Mom thundered her Saab mid-life-crisis Turbo into the church parking lot Monday after volleyball practice. She pressed the satellite POWER button silencing Bill Cosby on the comedy channel. Did Mom think listening to the same comedian’s spiel Joy had been hearing since she was a little girl would do the trick to help her forget about her best friend’s suicide? She couldn’t be that lame.
Joy closed her eyes. She’d have to walk across that big parking lot, through those familiar doors, sit down with the one stranger in the whole church—the counselor, Mary Alice Gianetti—and talk about her most raw feelings. Sounded like a party.
For once, as they left the car and walked toward the building, the parking lot seemed too small, the distance too short. Mom leaned her body into the back of Joy’s arm. Was she trying to hold her up or make sure she didn’t get away? Probably a little of both. Now there was a thought. Joy could take off. Run until she couldn’t run any longer. Problem was, the demons that plagued her would surely follow close at her heels.
The double-door entrance rose up under the steeple that pointed to heaven. Like most churches, this one believed it had a special “in” with God. A fast track to the pearly gates. Maybe it did … but, if so, that meant so many other people who thought they were right, too, were going to be really surprised one day. Joy never heard the pastors address the beliefs of other faiths. They preached as though they assumed everyone understood and agreed that their teaching was right, so by default the others missed the mark. What if they were wrong? Someone had to be.
Joy had already mostly proven to herself the church was completely off about one very important thing she’d been taught, and had believed, since she was a little kid. Supposedly, people died and then beamed right up to heaven. Simple as flipping a switch. But even though she wanted more proof, Melanie made it look pretty likely that when people died, they didn’t, or at least some of them didn’t, immediately go to be with Jesus.
So the pastor was wrong. And so was the Bible. Now, what was Joy to do with that bit of knowledge? Where did it put her faith in everything she’d ever been taught?
Maybe she’d make that the first question she’d ask her counselor. What happened to people after they died? Or better yet, what do you do about your faith in God when you prove Him wrong? If even a professional gave the party-line answer to either of those questions, as Joy expected her to, then she’d know that Mary Alice Gianetti really was as clueless as the rest of them. Or that there was no answer.
Mom held the door open and ushered Joy through. Her eyes searched Joy’s for signs of something. Poor Mom. The days of their carefree, chatty relationship seemed so distant. Now it was always somber with talk, or unspoken questions, about death, suicide, and betrayal. Joy shivered and pulled her arms tight around her body.
They approached the pastor’s office where light crept from under the doorway. Don’t knock, Mom. Just keep going.
Phew. She moved past the office door and zeroed in on the open door at the end of the hall. Mom poked her head through the open doorway. “Mary Alice? I’m here with Joy.”
Last chance to run. Joy stared through the window at the end of the hallway. Those snow-covered cornfields looked inviting.
“Oh hey, Peg. Great. Send her in. If you want to, you can wait in the coffee shop. I’ll send her down when we’re through.”
Mom nodded and held her hand out toward the office. “Go ahead, sweetheart. It’ll be fine.”
Whatever. Joy shoved her hands deep into her pockets and skulked past Mom through the doorway.
“See you in a little bit, sweetie.”
Joy nodded. Stop being so fake, Mom. Didn’t she know everyone could see through her? It was okay to be normal. Or at least some version of normal.
“Hi, Joy. I’m Mary Alice. Come on in and have a seat.” She stood from her desk with her hand outstretched, bangles tinkling from wrist to elbow, and gestured toward the corner.
Well, at least Joy thought she was standing. Mary Alice Gianetti could not have been five feet tall. Joy stepped toward the stuffed chairs and sank into one. The counselor followed her and chose the blue one across from Joy’s red one.
Mary Alice Gianetti crossed her denim-clad legs, her three-inch strappy gold heels dangling from her toe. So how tall was this woman really? And what was it about the counselor’s name that made Joy say the whole thing every single time? Mary just wouldn’t cut it. Mary Alice just sounded weird.
“So, Joy …”
Okay, if this lady was lame enough to say something like “tell me what brings you here today,” Joy was out of there.
