The Secret of Joy (16 page)

“Your room at the lodge will be covered, of course, since you’ll be working, really.”

“That’s okay, Joy. I’ll pay my own way.”

Joy let out a deep breath. “I was hoping you’d say that. Ever since Harry moved downstairs, I’ve been using only my own mon—” Dead silence. “Ugh, see, you
are
good at getting people to say things they don’t mean to or don’t want to. I have to go. The group is meeting at my house on Friday at six thirty.”

“You won’t be sorry,” Rebecca said as though Joy had just hired her for the job of her dreams. “I know this isn’t … easy for you. Having me drop on your head at all, let alone when you’re going through a separation of sorts, and—”

“So there’ll be three couples on the tour,” Joy interrupted, the sharp edge in her tone saying,
Back off, chickie. We’re not on the bus yet
.

“Three couples sounds manageable. So you and Harry, Ellie and Tim, and another couple?”

“The Cutlasses. Aimee and Charles. I don’t know them—well, I know Aimee from the library, she’s one of the librarians. I don’t know if you’ve been over there—she’s the tall, slender redhead? Anyway, I don’t know her very well. She saw one of my flyers posted. I’ve never met her husband. We’ll all meet at my house on Friday for a brief hello and then take the minibus to the lodge.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” Rebecca said. “I really think I can do some good.”

“See you Friday.” Click.

Purpose!
Rebecca leaped up and looked in her closet for a weekend’s worth of outfits befitting a … what should she call herself exactly? She didn’t think throwing the words
divorce mediation paralegal
would ease the anxiety of the men on the trip.
Divorce
was a big ugly scary word, but then again, perhaps that word would scare everyone into paying attention to their marriages since the alternative was so bleak. And mediation was a word that required definition. No one ever seemed to know what a paralegal did, so that was helpful.

I help couples reach agreements
. That was what she did, what she liked to do, what eased something in her own heart.

As Rebecca was wondering if a tweed skirt was too therapisty and too much for a Maine camping lodge, the phone rang.

Please don’t be Joy rescinding
, Rebecca thought.

It
was
Joy. Rebecca held her breath.

Joy cleared her throat three times before the rush of words finally came out. “My mother and stepfather are coming this
weekend to babysit Rex while Harry and I are gone on the tour. If you happen to see her on Friday at my house when the group gathers, I would appreciate it if you didn’t let her know who you are. I’ll tell her about you when I’m ready.”

Pia Jayhawk. Rebecca wondered how she’d feel when she saw her, if she’d feel anything. If she’d understand something then she couldn’t now.

“Okay,” Rebecca said. She wasn’t so sure she’d be able to even speak to the woman, let alone introduce herself.
“Hi, I’m Rebecca Strand. You had an affair with my father twenty-six years ago. Remember?”

“I have your word?”

Does my word mean something to you?
she wanted to ask. “You have my word.”

“Thanks,” she said, and hung up.

A chill seemed to seep through Rebecca’s room, moving inside her sweater, into her skin, into her bones. She wasn’t even so sure she wanted to meet Pia Jayhawk, look upon her, this woman who’d had an affair with her father, a married man, a married man with a child.

Pia was the “other woman” in this scenario. Yet she’d somehow become the “victim,” the scorned woman, the woman left alone and pregnant.

Because Rebecca’s mother had been none the wiser till the day she died? Because more than twenty-five years had passed? Because circumstance was circumstance?

Because things were … relative. Nothing minimized Pia Jayhawk’s experience as a woman who’d faced pregnancy alone. Who’d raised a child alone.

Suddenly, Rebecca was consumed with the idea of knowing everything there was to know about Pia Jayhawk. She glanced at the leather box of letters on her bedside table, the box she hadn’t opened in days. Perhaps there was something in there about Pia. How the affair had started. Why her father had fallen for Pia. What was so special about her that it trumped his feelings for her mother.

And how that worked.

Maybe it would unlock the mystery of why people cheated in the first place.

