Rebecca smiled, and Ellie’s face brightened for just a moment.
“So I asked him if he would do one thing for me, just this one thing, and come on Joy’s Rocky Relationships Tour this weekend. Tim really likes Joy and Harry, he respects them, so I figured he’d at least consider it, and he said there’s no way he’s doing something all New Agey like that.”
“Is it New Agey?” From the little Rebecca had heard about the Rocky Relationship Tour it was a camping tour of sorts, but the group would stay in a private lodge with several bedrooms. They would laze around the big room with its wood-burning stove and fireplaces, talk as a group at three designated times—after breakfast, after lunch, and after dinner—then hike the trails, or do absolutely nothing. The nothing was supposed to put the focus back on the individual, the couple, without the distractions of friends or buttinsky relatives. The lodge was isolated enough so that leaving on foot wasn’t an option.
“Not at all. There’s no Enya or meditating involved. It’s just about getting away from everyday life, everyday problems. I told him it would be almost like marriage counseling, but without the therapists, which he totally isn’t into. And he still said no.”
“That doesn’t mean he won’t go, just that you need to work on him a little. Like you and Maggie told me about Joy: She’ll come around. Tim will, too.”
“You think?” Ellie asked, glancing up.
“I hope,” Rebecca said. “How long have you been separated?”
“Almost two months. But he comes over a few times a week. We have sex, and I think we’re going to work things out, and then it’s back to the same old disappointments, same old problems. No, he’s not going to some marriage counselor. No, he’s not reading any self-help books. No, he’s not agreeing to not going out with his asshole friends for one week.”
“What’s Tim like? When he’s not being a jerk?”
Ellie’s face brightened again. “He’s wonderful. He can be so sweet and tender and funny. And just when I’m thinking I can overlook what I hate, someone will whisper in my ear, ‘I saw your husband out with some bleached blond last night.’”
“Maybe you can’t overlook what you hate,” Rebecca said. “Maybe you shouldn’t.”
“I know. That’s why I went on the singles tour. To force myself to accept that he’s cheating. That he walked away from this marriage. I know I should move on. I know being with Tim means nothing but heartache. I know, I know, I know. But knowing doesn’t seem to help.”
“Is the heartache mostly to do with the cheating or were there big problems before that?”
“Well, I didn’t know he was cheating for a while. Before I caught on, we argued about everything—what to spend money on, how much to save, if he should go out practically every night after work with his stupid friends and get rip-roaring trashed. Do you know that the last time he went out with those morons one got so drunk that he misaimed a metal dart and it hit someone in the back of the neck?”
“Maybe it’s time for an ultimatum,” Rebecca said, handing Ellie another tissue.
“I’ve tried those. A million times. He gets all scared and comes rushing back, promising me things will be different, and they are for a week. Then it’s back to his old ways. Maybe I just have to accept him the way he is. If I love him. That’s what my mother-in-law says. ‘Men are men,’” she added in a singsong voice. “‘Like the famous saying goes, it’s the wife’s job to be a cook in the kitchen, a hostess in the living room, and a whore in the bedroom, all while not nagging about nonsense like socks on the floor and keeping her figure nice and slim.’”
“Your mother-in-law actually said that? She sounds worse than Maggie’s!”
Ellie nodded, then laughed. “The only good point about my marriage ending is that she goes with the marriage.” Ellie sobered up fast. “I don’t want a divorce, though. I want my husband. But I want him different. I want him to be like the guy he was when—”
“What?”
“I was gonna say like when I married him, but he wasn’t so different. I just thought marriage would change him. That he’d settle down. God, I’m such a stupid cliché.”
“No, you’re just a woman in love with her husband. A woman who wants her marriage to work.”
Ellie let out a deep breath. “I think he might do Joy’s tour. If I tell him this is it, this is our last chance to try and fix this marriage or I’m filing for divorce. He doesn’t want a divorce. He doesn’t even want to be separated. He just wants to do what he wants and have me, too. Please, please, please tell me you’ll come, Rebecca. Joy is great at getting conversations started and opening dialogues, as she calls it. But you’re the expert. You have to come. You can really guide us.”
