50 Joey
Joey
Violent flashes of distant lightning foretell a bitch of a storm.
The boxes by Joey’s front door are half-empty their contents gutted and strewn all over her floor.
She told Sophie that they were things she kept meaning to get rid of, and it’s true.
Some of it was her mother’s. Old shoes and purses and makeup and books that she treasured, a hideous brooch passed down from Joey’s grandmother, and other trinkets.
She shoved these all into this box ten years ago on that hotter-than-average September day when her mother didn’t wake up, and she hasn’t opened it since.
She’s never been through them. But now that she’s free of the obsession with Quinn’s death that’s occupied her for the last fifteen years, she might as well keep going, cut her life wide-open, expose the underbelly of all her problems, and discard what isn’t necessary.
She looks at her phone, at Elena’s text from hours ago. Quinn update. Joey didn’t reply, ignoring her own curiosity. She is done talking about Quinn.
She pockets her phone and sifts through a stack of old Cosmopolitan magazines and sees a small note.
It just says Love you, Mom! written in the laborious hand of a young child.
The love she had for her mother was more than normal, she always thought.
Because it went beyond love. It was admiration, adoration, obsession.
Her mother would get dressed to go on dates with men she met through a friend of a friend, men from distant towns, and Joey would watch her from the bedroom door.
Carly Close had deep blue half-moons under her eyes, even then.
“The exhaustion of living,” she told Joey when she’d asked what they were from.
And that was the thing, in the end, that killed her.
Exhaustion. Joey tried cracking jokes, making meals, letting her lie in bed for as long as she needed to, and trying to lift her mother’s spirits even as she was weighed down with grief for Quinn.
But the summer just after Joey turned twenty-two, her mom’s latest boyfriend left her for a younger woman in Santa Fe, and that was it.
Carly couldn’t fight it any longer. She let go and was pulled under.
It was the second time Joey had discovered the dead body of someone she loved.
The second time she both recognized and didn’t recognize a face that she had seen thousands of times.
It was a Friday evening when they folded up the wheels of the gurney and slid her mother’s body into an emergency vehicle.
The sunset was one of the most beautiful Joey could remember, and all she kept thinking was that her mom could have seen it.
If she had just hung on for three more hours, she could have seen it.
Joey swallows and sets the note inside the garbage bag.
Rain is scratching at the windows, at the roof.
She’s swimming in a sea of memories, and she needs to come up for air.
She slides the pile off her lap and peels open the other box.
This one isn’t full of her mother’s things.
This one is filled with Joey’s keepsakes from high school, and, she remembers with surprise as she rifles through, some of Elena’s things.
They found Quinn’s body on a Thursday morning, and the very next day, Elena came and dumped a shoebox of trinkets into Joey’s arms before leaving without an explanation.
Elena wasn’t allowed to have posters or pictures on her walls at home, so there wasn’t much.
Joey had never looked through it. She’d just put it in her closet, expecting Elena to eventually come back for it.
But she never did. When Joey moved, she brought Elena’s shoebox too.
She digs through it now, distracted immediately by a group photo, capturing a moment of pure glee, the four of them with their smiles wide and open, their eyes closed, heads tipping toward each other.
At the bottom of the box, she lifts a small Bible that seems out of place among Elena’s things.
Beneath that, the first thing she sees is a pink sticky note.
The room sways around her. On the note is the same scribbled handwriting she found on the one in River’s closet.
The same handwriting as the one on the journal that Sophie found.
Joey starts to peel it off. Then she looks at what it’s stuck to.
She blinks and looks again because she doesn’t quite understand what she’s seeing.
It’s a DVD case. On it are two names. One she doesn’t recognize. And the other is Nicola Bianco.