Waking Up Joy

Insomnia

Chapter One

Joy Talley—At the End of Her Rope

1982

I’m still breathing, so I obviously didn’t kill myself. I just want to say that right now. I know what it looked like when my brothers and sisters found me dangling from the roof over the balcony, but—did any one of them ever think to ask why in the world I would have tied a rope around the crumbling chimney and jumped off the roof, especially when there was a perfectly stout and sprawling apple tree growing right next to Momma’s front yard?

The magic apple tree, as some people still call it, would have been the perfect hanging tree, but, of course, they didn’t think of that. I could have even removed the cover from the old well next to the orchard and tossed myself down into its murky depths; or worse, let myself be washed away in the so-called Spring of Good Luck that spiraled deep into the ground behind our house; but I didn’t, because killing myself, accidentally or on purpose, wasn’t ever part of my plan.

My plan was to bid farewell to the past and live free in the present, to let go of the one person who knew the truth about me. For years, I had been clutching the memory of us to my heart like a bride clutches her roses, although I would never be his bride. That much was certain, since he had let go of me a long time ago and married someone else. So, I decided to be brave as I stepped onto the roof. It was time to let go . . . time to trust the future. It was just my luck that my leap of faith landed me dangling in a tangle of rope.

Undeniably, I am a Talley and sometimes our luck is good and sometimes it’s bad, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when I fell, or that my brothers and sisters thought I jumped off the roof on purpose. They had no idea why I was up there, although it probably wouldn’t have made a difference if they had. When a family relies on luck to explain anything and everything, they’ll naturally leap to the most horrible conclusion at the absolute worst time. This was one of those times.

When they saw me dangling over the balcony, they thought the worst, and all dashed into the house and up the stairs. If any one of them had a lick of common sense, they would’ve looked at the grimy soot on my hands and known I was up to something more important than trying to kill myself, but I guess it was the easiest conclusion they could come up with as they spilled onto the balcony and reached out past the railing to pull me in.

Rory, the taller of my two brothers, wrapped his arms around my limp noodle legs and lifted me up, while River pulled out his pocket knife and cut the rope, thank goodness, loosening what they mistook for a poorly tied noose and pulling it over my head.

She never was good at tying a knot when we were kids, River said.

I wonder why she did this. Carey’s pitiful weeping made me want to scream, but of course I couldn’t.

Bless her heart; did she think we didn’t love her? I couldn’t see her, but I already knew Nanette was digging through her purse for a used tissue.

It’s funny that I heard my brothers and sisters speak every day, but the way their voices echoed around me in that moment, their Okie accents rolling around in their mouths, they sounded like a bunch of hillbillies. I reckon I sound just like them, but I hope I sound a little bit smarter. Now, I’m not putting them down, just because I made the honor roll my senior year and they didn’t, but to be honest, they weren’t always the brightest bulbs in the chandelier. Take my sisters, for instance. Each got her GED and husband, then, had passels of kids; and I have to admit seemed to be happier for it at the time.

Do people who do this still go to heaven? Rory. I had to feel sorry for my baby brother. He sounded like he might cry, even though he was the bigger and the stronger of the two boys. He’d always had a tender heart—and the worst grades in school. I’m not really surprised he thought I tried to kill myself. To be honest, I’m not shocked that either of my brothers came to that conclusion. I’m just annoyed. They never were book smart, but now, they were definitely tool and dye sharp like Daddy. Those boys didn’t even bother with a GED. They could rebuild any engine around and nobody knew how they first learned it, so they opened an auto shop called The Greasy Wheel where I worked as their secretary, just around the corner from Momma’s house.

Momma would say, no, said Carey. People who kill themselves don’t go to heaven.

I heard a gasp. Nanette’s voice whispered back, thick with indignation. You don’t know what Momma would say.

No matter if I do or not, Carey said, her voice hitting a high pitch, like she had gone a little nuts from all the stress. Knowing Momma, she’d make some kind of charm and then turn around and try to pray Joy into heaven. Because we’re lucky—except when we’re not. Am I right?

Nanette’s voice turned sharp. She doesn’t need to be prayed into heaven. And besides, she’s not dead!

Before I knew it, I was stretched across Carey’s and Nanette’s laps in the backseat of the truck headed to the hospital, instead of to the funeral home to see Momma laid out in her Sunday best, which is why they’d all come to pick me up in the first place.

Momma.

My heart leapt toward Momma’s memory, but then I realized it was just the truck lurching. I felt the hands of my sisters preventing me from rolling onto the floorboard.

Be careful, man, Rory said.

