The Secret of Joy (2 page)

He wanted to be surrounded by certain favorites, ones he’d whispered in her ear. And so every day she brought something he loved, from the eggnog to strawberry cheesecake, from Junior’s (his beloved original on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, even though a Junior’s had opened close to her office in Grand Central) to a greasy, no-good Steak-umms sandwich piled high with fried onions. The cuddly down comforter she’d bought him for Hanukkah last year. And Neil Diamond’s greatest hits on repeat on his iPod, her present for his fifty-ninth birthday last week.

He burst into tears again. She hurried back to him, then realized she’d forgotten the eggnog and spun around, the beautiful white dress swishing at her ankles. The one thing her father hadn’t done since he’d been admitted this time around was cry. Daniel Strand was tiny for a man, only five feet four like Michael J. Fox, and he’d told Rebecca he’d learned in first grade that
never
crying and being very funny was the way to make up the inches with the other kids. Rebecca could think of only two times she’d seen her father cry: when he’d told Rebecca her mother had died and then again at the funeral.

“There was a baby,” he whispered.

She set the plastic cup of eggnog on the gray swivel tray over his bed. He’d been doing a lot of this these past few days: throwing out the odd reference to events big and small. Big like her mother, who’d died when Rebecca was nineteen. Medium like Finn Weller, who’d broken Rebecca’s heart during her senior prom. Small like Cherub, Rebecca’s childhood guinea pig, who’d lived a short, uneventful life in a cage on her pink and white dresser.
“We had a dog,”
he’d said last night.
“What was its name?”
His brown eyes had twinkled with memory, but then he’d turned and stared out the window, his expression heavy and sad.
“Bongo, was it?”
Rebecca had held his hand and reminisced about their dear little beagle, Bingo, reminding him of how he’d taken her to the ASPCA on her sixth birthday and let her pick out any pet she wanted, from the biggest dog to the tiniest kitten. She’d chosen the sad-faced beagle, and every morning and every night, she and her father would walk Bingo together, singing funny versions of the old song—that first year, anyway. “
Was a chicken, laid an egg and Bingo was its name-o
…”

“
Is
a baby,” her father said. “Is. Is.” Tears pooled, and he turned his head toward the wall, his gaze on the poster of fire-safety rules again.

Rebecca tried to think what her father was referring to, hoping to fill in a blank for him. Perhaps her mother had lost a baby and they’d kept it a secret from Rebecca?

“I never wanted you to know, Rebecca,” he said, his voice cracking again. “Your mother never knew.”

Whoa
, Rebecca thought, her shoulders stiffening. Wait a minute.
What
was he talking about?

“Dad, what baby?”

“She called her Joy.”

“Who?”
Rebecca asked.

Tears streamed down her father’s face. And for the next half hour, between sobs and “I’m sorry,” Rebecca slowly learned the story of a baby named Joy Jayhawk. Of an affair, a summer affair in Wiscasset, Maine, where the Strands had gone for vacation. There’d been a woman named Pia Jayhawk, an artist.

Rebecca had a half sister. A
twenty-six-year-old
half sister.

This made no sense. Her tiny, hilarious father, the kindest person she’d ever known, had a secret life?

“Don’t hate me, Beckles,” he whispered. “Please just don’t hate me. I can’t go with that. But I had to tell you. I couldn’t go without telling you.”

Beckles. He’d started calling her that when she’d come home complaining that she didn’t have freckles like the reigning queen of first grade, a girl named Claudia. And when he’d been calling her Beckles, somewhere in Maine was a four-year-old who was probably starting to ask where her own father was.

“I have a half sister,” she repeated. “I can’t believe this.” Rebecca stood and paced the room, stared out the window at the stretch of gray water. A hot shot of anger slammed into her stomach, but at the effort it took him to take a deep breath, the sadness returned, the grief.

He took another deep breath, then another, and told her about the phone calls he’d received from Pia Jayhawk when the family had returned to New York. There were two: the first to alert him to the pregnancy, the second to the birth. A girl, six pounds even, named Joy.

“When she called to tell me she was pregnant, I didn’t say anything. Not one damned word,” he said, staring up at the squares of ceiling tile. “She’d said, ‘Daniel, are you there?’ And I didn’t say anything. I just held the phone, not breathing, afraid to move a muscle. And she said again, ‘Daniel?’ And finally she said, ‘Okay,’ and hung up.”

