The Secret of Joy (31 page)

Her shoulders slumped and she nodded.

“What, I’m a guy so I’m supposed be fine about this? I’m not looking to get my heart smashed again, Rebecca. Been there, done that, long enough for me not to make the same stupid mistake twice.”

“I didn’t know you got your heart broken.”

He stared at her. “You haven’t really asked, have you? We’ve been mostly talking about you.”

“I guess we have. My life is crazy right now.”

“I know. But that doesn’t give you the right to run roughshod on me—or the guy in New York.”

“I just know that I want to be with you, Theo.”

“While you’re here, you mean.”

“No, I mean—” What
did
she mean? Always? Maybe. That was how she felt. But being here felt like some kind of limbo state. Limbo depending on six more business days.

He stood. “Come to me when and if you’re free and clear, Rebecca Strand.”

She jumped up. “Theo, please. Don’t do this. Don’t take yourself away from me.”

“Sometimes it’s easier to figure out what you want when you’re not right in the middle of something,” he said.

“So that’s it? Either I break up with Michael or that’s it?”

“Rebecca, this is junior high stuff. Yeah. That’s what I’m saying. Me or him. Not both. Does he know about me?”

She nodded.

“And he’s okay with it?”

“He’s willing to give me time to figure things out.”

He opened the front door. “Well, he either really loves you or he’s an idiot.”

“What about you?”

“I’m not an idiot, that’s for sure.”

And with that, he was gone.

Rebecca took Charlie for a long walk down side streets she hadn’t yet explored, hoping the rain would pelt her on the head with the answers to her five thousand questions. Including: How had her massage and the perfect hamburger ended that way?

Now suddenly Michael was the flexible one, the one willing to give her time and space? How had they flip-flopped?

Not that Theo was wrong.

Or Michael.

She lifted her face up to the stars, the gentle rain feeling good against her skin. “What am I supposed to do, Dad?”

She wished he was here. Whenever she was really low, broken up about something, she’d go see her father, and he’d take her out for Chinese, and they’d order five dishes, but always two of the sesame chicken, and he’d offer so much wisdom. He’d say just the right thing without being preachy, without uttering a single platitude or cliché.

“I miss you,” she said, and felt tears prick her eyes. The only thing she really had of him was the box of letters, but she’d stopped reading them because they seemed so exclusive of her, even though her father went on and on about her in
several she had read. They were Joy’s letters,
for
Joy. And when Rebecca came up here and met Joy, the letters seemed like something that should be private, between Daniel Strand and the daughter he’d never known.

She supposed she could read a few more, just to hear the sound of her father’s voice. Several of the ones she’d read didn’t contain much more than
“Dear Joy, you’re seven now. I’ll bet you received your very first Barbie doll today. Rebecca loved Barbies when she was seven and eight.”
Hardly personal. Yes, she’d go home and read a few more of the letters, just to spend some time with her dad, and perhaps it would be a comfort.

She let Charlie lead the way home, let him stop and sniff every leaf and blade of grass that he wanted, and for a good five minutes, she stood in the drizzle and chatted with a woman she often saw in the little park with her pug.

Once they were back home, Rebecca stretched out on her bed with the letters and read them one by one, starting with the first, but she began skimming them, since they truly were mostly about what he assumed Joy was doing, what Rebecca had done at that age. There was very little about himself and what
he
was doing, how
he
felt, what
he
had missed.

How had he expected Joy to know him from these letters? Or perhaps that hadn’t been his point. She’d hoped the letters would
explain
more—why he had cheated,
how
he’d been pulled away from the woman Rebecca had heard him describe many times as the love of his life. And how he had lived every day with what he’d done to Pia and Joy. But there was no explanation, nothing that made sense of it. Just the stupid
seaweed and the rock and chemistry on a beach when he’d had a bad day.

So why had he written the letters? Just to mark the day with something? Had he really intended for Joy to read them one day? Perhaps he had no intentions. Perhaps he just made a ritual of the letter writing, something he did by rote, yet something ever-changing with the year, with the times.

