The Secret of Joy (6 page)

And coming in October:
Ogunquit and Kennebunkport

TESTIMONIALS!

“I met my fiancé during Joy Jayhawk’s Weekend Singles Tours getaway to Sunday River!”
—Elizabeth P., Portland

“I didn’t meet the love of my life on the Camden tour, but I did have a blast, made two new amazing friends, and can’t wait to take another tour!”
—Maddie R., Freeport

“Annie and I are going on our third date tomorrow night … all thanks to Joy and the Ogunquit tour.”
—Jack M., Gorham

“My boyfriend dumped me and the next day I signed up for Joy’s Old Port tour. I flirted all weekend, got my groove back, and came home happy. Thanks, Joy!”
—Carlie W., Pittsfield

There were more testimonials, fee ranges, a What You Need to Know section, disclaimers, and a small photograph of Joy. Rebecca looked for an About Joy link, but there wasn’t one.

Joy was barely higher than the
WELCOME TO MAINE
sign she had her arm wrapped around. She stood on the side of the highway, an orange minibus parked behind her.

She looked remarkably like the girl Rebecca had
envisioned, down to the blond hair, a rich sunlit sandy shade, and brown eyes.

She didn’t look anything like Rebecca or her father, except, as Charlotte noted, for the round shape of her eyes. Her hair was just past her shoulders and pin straight, the kind Rebecca, with her dark waves, had always coveted. Joy looked like a nature girl. She wore a white sleeveless button-down shirt and low-slung jeans with a belt that looked like a real daisy chain. She was very pretty, yet there was a no-nonsense glint in her eyes.

This is my sister
, Rebecca thought, unable to take her eyes off the photo.
My sister
.

“You’re my sister,” Rebecca said to the small photo. “We have the same father.”

“I like the looks of her,” Charlotte said. “She looks like a nice person, a good person. And she’s a matchmaker.”

Rebecca stared at the photo. “I have a sister. I still can’t believe it, can’t wrap my mind around it.”

“Do you think she knows about you, that you exist?” Charlotte asked, taking a sip of her coffee. She stood, wrapping her hands around the white takeout cup, and gestured for Rebecca to sit.

Rebecca shrugged and sat down in front of the laptop. “I have no idea.” Joy’s mother must have told her something about her biological father. Pia Jayhawk clearly knew his name and had been able to call him at the Manhattan apartment. Had she known the man she’d been seeing was married? Had a child? Or had Daniel Strand lied, pretended to be single?

“Do you even know your father’s name?” she asked the
photo. “That you have a sister?” Surely Joy could have tracked down her father if she’d wanted. But then Rebecca remembered the unlisted number, the move to Westchester. Perhaps Daniel Strand hadn’t been so easy to find.

Rebecca typed her dad’s name into the search engine. Thousands of hits. She entered the name into Manhattan White Pages. Hundreds. No, he would not be easy to track down.

“She is my sister, right?” Rebecca asked, turning to face her friend. “Michael is wrong, isn’t he?”

“She’s your sister,” Charlotte said. “Michael is dead wrong. And you’re going to change her life. One hello and her life completely changes.”

“She might already have a sister,” Rebecca said.

“Not a sister of the father she never knew,” Charlotte pointed out.

Charlotte, who Rebecca had known since preschool, had the kind of intact family that held reunions every summer at state parks. Her parents had been happily married for thirty-four years and still held hands. She was very close to her older sister and her two brothers. A sister was a sister. Michael, on the other hand, had become a divorce mediation attorney because of his own parents’ hateful divorce trial, which he’d been subjected to for almost a year at age thirteen. He barely spoke to his own brother, who at sixteen had sided with their father over their mother. A brother was not a brother to Michael; a brother had to earn the title.

Rebecca picked up the phone and called Michael. “She has her own business,” she told him. “She hosts informal singles tours.”

“I know,” he said. “I Googled her last night. Sounds a little trashy, Rebecca. She operates singles tours? Out of an orange minibus?”

“Sorry I called,” she said, and hung up on him.

He didn’t call back and neither did she. Operating a singles tour bus sounded sort of enterprising to Rebecca. And fun. And, well, romantic, which she could not say for her own relationship with Michael.