Rebecca was pretty sure she knew the answer to that one, though: because. A shrug of the shoulders.

There was no real answer. It wasn’t about having a hotter body or an interest in parasailing. Why people didn’t cheat was a lot easier to answer: because the couple was committed to each other, plain and simple.

If her father had been committed to her mother, to their relationship, their marriage, their vows, he might have enjoyed a boosting conversation with Pia Jayhawk, but he wouldn’t have touched her, wouldn’t have kissed her that first time. There would have been no first time. His strongest impulse would have been to his marriage, to his wife.

Instead, at a particular moment, there was a stronger impulse, and he gave in to it.

You didn’t have to, though.

Rebecca just wasn’t sure what it meant for those who did. And how many divorces had Rebecca worked on in which adulterous spouses had been forgiven? What broke up the marriages 98 percent of the time was that one spouse wanted out.

Rebecca bit her lip. She knew nothing about marriage. She’d never been married herself, so who did she think she was, claiming to be able to help couples in trouble?

Maybe there were answers in her father’s letters, something that would help her make some sense of all this … mishmash. Wrong, right, right, wrong.

There was an outside temperature gauge on the tree outside Rebecca’s window. Sixty-one degrees. Hammock weather. She made a cup of tea, shoved the leather box in her tote bag, and put on a chunky Shetland sweater to ward off the chill that wouldn’t leave, then headed outside to the hammock on the far left side of the backyard.

It was blessedly quiet. No sawing. No hammering. No Theo. Just the ever-present chirping of birds and the occasional sound of a passing car. Someone had ingeniously hung a little shelf onto the tree bark over the hammock so that Rebecca had somewhere to rest her tea. She settled herself in the hammock, the box beside her. She skimmed through the letters, looking for more than a casual mention of “your mother.”

And then Rebecca found what she was looking for.

Dear Joy
,

You’re eighteen years old. My God. You’re an adult. How did that happen? How did the years pass like this? On the one hand, I’ve been waiting anxiously for this day, wondering if this is the day you’ll try to track me down, come look for me. I suppose you could have done that before, but something about being eighteen, a full-fledged adult, makes it seem more likely. Or something I could imagine a teenager saying: “When I turn eighteen, I’m gonna look for my father.”

Of course, I don’t know if you ever said that, if you even want to find me. And if you did come knocking at my door, I wonder how I’d react. If I’d do like I did to your mother when she told me you were born. If I’d close the door as though you weren’t standing there. I suppose I’d still be scared, of the weight of you, of how Rebecca would feel
.

You two could be sisters. Are sisters. And yet you don’t even know of each other’s existence. Well, you might know of her existence. I’ve always wondered what your mother shared with you about me. If you know you have a sister, two years older
.

Rebecca let the letter flutter down to her stomach. She stared up at the cotton-candy-white clouds, at their slow drift across the blue sky.

Had Joy known that Rebecca existed? Had her mother told her that her father had a wife and another daughter?

Had Joy grown up knowing she had a sister, a half sister, out there somewhere?

Why hadn’t she asked Joy that question?

Because something told Rebecca that Joy
had
known, had grown up knowing. And she couldn’t imagine what that felt like, the awareness of something so solid, a
sister
, somewhere on Earth. The knowledge of it these past weeks had given Rebecca a certain strength: I have a sister.

She wondered if Joy had felt that her entire life, when she
was sad or troubled, that she had this guardian angel looking out for her.

Or maybe Joy had just felt the emptiness of it all. The nothingness. The unsisterness.

A breeze fluttered the letter off her stomach, and Rebecca grabbed it before it was carried away. She took a deep breath and read.

I’ve held back from talking much about your mother and our relationship because I didn’t think it would be fair to you, but now that you are eighteen, I think it’s okay. I can’t imagine you’ve heard much about me from Pia, but then again, I didn’t know her that long or necessarily very well. I felt like I knew her, though
.