I’m in a bit of a hurry, dimwit.

It won’t matter if you jostle her to death ‘fore we get there.

I wished I could rub away the prickling pain in my neck, but my arms were as heavy as the musty bricks in our chimney. Nanette moaned, as if she was in pain, too, and I imagined her pretty olive complexion turning sallow right up to her thick brunette ponytail. I’ve always been a little bit jealous that she wasn’t made to suffer my frizzy red mane.

Can you two please get along?

My brothers never have been able to agree on anything. Not even on how to run their shop. Eventually, they had to hire a manager to manage them because they couldn’t manage to get along with each other. Of course, it was me they hired, so I wondered what they were going to do if I didn’t come out of this alive.

We probably shouldn’t have moved her, Nanette said.

I guess we could’ve just let her hang from Momma’s roof a few more days, River said. That’s how long the ambulance would’ve taken to find her.

I agree.

Momma’s house really was difficult to locate at the end of a winding red dirt road that zigzagged through ten miles of twisted woods before opening up to a thousand acres of pastureland and thousands of towering oak, elm, and pine trees in the background—definitely not flat and treeless like the western part of Oklahoma. Spavinaw Junction is tucked in between Green Country and the Ozarks, right in the three corners of Oklahoma, Missouri, and Arkansas. I’ve never wanted to live anywhere else, unless you count the ocean, and as I lay across my sisters’ laps I wondered if I would ever again see our lofty pastel blue farmhouse, a century-old structure admittedly in need of a makeover.

I loved how it sat like a giant Easter egg where the bluffs and pasture meet, its two stories trimmed in flaking white paint and shaded by a couple of towering oak trees in the front yard. Anyone looking at our house from the outside would see it as an ideal, albeit a bit sagging, example of Americana, never guessing at the long hidden mysteries its secret spaces and passages harbored, one of them being my very own.

Chapter Two

"I guess we won’t make it to the funeral home today." I detected grief in Nanette’s voice, and my own sorrow rose up. My heart suddenly felt like a bird, a large annoying crow to be specific, banging at the bars of my chest.

What if I miss Momma’s funeral?

The idea should’ve brought tears to my eyes, but they were dry, despite my sorrow.

How odd.

What if we have to combine the funerals? That was Carey’s voice. If I had hands that worked I might have reached up and given her blonde, curly head a good shake. Will two caskets even fit on the church stage?

Excuse me? A casket?

Mercy, they were pathetic with their complaining.

Carey sniffled. At least Momma will be glad to see Joy.

Carey, Nanette scolded. She’s still breathing!

I couldn’t help my thoughts. I remembered those Halloween movies I used to watch with Carey and Nanette in which the poor souls got buried alive and scratched their finger nails off trying to get out.

I’m not dead!

I wished I could holler the words, I didn’t kill myself! You wouldn’t believe how hard I tried to open my eyes.

Nothing. Not even a blink.

I guess I’m really dying, but not from my own hand, just my own stupidity.

My nose tickled from Nanette’s tears.

Momma would hate it knowing that Joy tried to hang herself.

Poor Momma.

I imagined her lying at the funeral home waiting for us, dead and waxen, dressed, I hoped, in her favorite duster robe with the tiny blue flowers that I chose for her. I wished I could get enough air in my lungs to shout.

You’ve got it all wrong.

Boy, did they have it wrong. As strange as it sounds, I really was simply looking in the chimney for something important before anyone else could stumble upon it, something I’d hidden together with the boy I wanted to marry when we were very young. It was something I should’ve destroyed decades ago, but kept, like any Talley, in the chimney with Momma’s charms. Even though our chimney was so easy to get into that it never could’ve passed an inspection, getting to what I had hidden inside was still tricky. First, I’d tried to climb up through the fireplace hearth on the second floor, but couldn’t reach the place where my boyfriend and I put it decades ago. Finally, I climbed up on the roof thinking I could at least shine the flashlight down and see which old brick we’d crammed it behind.

My name is Joy, not Grace, so like an idiot I dropped my flashlight down the chimney, stumbled, and promptly fell off the roof. I guess it really was a stupid way to look for what seemed to be lost in the chimney, but I was feeling desperate. I was lucky I tied a rope to the chimney for balance, or I might have cracked my head open. And it’s a good thing my brothers and sisters showed up when they did, because it wouldn’t have been a pretty sight had they shown up a day or two later, me dead and tangled at the end of a rope that oddly resembled a noose, hanging from my momma’s chimney.

