Finding Joy (The Joy Series)

by Jenni Moen

  “Why were you sad?” I looked around the coffee shop, which was strangely busy for this late in the day, and wished that we had met somewhere else. Somewhere more private. I didn’t know how much longer I could hold myself together, and someone from my office could wander in at any moment. At least we were in the corner.

  “It was awful, Allie. For everyone. It was like you’d died, too.”

  All these years, I had thought my friends had abandoned me, but Brittany was telling me that they’d had no other choice … and that she’d had felt like I had died. Had my best friend grieved for me? How was it possible after I had done something so horrible?

  I buried my face in my hands. The pattern in the brushed metal table top began to blur. “I didn’t understand why you didn’t want to be my friend any more,” I said. “I understood why Thomas didn’t, but you … I didn’t understand.” Finally, the dam of emotions that I had been trying to contain broke. Tears slid down my face onto the table.

  “Oh, Allie,” Brittany said. “I tried. I really did. When you were still in a coma, they encouraged us to visit all the time. They wanted us to talk to you … said you could hear us … said if we talked to you would have a reason to wake up. At first, I came to the hospital all the time, but it was the end of the year, and things got busy with prom and graduation and stuff.”

  The ‘stuff’ she was referring to was all the parties and celebrations that I had missed. At the time, I’d thought it was a big deal. Now, it meant nothing.

  “Still, even at the end, I visited at least once a week. But then one night, your dad came over to my house. He said that you had finally woke up. He explained to my parents and me that you didn’t remember the accident … that you had no idea about the little girl. He said that the doctors said that you might not ever remember. He also went to Thomas’s house and Katy’s and every other one of our friends.”

  “Honestly, I kept trying for a while. But eventually I gave up. You were my best friend. I knew that if you found out what had really happened it would devastate you. But if he could keep you away from everyone, you could go away to college. He said you could make a fresh start. You’d been through so much. I wanted to believe him. And he was your dad. He was looking out for you.”

  “That’s one way to look at it,” I said, finally looking up. I wiped my eyes with my fingers. Brittany shoved a napkin my direction.

  “I really believe that he thought he was doing the right thing,” she said. “I can see why you’re angry. I can’t even imagine how I would feel in your shoes. But I was there. I saw what the accident did to your parents. It wrecked them. Those first few days when we didn’t know if you were even going to live … I’d never seen your father like that. He was always so in control of everything. And there was nothing he could do for you. Nothing any of us could do. And then there was all of the press. The whispers. My mom says your mom was never the same.”

  “A lot of people were never the same,” I said in my whisper of a voice.

  Brittany just nodded and took a sip of her now cold coffee. We sat in silence for a few minutes while I tried to gather myself. “Thanks for telling me,” I finally said. “I do appreciate it. I don’t know how we can move past it but I do appreciate it.”

  “There’s something else,” Brittany said. Her voice was hesitant like she wasn’t sure if she should continue. “It’s the guy you introduced me to the other day. You said he was your boyfriend, right?”

  I knew now what she wanted to say. I was going to just head her off at the pass. “I know you’re wondering how it’s possible, right?”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, I didn’t recognize him at first, but there was something about him. All weekend it kept nagging at me. I felt like I knew him somehow. And then I finally placed him.”

  “I know it seems crazy,” I said. “No one but us understands it. My parents certainly don’t. And we haven’t even began to deal with his parents. Sometimes I wonder how he can stand to be with me. But somehow he’s forgiven me. I wouldn’t have thought that there was enough forgiveness in the world.”

  She looked at me like she didn’t quite follow. “I’m not sure I understand. What do you mean forgive you?”

  I ducked my head in shame and couldn’t believe that she was really going to make me say it. “For what happened to his sister.”

  “What happened to his sister?” she asked. She seemed genuinely confused, but I was more lost than her.

  “His sister … she was the little girl in the accident. You recognized him, right?”

  Brittany’s eyes turned into giant saucers of understanding. “No … uh … I didn’t know the family of the little girl. I’d heard that she had an older brother who had graduated from our school, but after the accident I remember thinking that we didn’t know him. I was glad that we didn’t know him.”

  We sat there looking stupidly at each other across the table for several minutes. My mind was racing a thousand different directions, and I desperately tried to grab onto one coherent thought as it flitted by. Finally, I asked the only question I could think of. “So if you weren’t going to tell me that Adam was Joy’s brother, what were you going to tell me?”

  “Uhhh, I was going to tell you how cool it was that you ended up with him. Like it was fate or something.”

  “Fate,” I said, laughing bitterly. “More like a curse. For him, anyway. He wakes up everyday with every reason in the world to hate me and somehow finds it in him to love me instead. I will probably never understand where that kind of love comes from.”

  I still struggled daily with whether I deserved Adam’s love. It was impossible to separate my feelings for him from my guilt over the accident. Still, I greedily accepted it because no one had ever loved me like he did. No one has ever seen my every flaw and accepted me anyway. Accepted me in spite of them.

  “No,” Brittany said slowly. “It’s definitely fate or destiny or maybe even God at work here. There’s something you don’t know, Allie.”

