For a moment, she considered just spitting it out, the whole story, but again she had that nudging feeling that she shouldn’t, that this was Joy’s territory, that this was equally Joy’s story, and she shouldn’t be telling everyone Joy’s personal business.
“Hypothetically?” Rebecca asked, taking another bite of her cake.
He glanced at her and smiled. “Sure.”
But instead of saying anything, she burst into tears, the image of her father, frail in the hospital bed, his lined face, the strange expression in his eyes, suddenly overtaking her. What was the expression? Not guilt, not really. “Let’s say someone’s father dies,” she rushed to say, “and right before, he confesses something, that he had another child and that this child is now an adult, just a couple years younger than, say, you are.”
He reached over to the napkin dispenser on the table behind them and handed her a few napkins. She dabbed under her eyes and clutched the white scratchy paper.
“And let’s say,” she continued, “that your own life is just sort of—I don’t know the right word exactly. Just sort of not. And something in this news, this startling piece of news, that you have a sister out there somewhere, means something to you, really means something. And you go in search of this sister and you actually find her and she wants nothing to do with you.”
“Ah,” he said, staring out at the darkness. “I would think she needed some time.”
“Really?” she asked, turning to face him. “Even if she said we’re not family, that there’s no there there, basically?”
He nodded. “Yup, time is the answer.”
Rebecca let out a deep breath and took another bite of cake, which sat in her stomach.
“My own father checked in and out pretty much my entire childhood,” Theo said. “If a kid of his came knocking on my door and said, ‘Hey, I’m your brother,’ I wouldn’t feel much of a connection. Not at first.”
Rebecca nodded. “I can understand that. I guess I feel the connection because I did grow up with my father. His other daughter is part of him. But she doesn’t have that. She doesn’t have anything to go on. I’m a stranger.”
“Hypothetically a stranger,” he said, tipping his beer bottle at her.
She smiled.
“Theo, dear, I’m ready to leave.”
Rebecca turned around to see one of the elderly square dancers smiling at them from the doorway. She wore a long, quilted down coat even though the temperature was in the low 60s.
“My grandmother,” he whispered. “Roommate of the birthday girl.” He closed his hand on Rebecca’s for a second and added, “Time works. Sometimes even a half hour is enough.”
And with a last smile, he was gone. In one fifteen-minute conversation, he’d managed to make her feel better than she had in a week.
Finch’s Seaside Inn turned out to be quite fancy, a huge Victorian on the water, but since it was closed for the season, the restaurant and the spa and housekeeping were shut down. Marianne Finch, the friendly faced proprietor, said she would drop off linens in the morning, but Rebecca had to change her own sheets. Oh, and she had to put up with some construction noise from the new deck and back porch she was having built. For this, her room rate was less than fifty bucks, and what a room it was. Spacious, with a dark wood four-poster bed and white, fluffy down comforter and a marble bathroom and a balcony that overlooked the beach.
It was close to midnight, but Rebecca pulled on a sweater and her L.L.Bean wool socks and headed out onto the balcony with the leather box of letters and the liter bottle of Diet Coke that Arlene had given her as she left Mama’s. For a few minutes, she listened to the lap of waves, let the calm, the peace surround her. Surprisingly, Theo came to mind—those gorgeous dark eyes—and then Michael’s face, with the disapproval etched in his handsome features, overtook it.
He hadn’t called once since she’d left. How could that be? How did you go from waking up next to someone every morning, sharing a bathroom, a bed, and then not call to even check in, to hear their voice, when they were going through something so … so what? Painful. Strange. Unmooring. If she didn’t do what he said, what he suggested, he would fire her as a girlfriend? Seemed so.
She leaned her head back against the chaise and pulled the leather box tight against her. Not that the contents were a comfort. They contained someone else’s secrets and were meant for someone else. Not for her. Charlotte had said she’d get to know her father through the letters, but did that mean she hadn’t known him? That the man she had known as her dad was someone else, someone with a lie in his past, a secret emotional life?
Time works.
