Waking Up Joy

by Tina Ann Forkner

  Rory let one lone tear trail a path down his cheek. I’m telling you right now, there is nothing harder than seeing a big man like Rory cry.

  “She didn’t want me to tell anyone.”

  So, I’m not the only one who managed to keep a secret from the family.

  “Why the hell not?” River said. What people didn’t know about River was that as grumpy as he could be, he was nothing but a big pat of butter waiting to melt. Rory frowned.

  “She thought there was something wrong with her. So, she’s real worried about this one.” His face hardened.

  “She’s hurt, too. All anyone talks about is stupid luck charms and Joy being crazy.”

  “What?” I lay a hand on his arm.

  “Nobody’s even given her a baby shower. You’re all too wrapped up in your own stuff.”

  Rory never got mad for no reason. I wouldn’t cry, no matter how ashamed I felt, because this was Rory’s pity party and not mine, but I felt awful. It was true. This was just one more thing I’d not paid attention to before my coma, so wrapped up in my boring life was I.

  “We’re sorry,” River said.

  I searched for the right words, but they wouldn’t come. I might as well have been back in my coma. “So sorry about the baby, and for not showing y’all we’re excited about this one. Guess we were just waiting for him to come, honey.”

  “And her,” Rory said. “Him and her.”

  “Oh my Lord!” I jumped out of my chair. River started slapping Rory on the back, while I hugged his big old chest.

  “Twins?”

  “Twins!” River exclaimed. “That ought to be good luck, right?”

  I laughed. “Not luck. Just a blessing.”

  “A miracle,” Rory said.

  “Yes, a doggone miracle,” River agreed.

  If Momma had been there, she, of course, would’ve given all kinds of reasons why Talley twins were a good omen, but none of us were saying it now.

  Before the boys went back to work, Rory surprised me by turning the subject back to Jimmy.

  “Sis, you got to patch things up with Jimmy. It’s killin’ him to see you and Doc hangin’ out together.”

  “What?” That couldn’t be true. Jimmy hadn’t so much as called me and asked me to dinner since the night in the balcony. Either he really had been asleep, or he felt some moral dilemma about the rumors that were going around about that night, thanks to none other than my sister, and you can guess which one.

  “It’s true,” River said.

  “It’s not.”

  “It is,” Rory assured me. “Just think about it.”

  They each kissed me and walked out, leaving me to question everything I was starting to think about my relationship with Kyle. And apparently with Jimmy.

  Ruthie’s Diary

  Dear Diary

  Please don’t think I’m a spy, but I overheard my uncles talking to Aunt Joy about the mayor, and it made me realize that I was wrong not to give Aunt Joy her box. Believe it or not, she took things better than I expected, when I finally did. I hadn’t meant to wait that long to tell her, honest, but so much happened with the tornado and a bunch of other stuff that it hadn’t seemed the right time before now. When I handed her the envelope and the box, she looked inside right in front of me. We were sitting on the front porch and as soon as she opened the box, she snapped it shut.

  “Gross, isn’t it?” I said, thinking of the tooth. That was one of the weirdest things about the charm Aunt Joy and Jimmy created. It didn’t make any sense at all. A tooth, a silver heart with their names engraved on it, a little wooden man with a noose around its neck, and a carved snake. There were also a handful of letters and photos obviously put in there by Grandma Bess.

  Aunt Joy said that stuff is from a charm she made when she was barely out of high school. She thought it would magically hide her secrets, which I have to say is silly. She said it seems ridiculous now, but that at the time, she was desperate. She kept the silver heart, but for some reason she let me keep the picture of her and the mayor. They were so young. Aunt Joy, so pretty and dressed in old-fashioned clothes, was sitting on the lowest branch of the magic apple tree. The mayor stood laughing with his arms out, as if to catch her. She said a friend of Jimmy’s took that picture when Grandma Bess wasn’t home. I put it in my Bible.