  “What?” I asked impatiently. I was growing weary of all the things that I thought I had figured out, but still didn’t know.

  “I know you probably don’t want to talk about the accident. But you remember why you wrecked the car, right?”

  “The phone was ringing. I couldn’t find it in my purse. I was driving with one hand and digging with the other. And then it started to rain.”

  “Right,” she said. “The phone was ringing. And it was me calling to tell you to meet me at the Goose. But I wasn’t calling from my phone.”

  I remembered. It was because I thought it was Brit calling that I’d been so insistent on finding that ringing phone. I’d needed to talk to her. No. I’d wanted to talk to her, but it definitely could have waited. It should have waited.

  Just before I lost control of the car, I had found my phone but hadn’t recognized the number on the screen. “I remember,” I said. I didn’t know where this was going but my heart was racing in anticipation of what she was going to say next.

  “The battery had died on mine so I borrowed a phone from this guy that I’d just met down on Greenville. I wanted you to come to the Goose because I wanted you to meet him. I remember thinking that he was perfect for you. He was older, and you had said over and over again that you were tired of Thomas and his high school boy antics. You guys had just broken up, and you needed a date for prom. The guy with the phone ran track for UT, and he had great calves.”

  “Great calves?” I asked. I knew a guy who had run track for UT and still to this day had great calves. It wasn’t the first thing I noticed when I looked at him, but Britt had always been a little weird. She would’ve noticed something like great calves.

  She smiled at me wickedly. “It was Adam, Allie. He was Adam. The guy with the great calves was Adam.” She grinned from ear to ear. It reminded me of a younger Brittany. The one who used to slip me notes in class to tell me that she thought our science teacher was hot and had a great ass.

  My thoughts sk
ittered to a halt. The phone call had been from Adam. Well, not Adam … but from Brittany … on Adam’s phone.

  “Adam,” I said. It was all I could manage.

  “Adam,” she repeated, nodding. “Maybe you were always supposed to meet. Maybe that’s why he can forgive you. Because it is destiny or fate or whatever. It may have taken a decade, but you were supposed to get together.”

  Maybe.

  Or maybe we were never supposed to be together at all.

  _________________________

  I worked late that night. I had plenty that needed to get done, but that wasn’t what kept me at the office. It was my complete and total inability to go home and face the music. To face Adam. There was no way that I could keep what Brittany had told me from him. No way. So to avoid the inevitable confrontation, I pushed papers back and forth across my desk, hour after hour, without even looking at them.

  My meeting with Brittany had turned out to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I now knew how it had all gone down. For months now, I’d wondered how my dad had managed to pull it off, keeping me in the dark for so many years. By cutting me off from every friend I’d had prior to the accident, he had ensured that I remained in the dark about the whole thing.

  I had never looked at a paper. I hadn’t known that I should.

  I hadn’t asked my friends. Because I no longer had any. My father had orchestrated it that way.

  If you could say such a thing, the timing had been perfect. For weeks and weeks, I’d been unconscious. When I finally woke up, it had been time for graduation. But while all my former friends walked across the stage, I’d been bedridden. There had been no way … physically or emotionally … that I could’ve walk across that stage. And so I had been alone while life went on without me.

  At the time, it had seemed like the end of the world, but I knew now that I’d still had everything to look forward to. I was still alive. Not everyone was.

  And the blame was solely mine. There wasn’t a question in my head about that. I was the one who had been distracted. I was the one who had driven too fast down that residential street. I was the one who reached for the phone. But how would Adam feel when he found out that it had been his number that had flashed on my screen just before I’d hit that tree and taken his sister’s life?

  Brittany had called from his phone so that we could meet. It was the most vicious form of irony.

  It was almost 10 p.m. when Ethan wandered in for the second time that day. “Holy shit! What are you still doing here?” he asked, leaning up against the wall.

  “What’s it look like I’m doing? I’m working.”

  “You haven’t worked this late in months,” he said. “To be honest, I thought Adam had killed your work ethic.”

  As usual, I looked around for something to throw at him, but found nothing suitable. He still had my stiletto tape dispenser. “I need my tape back.”

  “Sure,” he said. “But not if you are going to use it as a weapon. You could put an eye out with that heel.”

  “Whatever,” I said, rolling my eyes at him. “The better question is what are you doing here? Constance has been gone for hours,” I said in a sing-song voice.

  Ethan looked around as if someone might have heard me. I already knew that every office on my hall had been empty for at least an hour. “Shut your pie hole, Alexis. You’ll get her fired.”

  His interest in her well-being intrigued me. Ethan had slept with plenty of office girls. This was the first time that he had worried about what effect it would have on their careers.

  “Nobody’s here, Ethan,” I said, yawning. He eyed the chair like he might sit in it. “Seriously, what are you working on?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I answered with a sigh. “Have a seat.”

  He happily obliged.

  “I know that deep, meaningful talks aren’t really our thing, but can I talk to you about something?”

  “Of course,” he answered, but he eyed me warily. “Is this about Adam?”