Rebecca closed her eyes and reached into the box and pulled out a letter at random.
Dear Joy,
You are thirteen, and I know what that means. I’ve been through it with Rebecca. TROUBLE. Not that Rebecca’s trouble. She’s a good girl. Well, most of the time. She has a boyfriend named Dalton. Dalton—what a name. He’s her first boyfriend and, oh, is she crazy about this boy. Of course, Dalton broke her heart tonight, crushed her right before a school dance by just not showing up, so of course she and her friend Charlotte went to the dance anyway, and there he was, slow dancing with another girl. She called and asked me to come get her, and cried and cried, and asked why boys pick other girls, and what’s wrong with her.
I’m the last person to have any answers about that, but it got me thinking about your mother, how I suppose I “picked her” when I had a perfectly wonderful woman, a wife, the mother of my little girl. I wanted to explain to Rebecca that you can love someone and get pulled away anyway by things that trigger other things in you, but how could I explain that? I ended up offering some platitudes.
You choose who ends up making the most sense for your life in that moment, not necessarily who you love most. Not that I loved your mother more than Rebecca’s mother. Oh, Lord, I don’t even know what I’m saying. I just know you make a choice in a moment, sometimes without conscious thought, and you figure that must be the right one, so you don’t rehash the one you let get away too much. Until later, I guess.
Rebecca remembered that conversation with her dad about Dalton and her first broken heart: “You’ll be fine, honey. There will be other boys. He doesn’t deserve you. By homeroom in two days, you’ll have a new boyfriend.”
There wasn’t a new boyfriend for a while, a very long while. Would she have preferred if her father had said, “You want the truth, Becs? The truth is, you can really like a girl so much, think about her all the time, and then turn around and like a new girl just as much, and actually want both girls in your life, but of course you can’t have both girls, so you choose the one that makes the most sense.” And Carrie Futterman had obviously made the most sense for Dalton, since she had enormous breasts at age fifteen, a.k.a. a C cup.
Rebecca picked up her cell phone and called the hotel that Joy and the group were in. She asked for Joy’s room, then almost hung up when she realized it was midnight. But she knew Joy would be awake, with much more than Rebecca on her mind.
“Hello?” came the voice, as wide awake as Rebecca expected.
“Joy, it’s Rebecca. I just want you to know that I get it, that I understand. I just read one of his letters to you and I don’t think he gets it at all. He’s explaining himself, but the explanation sucks.”
“Of course it does,” she said.
Rebecca closed her eyes and held her breath. “Can I come back tomorrow morning? Not to talk about him, not to try and explain anything. Just because we are sort of sisters—lousy, weak connection, and all. I just … want to understand something, but I don’t know what.”
Joy named a restaurant on Commercial Street and a time, then hung up.
So Theo was right. Time works. Sometimes in hours.
Her shoulders relaxed with the in Joy had given her, with the somewhere-to-go, and she headed inside with the idea to take a bubble bath before crawling into that inviting bed. Her cell phone rang. Joy rescinding
already?
No. It was Michael. Her heart flip-flopped at his name appearing on the tiny screen.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hi.” She imagined him lying barefoot on the black leather sofa, three case files on the coffee table.
“So? Does she have two heads? Eight dirty children? A criminal record?”
Rebecca smiled despite herself. Despite him. “I’m sure you already vetted her, Michael.”
“Of course I did. If there had been something even slightly off in her background, I would have come after you.”
He would have, of that Rebecca was sure.
“She’s … nice,” she said. “A little prickly. Understandable given the circumstances. I was a total surprise.”
“When are you coming home?” he asked.
She was due back at the office on Monday. But she couldn’t imagine leaving on Sunday. “A few more days, I think. I just need some more time here.”
Silence. “So you’re just not coming to work?” he said. “Rebecca, you do have responsibilities.”
“Responsibilities I suck at.”
“You’ll take the refresher course—”
No, I won’t. “Michael, I’ve been a paralegal for six years.” Were they really talking about this right now?
