“I know what I mean.” Clark grinned. “Sweet dreams, girl.”
Chapter 15
It helped to have a method in her searching. All of her spare time now went to paging through websites and old media, looking for a face or name that tugged at her memory. Reading up on celebrities and models, she found that she kept running across articles by someone named Standish Billups, and she took the time to find out more about him. She thought the name was familiar, but maybe it was just from seeing it in bylines so often.
Billups seemed to have written a lot of articles about the supermodel Melisande. Joy skimmed a few, but nothing jumped out at her as being relevant to her search. The photographs of the icy blonde beauty stirred a strange dislike in her that was as violent as it was puzzling. Joy had no reason to hate the beautiful, queenly celebrity, but she found herself shaken by anger and something that was close to fear.
Was Billups the key? She found him on LinkedIn, but the photograph didn’t spark any strong response in her. He was twenty-something, paunchy, with an amiable enough face and an untidy beard. Nothing like the beautiful unknown in her dreams.
Every night she still dreamed of that other life with him. And every morning she woke to loneliness that never stopped hurting.
She could almost believe what Clark had suggested, that somewhere some other Joy was living this life. Otherwise it didn’t make any sense. She’d never been desperate for a boyfriend; she was so used to not dating that William had been an anomaly, and even he hadn’t upset her normal life very much. This felt different; it felt specific, as she’d told Tasha and Clark. It wasn’t just a generic guy she felt this aching for. It was this particular one. Just as it wasn’t babies in general that she wanted: it was their baby. Sometimes when she looked down at her unpregnant body she felt a shattering emptiness at the reminder that the baby her dreaming self awaited so joyfully wasn’t coming.
Her parents were getting concerned, she discovered. One evening as she sat at her computer scrolling through pages of useless search results there came a knock, and she looked up to see her father standing on the threshold. “Am I interrupting?” he asked.
When she shook her head, he ventured in. The only other chair in the room was the old bentwood rocker, and he drew it close to the desk before taking a seat.
“Your mom and I are worried about you, kittycat,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. We just hate to see you unhappy.” His eyes behind his glasses were full of concern, and she looked away, feeling guilty. “Is there anything I can do to help?” he asked.
“Can you do magic?”
He blinked. “Can I what?”
“Unless you can wave a wand and make everything better, I don’t think there’s any way you can help.”
“Oh. No, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” He was silent for a moment, then observed, “You’re wearing your mother’s rowan pendant a lot these days.”
Her hand closed around it in what was becoming a reflex when she felt in need of reassurance. “I asked Mom if I could have it. It makes me feel a little less lost.”
“Is that what’s bothering you? Feeling lost?”
She hesitated for a long moment. Finally she said, “I think my life was supposed to go in a different direction.” That was as close as she would get to telling him about the dreams. She could imagine how flimsy and insignificant they’d seem to him, the fantasies of a lovelorn teenager.
“Joy, you’re only seventeen,” he said gently. “Your life can go in any direction you want it to. If you’re missing something, you go out and find it.” He reached out to pat her hand. “You’ve got a future ahead of you to do anything with—anything you want. And in less than a year you’ll be in college, discovering all kind of new directions your life can take.”
“You don’t understand,” she said desperately. “I’m really afraid this is something I’ve lost for good, not something that’s still out there for me. I think I’ve missed my chance.”
He nodded, his brow furrowing with thought. “I see. Well, if that’s the case, you’re not going to change anything by dwelling on it. All you can do is learn from it and move on—and start looking ahead.” He seemed to take her silence as agreement, because he stood to go, smiling down at her reassuringly. “Your mother and I will help you in any way we can. If you want to take a year off before college, maybe travel some, see the world… just let us know what will make you happy.”
“Thank you,” she said dully. It didn’t seem worth explaining that she couldn’t imagine anything they could offer her making her happy.
At the threshold he paused. “I meant what I said about not getting hung up on the past. Grieve for it if you need to, but think about the future. That’s what matters.”
She said, “I’ll try.” And maybe for a minute she even meant it.
It didn’t help, though. She still drifted around in a kind of muffled haze, finding it harder and harder to tune in to what was going on around her. Random things would catch her attention, and she’d surface in the middle of conversations to hear Maddie saying to Tasha, “Alissa really overdid the self-tanner; she’s positively orange,” or William arguing with Jeremiah: “You can’t seriously compare Robby Krieger’s technique to Lindsey Buckingham’s. I mean, look at his live performance of ‘Big Love’…” She’d catch her mother or father watching her with a worried expression when they thought she didn’t notice.
In her darker moments she feared that she might be losing touch with reality. But it didn’t feel like that. It felt like trying to find her way back to reality out of a life that was out of joint.
She’d fall into bed after a late night of searching names and faces online and find herself back in the real right life with her dream lover. “How about I make my special microwave mac ’n’ cheese?” he might say, with a smile that made her breathless, or “She seems to be moving around a lot lately; do you think she’s going to come soon?” as he touched her rounded belly. Small, mundane moments, just glimpses of an ordinary happiness that was only extraordinary because it was out of her reach. A casual kiss as they parted at the front door that the waking Joy cherished as much as she would have a diamond ring.