And something tells me she didn’t share much about me with you. Likely because she felt she made a very big mistake in falling for me, and who wants their father to have been a mistake? No, I can’t see that she’d tell you what a jerk and an idiot I was. She saw something in me, something about me captivated her, her—this beautiful free spirit. Apparently, I made her laugh. Me, a short Jewish lawyer from Noo Yawk
.

I know you’re probably thinking, “Yeah, right,” like there’s anything funny about what I did. On both counts. Having an affair with Pia and then just turning my back on her. If it helps, which I’m sure it won’t, I knew Pia would be all right. Your grandparents are gold. I met them once, just once, and of course they didn’t know about me and Pia, but they were such warm, friendly people. I had no doubt they’d help her, see her through. That eased things in me, somewhat
.

The first time I saw her was on the beach in Wiscasset, way down by the old pier where no one much goes. I’d gotten into a big argument with my wife, and Rebecca was throwing some kind of wild tantrum, and I’d slammed out of the cottage and gone for a walk, ending up on the desolate stretch down by the old pier, where it’s all seaweed. I was throwing shells into the water, pissed off that they were so light and wouldn’t go very far
.

And all of a sudden, a woman said, “Try this,” and I turned around, and there was a Madonna look-alike, you know, with the crazy cut-up black clothes and wild hair and hundreds of silver bangles. She handed me a rock that she said she’d found up along the path. She said she was planning to paint it, its jagged perfection, but she thought the heft of it would be of more use to me
.

So she put it in my hand, and she had this crazy black nail polish on her fingers—I remember that so vividly—and I was about to throw it, but it felt so good, just to hold, and I gave it back to her. And she said something like “Rough day in the office?” I guess making fun of my khaki pants or whatever, and we just walked and walked and talked and talked. We talked about everything, and the chemistry between us surprised us both
.

How I made her laugh that day! She was laughing when I kissed her for the first time. She was laughing that big, crazy laugh of hers and I just turned and stopped and kissed her, and there was no hesitation, not a moment’s. And she kissed me back. We stood there and kissed for like an hour by that rotting old pier. We didn’t talk much after that, we just held hands and walked and kissed, then we stopped and sat and watched the ocean and each other. Have you ever had a relationship that didn’t require any talking at all? Like you could answer all your problems, all your questions by just looking into someone’s eyes? That’s how it was that day
.

We made plans to meet that night, same spot, and it’s there that we … were together for the first time. We met every day for the rest of the two weeks I was there. And when it was time to go home, I imagined keeping the relationship going on vacations, a “this time next year” type of thing
.

We spoke a few times on the phone once I was back home. But whatever strain there’d been between me and Norah—that’s Rebecca’s mother—had been mended somewhat, almost like that affair gave me myself back. I don’t know if this makes any sense. I told Pia I cared for her but that I wanted to save my marriage and that I didn’t think we should talk anymore. She was gracious, not that I gave her much time to say anything. Six weeks later, I heard her voice again, alerting me to the pregnancy. I just went numb and dumb and didn’t say a word. And finally she hung up. And then, eight months later, she called to tell me you were born and that her parents helped her buy a little blue Cape in town on Maple Drive and that’s where she would be. I thanked her for informing me and that was that. I closed my mind to it, and it’s amazing how the mind can shut down, close itself off to what it can’t handle. What it doesn’t want to handle, I should say
.

I’m sorry, Joy. I didn’t do the right thing. And now that you’re eighteen, now that you’ll be finding your own man to marry one of these days, I hope my actions don’t bear any weight, that you don’t make choices based on what I did or didn’t do. I hope you choose a good guy, someone who’ll love you like crazy and stand by you through thick and thin
.

Happy eighteenth birthday, Joy
.

—Daniel Strand

Rebecca shoved the letter back in its envelope and stuck it in between the others. All she could think was, if she hadn’t had a tantrum that day, her father might not have stormed out of the house and therefore been on the beach at the very moment that Pia Jayhawk had been out looking for the perfect rock to paint.