  Aunt Joy said she wasn’t mad at me for not giving her the box sooner. She said life was too short to be mad, but that she was relieved. I am, too, but I wonder what’s going to happen now, with the mayor, and with Doc.

  Ruthie

  Chapter Twenty-three

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  So after more than twenty years, the charm was in the chimney after all, and safe-guarded by my own Momma who never said a word. In a letter she put in the box for me to read, she said, that because of the tooth, she had an idea of what had happened and why Jimmy and I would try our hands at making a dark charm. She said the charm wouldn’t work, and that the only way to hide something like that kind of secret was to throw the evidence—the tooth—somewhere that nobody would ever find it. As for the wooden trinkets, she didn’t know what we meant by including them, but I should just throw them in the well, too, because they were creepy and she didn’t like them.

  Momma. She had always liked the lighter side of magic, and nothing dark. As for those trinkets, except for the heart, I just wanted to forget about them, and the tooth, which Momma was right about. It was a bad thing to have hanging around. It was evidence, and the fact it had been in the box with a heart that had our names on it gave me the shivers. What were we thinking?

  “Ruthie, come help me, dear.” I held out the box I’d placed in the chimney all those years ago nodding at the question in her eyes.

  “You are already mixed up in this. Might as well help me get rid of this awful thing. Let’s go throw it in the well, where it won’t ever be found.”

  Looking happy for the adventure, she grabbed my other hand and headed toward the front door toward the old well, but I gently pulled her back.

  “I want to show you something, Ruthie.”

  She looked confused. “And then we’ll go out to the well? Grandma Bess said you should put it in the well.”

  “Well,” I said conspiratorially. “Let’s just say that Grandma Bess didn’t get to tell you all her secrets before she died.”

  I pulled open the basement door.

  “We have to go down there?” Ruthie asked, her voice filled with dread.

  “Are you afraid?” I teased.

  “No.” I knew she was lying. The last time she’d been down there was the night of the tornado, and that was enough to scare anyone, except me. Momma had taken me further into the bowels of the basement before and the need to dump those teeth and carvings into the well overcame any fear I might’ve had if I were smart enough to be afraid back then.

  What were we thinking, Jimmy?

  Actually seeing the items that had made up the charm we made and hid, only half believing and hoping that it would ward off the truth forever, reminded me of how young and naïve we were when we contrived our ridiculous idea. It was outrageous, of course, but an idea born out of fear and grief. An idea born out of immaturity and naivety.

  And maybe stupidity, let’s face it.

  As we walked, I pulled strings dangling from light bulbs that zapped and flickered.

  “It’s cold down here,” Ruthie muttered.

  “It sure would be nice to have one of Carey’s sweaters, wouldn’t it?”

  “She has one for every season.”

  I pulled Ruthie passed stacks of papers and one final bucket of charms left from the old chimney. Since the tornado, I’d been organizing the house, so it didn’t look too bad anymore. The closets and trunks had been emptied and repacked. Grandma Bess’s stacks of picture albums and scrapbooks had been organized on a shelf in the hallway. I’d even swept out the passageways behind some of the walls, sometimes imagining Daddy’s voice was caught in those walls, and remembering playing hide
and seek with my sisters when we were little. It was hard to believe Momma and Daddy let us play there.

  “Look at this, Ruthie.” This room had a real light switch and an old chandelier, something odd to be in a basement. It lit up the room, driving away all thoughts of ghosts or spiders. The room was adorned with dusty, moth-eaten, but stately looking furniture.

  “Whoa,” Ruthie breathed.

  I picked up a handful of photos I’d found in a drawer and set on the old coffee table in the center of the room. The first one was a picture of a man that looked just like Grandpa Talley beside what could only be outlaws.

  “Is that?”

  “No,” I said. “It looks like your Grandpa, but it would’ve been a little before his time. “Must be a great grandfather or great uncle.”