Some nights she tried not to let herself fall asleep, because the waking was so wrenching. But sleep always won—that, and the yearning to spend more time in that other life.
Until finally she found that she didn’t even need to be asleep.
One cold night in late January she sat up too long at her computer, and when she crawled into bed she was too chilled to fall asleep. She listened to the heat cycle on, rumbling gently in the pipes, and heard the floorboards of the house creak as they expanded. She tucked her hands under her cheek to warm them. She should get up and fetch a heating pad. But she didn’t want to climb out of bed and cross the cold bare floor, so she stayed where she was, huddled under the covers. Her mind drifted, even though she was too cold to fall asleep.
Then she felt the mattress sink as her husband got in bed and curled up next to her, tucking his knees behind hers so that they lay together as snugly as two spoons in a drawer. He draped his arm over her, and without opening her eyes she drew his hand between hers, feeling his chest expand and contract against her back with his breathing, a soothing rhythm that brought a faint sleepy smile to her lips. His body sheltered and warmed her, made her feel cocooned and safe, and she felt herself slipping into a contented sleep…
I don’t have a husband.
She jerked fully awake, twisting in the bed to look at the space beside her. There was nobody there.
But—
She flung back the covers and, after a paralyzed moment of dread, rested her hand on the mattress next to her. Was it her imagination, or was it warm?
Then the full memory rushed in, and a little gasp of pain escaped her. She drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, squeezed her eyes shut and huddled into herself.
He was
her husband. They were married—or supposed to be.
Maybe that was what it took to make sense of the random things her magpie mind was tuning in to. As morning broke after her sleepless night, she crawled stiffly out of bed, plopped down in her desk chair, and typed TANNER LINDSEY into the Google search blank on her computer.
Her low wail brought the sound of running bare feet and a knock at the door. “Joy? Are you okay?”
“Mom?”
Her mother pushed open her door and caught sight of her face. “Honey, what’s wrong?”
She shook her head mutely, feeling the tears spilling hotly onto her cheeks, and pointed at the monitor. Her mother came to stand beside her, one hand going to her hair to stroke it back from her face, and read the two-line obituary from last April:
LINDSEY, TANNER, 17, of Murphy. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
The handsome young man in the photograph was the one from her dream. At last she knew why she hadn’t found him on any of the model agencies’ sites or at the motorcycle shop. He was dead.
“Baby, who is it? Someone you knew?” Her mother knelt on the floor next to her chair, and Joy nodded and reached out blindly for her. Instantly her mother’s arms went around her, and she rocked her as if she were still a little child.
“I was supposed to marry him,” Joy gasped between the sobs that shook her body. “We were supposed to have a baby together. And it’s too late.”
“Joy, honey.”
“Anna?” came her father’s voice. “What’s happened?”
Joy raised her face from her mother’s shoulder and saw him standing in the doorway. “I figured it out,” she said wretchedly. “I found out who he is. But he’s dead.”
Her father hadn’t taken the time to put on his glasses, and it made him look all the more bewildered. “I don’t know what’s going on. Who’s dead?”
“Tanner,” she said, and saying his name for the first time brought a fresh flood of tears.
“Come on, let’s get you settled,” said her father, shepherding them to Joy’s bed. “You both must be freezing.” He draped the afghan around them as they huddled together, Anna’s arms still around Joy, and sat down on the bed next to them. “That’s better. Sitting on the floor can’t help.”
“Joy,” said her mother gently, “who was this Tanner? You said something about marrying him—?”
She nodded and sniffled. Her father retrieved a tissue from the pocket of his bathrobe and handed it to her, and she mopped her face with it. “I know it sounds crazy. But for weeks I’ve been feeling like there was this big hole in my life, and now I know it was him.” She sniffled again, and croaked, “and our baby.”
“So you knew him before he…?”
She shook her head. “That’s the terrible thing. If I’d known him it wouldn’t have happened. He’d be alive, I know it.”
Her mother hugged her tight. “Don’t put that on yourself. That’s not your load to carry.”
That was easy for her to say; she didn’t know what had happened, or had been prevented from happening. But neither did Joy. “What could have gone wrong?” she whispered. “Why do I have all these memories of a life with him if we didn’t get to have it? What am I supposed to do with them?”
A sigh from her father. “I’m so sorry,” he said softly. “I was afraid of something like this, but I was hoping you wouldn’t find out.”
Joy sat up in mid-sniff and stared at him through bleared, stinging eyes. “You knew?” she demanded. “You knew about me and Tanner? That we were supposed to be together?”
When he hesitated, her mother said sharply, “Steven Atticus Sumner, you tell us what’s going on.”
He opened his mouth as if to protest, took another look at his wife’s face, and gave a resigned nod. “I’ll make some coffee. And then I’ll explain.” On his way out of the room he paused and added to Joy, “You may want to call Maddie Rosenbaum and ask her to come over.”
“Why?”
“She’s… involved,” he said, and left her staring after him with more questions on the tip of her tongue.
“And after that,” said Steven, “I didn’t see Tanner again.”
