The Secret of Joy (5 page)

Authors: Melissa Senate

BOOK: The Secret of Joy

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Or maybe just talked the talk.
How in hell could you have done it?
she screamed in her head.
You cheated on Mom and you got some woman pregnant and then said nothing as she told you. And then you did nothing. How in hell could you have done that? And now you’re dying and you’re leaving me with this? Bastard
.

She felt so guilty that she immediately closed her eyes and sent a
Sorry
through the airwaves.
Oh, God
.

She took another long sip of coffee, then balanced the cup on the slats of the bench and reached into her bag for the letters. She had to know something, anything, that would help, that would make sense of what she’d been told. She slid a random letter from the pack and held it, a picture of Joy Jayhawk as a teenager forming in her mind. Long blond hair down her back, and a pink bikini, and flip-flops with flowers between the toes. She was with friends, all with the same long, pretty hair. She wore a gold necklace that sparkled in the summer sun, a heart locket with a
J
engraved on it.

Okay, she told herself, pulling out the letter from the envelope. Just start with this one.

Dear Joy
,

In the very first letter I wrote you, which took me a good seven months from hearing the news of your birth, I told you I liked your name, that it was a good name. Now you’re twelve and I suppose everything is starting to change in your world. Puberty, boys, friendships. I hope you know that you are your name, that you can find solace in it whenever times get tough. Take Rebecca, for instance. She was named after my grandmother, the kindest person on the planet, and my girl Rebecca Strand is pure kindness. Just like I’m sure you are pure joy…
.

Rebecca felt sick to her stomach and put the letter back, probably out of place. She knocked over her coffee by accident, scaring away the pigeons. She stared at them, their fat gray bodies and spindly little legs, unable to focus on any one piece of information—that her father had cheated on her mother, or that it had resulted in a pregnancy, or that her father had turned his back on the baby and child’s mother, including, she assumed, child support, or that her father, who she’d thought until that morning was so perfect, was dying.

She stared up at the overcast sky and whispered, “I’m sorry,” to her mother, then called Michael on his cell phone. She couldn’t speak, though; all that came out was a sob and that she was sitting on a wet bench by the zoo. He said he’d meet her in twenty minutes.

And then there he was. She told him about the letters, showing him the stack.

Michael tucked them in her bag. “Honey, I think you should go back to the hospital and let your dad know you read the letter he wrote you and that you need time to digest. He’ll understand. All he needs to know is that you got the letters, you read his to you and one of his to her, and that you don’t hate him for the affair. These letters are for
you
, Becs, not her. He wrote them to assuage his guilt to you.”

“I think he wrote them to her, for her,” Rebecca said. “To assuage his guilt for not being there for her.”

He shook his head. “If your dad felt that guilty, he would have tracked her down at some point over the past twenty-six years. It’s a deathbed confession, Rebecca. It’s to ease his heart. It’s so he can die in peace.”

A pain, so sharp, sliced through Rebecca’s chest and she let out a wail and the tears started falling. A little kid walking past with his mother stared at her.

“Trust me, Rebecca,” Michael said, sliding his arm across her shoulders. “This is what I do. Guilt makes people do all sorts of things at the end. It’s one of the reasons mediation works at all. It’s why Edward Frittauer signed the separation agreement an hour ago. He gave Gwendolyn the co-op and all its contents, including the Peter Max.”

The drizzle started again, and Michael, always prepared, held his large black umbrella over their heads as he led the way to Fifth Avenue and hailed a cab. He took her home, to the apartment they shared. It was a one-bedroom on the twenty-third floor and had a great, sweeping view south. Rebecca would often sit at the tiny dining-room table next to the windows and stare out at the dizzying array of buildings, of lights. She could easily see the Empire State Building. She thought she’d go sit there now, in her view chair, and just stare, but Michael led her to the couch and gently patted the pillow, then covered her with the chenille throw. She heard him opening and shutting cabinets in the kitchen, then the microwave beep, and then he returned with a mug of tea and buttered toast. She loved when he was like this, when he was being her boyfriend instead of a lawyer. When she felt he
was
a haven.