Rebecca stared at her father, unable to process this. The words were just building up on top of each other.

“Every day I expected the phone to ring again, expected your mother to answer it, expected her to come ashen-faced to find me with
‘I know.’
But weeks passed, and months, with nothing. I think I was in some kind of denial. It just went away and I didn’t think about it.”

Didn’t think about it? This couldn’t be right. This couldn’t
be
.

“Until she did call again,” her father said on a strangled sob. “The day the baby was born. I thanked her for informing me, then hung up and went back to the Sunday crossword. I finished the entire puzzle, Rebecca.” He covered his face, then let his hands drop as he stared up at the ceiling again. “And then I suggested to your mother that we take you to the Central Park Zoo and maybe the carousel. We never made it to the carousel because you couldn’t bear to leave the polar bears. You screamed every time we tried to wheel your stroller away. By the time we were back at the apartment, it was as though the phone had never rung.”

He explained it was why they moved a few weeks later to the Westchester suburbs. Why their telephone number was never listed. Why he dared never make another false move.

Her mother’s face, the sweet doe eyes and long, strong
nose, her wavy auburn hair, floated into Rebecca’s mind. Norah Strand had died almost ten years ago, three days before Christmas during Rebecca’s freshman year in college. A speeding cab at the corner of Lexington and Sixtieth, right in front of Bloomingdale’s, where her mother had bought a pink cashmere hat and matching gloves that Rebecca still used every winter. Rebecca, a dazed, grieving mess, hadn’t gone back to Cornell. Despite a complete lack of interest in the law, she’d worked for her dad’s law firm for a while, not wanting to take her eyes off him for a second, then commuted to Hunter College to finish her degree (psychology) and earn a paralegal certificate for its structure and security, its “you are now
this
” quality. She’d lived with her dad in the too-big Westchester colonial through college and her postgrad work. He’d been so devastated by her mother’s death.
Seemed
so devastated.

“So the reason you didn’t cheat again was because you were afraid of another phone call like that?” she asked, the anger building again.

“I had a vasectomy,” he whispered. “Right after I found out. I was so ashamed, Rebecca. I didn’t deserve another child with your mother.”

So much for God and biology.

“Please don’t hate me, Rebecca. I couldn’t—”

A large, squishy lump made its way from her stomach to her throat. “I couldn’t hate you.”

She was about to ask if he’d loved the woman, this Pia Jayhawk, but then realized she didn’t want to know.

“Rebecca, come close,” he said, and she hesitated, but sat
down on the edge of bed. “In my desk drawer at home, in a red leather case, there’s a key to a safety-deposit box at the Citibank on Lex near my office. There’s more in there about all this. It’ll explain better than I can now. Go there now, Becs.”

No. No, no, no. She didn’t want
more
. And she couldn’t bear the idea of being alone with this crazy story. As long as she was in this room with her father, the man she’d always known, always loved and adored, things were as they always were. He was still the same man, the same father. There was no lie. No baby named Joy. No
more
.

But the moment Rebecca walked out of room 8-401, cold, gripping reality would knock into her knees.

There was a baby
.

Is
a baby
.

“I want to stay with you, Dad.”

He shook his head. “Please, sweetheart. I want you to get what’s in the safety-deposit box. I want to know, be sure, that you’re going to the bank. Please, Rebecca.” A wheeze came from his throat, and her heart clenched.

“What’s
in
the box, Dad?”

“I’m so tired, honey. So, so tired. Just promise me you’ll go today. I know you always keep your promises.”

“I promise,” she assured him. Suddenly, she
could
imagine leaving, could imagine walking out of this room, could imagine going to the bank with the key—as long as she didn’t open the box. “But, Dad, what do I do with what’s in the box? Do you want me to bring it back here?”

“No,” he said. “Not here. I know you’ll know what to do.”

He closed his eyes and she sat there in the wedding gown, afraid to move.

“A half sister?” Michael repeated. Rebecca had flung out the story in a rush of words and wasn’t sure she’d made any sense.
“What?”