Rebecca would love to go. To see if she could really think about a career in counseling, if going to graduate school wouldn’t be a waste of her paralegal certificate. And to spend the weekend with Joy again, in a setting of sharing and opening up, could do wonders for their stalled relationship. But Rebecca couldn’t imagine Joy suddenly saying, “Sure, stick around even longer, listen to my most innermost problems and the details of my marriage.”
“Ellie, I would love to, really, but I don’t think Joy wants me sticking around until the weekend.”
“I’ll bet she wants you to come. She might not be able to handle one-on-one with you yet, but she seems comfortable with group stuff. She asked you to come this past weekend, didn’t she?”
She did. That was something. Something big. It wasn’t just an impersonal cup of coffee at Starbucks. It was a weekend away with her friends. The Wiscasset Divorced Ladies Club wasn’t made up of random singles who Joy barely knew. These women had known about Joy’s father. They knew about her marriage. And however grudgingly, Joy had invited Rebecca to come on their weekend away.
“I’ll ask her,” Rebecca said. “But I can’t promise anything.”
Ellie nodded. “If she says okay, will you go? We really need you. Not just me and Tim, but Joy and Harry, too. You’re a divorce mediator from New York City. That’ll mean something to Tim and Harry. They’ll respect what you have to say.”
Whoa. Joy and Harry were both going? Rebecca hadn’t known that.
But still. “Ellie, I’m not a mediator. I’m not a therapist. I’m a paralegal. And given that I didn’t show up at work this morning after a week of bereavement leave, I’m very likely going to be an unemployed paralegal.”
Ellie shook her head. “Experience is experience,” she said. “Right?”
After Ellie left, with two of Marianne’s whoopie pies in her hands and an assurance to knock on Rebecca’s door anytime, day or night, Rebecca called Joy.
“I’m not calling to ask you to coffee for the hundredth time, I promise,” Rebecca said. She explained about Ellie, about the Rocky Relationships Tour. “I’d like to come, if it’s okay with you. Maybe I really can help.”
Silence.
And I think it could help me, help me figure out what I’m supposed to be doing with my life when everything waiting for me in New York feels so wrong.
“Ah, I just realized you must think I’m a total idiot for thinking I can help when we haven’t even talked about what you envision. I heard a bit about what you’re planning, and Ellie filled me in, but—”
“No, it’s not that.”
Rebecca waited for what it was, but Joy didn’t say anything. “I think the tour would help me, too,” she rushed to say. “I know what I don’t want to do with my life is help couples divorce—even nicely. And that’s been my job for the past two years. I want to help couples not divorce. I want to help them work toward reconciliation, toward what made them fall in love in the first place, toward how to honor that every day while dealing with everyday crap. If that’s what you envision for the Rocky Relationships Tour, then I do think I can bring something to the table.”
Silence. Perhaps Joy didn’t go for corporate speak.
Rebecca let out a silent sigh of frustration. You are emotionally fri
gid, she wanted to scream. Respond! Say something! Get all pissed off the way you did in Portland. Tell me to go away.
But don’t really tell me that.
“Well, why don’t you think about it and let me know,” Rebecca said, liking the idea of Joy having to call Rebecca one way or another.
“Actually, I do think you’d be a big help on the tour. You’re more than welcome to come.”
Rebecca’s heart leaped. She closed her eyes and sat down on the edge of her bed, relief flooding through her. She now had a purpose, a defined reason to stay through the coming weekend.
And she would get to know Joy on a whole new level.
“And I have no idea if what I do envision is even going to work,” Joy added. “This is the first time I’m leading this type of tour. And I’m one of the participants. So this is new territory for me, too. Weird territory. If I envision anything, it’s three couples—well, three if Tim agrees to go—being away from the distractions of their everyday life, with a little shop talk, a little relaxing, a little enforced time together. But considering I am one of the participants, I think having someone impartial, someone with experience with warring couples, would be great.”