On their one-year anniversary of dating, he’d handed her a small velvet jewelry box and she’d almost fainted—and not from happiness—as she opened it. She would not have said yes to forever with Michael Whitman. She would not have fallen into marriage the way she’d fallen into becoming a paralegal. But it hadn’t been a diamond ring in the little box; it had been a silver key—to his apartment. That was a year ago. She’d said yes to moving in because she had loved Michael then. How had things changed between them so much in a year? In much less than a year, actually. A few months ago, Rebecca started realizing that she was making plans after work with Charlotte or visiting her dad a lot more often. She went to the movies alone. Joined a gym.

She’d been avoiding going home. And Michael had been doing the same thing, though it had taken her a while to see it. Something was wrong, but neither of them was ready to acknowledge it or even name what it was. They
liked
each other, that had always been there—a fondness, a connection. But something had happened when they moved in together, something cloying and claustrophobic that neither of them had expected. When right felt so wrong for reasons not so readily
apparent, you could end up in a holding pattern, waiting for something to become clear. But that had never happened. Instead, things had became cloudier.

Sometimes she did think she still loved him. But lately, she wasn’t so sure. She knew only that she was content enough to live with him, to not break up with him. For the time being. That was a favorite phrase of Michael’s, actually.
“It’s fine for the time being.”
The problem was that Rebecca’s time being had lasted a long, long time.

And now the time being felt interminable. After her gaffe with the Frittauers, Marcie had once again “written her up” by filing a memo with Michael and the partners detailing her continual errors:

Rebecca is a paralegal, not a mediator or an attorney. She has overstepped her bounds on numerous occasions, this previous occasion almost resulting in the loss of a client and potential new business from the Frittauers’ friends and associates. It’s my experienced opinion that Rebecca take the refresher course in paralegal studies offered by several schools of continuing education
.

Michael had told her to forget about it, that it would blow over during Rebecca’s bereavement leave, but that Marcie wasn’t entirely wrong—
“but don’t think about that now, honey.”
Rebecca had stiffened; she knew Michael was trying to make a point, that
she
didn’t know it all, that she wasn’t the mediator here, and perhaps she should listen to his advice about chasing after a stranger who ran a matchmaking
service out of a minibus. A stranger who could go after her father’s estate.

“Want to know what I think he’s so afraid of?” Charlotte asked, taking out her compact and dusting her unshiny nose. Rebecca knew Charlotte really meant what her husband, a therapist, thought.

Rebecca nodded. She’d never shared her ambivalence about Michael with Charlotte for fear that Peter would be full of
why
. Rebecca wasn’t ready for
why
.

“I talked it over with Peter, and we think he’s afraid of losing control over you. Michael has a very strong personality. So now he’s afraid your sister will influence you.”

Possibly
, Rebecca thought. “But to do what?”

Charlotte adjusted her pink and red scarf around her neck. “Not be such a devoted girlfriend, maybe. Break out. Maybe he’s worried she’ll convince you she deserves the entire estate. And since he knows about her business, maybe he’s even more worried she’ll have all sorts of men to fix you up with.”

Rebecca laughed. “Michael Whitman, worried about a rugged Maine lobsterman? Doubt it.” Michael didn’t lack confidence.

Charlotte smiled. “You never know.”

Rebecca stared at the photo of Joy. “Should I call her first? I can’t decide which would be less shocking to the system—getting a call from a long-lost sister or a knock on the door. I mean, she’s going to hear that her father is dead. She very likely has held out hope that one day she’d get to meet him.”

“I’d just go,” Charlotte said. “Especially because she still lives where the affair took place. That is where she was
conceived and born, and just being there might help you come to terms with the affair.”

“What terms?”

Charlotte shrugged. “I’m just repeating what Peter said.”

“Maybe I’ll just go right now,” Rebecca said, the idea not seeming so crazy. She needed to get out of the apartment, Michael’s apartment, with its black leather and chrome furniture, if only for a day or two. “Just up and rent a car and drive to Maine right now.”

Charlotte smiled, then wrapped Rebecca in a hug. “You’d better. It’s Wednesday. She’s gone Friday through Sunday, remember.”