“So do you think I should just send the letters?” she asked him. “I guess all I need to do is Google her name with Maine and her address will probably turn up.”

He stared at her. “I think you should just let it go, Rebecca.
You’ve got enough to deal with right now. Just put aside the letters, this Joy person, for now. Focus on your dad.”

She liked this advice; it gave her something to do that made sense
and
let her forget the letters—for now. She sipped her tea and closed her eyes for a half hour, then went back to the hospital and sat at her father’s side while he slept until the nurse told her it was time to go.

Her mind was blank; it had clearly short-circuited. Now there was nothing but
numb
. With the little leather box in her arms, she kissed his wrinkled forehead and went home to Michael, who took her to bed and made love to her with a tenderness she hadn’t experienced from him in months.

And when she arrived at the hospital in the morning, her father was gone.

Since Rebecca’s father was Jewish, the funeral was immediate. Michael made the arrangements. There were distant relatives in North Carolina who flew in, and friends of her father’s, some coworkers, and a few clients from his private law practice. His secretary, a tall, thin fifty-something woman named Barbara, cried so constantly that Rebecca wondered if she’d been her father’s girlfriend. He’d never introduced Rebecca to a “ladyfriend” in the years since her mother’s death. Rebecca told Barbara to take anything she wanted from the apartment. With tears in her eyes, Barbara asked if she could have his watch, the twenty-dollar Timex he’d worn every day for the past twenty-three years. Rebecca had given her father the watch for his birthday with her piggy-bank money when she was a kid and
he never took it off. She still wasn’t sure if Barbara and Daniel Strand had been a couple, but if all Barbara wanted was the watch, she must have loved him. Rebecca gave it to her.

The day after the funeral, she sat shiva in her father’s apartment, on one of the hard kitchen chairs. She chose the kitchen because the one window overlooked the brick wall of the apartment building across the street. She stared at the brick, at the tiny, frosted hallway windows in a vertical row. She sat and sat and sat, her father’s ancient Columbia sweatshirt not doing anything to take the constant chill from her skin, her bones. If a snake slithered out of the kitchen drain and came toward her, she probably wouldn’t flinch. She was that numb, that bone tired.

Her dad was gone. Her mother was gone.

When her mother died, Rebecca’s boyfriend at the time, a jerk philosophy major named Laird who hadn’t bothered to show up for the funeral, told her it was a shame her father wouldn’t be able to join her mother in heaven, since he was Jewish. That had been the end of Laird. Her father
had
believed in heaven, which was a great comfort to Rebecca ten years ago, and now she imagined her father’s soul, the part of him she still knew was very, very good, making its way to where her mother was. Her mother would know now, of course, and forgive. Perhaps her mother would help her father work through it all.

At around three in the afternoon, the distant relatives, a second cousin and his family, came over to pay their respects. Rebecca was tempted to tell him there was another Strand out there.

“She’s not a Strand,” Michael said that night as he and Rebecca lay in bed, the shiva candle burning on her bedside table. “She’s just some stranger.”

Not to Rebecca. For the past few days she would be walking down the street or washing dishes or trying to read the book on loss that her best friend, Charlotte, had given her, and she would see a flash of blond hair. Brown doe eyes. She would see Joy as a child, maybe five years old, spinning around, then stopping to say,
“Daddy? Do I have a Daddy?”
That morning, while Rebecca stirred Sweet’N Low into the terrible coffee Michael had made (always too strong), the little blond girl stopped spinning again and stood still, her face in shadows, and said,
“Hello?”

“Hello,” Rebecca had whispered back. “I am cracking up,” she’d said to the coffeepot.

She pulled the blankets up to her chin. “The point is, Michael, she’s not
supposed
to be a stranger. I’m going to track her down. It’s what my dad would have wanted me to do.”