“We’re actually going to do things a little bit differently than I usually would at a first visit. What I’d like to do is talk about the future. The past is the past. It’ll be there—we’ll get to it, but there’s a lot of tragedy in the past from what I understand about what you’ve gone through recently. More important is to try to rediscover what made you who you are. I’d like to help you find your purpose again and prove you’re still in there.” She tapped on her chest. “The real you.”
Joy shrugged. The more she could keep Mary Alice Gianetti talking, the less she’d have to say herself.
“So let’s start by looking ahead. What is the one dream job you could really see yourself doing one day?” The counselor waited with her pen poised over her yellow legal pad.
Joy looked up at the ceiling tiles. Some had rings of water stains. Two were missing completely. Surprising for a church where everything was usually impeccable.
The counselor kicked off her heels then drew her legs up into the chair and crossed them. Her bright purple satin tunic billowed up for a brief moment, and Joy saw a taut tummy—years of exercise, no doubt. The tan courtesy of the local beds.
“I don’t know.” Brilliant. All that buildup, and I don’t know was the best Joy could come up with for her first words ever spoken in a counseling session?
Mary Alice waited.
“There was a time when I thought I would be a veterinarian, but I don’t know anymore.” Joy shrugged.
“Why don’t you know? What do you mean you don’t know anymore?”
Was she joking? Joy searched the wall for proof of a college degree. “Well, I think it’s just with all that’s gone on, I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t know what matters to me.” As she stopped and thought about it, where had the passion gone? The shelves of animal books lining her room. The National Geographic DVDs and magazines piled on the floor beside her desk. The applications to the best vet schools in the country that she’d collected early and stacked on her nightstand where they’d been for the past year, completed and waiting until the first moment she could send them.
Oh, and she couldn’t forget the animal first-aid kit she’d had beneath her bed since she was eight, waiting for a broken wing to splint. Time was, she hadn’t gone a day, rarely a few hours, without thinking about the clinic she’d open near the lake after she’d proven herself by working for the Animal Clinic off of Route 30 for a few years.
Joy hadn’t thought for one moment about that dream or any other since That Day.
“Aha.” The doc held up a finger. “My point exactly. You’re still Joy. What God put into you to make you unique is all still there. Who you were before your friend’s death is still who you are after her death. Circumstances can affect the way you look at life, but they don’t change who you are inside.”
Not buying it. Circumstances absolutely did change a person from the inside out. How could this woman try to say anything otherwise? Joy opened her mouth to protest, but what would be the point of arguing?
The counselor nodded. “See what I mean? We need to spend our time focusing on how to reclaim the Joy you once knew.”
Joy’s deep questions about life, death, and eternity probably had to wait until next time. Though she had little hope Mary Alice Gianetti would have any answers.
All the talk of the future made Joy want to cling to the past.
She pointed her trusty Bug toward Ogallala Cemetery. The last time she’d been there was the last day she saw Melanie in her physical form. In her casket. That smell. Oh, it had been awful. She noticed it the moment she walked into the funeral home. “Where is that smell coming from?” she’d whispered to her mom.
“Oh, you know Maggie and her candles.”
She’d been selling them for years, which was fine, but to subject all of them …?
Joy had tiptoed into the viewing room, where they’d spent the day before greeting the family, shaking hands, and being squeezed by middle-aged women she’d never met. That day they were there to say good-bye once and for all.
The candles had been everywhere—every surface flickered with a tea light or votive. Maggie stayed near a glowing cluster and inhaled comfort of Melanie somehow. Joy would have to overlook the pumpkin spice that filled the room. At least it was better than roses. She stepped over to Maggie and put her arms around her. “How are you doing?”
“The best I can.” Maggie’s shoulders slumped.
“It’s all anybody can ask.” Great. She sounded just like the people who had driven her crazy with questions. Silly questions. Silly answers. Joy looked around the room. “The candles are a nice touch.”
“Pumpkin spice was Melanie’s favorite.”
That was true. Joy had forgotten. Mel always loved the minute leaves started to fall because she knew the boxes would start coming from her mother’s candle company.
“Pumpkin spice,” mused Maggie. “Gingerbread spice, vanilla—and she didn’t play with them. Remember the coffee beans? She’d smell the candle and then the coffee beans to clear her senses, and then another candle and more coffee. She would do that for hours.”
Joy remembered. They’d inhaled a lot of fragrance that way.
The pastor stood at the front. “Gather around, everyone. Take your seat and let’s start the service.”