“Becs, honey, listen—forget that right now. I shouldn’t have even brought it up. You’ve been through a lot this past week. I understand that you want to stay up there in this other universe. But you have a life here and you’re needed here.”
I don’t want to go home. The thought inched up. She didn’t want to go home. Not yet. Not until something with Joy was … what? Settled? Figured out?
“I’m not ready to leave here, Michael. Please understand, okay?”
There was a sigh. Then nothing. Then: “Rebecca, I shouldn’t tell you this, not now, but I feel like I have to. That maybe drastic times call for drastic measures, you know?”
She waited, the silence scaring her.
“Things have been kind of off between us for a while now,” he said. “And we’ve both coasted with it.”
That was true. “I know,” she said softly. “I don’t really know what to do about it.”
“I’m not sure, either,” he said. “But I need you to know that I do have a new friend—just a friend, someone I met at the gym last month, and there’s a real connection there.”
Her stomach churned and she got up, tears pricking the backs of her eyes. “And?”
“And, you could swing it either way, Becs. You could come home and we could work on things between us. Try and figure out what’s there. Or … not,” he added.
She closed her eyes and said, “I don’t know what to say to all that right now, Michael,” then hung up like Joy had.
She imagined Joy sitting on her bed with a brick in her chest like Rebecca had right now. Overwhelmed with everything and nothing.
seven
Ellie was flirting with the waiter when Rebecca arrived at Wharf’s Diner at 9:00 a.m. Her poker-straight dark hair was in a low ponytail, and her intense green eyes were made up in a smoky, nighttime way. Victoria and Victor were deep in conversation, their chairs turned toward each other. Victor kept twirling his hand through the ends of Victoria’s pretty long red waves, seemingly unable to take his eyes off her face. And Maggie, also a bit heavily made up, her delicate features in too much mascara and pinky-brown lipstick, appeared to be stewing, holding her coffee mug tightly. She and Clinton the Marlboro Man were not sitting next to each other—and they’d been dancing pelvis to pelvis the last time Rebecca had seen them. Clinton, in a cowboy hat, was absorbed in the menu. And Joy, her blond hair off her face with a red suede headband, not a shred of makeup on her pretty face, was looking over a map of the Old Port.
Rebecca felt her heart surge in her chest at the sight of Joy, at the new familiarity of her.
She’d read somewhere that twins separated at birth were later found to have much in common, from, say, choosing the same brand of shampoo to both not liking lobster. Rebecca wondered if Joy used Pantene and loved tuna fish sandwiches with cucumber slices, if red were her favorite color, if she cried at corny scenes in movies. If she was the only other person besides Rebecca who loved the movie Hope Floats.
If she would have told Michael something different on the phone.
But Rebecca and Joy weren’t twins and they were half sisters at that. And Rebecca took after her mother.
“Look who’s back!” Victoria announced at the sight of Rebecca. There was actually a round of applause, and Rebecca felt her slumped shoulders perk up a bit. Apparently, Joy had told everyone that Rebecca had volunteered to drive the nervous Jed home last night instead of making him drive alone.
Victor jumped up and slid over a chair from the next table, squeezing Rebecca in between the upset Maggie and Joy.
Maggie whispered, “Jerk in the fake Stetson told me, with my dress bunched up around my waist, that he wasn’t looking for anything serious, that he liked me enough to tell me that. Asshat.”
Ah. “I’m sorry,” Rebecca whispered.
Maggie leaned even closer. “Though part of me wanted to knock on his door last night and tell him, ‘You know what, jerk, I’m not, either. My ex-husband is getting married in twelve hours and I’m a wreck and just want some good hard sex.’”
Rebecca squeezed her hand.
“But I would have felt worse, right?” she asked, tears in her eyes.
Rebecca nodded and whispered, “Very likely. It’s not him so much as it is the meaning you’re looking for right now, assurances and comfort. You’re not looking for someone else to tell you his heart isn’t in it.”