He turned on his side to face her, his dark blue eyes full of sympathy. “Rebecca, from what you told me, I don’t get the sense he wanted you to find her. It’s not like he said that outright. And remember, he’s
nothing
to her. And he can never
be
anything to her because he’s gone. She’s just going to want the money. And because of all the documentation he left, she’ll very likely win half the estate.”

“So?” she said, consumed by the urge to push Michael out of the room and shut the door. “She
should
have it. If only for back child support.”

“Honey, that half million you’re so willing to give to some
stranger, some very likely trashy loser, is our future. If we get married one day, it’s a down payment on a house. It’s our kids’ college education.”

She bolted upright. “She’s my father’s daughter. She’s not a trashy loser. Don’t say things like that, Michael.”

“Sweetheart, it’s the truth. Or the potential truth, anyway. I can’t sugarcoat it for you. That’s not who I am. My job is to help people understand the truth, find the best in the truth, in the real circumstances. I know you just lost your only living parent, Becs. And I know how close you and your dad were. But this person isn’t part of your father. She’s just some stranger he wanted nothing to do with.”

“Because of the
circumstances
,” Rebecca said. “He didn’t want my mother to find out. The circumstances are now completely different.”

“Really? How are they different now than they were ten years ago when your mother died? It’s not like your father tracked down this illegitimate daughter after your mother’s death. And speaking of your mother, Rebecca, how do you think she’d feel about this? Do you really think she’d want you to go find her husband’s bastard daughter?”

Rebecca moved over to the windows and looked out onto Second Avenue, cold in her thin T-shirt and underwear. She focused on a cab squeezing past double-parked cars.
Deep breath, Rebecca
. “Don’t twist this around on me to suit your argument.” She had no idea how her mother would feel. No idea at all. But this wasn’t about her mother or her father or even Rebecca, really.

“Fine,” he said, coming up behind her. He wrapped his
arms around her. “You’d be opening a can of worms. You have no idea who she is, what her family is like, if they’ll come after you for money. Maybe she has three little kids and no husband. Maybe she’s a junkie. Have I proved my point?” he asked with a condescending kiss on the back of her head.

“I need to find her,” she said in such a low voice she wasn’t sure he heard her. “I just have to. She has a right to those letters.”

He turned her around, his blue eyes intense. “Rebecca. I’m giving you excellent free advice. And I strongly advise you to take it. I’m sorry you lost your dad. I love you and I don’t want to see you lose everything else, too.”

Such as yourself?
she wanted to ask, but she turned around instead and stared out the windows at the twinkling lights of the city.

Rebecca didn’t have parents anymore. But she had a sister, somewhere in Maine. And she was going to find her.

three

The next morning, after Michael left for work (Rebecca was on bereavement leave and pretended to be asleep until she heard the key locking the door), she typed the name Joy Jayhawk into Google, then stared at the name and deleted it.

She needed reinforcement. She called her friend Charlotte, who said she’d be over in twenty minutes with coffee and bagels. By the time Charlotte arrived, in her uniform of pantsuit, silk scarf, and bun-controlled wildly curly brown hair, Rebecca had typed the name and deleted it five more times.

“I’ll do it for you,” Charlotte said, beating Rebecca to the desk chair. She hit Enter and peered at the screen. “She has a website!”

Rebecca’s hands shook slightly around the cup of coffee. Just like that. A website. Instant information she wasn’t so sure she was ready to have.

“And there’s a picture of her,” Charlotte said. “She’s so young. And pretty. And blond. She has the Strand round
brown eyes. And a much bigger chest than yours. She operates singles tours in Maine.”

Singles tours? Rebecca stood behind the chair and peered around Charlotte.

JOY JAYHAWK’S WEEKEND SINGLES TOURS

Join your tour guide and host Joy Jayhawk for fun, informal weekend tours of Maine’s tourist towns, beaches, state parks, lighthouses, and attractions.