“So I’m hired?” Rebecca asked.
“You’re hired. Not that I can pay you.”
Rebecca laughed. “I know.”
“Your room at the lodge will be covered, of course, since you’ll be working, really.”
“That’s okay, Joy. I’ll pay my own way.”
Joy let out a deep breath. “I was hoping you’d say that. Ever since Harry moved downstairs, I’ve been using only my own mon—” Dead silence. “Ugh, see, you are good at getting people to say things they don’t mean to or don’t want to. I have to go. The group is meeting at my house on Friday at six thirty.”
“You won’t be sorry,” Rebecca said as though Joy had just hired her for the job of her dreams. “I know this isn’t … easy for you. Having me drop on your head at all, let alone when you’re going through a separation of sorts, and—”
“So there’ll be three couples on the tour,” Joy interrupted, the sharp edge in her tone saying, Back off, chickie. We’re not on the bus yet.
“Three couples sounds manageable. So you and Harry, Ellie and Tim, and another couple?”
“The Cutlasses. Aimee and Charles. I don’t know them—well, I know Aimee from the library, she’s one of the librarians. I don’t know if you’ve been over there—she’s the tall, slender redhead? Anyway, I don’t know her very well. She saw one of my flyers posted. I’ve never met her husband. We’ll all meet at my house on Friday for a brief hello and then take the minibus to the lodge.”
“I’m looking forward to it,” Rebecca said. “I really think I can do some good.”
“See you Friday.” Click.
Purpose! Rebecca leaped up and looked in her closet for a weekend’s worth of outfits befitting a … what should she call herself exactly? She didn’t think throwing the words divorce mediation paralegal would ease the anxiety of the men on the trip. Divorce was a big ugly scary word, but then again, perhaps that word would scare everyone into paying attention to their marriages since the alternative was so bleak. And mediation was a word that required definition. No one ever seemed to know what a paralegal did, so that was helpful.
I help couples reach agreements. That was what she did, what she liked to do, what eased something in her own heart.
As Rebecca was wondering if a tweed skirt was too therapisty and too much for a Maine camping lodge, the phone rang.
Please don’t be Joy rescinding, Rebecca thought.
It was Joy. Rebecca held her breath.
Joy cleared her throat three times before the rush of words finally came out. “My mother and stepfather are coming this weekend to babysit Rex while Harry and I are gone on the tour. If you happen to see her on Friday at my house when the group gathers, I would appreciate it if you didn’t let her know who you are. I’ll tell her about you when I’m ready.”
Pia Jayhawk. Rebecca wondered how she’d feel when she saw her, if she’d feel anything. If she’d understand something then she couldn’t now.
“Okay,” Rebecca said. She wasn’t so sure she’d be able to even speak to the woman, let alone introduce herself. “Hi, I’m Rebecca Strand. You had an affair with my father twenty-six years ago. Remember?”
“I have your word?”
Does my word mean something to you? she wanted to ask. “You have my word.”
“Thanks,” she said, and hung up.
A chill seemed to seep through Rebecca’s room, moving inside her sweater, into her skin, into her bones. She wasn’t even so sure she wanted to meet Pia Jayhawk, look upon her, this woman who’d had an affair with her father, a married man, a married man with a child.
Pia was the “other woman” in this scenario. Yet she’d somehow become the “victim,” the scorned woman, the woman left alone and pregnant.
Because Rebecca’s mother had been none the wiser till the day she died? Because more than twenty-five years had passed? Because circumstance was circumstance?
Because things were … relative. Nothing minimized Pia Jayhawk’s experience as a woman who’d faced pregnancy alone. Who’d raised a child alone.
Suddenly, Rebecca was consumed with the idea of knowing everything there was to know about Pia Jayhawk. She glanced at the leather box of letters on her bedside table, the box she hadn’t opened in days. Perhaps there was something in there about Pia. How the affair had started. Why her father had fallen for Pia. What was so special about her that it trumped his feelings for her mother.