Anyone else, with the exception of the man who had dumped me for someone else, might wonder why I didn’t just leave my secret charm—which wasn’t charming at all, I assure you—in the chimney forever; but when that stuck-up lawyer arrived only a few hours after momma died, I knew I couldn’t leave it up there anymore.

Lease the Talley land? I asked Mr. Littleton, a skinny, balding lawyer all the way from Tulsa, even though Momma’s bank was in Jay, just down the road. Who would we lease it to?

An investor. A farmer. Anyone who will take it, he said. Someone who might buy it and the house from you if it comes to that.

But then I couldn’t live in it. I glanced at the chimney and the secret charm seemed to mock me through the bricks.

Yes, he said, the circles underneath his armpits slowly darkening his yellow shirt. That’s true, but the house will have to come down someday anyway. It cannot stand forever, Mrs. Talley. He spoke like a college-educated man. In most circumstances, I’d have been intimidated, but at the moment, I was too ticked off to be impressed.

Ms. Talley, I corrected.

I’m sorry, Ms. Talley. He placed extra emphasis on the Ms., emphasizing my spinster status, as if he knew anything about my love life. Was I that desperate looking? I’d make a point to get my friend Peter to take me out on a date as soon as possible, just to get the town talking about my love life. And Peter’s too, for that matter. That would really confuse people, since Peter was a sworn bachelor for life.

Why are single men in their forties bachelors, but women are spinsters?

Are you a bachelor, Mr. Littleton?

He cleared his whiney throat. Yes. But I don’t see what that has to do with—

Then don’t talk to me like I’m just a witless spinster. You and I aren’t that different. I’m a bachelor, too. I have a brain.

There was eyebrow raising and throat clearing. As I was saying, when your mother opened the beauty shop for your sisters, she mortgaged fifty acres of the land, including where the house sits, to help pay for the shop.

I thought of Nanette and Carey, young and wanting their own beauty salon so badly. They called it Momma’s Curls, since she was paying.

Fifty acres isn’t much, I said. We have a thousand.

Yes, so eventually she mortgaged four hundred and fifty more acres, including the land this house sits on. And then she fell behind on her payments, he continued to explain everything in a tired voice, as if he’d clarified this a hundred times.

Why didn’t she say anything to me?

I can’t answer that, he said. But you must understand the house itself has lost its value. It needs significant improvements that, frankly, you aren’t going to be able to make on your budget. In fact, it probably needs to be torn down.

You donkey’s butt!

He made a show of clearing his throat and sitting up straighter, and for a second I thought—and wished a little bit—that I’d called him that out loud.

If I might be a bit more personal, Ms. Talley?

You aren’t already?

He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

It would be easier if you sell all thousand acres. You would make a very tidy profit even after you paid off the mortgage. How many men in this part of the county use the word tidy? I happen to know of some nice places in the country, smaller places that are close to town; perfect for a woman like you.

Perfect for an old maid.

It’s true that I was single, but nobody really knew why, except for me. I will give you a hint: It had something to do with what was in the chimney, of course, or why wouldn’t I have let well enough alone? Not even my brothers and sisters knew the whole story, and I didn’t want them to, either. If the house was sold, someone else might discover more than the name of the one who broke my heart.

In a moment I kind of regretted later, I pulled the plate of chocolate chip cookies from Mr. Littleton’s hands and sent the poor man off without an answer. I still remember how disappointed he looked, but I wasn’t sure whether it was because he didn’t get me to make a deal about the Talley property, or because he didn’t get to finish his cookies. My cookies, after all, were famous in Spavinaw Junction, if I do say so myself.

The indignant Mr. Littleton couldn’t have known that it wasn’t just losing the house I was upset about. The truth of it all tingled along the back of my neck as I ushered Mr. Littleton out the door. I watched him move tersely to his fancy black car and wondered at how he managed to get in, even though he held himself straighter than the stick up his—well, you know.

I had slammed the door behind him and walked over to the fireplace, rested my head against the heavy mantle. Memories of trinkets and old charms taunted me. I’d removed some of them from the mantle when Momma died, because it all made me sad, but I hadn’t touched anything inside until that morning. So in a way, it was Mr. Littleton’s fault that I had decided to climb into the chimney.

Of course looking back now, I wish I’d not been in such a gosh-darned hurry to get up on the roof, but like all Talleys, I was always pressing my luck. So there I was, flying down the hospital’s hallway on a gurney leaving the sniffles of my sisters behind and wishing those girls had just a drop more faith in the possibility I wouldn’t die. Thanks to Rory, who mumbled something about bad luck, and River’s quiet agreement as they wheeled me away, they now had me worried and bawling in my own head, even though I couldn’t actually make any tears.