She wished she understood.

She skimmed through
“Dear Joy, you’re twenty-five, a quarter of a century,”
blah, blah, blah. And then she took the last letter from its envelope. It was dated six months ago.

Dear Joy
,

I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer thirteen days ago. I haven’t told anyone yet, not even Rebecca. But I’m telling you. If I die tomorrow, Joy Jayhawk, I want you to know that I did love you in my heart. You probably don’t think that’s possible. But I’ve loved you from the moment I heard about you, even though you’d never know it
.

You can love someone and not be able to be with them. You can love someone and never meet them. The idea of someone, even. If you want to know how I know this is true, how I know it’s possible, it’s because I have experienced it. I feel it
.

You’re twenty-six now and probably hate the idea of me. But I do love you, Joy. I always have. Not everything can be explained—and explained easily. I don’t know if you’ll ever forgive me for turning my back on you and your mother. I hope you can. I wasn’t your father and there’s no way to give you that back. So I guess there are two things I want you to know: The first is that I’m sorry. I am, Joy. Very, very sorry. And the second is that I do love you
.

There’s something that has been on my mind these past couple of weeks, and now that I’m probably not going to be around too much longer, I’d better do something about it. It’s the only thing I can do. One of the worst repercussions of what I did was I denied a pair of sisters. I don’t know if you have any brothers or sisters, but Rebecca is an only child. She always wanted a sister. She’s been asking for one since she was five years old. And she always had one. The two of you are completely innocent bystanders in all this. And if you could find your way to each other out of nothing, wouldn’t that be something?

—Daniel Strand

Tears streamed down Rebecca’s cheeks.
Yes, Dad, it would be something
.

She should have thought of reading the last letter first, but she doubted it would have been exactly what she needed before now.

And exactly what Joy needed.

Rebecca knocked on the Jayhawk-Joneses’ door at ten fifteen, but there was no answer. Both cars and the Love Bus were in the driveway, so Rebecca knew they were home. This late, Rex had to be fast asleep, so Rebecca gave the doorbell a
quick press, hoping it wouldn’t wake the little guy. She carried the box of letters, just as she had the first day she’d arrived in Wiscasset.

When Harry opened the door, she said, “I thought you and Joy might want to have another session.”

Joy appeared behind Harry. She looked more surprised than bothered. “Now?”

“Now,” Rebecca said.

Harry stepped back to let Rebecca in. “She’s here, and we’re here, so we might as well.”

“Can I make a pot of coffee so I have something to do other than sit and be uncomfortable?” Joy asked, eyeing the box of letters.

Rebecca smiled. “I’d love some coffee.”

Harry sat across from Rebecca at the kitchen table. “Thanks for your note, by the way. I think we were a little discouraged.”

“I don’t see how this will be different than last time,” Joy said, pressing the red button on the coffeemaker.

“It’s different because I have two rules,” Rebecca said. “It’s the No Saying ‘Yeah, But’ rule, which in your case means no saying ‘You don’t understand’ or ‘You never listen.’ In fact, neither of you is going to respond to what the other says. I’m going to ask you each a question. You’re just going to listen to each other. And then I’m going to read you something.”

Joy sat down with a slight scowl and wrapped her hands around her empty mug.

Here goes everything
, Rebecca thought. “Harry, what do you want Joy to know most of all?”

“Most of all?” he said, running a hand through his dark hair.

“Most of all,” Rebecca repeated.

He stared at his wife. “That I love her to death.”

Rebecca smiled to herself. She was hoping he’d say that. No, she
knew
he would say that. She turned to Joy. “Joy, what do you want Harry to know most of all?”

Joy looked from Rebecca to Harry, biting her lip. “That I love him, too. And that I miss him. A lot.”

Harry’s hands covered Joy’s. “I miss you, too.”

Rebecca let out the deep breath she’d been holding. “I want to read you the very last letter my father wrote to you, Joy. On your twenty-sixth birthday. Is that okay?”