And how that worked.
Maybe it would unlock the mystery of why people cheated in the first place.
Rebecca was pretty sure she knew the answer to that one, though: because. A shrug of the shoulders.
There was no real answer. It wasn’t about having a hotter body or an interest in parasailing. Why people didn’t cheat was a lot easier to answer: because the couple was committed to each other, plain and simple.
If her father had been committed to her mother, to their relationship, their marriage, their vows, he might have enjoyed a boosting conversation with Pia Jayhawk, but he wouldn’t have touched her, wouldn’t have kissed her that first time. There would have been no first time. His strongest impulse would have been to his marriage, to his wife.
Instead, at a particular moment, there was a stronger impulse, and he gave in to it.
You didn’t have to, though.
Rebecca just wasn’t sure what it meant for those who did. And how many divorces had Rebecca worked on in which adulterous spouses had been forgiven? What broke up the marriages 98 percent of the time was that one spouse wanted out.
Rebecca bit her lip. She knew nothing about marriage. She’d never been married herself, so who did she think she was, claiming to be able to help couples in trouble?
Maybe there were answers in her father’s letters, something that would help her make some sense of all this … mishmash. Wrong, right, right, wrong.
There was an outside temperature gauge on the tree outside Rebecca’s window. Sixty-one degrees. Hammock weather. She made a cup of tea, shoved the leather box in her tote bag, and put on a chunky Shetland sweater to ward off the chill that wouldn’t leave, then headed outside to the hammock on the far left side of the backyard.
It was blessedly quiet. No sawing. No hammering. No Theo. Just the ever-present chirping of birds and the occasional sound of a passing car. Someone had ingeniously hung a little shelf onto the tree bark over the hammock so that Rebecca had somewhere to rest her tea. She settled herself in the hammock, the box beside her. She skimmed through the letters, looking for more than a casual mention of “your mother.”
And then Rebecca found what she was looking for.
Dear Joy,
You’re eighteen years old. My God. You’re an adult. How did that happen? How did the years pass like this? On the one hand, I’ve been waiting anxiou
sly for this day, wondering if this is the day you’ll try to track me down, come look for me. I suppose you could have done that before, but something about being eighteen, a full-fledged adult, makes it seem more likely. Or something I could imagine a teenager saying: “When I turn eighteen, I’m gonna look for my father.”
Of course, I don’t know if you ever said that, if you even want to find me. And if you did come knocking at my door, I wonder how I’d react. If I’d do like I did to your mother when she told me you were born. If I’d close the door as though you weren’t standing there. I suppose I’d still be scared, of the weight of you, of how Rebecca would feel.
You two could be sisters. Are sisters. And yet you don’t even know of each other’s existence. Well, you might know of her existence. I’ve always wondered what your mother shared with you about me. If you know you have a sister, two years older.
Rebecca let the letter flutter down to her stomach. She stared up at the cotton-candy-white clouds, at their slow drift across the blue sky.
Had Joy known that Rebecca existed? Had her mother told her that her father had a wife and another daughter?
Had Joy grown up knowing she had a sister, a half sister, out there somewhere?
Why hadn’t she asked Joy that question?
Because something told Rebecca that Joy had known, had grown up knowing. And she couldn’t imagine what that felt like, the awareness of something so solid, a sister, somewhere on Earth. The knowledge of it these past weeks had given Rebecca a certain strength: I have a sister.
She wondered if Joy had felt that her entire life, when she was sad or troubled, that she had this guardian angel looking out for her.
Or maybe Joy had just felt the emptiness of it all. The nothingness. The unsisterness.
A breeze fluttered the letter off her stomach, and Rebecca grabbed it before it was carried away. She took a deep breath and read.
I’ve held back from talking much about your mother and our relationship because I didn’t think it would be fair to you, but now that you are eighteen, I think it’s okay. I can’t imagine you’ve heard much about me from Pia, but then again, I didn’t know her that long or necessarily very well. I felt like I knew her, though.
The Secret of Joy Page 12