“That’s exactly it!” she said, brightening some. “I couldn’t figure out why I was so upset over a slick dick like Clinton.” She slid her gaze across to the far end of table, where Clinton was asking the waiter for details on hollandaise sauce. “I mean, I know his type. Everyone does. But I was crying my eyes out last night.”
“It wasn’t him,” Rebecca said. The waiter appeared between her and Maggie, and Rebecca ordered a Swiss cheese omelet. “And coffee, two cups, please.” As Maggie ordered, Rebecca whispered to Joy, “Thanks for having me back.”
Joy nodded and mentioned that another single had opened up in the bed-and-breakfast, so she’d booked it for Rebecca, and then she launched into the morning’s itinerary, which included wandering around the Old Port and visiting Portland’s other neighborhoods, such as Munjoy Hill and the West End.
So much for talking late into the night in their shared single room. Rebecca had envisioned them sitting cross-legged on their twin beds, facing each other, going back and forth about what they liked, what they didn’t. There would be a constant refrain of “Me too!” And then Joy would ask a question about the father they shared.
Time, she reminded herself, Theo Granger’s face, those deep brown eyes, that one dimple coming to mind.
As they headed outside, Rebecca breathed in the fresh, fresh air, marveling at the size of the seagulls swooping over the bobbing boats that lined the harbor.
“Wish I could push that asshat in the water,” Maggie whispered to Rebecca as Clinton’s gaze followed a shapely woman down Commercial Street.
“He’ll probably fall in all on his own,” Rebecca said as Clinton got perilously close to the edge while staring at another woman’s large breasts.
Joy handed out brochures for the Portland Observatory and maps of the various neighborhoods. Clinton asked Victor if he wanted to see about getting tickets to a Sea Dogs game, but Victor tightened his arm around Victoria’s and said he was booked for the day, then added, “Maybe for the rest of my life.” Victoria practically purred next to him as they headed down the pier.
“Meet back in the lobby of the hotel at 1:00 p.m. if you want to join us for lunch,” Joy called after the lovebirds.
Clinton then turned to Ellie and tried to wrap his arm around hers with a “Shall we, milady,” but Ellie slugged him, and Clin
ton countered with a whispered, “Your loss, babe.”
“You’re overconfident, Clinton,” Ellie shot back.
“Can we just get going?” Maggie muttered.
“Clinton, we’ll meet back in the lobby of the hotel at one, okay?” Joy said. Meaning Beat it, jerk.
Clinton raised an eyebrow. “You’re not going off to devise ways to murder me, are you?” he asked, then laughed.
“Someone got hurt here,” Joy whispered to Clinton.
He eyed Maggie for a moment, then took off his hat and held it in his hand. “Maggie, listen, I was just trying to be honest. Before anything happened, before we went too far. You know?”
Maggie bit her lip and stared at the cobblestones.
“Should I have made love to you and then left in the middle of the night? Told you in the morning that it wasn’t like the sex meant anything?”
“We didn’t have sex,” she muttered. “Oh, just forget it.”
“I don’t get why you’re so mad at me,” he said. “Why am I the bad guy for being honest? I told you at just the right moment that you shouldn’t have expectations.”
“The right moment would have been while we were still in the bar,” Maggie explained, her voice rising. “When you were telling me how beautiful I was. How you couldn’t understand why my husband let me get away.” She jabbed a finger at him. “Or better yet, when you told me you could look into my eyes forever. Maybe that would have been the right time.”
“Honey, I had three margaritas,” Clinton said, doing a ministagger.
Tears welled up in Maggie’s eyes and she turned away, crossing her arms over her chest. Rebecca put an arm around her shoulder. For the past two years, Rebecca had not missed dating. She’d forgotten what it could be like: this.
Joy walked over to Clinton and pulled him aside to talk. After a few moments, they both walked back to the rest of the group.
“Joy’s right,” he said to Maggie. “Someone did get hurt, and that’s what matters. I am sorry your feelings got hurt, Maggie. I don’t know. Maybe you’re just not my type or you just come off as too desperate or something.”
The Secret of Joy Page 9