Her expression hardened, but Harry squeezed her hand, and she said, “Okay.” Whispered it, but finally said it.

And so Rebecca sat there and read the letter, and when she finished, there was dead silence, until Joy broke it.

“I don’t forgive him,” she shouted. “I don’t and I can’t. I don’t care if he says he loves me. I needed a
father
. And now I’m twenty-six years old and I’m supposed to be over this, not crying about it like a loser. I always thought that someday I would get to meet him, get to ask him
why
, and punch him in the face or something, but now he’s dead, and I don’t know how to get over
that
, the end of this stupid dream I’ve had for as along as I can remember.” Tears fell down her cheeks. She leaned into Harry and sobbed into his shirt. “I don’t know how to get over any of it.”

“It wasn’t a stupid dream,” Harry said, stroking her hair. “And I’ll help you work through it. You just have to talk to me like you’re doing right now.”

She nodded into his chest.

Harry let out a deep breath. “Thank you,” he whispered to Rebecca.

Thank you, Dad
, she whispered silently to the ceiling. In the end, their father had said the right thing, the right way. At exactly the right time.

seventeen

When she turned her car onto Elm Street, she saw that someone was sitting on her porch, on the steps next to the ceramic pot of African violets. A man. Was it Theo? Her heart thudded in her chest—she couldn’t wait to tell him everything that had happened, tell him she was sorry, tell him she just needed some time. But as she pulled into the driveway she realized it
wasn’t
Theo; Theo was taller and lankier and wouldn’t be sitting on her porch at eleven at night wearing a business suit. He also didn’t have a maroon sedan, which was parked in front of the house. She sat in her car for a moment, wondering if little Charlie had it in him to bust through windows and attack if need be, and then the man stood up and she saw that it was Michael.

Michael?

“You bought a
house
?” he asked in exactly the tone Joy had as Rebecca came out of the car and walked toward him. Charlie was barking like crazy inside the house. “And you have a dog? When the proprietor of your bed-and-breakfast gave me
this address for you, I assumed it was another little inn, since that other one was closed. But this isn’t a hotel, is it?”

She forgot how good-looking he was. How his dark blue eyes were like the color of the ocean on certain stormy summer days. How his thick brown hair sometimes fell in his eyes, and how he’d run his hand through to shove it back. It was good to see him, truly good, in a heart-and-soul way. He was familiarity and comfort and everything she’d left behind in New York, and here he was in Maine, in his suit and expensive black shoes.

She couldn’t take her eyes off him. “I’m renting the house on a month-to-month lease. But the dog is mine.”

He stared at her, and she expected him to say he thought they’d discussed that they wouldn’t have pets, that pets shed and puke and pee all over the place. But instead he said, “You look pretty.”

She smiled. “You too.”

“Is the dog going to try and kill me?” he asked. “Dogs hate me.”

That was true. Every dog they met in New York, from their neighbor’s yippy terrier to friendly golden retrievers chasing Frisbees in Central Park, growled at Michael.

“You’re safe,” she assured him. “Any friend of mine is a friend of Charlie’s.”

“So is that what we are? Friends?”

She dodged the question by unlocking the door. As he walked in behind her, Charlie got between them and flattened his little ears and growled in as menacing a way as Charlie could.

Michael scowled at him, then glanced around. “You bought all this stuff?”

“It came mostly furnished,” she said, pulling open the sliding glass doors to let a still suspicious Charlie out into the backyard.

Michael sat down on her red sofa, against her pillow with the embroidered sunflowers, and he suddenly looked so out of place that anyone doing a Guess What Doesn’t Belong in This Picture would circle Michael Whitman immediately.

“Did you fly up here?” she asked. “And rent a car at the airport?” She couldn’t imagine Michael driving seven, eight hours from New York City to Maine after work. The flight was only an hour.

He nodded. “I left work late as usual, but I just couldn’t bring myself to go home to an empty apartment again. Every night I leave work without you, I go home without you, and you
never
come home. That’s a lot of space to think in.”

She sat down next to him. “And what have you been thinking?”