up. She does not want to blur the line, to say Daniel’s name aloud in this garden, to take anything away from Eric, this new life he is creating.

  “How many letters did you write before you heard back?”

  “Eighteen. A girl I know, Amari, told me how hard it is to get a private audience with him, that he grants very few, and that even if granted, it might be four months or more before you actually meet with him. Amari said he gets hundreds of letters every day and the secretary reviews each case on its merits.”

  She wonders if Amari is the girl who uses the second canvas ch
air by the pond, then thinks she has sent only the one letter, and that if she is serious about trying to elicit the Dalai Lama’s advice, she will have to write many more.

  She is forming the words she wants to say to Eric, that she is relieved to find him so well, proud of his progress, gratified that he is alive, when for the second time, he taps into her thoughts.

  “My past belongs to me, and yours belongs to you, and unless you need to talk about all that stuff between us, I’m fine if we don’t. I’ve learned it’s best to leave it behind, to keep moving ahead. I know you’ve been badly hurt. I just hope you don’t blame yourself for me. I meant what I said in Oregon, it was all my own doing. You tried to stop me, I know that, but I wouldn’t listen. I thought you wanted to keep me from my destiny. But that was never my destiny. This is.

  “I know I can’t snap my fingers to make it all okay for you, to wipe out all these last years, but this is a good place to find the solace you need.”

  He has turned into a young Buddha, replete with the wisdom, the truth, that Joan is trying to learn, that she thinks about in Ela’s meditation class and when she is alone on her own. She should tell Eric he’s not responsible for her being here, that she is here not because of what she suffered as a result of him or Solve or his troubles, but because of what his older brother has done.

  Would Eric feel better or worse if he knew he was not the compelling reason behind this trip to Dharamshala? That his flagrancy with life and death did not send her in flight from home, traveling across the world, that life-and-death matters had not trumped betrayal? Would a fine parsing of the truth accomplish anything?