Chapter Text
Josh doesn’t remember much about the night his sister died. Most of what he remembers comes after.
He remembers Joanie begging his parents to take Josh with them, that her friends were having a sleepover and she was the only one not going — how could she ever show face at school again after missing out on such an important event? He remembers their parents hugging and kissing them on their way out the door, promising Joanie they would make it up to her. He remembers Joanie storming up the stairs and slamming the door to her bedroom, sheepishly coming back down after twenty or so minutes. He remembers pestering and pestering her until she agreed to watch a movie with him.
Even at the age of seven he knew when she was really annoyed with him, which exasperated huff meant she was seconds away from snapping at him, or which roll of the eyes meant he could get away with pushing a bit more, waiting for the sparkle in her eyes and her dimples — identical to his, as family friends and relatives loved to point out — making an appearance as she’d finally relent.
That’s how he remembers Joanie when he thinks of her. Fondly exasperated with her baby brother, yet more often than not happy enough to let him hang out with her, taking him to the park, to ball games, teaching him how to play the simplest of songs on the piano with the patience of a saint. He used to love listening to her play piano.
Joanie was funny and compassionate and so incredibly smart and it doesn’t seem fair that he only got to have her for seven years. That she only got sixteen when he knows without a doubt that she could have changed the world.
Josh remembers asking her to make popcorn.
“We can’t watch a movie without popcorn, Joanie,” he pointed out with a much too serious frown and the lisp of a child who hasn’t grown into themselves yet.
And Joanie had laughed, ruffling his hair on her way to the kitchen.
“Don’t start it without me,” she’d called over her shoulder.
He’d listened to her moving about the kitchen, cupboard doors opening and banging shut, Joanie softly singing along to herself; an old nursery rhyme their dad used to sing to them - one of Josh’s favourites.
Then the smoke alarm had gone off and all he remembers from there is Joanie shouting his name from the kitchen, telling him to run, run, run, and run he had, out into the freezing night, shouting and crying until one of the neighbours had come out to see what all the noise was.
The fire engines came with their sirens and their lights, the back of the house engulfed in flames and smoke and seven year old Josh sobbing into his neighbour’s chest as he’d waited for Joanie to come out too.
He remembers the aftermath more than anything.
The Lyman home, once bustling with life and laughter, now eerily silent, Joanie’s piano, proving to be too painful a reminder, relegated to the spare room where it stayed for years, untouched and gathering dust. Josh remembers thinking it had been funny that they’d moved the piano so soon when his parents ensured her bedroom remained the exact same, a messy shrine to the daughter they lost.
He remembers more than anything the constant stony-faced expression his dad wore, his mom timidly shuffling around the house with red-rimmed eyes, both of them seeming to withdraw into themselves until Josh was left all alone, missing his sister and wondering what he’d done wrong.
(He knows what he’d done wrong. He hadn’t waited for Joanie.)
He remembers relatives and friends dropping by with piles of food and sad, somber expressions, patting his head and telling him he was a good boy. And he’d hated them, with their condolences and their words of affection because they never knew Joanie like he did and they didn’t miss her like he did, like a gaping wound in his chest that felt like it was never going to heal. But they also hadn’t left her in a burning building like he had.
He remembers the morning of the funeral, and screaming at an elderly relative who had given him a row for spilling breakfast on his shirt.
“How can you expect to properly pay respects to your sister with coco pops down your shirt?” she had asked sternly and he had stared up at her with big questioning eyes, bottom lip quivering before he’d lost it.
Because why did it matter that his shirt was stained when Joanie wasn’t going to see it anyway? A clean shirt wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t make it easier to say goodbye or make it hurt any less. Joanie was gone and nothing would bring her back.
In the end Josh hadn’t gone to the funeral. His mom had decided he was too young and he’d spent the day with a neighbour who, in a show of pity and uncertainty, had let him stuff himself with chocolate and cakes and candy until he’d been sick.
He doesn’t think his parents ever really recovered from losing Joanie. It was years before they were able to talk about her freely. Years of his dad burying himself in work while his mom skirted around the subject, obsessed with the idea of presenting the remaining Lymans as the perfect, tight-knit family. As though they hadn’t been walking on egg-shells around each other in the years since Joanie’s death, as though acting like nothing had happened hadn’t done a number on Josh’s psyche and guaranteed him a lifetime of mental health issues.
As though Josh hadn’t gone through the loss of his sister alone.
He still struggles to talk about her, even now. Not a day passes where he doesn’t think about her and, if anyone asks, he’ll always tell them he has a big sister. Her name’s Joanie, he’ll tell them with the same pride, the same fondness, as he did when he was a kid. But he can never bring himself to tell them what happened to her.
Until he finds himself stranded in a diner in the most rural part of Kentucky thirty or so years later, sitting across the table from his newly hired (self-hired) assistant and the words come spilling out.
Donna listens intently, expression soft and open as he tells her about Joanie. He struggles to put his big sister into words, even after all these years, but there’s something about Donna that makes it easy to open up to her, makes it easy to tell her how Joanie was his best friend, how he loved her fiercely, how she died.
“She sounds wonderful,” Donna tells him with a warm smile and a fondness in her voice. “I think I would’ve liked her.”
Josh will soon learn that Donna always knows the right thing to say — even if he doesn’t always like how she says it. But right now all he can think is that Joanie would have liked Donna, too.
After all, he’s already developing a soft spot for the woman in front of him. That took all of five minutes, if he’s being honest. This bold, brave woman with her kind eyes and unwavering honesty, who had given up everything and driven across the country in a car that was pretty much falling apart because she believed in something bigger than herself.
How very Joanie of her.
And when Donna reaches over to steal a fry from his plate with a toothy grin, Josh feels some of the tension that’s been consuming him for pretty much his entire life finally start to ebb away.