Maggie clutched Joy’s arm. “You’re family. Don’t sit at the back. You’re the nearest family she had.”
Joy smiled softly and followed Maggie down the aisle. It couldn’t have been any other way.
Later she stood beside the family as the coffin lid was lowered. She held Maggie’s hand, squeezed it as they caught the last glimpse of their precious Melanie.
Joy shook her head. A touch of a smile teased her lips. Even in that dreadful moment at the funeral, the movie addiction she’d shared with Melanie bubbled to the surface. They’d have surely looked to M’Lynn, from Steel Magnolias, talking about the moment her daughter died for the quote-for-the-day.
“There was no noise, no tremble, just peace…. I realize as a woman how lucky I am. I was there when that wonderful creature drifted into my life, and I was there when she drifted out. It was the most precious moment of my life.” Joy sighed. Shelby’s death, in the movie, was sacrificial in some ways because of what she’d put her body through for her son. A tragic but natural occurrence. Melanie’s was everything but that. So not precious. So unnatural.
What was it about cemeteries that drew people to them like magnets? Filing in for holiday visits and to bring flowers at the change of the seasons. Dead people didn’t know they had a new plant or a basket of silk flowers or even a visitor—or at least that’s what Joy had always assumed. Maybe she’d been wrong. Joy pulled in close to where Melanie was buried and turned the ignition off. She leaned against the headrest as rain pelted her windshield.
What was the truth? That question was what brought her there. She needed to reach out to Melanie with no one around.
To see if she could make sense of it all somehow.
Joy climbed from the car and shut the door with her hip. Her eyes went right to Melanie’s grave. The only fresh mound in the cemetery. She crept out among the headstones, careful to step around where she imagined the people lay six feet beneath the damp earth, and approached the churned heap of dirt.
It didn’t seem like a real grave without the headstone. Joy’s grandpa had selected and ordered it as a gift to Maggie while he was in town for the funeral. It would still be several weeks until it was ready. Wonder what Grandpa had engraved on it. Here lies a life ended too soon? Nah. Here lies a stupid, selfish person? No.
Here lies someone who had no hope.
Had the concept of hope dissolved for Melanie like it had for Joy?
Was Mel there? Could she see Joy? Joy’s head twitched as she sensed something. Someone? Don’t look back. The palpable presence wouldn’t be visible. Maybe if she spoke out … as long as Melanie didn’t speak back audibly. Joy couldn’t face that possibility out here alone in a cemetery at dusk. No way.
“Mel, you know me so well, I’m sure you know I can’t handle hearing from you, at least not yet, but I want you to know that I believe you exist somewhere between the world of the living and the dead. I don’t understand it at all, but it seems to be true. I want you to know that I love you. I hate what you’ve done to yourself, but I love you.” Joy scuffed the dirt with the toe of her boot. “Honestly, I could care less about Austin and what happened between you two. I came to your house …”—Joy’s voice caught with emotion—“that day to forgive you. And I do forgive you.”
Joy waited. She listened to the wind whistle in the trees. Winter was on its way.
Could the acceptance of forgiveness and love release Melanie from where she was trapped in the world of in-between? “It’s okay to let go, Melanie. I don’t know how it works. I don’t know if you’re stuck, or if this is where you want to be. I don’t know if you have a choice, but if you do, it’s okay to let go. It’s okay to release yourself to eternity if it’s a better choice than the one you’re enduring. I’ll be okay, and your parents will be okay. We miss you like crazy, but we forgive you and we love you.”
Joy collapsed onto the fresh dirt, her knees instantly damp and muddy. She scraped at the dirt and clutched handfuls as though hugging what remained of her best friend. Her tears mingled with the raindrops and landed on her mud-caked hands.
She fell forward onto the grave and sobbed. Her body wracked with the pain of tears withheld. She set them free. Her mind wanted to shout into the wind, “Why?” But she knew the wind had no answer. So she cried.
Hours later … minutes, maybe … Joy clambered to her feet, feeling much older than her seventeen years.
“‘Wouldn’t it be lovely if we were old?’” Joy whispered the quote from The Way We Were as she let the mud drop from her fists. “‘We’d have survived all this. Everything would be easy and uncomplicated; the way it was when we were young.’”