Joy sat with her hands wrapped around her mug. She hadn’t tasted her coffee; her mind was too busy absorbing all that her father had told them, and all that she was starting to remember. Memory was coming back to her. Identifying Tan seemed to be the breakthrough she had needed, and now, at every moment, she found herself recalling things from her own past. The flood of information should have been overwhelming, but instead, every piece that clicked into place made her feel clearer-headed. There were shocks, but most of them had the muted effect of things already known to her but forgotten.
Not all of them, though. As he spoke, she faced the shocking fact that her own father had meddled with the past and present to try to remove Melisande from the world.
“I wasn’t lying,” he said now. “I really did try to find a way to save Tanner. I researched it all night at the library. When morning came and I hadn’t found an answer, I came home to wait for him. But he never contacted me, so I realized…”
“You realized he had been deleted,” said Joy, stunned. “And Maddie—?”
“I guess I forgot,” said Maddie, whose eyes were wide with the shock of returning memories. She had come armed with her own coffee in a jumbo-sized travel mug, although as far as Joy could tell she didn’t need it: she sat restlessly, jiggling a denim-covered knee. “I didn’t remember anything about Tanner until your dad called this morning. All I remembered was that you were supposed to be with someone who wasn’t William.”
Anna’s eyes were snapping. “Steven, I can’t believe you would try to do something like this without the rest of the council. What on earth possessed you?”
Joy would have liked an explanation as well. But her father just gave Anna a long, sorrowful look and didn’t speak.
“I don’t understand,” said Maddie. “Couldn’t the council have maybe reversed things? Why didn’t you go talk to them after Tanner disappeared?”
“Yes, why not?” Joy’s mother chimed in. “It seems like the most straightforward solution. This is too much to try to manage without Eleanor and Mo.”
“You know about the council?” Joy couldn’t help asking. There didn’t seem to be any end to the surprises this morning.
“I’ve known about it ever since I was a student at Ash Grove. So tell me,” she continued to her husband, “why try to keep it so hush-hush? I know it would have been embarrassing to admit to them how things got out of hand, but you had no way of knowing Maddie would make that wish when she did.”
“There’s something you’re not telling us.” Joy didn’t think she sounded accusing, but her father, hunched in his chair, gave her an agonized look. Anna reached over and put her hand over his.
“Steven,” she said gently. “We’re not trying to condemn you. We just want to help set things right. What is it you’re afraid of?”
He swallowed, and met her gaze. “Losing you,” he said. “If I tell the council everything, they’ll take you away from me.”
Joy’s mother shook her head helplessly. “How could they possibly do that?”
Maddie’s gasp drew their attention. She was staring at Joy’s mother with wide, horrified eyes. A second later, as if the knowledge was contagious, the answer came to Joy, and she felt cold all over.
“Dad brought you back,” she whispered. “That’s what he doesn’t want them to know.”
“Brought me back from where? Steven, what aren’t you telling me?”
He couldn’t look her in the face. “You died,” he said, his voice a thin thread. “When Joy was six years old, you died. That’s what the first spell really was: to bring you back.”
Her mother’s face paled, and for a long moment no one spoke. The room was so still that, even through the closed windows, Joy could hear the sound of the river, a distant rushing
. Usually she found it soothing, but on this bleak morning it sounded more like a commentary—or a criticism. Maybe that was how time was supposed to operate: once a moment passed, you couldn’t force it to back up and go in a different direction. Time should flow forward only, never back.
Trying to change that had worked for Maddie, it seemed—but only for her. Joy looked down at her ringless left hand, her never-pregnant belly, and felt emptiness like a biting pain. But the pain she felt at the thought of losing her mother was just as sharp.
Her mother’s next question came in little more than a whisper. “How did I die?”
Joy saw that her father wouldn’t be able to answer. “A car accident,” she said. Her own voice sounded thin and fragile. “Single car, Dad said. No one ever figured out why you went off the road. Maybe there was a deer.” There was a queasy unreality to describing her mother’s death to her.
“We need to bring the council in,” said Anna. There was a new certainty to the set of her chin. “This is too big for us to try to fix on our own.”
“But what if they want to take you away from me?” Steven demanded, and his wife reached out to take his hand.
“We’ll figure something out,” she said. “I’m calling Eleanor.”
As she rose from her chair, Maddie fished in her purse for her own phone. “And I’m calling William,” she said. “He deserves to know the bigger picture too, since I pulled him into all this.”
What if he was disgusted by Maddie’s attempt to change the direction of his life? “Aren’t you afraid of what he’ll think?” Joy asked before she could stop herself.
Maddie gave her a warped smile. “Terrified,” she said.
Chapter 16
“I call this meeting of the Ash Grove council to order.”
Dr. Eleanor Aysgarth sat at the head of the long, gleaming conference table. Joy sat with her parents, Maddie, and William along one side. Across from them sat familiar faces: Gail and Jim Brody; Dr. Marzavan, or Mo, head of the music program; Ms. Ansley, the Ash Grove nurse; and adults Joy couldn’t place at first, but who began to seem familiar over the course of the meeting.
Among the Shadows (The Ash Grove Chronicles) Page 18