Momma, I wish I could have one of your teas right about now. Or a magic chocolate. Chocolate was always good medicine.

I hadn’t had any of Momma’s quieting teas or charmed candies when I felt the gurney move and an unnatural foreboding roll over me like night fog in the hollows near our house, thick and heavy. I got lost in that fog once when I was a little girl. I never even saw Daddy come to me through the murky haze, but I heard him say, You can breathe now, Joy, just before putting his hands under my sticky armpits and plucking me out of the mist. He knew about my nightmares and that they made me hold my breath when I was scared. I heard Daddy again, there in the hospital.

Breathe, Joy.

Daddy? I sensed him there, alongside the gurney.

Breathe.

I’m trying.

I felt awake, as if I should just be able to walk out the swinging doors we’d just rolled through, but my limbs were as lifeless as Nanette’s were that time she found Daddy’s liquor stash and drank half a bottle of hooch. The lights on the other side of my lids dimmed and I started settling into a sleep that promised to be so deep I couldn’t really worry about much else. But then my eyelid was yanked up and a light aimed at my eyeball. A pair of dark eyes peered at me and then my eyelid dropped, but not before I caught a glimpse of a face with a strong jaw and a chiseled cheek.

Gee willikers.

Now, let me tell you one good thing about being single at an age when, let’s face it, gravity was not on my side: having time to read as many romance novels as I wanted. The number I’ve read is my business, but let’s just say it was high enough to know that a strong jaw and a chiseled cheek was always attached to a hunk. And the good Lord knows I needed some entertainment after so many years of having been discarded by the only man I’d ever loved.

Momma always said I had an overactive imagination, and maybe almost dying was mixing up my brain signals, but I think the hunky doctor kept me from tumbling into that tunnel I was trying so hard to ignore. Call me shallow, but everyone needs a reason to live.

Chapter Three

Now, I’ve seen enough TV to realize that with the trauma my neck and spine sustained, I probably should’ve been dead by the time the hunky (based on the strong jaw and chiseled cheek) doctor examined me in the emergency room of the small regional hospital that wasn’t exactly known for getting things right—a fact that made me about as comfortable as being wrapped up in a porcupine blanket, if there is such a thing. And I already know that I probably shouldn’t have been able to see anything at all, especially romance book heroes, unless I was already on my way up to heaven, and then it should’ve been the pearly gates. When the doctor lifted my other eye, I saw that he was determined to save me, and that he was a kind soul. I prayed he would see me, see my soul, and know I was in there. The problem was, I couldn’t keep that eye open either.

I am so tired.

What with grieving for Momma and planning her funeral, it’d been days since I’d slept at all. Frankly, I needed a nap, but not like this.

Momma.

Had it really only been two days ago when I got home from The Greasy Wheel to find Momma still sitting where I left her that morning beneath the apple tree’s magic branches at the edge of the little orchard? It was only the time of day that seemed odd. When I noticed her, she was still in the wooden rocking chair I’d carried out that morning—she refused to sit on anything plastic—with her head bowed down to her chest. Praying?

No. I recognized the same lifeless pose that reminded me of when Daddy died, the way his head had slumped in a simple nod. So, I already knew, even as I started running toward her as she sat in her chair with the breeze tousling her silver curls sprinkled with the white apple blossoms like a tiara, that she was, simply and irreversibly, gone. None of her good luck charms, however magical, could bring her back.

Momma really was gone, and even if all the doctors and nurses in the hospital could wake me out of the stupor I was in, she would still be gone. The truth gathered all the breath I had left and forced it into my throat. The sorrow of it made me want to give up. I didn’t know if I could make it without Momma, but when I felt my breath leaving me, I heard my father’s voice, the same way I’d heard him through the mist as he’d plucked me up when I was lost.

Breathe, Joy.

With a petite gasp, I drew it all back into my throat.

Life around me was a series of shadows that passed on the other side of my eyelids. I wasn’t sure of the day or time anymore and the pain in my neck throbbed, my head ached, and now a deep burning in my chest tried to pull me out of my dream of Momma. It hurt.

I want Momma.

I heard voices buzzing and a series of loud beeps, but none belonged to Momma. The skin on my head felt too tight, like it might snap, it hurt so much.

So much noise.

The gurney was moving again, this time gliding in slow motion.

Those idiot Talleys didn’t even stabilize her neck during transport.

Are y’all calling my brothers and sisters idiots?

It’ll be a miracle if she doesn’t have brain damage.

If, she comes back at all.

Hey! I’m here, you idiots.

I tried to process their