  I wasn’t sure when his allegiance to Adam started to rival his allegiance to me, but obviously that’s where we were now. I had to admit that I didn’t like it. Ethan was mine. In a divorce, I would fight for him.

  “It is. But I need an objective opinion.”

  “Well, I’m not sure I can be objective when it comes to you,” he said, making me feel bad for my previous assumption.

  I spent the next half hour rehashing my conversation with Brittany. It didn’t go down any better the second time. “What should I do?” I finally asked. “I shouldn’t tell him, right?” Ethan looked at me like I’d lost my mind.

  “Have you lost your damn mind?” he asked. “Of course, you should. There’s been enough drama between the two of you. You had your fucking soap opera beginning. Aren’t you tired of it?”

  I digested what he had said. He was right. Adam and I had agreed that we’d be honest with each other no matter what. There had already been too many lies. And, as it was, I was already keeping one secret from him. I couldn’t keep another.

  “You’re right,” I said, nodding at him. “I should go home.”

  “You should go home,” he said, standing up. “It’s not like you’re really getting anything done here, anyway.” He strode out into the hall, but then stuck his head back in. “Take a cab. It’s late.”

  He sounded just like Adam, and I rolled my eyes at his over-protective request.

  I didn’t waste any more time. There wasn’t much chance of outlasting Adam anyway. He still kept college student hours. Even when we went to bed together, he frequently got up after I was fast asleep. Sometimes he read for school, but most of the time he watched television. He saved the really violent, gruesome shows for those late night hours when he knew I was sleeping peacefully.

  For the first time in a decade, I was sleeping peacefully. For two months, there had been no nightmares. There had been no more waking up in a cold sweat because something just under the surface of my conscience was begging to be acknowledged. Each and every night, I slept like a baby because Adam was with me. Even when he fell asleep on the couch in front of the television, I slept better, just knowing he was close by.

  Make no mistake, I was still haunted. I still felt plenty of guilt. No amount of reassurance by Adam could temper it. After all, I had years of guilt to make up for. However, memories of the accident no longer waited for my eyes to close, preferring instead to wreak havoc on my guilty conscience during the day.

  Everything in my life now seemed to be tied in some way to Joy and her memory. All the years I’d busted my ass at school and then at work were just another attempt to distract myself from the reality of what I’d done. I even questioned whether my heart was in the right place when it came to Lizzie. Had I joined the program because I wanted to make a difference in some little girl’s life? Or was I trying to make up for the fact that I had taken another’s?

  And, of course, Adam was tied to Joy. I had fallen in love with him before I’d known the truth. I’d fallen for him for all the right reasons. For me, it had been the usual story of girl meets handsome boy, girl swoons over boy, boy woos girl, and girl falls in love. It had been wonderfully ordinary. For me.

  But not for him.

  While I’d been blissfully falling in love with a man who had seemed more perfect for me than I had ever thought possible, he had struggled. He had fought any feelings he had for me, and he’d had every reason to do so.

  Now our roles were reversed. I continually struggled with how to make myself good enough for him. I struggled to find ways to show him every day how sorry I was for what had happened to Joy. And so my feelings for Adam, like everything else, were now inevitably and inseverably linked to Joy.

  I loved him more fiercely because of her.

  I loved him recklessly. It was all I could give him after what I’d taken from him. Every day, I chose to ignore any lingering doubts that I had. I did not allow them to sully my love for him. But I was still awa
re that, even if I didn’t acknowledge them, they had every right to be there.

  Finding a way to forgive myself was a constant battle. But it was a battle I fought alone. I didn’t voice my concerns to Adam. I never hinted at the self-hatred that I still felt … that I would probably always feel.

  I didn’t tell him these things, because he didn’t deserve to carry those burdens. I did. We would make this work because he wanted it to work … not because it should.

  I wanted it, too. I wanted it with every fiber of my being.

  As I turned the key in the lock and pushed our door open, I wanted something else with every fiber of my being. I wanted everything not to be so damn hard. And I wanted to not have to tell him about the phone call that had changed both of our lives.

  The TV was on just as I’d expected, but Adam wasn’t in front of it. As I was kicking my heels off by the door, he rounded the corner from the kitchen with a bowl of sliced apples in his hand. I looked him over from head to toe. I couldn’t help myself. It was my natural reaction to him.

  His broad carefully sculptured chest was just barely concealed in a t-shirt I had never seen before. A cat wearing sunglasses hung perilously from a tree branch. ‘Hang in there, pussy’ was scrawled across his chest.

  He gave me a wicked grin and sidled over, “Hey, babe. You had to work late, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Nice shirt.”

  He shrugged at me. “Moral support.”

  “How’s your little project going?” I asked.

  “Good. We’re all but done. That cat is advanced. The instructions said it could take four weeks. Rubber Cat’s got it down in five days. Come check it out.”

  I followed him through the living room and our bedroom to the adjoining bathroom. The new assembly over the toilet was a donut of litter surrounding a big hole. The idea was that it would give Rubber Cat the impression of a litter box but he would end up squatting over the hole. The hole fed directly into the toilet and would result in victory. I would still have to remove the contraption to go to the bathroom, but it was a vast improvement.