And before Rebecca could even think of changing her mind, Charlotte was on the phone with Budget Rent A Car, booking a compact.

She left a note for Michael, that she was driving to Maine and would be back on Friday. But Rebecca packed practically all her clothes, not that she had many. Instead of two days’ worth of clothes—a pair of jeans, her favorite green cashmere sweater, her old cowboy boots that Michael hated, and a pair of nice shoes, maybe some black pants and a dressier top—she’d packed it all. All her shoes, including both pairs of sneakers. Her red suede loafers, her black T-strap heels, brown ankle boots, tall black boots. A stack of sweaters and shirts and camisoles, several pairs of pants and jeans, and four dresses, one fancy. Piles of underwear and a tangle of bras went into another suitcase with all her toiletries.

On her way out, she picked up a small framed photograph of her and Michael, one taken at last year’s firm holiday party. Rebecca in a red dress, Michael in his customary gray suit. Both with big smiles. She meant to put the picture back down on the hall table, but it went into her tote bag instead. Then off she drove in a silver Honda Civic.

She should have flown. The drive was endless with pockets of traffic and construction and accidents and rubberneckers. Eight hours later, she passed the sign her half sister had leaned against:
WELCOME TO MAINE: THE WAY LIFE SHOULD BE
.

The sign seemed like her fortune, her horoscope, her Magic 8 Ball answer. Her life was not the way it should be, and she knew it, had known it for a while. She liked the idea that simply passing the sign meant she was working on that.

An hour later, she couldn’t bear another minute behind the wheel and ended up checking into a hotel in the tourist and outlet mecca of Freeport, forty minutes or so south of Wiscasset. The hotel was a bed-and-breakfast, a white clapboard New Englander on Main Street, just a couple of blocks from the famed L.L.Bean, which according to a brochure in the hallway was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, Christmas included. As she headed back out to the small parking lot to lug in her suitcases, she took a deep breath and was surprised by how different the air felt and tasted. Clean, calm, with the scent of grass and flowers. Rebecca had expected to smell the ocean, especially because Freeport was right on the coast. But the grass, the flowers were good enough. It was barely seven o’clock and still light out, and both sides of narrow Main Street were packed with people swinging shopping bags. The streams of people,
the cars, reminded her of home. Except there were no speeding taxis and, oddly, no noise. The quiet was like a soothing balm. It wasn’t Aruba, but it was good.

In her cozy single room with its wide-planked wood floor and round braided rug and fluffy down comforter, Rebecca changed into yoga pants and a tank top and slipped into bed with her tote bag. She took out the leather box and a manila envelope of keepsakes she’d taken with her from home—pictures of her mother and father, a copy of their marriage license, a copy of her birth certificate, every report card she’d ever gotten. On her third-grade report card, her teacher had written: “
Rebecca is a smart, sweet girl, but she needs to become more of a leader, less of a follower
.” Rebecca had hated that critique. She’d always had just one best friend, a few different ones over the years due to moves or school changes, and she’d always been the less vocal, the less sure, the less everything. She liked that, though, felt safe within that. Like with Michael. Her mother’s response to the teacher’s scribbled line had been, “
You are who you are, and I like you fine
.”

Rebecca’s heart squeezed at the thought of her mother, and again those doe eyes floated into her mind. “I don’t think you’ll mind my doing this,” she whispered to the ceiling. “I would like to be more of a leader of my own life, less of a follower. Michael is wrong about so many things.” She took the pack of letters from her father and pulled one out at random.

Dear Joy
,

You’re five years old. I’ll bet you love kindergarten. Rebecca was so shy at five, but blossomed in kindergarten and made friends. In fact, she’s still friends with one of the girls, Charlotte is her name. I keep forgetting that I should focus on you in these letters, not Rebecca, but I suppose it’s natural for me to think you’re alike. You’re sisters, even if neither of you knows about the other. I’ve often wondered about nature versus nurture, and I think nature accounts for more than half. I’ll bet you like robots instead of princesses, like Rebecca. And I’ll bet you love chasing after frogs in muddy creeks, like Rebecca
.