  “That looks like Billy the Kid!” She said it in jest, but as we both leaned in to get a better look. We looked at each other with raised eyes. I didn’t know if it was him, but it was fun to see Ruthie get excited. That girl needed some adventure and here we had enough of it in our home for her to write a book about.

  My heart dipped a little to think of all this adventure being lost if we couldn’t find a way to appease Mr. Littleton and keep the house, too.

  “This kind of connection would explain the wild streak in your uncles,” I said.

  “Aunt Joy. You’re teasing, right?”

  I laughed, shrugged my shoulders. Ruthie’s eyes grew wide as the moon.

  “This way,” I said.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Somewhere you can’t tell the cousins about. It’s too dangerous for the little ones.”

  We followed the tunnels behind the walls to a door in the floor, which I pulled open with an attached rope. I shined a flashlight down into the hole. I had to ask Ruthie three times to go down first. A shuffle in the corner made me jump.

  Probably a mouse, right? Not a snake.

  But I still prayed Momma’s instructions were worth it to bring Ruthie all the way down here. All I needed was for the poor girl to get bit by a snake or a spider.

  “Why can’t we take stairs?” Ruthie asked.

  “There aren’t any stairs to this place, honey. This place is a secret.”

  “It’s different than where we hid during the tornado?”

  “It’s just deeper in, honey.” And damp.

  The room was small, the walls bricked, and the air musty.

  “The other side of this wall is the basement that everybody knows about, where we hid during the tornado. On the other side of that is the orchard, and of course beyond that and up the hill, the cave and The Spring of Good Luck.”

  “It’s creepy down here.” Ruthie’s voice was a squeak.

  “We won’t be long.” I motioned for her to follow me into a tunnel. Ruthie tip-toed behind. “This tunnel was built a long time ago. It goes pretty far back.”

  There was no electricity to the tunnel, so we followed my flashlight as we padded along, the cool air clinging to our skin. Finally, I came to an abrupt halt at the end of the tunnel, causing Ruthie to smash into me. I grabbed the wall to steady us both and I swear there was a minor earth quake that stirred the dust around us.

  I flashed the light where the tunnel turned slightly and ended against a wall that curved into a half circle.

  “This is an old water well,” I said.

  “Oh, wow. This is totally awesome.” She peeked into the hole, but I pulled her back. It wasn’t safe at all. “It must have been for the outlaws, right?”

  “It makes sense to me.”

  I angled my flashlight down into the well before us. The light reflected off black water. I guess I don’t have to tell you it gave me the creeps, but for reasons I couldn’t divulge to Ruthie. My experience was that underground waterways held bad things, and for all I knew, some of those bad things might have drifted into this very well.

  Lord, I hope not.

  “Can we hurry? This is getting kind of scary.”

  “Why do you think I brought you with me? Hold the light, Ruthie.” I pulled the pieces of the charm from my pocket, except for the heart, the photo I’d given to Ruthie, and the letters.

  I stepped forward and Ruthie reached out to steady me.

  “Thank you,” I whispered, although I don’t know why I was being so quiet. Nobody was down there but us. I stood at the well’s edge, Ruthie’s hand at my waist, and whispered, Lord, please make all this go away. Quickly, I tossed each item from the charm into the well—especially the creepy tooth. They landed with a plop.

  “There,” I said. “That’s that.”

  We paused back at the bottom of the ladder.

  “Aunt Joy?”

  “Yes, honey?”

  “The words you said when you were dropping things in the well. Were those chants?”

  “No,” I said, laughing into the stillness at how much Momma had influenced Ruthie with her belief in magic and good luck. “Those were just prayers, silly.” Prayers that those things would disappear into the well and never be found.

  “What was the charm supposed to hide?” Ruthie asked.

  “Something happened one day on the bank at Spavinaw Junction Creek. Something terrible.”

  Ruthie was silent, and then she asked the inevitable question.

  “What?”

  “I want to tell you, Ruthie. I do. But I need to tell some other people first and it’s not going to be easy. Then, I’ll tell you.”

