The Resurrection of Joan Ashby - Cherise Wolas

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boundaries to prevent any accidental bleeding between the two.

      Volkmann called only twice a year now to confirm Joan had received her royalty statements and checks. She no longer asked about Joan’s plans for her first novel, assumed Joan had ceased writing entirely, consumed with something like the joys of motherhood, and Joan allowed her that belief. The same was true with Annabelle Iger, who called every couple of months, saying, “Haven’t you had enough of this pastoral existence, all this mothering and wifedom? Aren’t you sick of love and diapers? Start writing again before it’s too late.” She and Iger talked of so many things, their editing days together, the men Iger was toying with, the plays Iger saw, the dance clubs Iger still frequented, but Joan never mentioned The Sympathetic Executioners or the Rare Baby stories to her either.

      She was again at a critical juncture, and this time, she needed to maintain the divide, husband and children out in the real world, but on her own, the writing she did would be truly private, consecrated, known only to her. No more reading her work to Daniel and Fancy. The new baby’s arrival would eliminate her study, soon to be transformed into another nursery.

      She watched the reddened sun pale and set, and she pictured a castle with a tower that soared into the sky, a moat that rendered it inviolable, an imaginary place where she would write for the next years, without Martin knowing. She would throw him off her scent, lie and tell him she was taking a break, void entirely his inquisitions. She did not want to hear him talking about her work, suggesting, pontificating, analyzing. On the walk, the names of her characters had been far too familiar in his mouth. He had her and Daniel and the child to come; that would have to be sufficient.

      In that high tower, that place of pure self, she might find her way to that first novel, at last write a book worthy of the reputation she had developed. She only wanted what belonged to her—what she created, her characters, her people, those with whom she spent the clearest hours of her days. It was, she thought, the way to make that truest part of herself whole once again. And if she protected her most essential qualities, the core of Joan Ashby, she could continue to give the rest of her heart to Martin, to Daniel, to the baby inside.

      She thought about Fancy. She could trust Fancy to keep her secret when Joan returned to her work, after the early months with the new one.

      She looked at Martin’s father’s clock on her desk. It had taken only thirty minutes to arrive at her plans for the future. Joan opened the study door and headed toward the living room, where her family was gathered. She could hear the roll of dice, the movement of plastic pieces, Martin and Daniel laughing, accusing each other of cheating, and she was aware how those voices both attracted and repelled her.

       7

      The delivery-room music was raucous in her thirty-second laboring hour. The baby was ten days late, and at the twenty-fifth hour, she had still been ticking off appropriate words: troublesome, exasperating, perverse, contrary, recalcitrant, obstreperous, disobliging, and then the few u words she could recall: unaccommodating, unhelpful, uncooperative, unwanted. Wait, she’d thought, when unwanted spiked, an articulated word she hoped only she heard. And then: entirely true, entirely not true, this time, last time, true and not true. She was sidetracked, the dictionary in her brain slipping away when a nurse increased the sweet epidural drip, and the music changed nature entirely. There had been Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart sailing through the delivery room, she was not an expert in classical music, but they were easily recognizable; now electric guitars were wailing, drumbeats pounding away, licks and harsh syncopations, and Joan’s voice croaked when she yelled, “Please! Change the station.” Nothing changed and she couldn’t tell if the music and her yelling were only inside her own head. Please, she prayed then, though the years had not changed her position about God, or gods, and she had already run through the panoply of words she used to invoke, could remember.

      Daniel’s birth had been rapid, like a rocket, he set a record, leaving Joan with most of her self-respect intact, but not this time, this one already determining the time line of life. Her sweat, rivers of it, started out sweet, had gone sour, then yeasty, and now there was a meaty scent she was inhaling. She felt like a sick and cowering dog.

      The bright lights all at once dimmed—why hadn’t they been lowered from the start, hadn’t they asked for a calm, quiet, melodic delivery?—and then Martin was soothing her forehead, whispering into her ear, “It will be okay.”

      A contraption rose over her belly, gloved hands draping reams of thick plastic over it, cutting off everything below from her view. She was in parts, leaving those on the other side to contend with what was beneath her curved flesh. Scrub caps darted around, white, pink, and yellow disks rising and falling, rapid voices chasing each other’s tight tails, words like maternal tachycardia, fetal distress, spinal block, catheter, IV lines, and Joan felt something sting her hand. Out of the cyclone came her doctor’s quiet voice, “Scalpel. Starting Pfannenstiel incision.”

      How wonderful now that everything was silent, the pain and fear gone, just the slow, slow beating of her own heart, her mind in a white haze that transformed into bleedingly bright primary colors. She remembered the pictures of a C-section that she had seen in one of Martin’s medical books, the scalpel so sharp against the thin skin that the underlying yellow fat layer burst, revealing the shiny, tough, fibrous fascia, over the abdominal muscles. A scalpel nicking an opening in that tough lower layer, then pulled apart, revealing the filmy, flimsy layer, the peritoneum, the actual lining of the abdominal cavity; it, too, was opened, with sharp, thin scissors. Then a small cut through her retroperitoneal. She heard “Retractor,” and pictured her bladder pulled down toward her feet, away from the rest of the surgery, sparing it injury. A final incision across the lower portion of her womb, her uterus easily tilted up and laid on her belly, revealing the baby only to the doctor and nurses busy working. There were pictures of it all in Martin’s book and a sentence that read: Pulling gently on the head will allow the rest of the delivery. She heard “Clamping umbilical cord,” and then she heard no more.

      She woke in a hospital room and wondered why she was there, wondered when someone would come to explain why she felt nothing below her waist, nothing at all. She knew she should be afraid, but something in her bloodstream was lifting her up, up, up, out of the bed, and she was floating just below the ceiling. Looking down, she was at the old dining-room table she used as a desk, the wood floor of her East Village apartment sloped under her feet, pages crawling with words flying through the air, stacking up next to the typewriter, there was a title on the tip of her tongue, that slid right off, and she, too, slid away.

      She woke again, and knew she was in her hospital room, that there was, or had been, a baby. Martin was on the bed, carefully balanced, tenderly looking at her. She heard him say, “That was all unexpected,” then ask how she was feeling, but she couldn’t respond, couldn’t keep her eyes open, they were like windows slamming shut, and her last thought, It’s all unexpected, reverberated then faded away.

      She woke again and Martin was in the armchair next to the bed, the baby hidden in a blue blanket. So the operation had been successful, the baby alive. “He emerged with bravado and his eyes clenched tight. He has all of his parts,” Martin said, and Joan wanted to say, “Turn down the painkillers, I can’t stay awake,” but she was gone before the words left her mouth.

      She was awake and alone in her hospital room. She felt wrecked and sore and the clock hands were elongated snails inching around the black markings of the day, but perhaps it was night, and late, because she couldn’t hear the nurses laughing at their station, couldn’t hear the shush of their foam-soled shoes.

      She woke and knew it was morning from the slant of the sun lighting up her hands, the veins standing out, needles inserted and taped down, and then the heavy door pushed open, and there was Martin, smiling and cradling the new baby, sitting down on the bed, transferring the infant into her arms. “Your first glimpse of your mommy,” Martin said, and Joan saw a cap of jet-black hair, skin white as alabaster, the combination giving him the look of a baby ghoul or a vampire, something medieval, potentially

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