Michael Whitman wasn’t easy to surprise. As a divorce lawyer, a specialist in mediation, he’d been there, done that, and heard it all. From affairs to hidden assets to secret children. Last year, he’d had a case involving a man who juggled two families at the same time, a wife and two kids, and a mistress and a daughter, but the mistress hadn’t known about the wife either. She’d believed him to be an international businessman when he really lived less than thirty miles away half the week. Still, Michael had managed to work his mediation magic on the couple—the married one—and they’d avoided a long and nasty divorce battle.

An unacknowledged baby? A secret safety-deposit box containing who knew what? Business as usual around the law and mediation offices of Whitman, Goldberg & Whitman.

Michael shook his head. “I can’t believe it.”

Rebecca nodded. “Me either. I have a half sister. I’ve known about this for almost an hour and it’s still not sinking in.”

They stood at the windows in Michael’s office. If Rebecca looked left, she could make out the cluster of buildings that the hospital comprised. She’d almost gotten off the bus when she saw her father’s Citibank branch on the corner, but she hadn’t been able to move, lift her herself up. She’d stared
after the Citibank logo as if bypassing it would make this all go away, temporarily anyway. She would go to the bank after work. She would find out what was in the safety-deposit box, then be able to go home. Michael would make her his famous Irish chai latte and she could try to think.

There was a tap at Michael’s door, and Marcie Feldman, the senior paralegal who reported to Michael, poked in her shellacked blond bob. She sneered at Rebecca. “I was looking for you. The Frittauers are here.” She made a show of glancing at her watch.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” Rebecca said. From her father’s bedside to
this
. To smug Marcie and Rebecca’s interminable case files of divorcing couples. For the past several months, walking through the front doors of Whitman, Goldberg & Whitman had required three strong cups of coffee. Because Michael was there? Or because her job had become so unbearable?

Or both?

“And as an FYI,” Marcie added, “per HR, if you’re going to be out of the office past allotted lunch hours between noon and two, you need to clear it with me first.”

If my father dies at 2:01, I’ll be sure and call you first to ask if I can stay by his side
, she felt like shouting. Talk about not sucking up to the boss’s girlfriend. Rebecca almost had to give Marcie credit for that.

“She cleared it with me,” Michael said. He was always way too kind to the superefficient automaton that was Marcie Feldman. Granted, the office would fall to pot if it weren’t for Marcie, but still. “I was so busy I forgot to mention it to you.”

Marcie smiled her tight smile at Michael, then looked at her watch again before the shellacked blond bob withdrew from the doorway.

“Forget the Frittauers,” Michael said. “I’ll have Marcie cover it.”

“She’ll just hate me more. I can do it. And I like the Frittauers. They’ll distract me from thinking about my dad and I’ll be able to focus on them. I think I can keep them on track.” Unlike the Bergerons or the McDonough-Pages, the last two sets of clients who’d had to be physically pulled apart—and not because they were hugging or had rediscovered their love at the eleventh hour. Marian Bergeron had flipped out over something Rebecca had said (seemingly in favor of her husband) and had pushed Rebecca so hard against a credenza that Rebecca had gotten a whopper of a black-and-blue mark on her thigh. And Jeffrey Page had thrown the contents of a water pitcher at his wife—and the pitcher at Rebecca. At least it hadn’t been a glass pitcher.

And Rebecca was just a paralegal—she wasn’t even the mediator.

She’d once actually thought she’d enjoy working in divorce mediation. Boy, had she been wrong. The result was always the same: a divorce.
Divorce with dignity
(the firm’s tagline) or not.

“No one could hate you, Rebecca Strand,” Michael whispered, and then pulled her into a hug. For a moment she actually felt that she
could
do it, sit down with the feuding Frittauers and go over the few remaining unresolved issues in their case. A hug from Michael had that power. Another addition to the pro column.

She and Michael had been a couple from her third day at the firm. On that third day, Rebecca had entered conference room 1 to attend to new clients, Mr. and Mrs. Plotowsky, and the moment she sat down she smelled Chanel N° 19, her mother’s signature scent. Her mother had been gone for years then, but it was the first time she’d smelled that scent since she’d put her mother’s clothes in storage, unable to give them away or put them in her own closet. Chanel N° 19 wasn’t popular like Chanel N° 5. And so she’d smiled at Mrs. Plotowsky and said, “Your perfume reminds me of my mother. It was her favorite.”