  “It’s something to do with why you and the mayor broke up, isn’t it?”

  I squeezed her shoulder. “You are such a hopeless romantic, Ruthie.”

  “Not hopeless,” she corrected. “Just a romantic.”

  “Okay,” I said, letting go of just a little, like handing one brick over and keeping the rest. “I used to be mad at the mayor, not for what happened that day, but for what he did after.” I grabbed a hand towel and started wiping down the counters.

  “You still are a little mad,” she said knowingly, “I can tell.”

  “Yes, I am, but maybe I’m just being stubborn. What the mayor did long ago was because he was young and confused, just like me. He was hurt, too.”

  “You did something to him?”

  Did I do something to him, too? Yes, I didn’t let him go. I acted like I really was off my rocker by expecting him to know how to fix the past.

  Out loud, I said, “What really happened, Ruthie, was that somebody did something to us, and all this other stuff is because of that.”

  “So you’re going to forgive him?”

  “Hmm. That is a good question, honey. That’s a very good question.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

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  I’d had three cookies, even though my hips probably didn’t need them, before I noticed Nurse Clara looked like she’d eaten a few too many herself. She sat on the edge of a chair in her living room still dressed in pink scrubs with her hands clasped tightly over her knees.

  “What is it, Clara?”

  “Girls, I should have told you this a long time ago, but now is the right time.”

  My sisters and I all leaned forward, confused about what big secret our childhood babysitter could possibly tell us.

  “If it’s about the house and all Momma’s secret charms and stuff, we already know all about that,” I said.

  “Oh, that stuff,” she said, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “I never let that bother me. Your momma was always a bit eccentric.”

  We girls nodded. How could we argue with that?

  “What I want to tell you is more important. After I found out, I tried to forget about it. Seeing you girls around town, I always felt guilty, but didn’t want to turn your worlds upside down.” She bit into a new cookie. “When you showed up in my hospital, Joy, and I saw the tension in you, Carey and Nanette, I just knew it was time. Secrets always find their way to the surface, don’t they?”

  She peered at me, as if I should have known what she was talking about. It gave me an e
erie feeling at the back of my neck, which I ignored. I was tired from waking up in the middle of the night from my own secrets, and during the little drive from the farm house to Clara’s little house in the center of town, I promised myself that this would be a day of fun. Clara’s positive attitude in the hospital had a lot to do with the change I felt, and I was determined not to let eerie feelings or signs of bad luck ruin this afternoon.

  “What would you have to tell us that we don’t know?” Carey asked, always the frank one.

  Nurse Clara set her plate of cookies on the coffee table and stared at the cut flowers from Momma’s garden. I’d wanted to thank her for the hours she’d sat by me in the hospital, even coming in on her own time. It had seemed pretty extreme that someone who didn’t really know us would put in extra time, but I was convinced she was just one of those people, like a Good Samaritan type. It turned out that Clara, who really was a nice person, was also motivated by the past, just like so many of the rest of us.

  “When you walked in to see your sister, Carey, the truth felt like a big ole rock in my chest. I knew it.”

  “Knew what,” Carey asked, now intrigued.

  I leaned forward to get a better listen and Nanette picked up her fourth cookie.

  “I knew I had to tell you the truth, Carey.”

  Tell Carey the truth? Now, this was interesting.

  Apparently, not everything is about me.

  Carey sat, her spine straight, looking like a prim lady setting herself against unsavory news. It was interesting, and a little heartrending, to watch Carey’s posture wilt a little with each tick of the clock on Clara’s wall as she started telling us about her friendship with our mom, occasionally standing up to straighten her perfectly arranged knick-knacks on the sideboard and smoothing out the doilies and cloths draped on the antique furniture around the room as she talked.

  “I feel like I’ve made myself at home with our new deeper friendship—which I admit I needed, been so lonely all these years by myself—and I’m not sure your Momma would like it.”

  For a moment I was distracted by her admission of loneliness.