Seré Halverson - The Underside of Joy

Letters? Right, lady. You abandoned your children and your husband because you had a little case of the baby blues? And now you’re so desperate, you’re willing to lie?

I was recovering from illness and did not fully understand my rights with respect to custody, nor did I have the financial means or physical and mental stamina to fight the father for custody when he asked for a divorce. I concentrated on rebuilding my life with the intention of eventually reclaiming my right as the children’s mother. I have become a successful home stager. My job is lucrative, my schedule flexible. I have an office set up in my home and so am in the position to provide financially and emotionally for Annie and Zach. Although their stepmother has done an adequate job as a caregiver, Annie and Zach are suffering the loss of their father and need to be with their only living parent. I can give them the depth of love and support that only a real mother is capable of.

Oh, do not even get me started on what makes a real mother. Adequate? And let’s talk about exactly what it was that you were capable of doing, what you did to Annie and Zach, the one thing that no mother in her right mind would do to her children.

I am asking that they be allowed to live with me in Las Vegas, where I own a beautiful home in a neighbourhood full of young children, and that full custody be granted to me.

I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct.

A mediation date was set for October 1; an order to show cause hearing, whatever that was, was set for November 3. And a demand for some documents, including the fictitious letters.

Joe hadn’t let on about just how much the store was struggling. I was shocked by that, but I could almost understand how it might happen; the store was Joe’s business, literally. He’d thought he could turn it around and no one — even me — would have to know how bad things had become. I hadn’t been involved in the day-to-day operations of the store. But the kids — that was different. When it came to Annie and Zach, Joe and I told each other every single thing. We went to their doctor’s appointments together, took Annie to her first day of kindergarten together, shared each of Zach’s new words — including the most colourful. Joe would have told me if Paige had tried to correspond with the kids. And I knew without question that Joe wasn’t cruel.

I threw the packet as hard as I could, but it wiggled feebly three feet in the air before slumping to the ground.

I think I slept twenty minutes that night. The next morning, as soon as I got back from taking the kids to school, I called the troops — all of Joe’s family, Lucy, my mom, Frank — and told them Paige had filed for custody. No one let on that they were worried. ‘No judge in his right mind would give custody to that woman,’ Marcella assured me.

Joe had handled the paperwork for his divorce without a lawyer, but I knew I needed one. Frank recommended someone, and I called her as soon as I hung up. She could squeeze me in during her lunch hour — could I make it? I left the kids with Marcella and made sure David and Gina could cover the store.

Driving in, I remembered the last time I’d gone to see a lawyer. It was when Henry and I decided to divorce. Henry, who had once, long ago, turned up as my cute lab partner in my Protists as Cells and Organisms class, said my name reminded him of L.L.Bean. He said he could picture me on a page from the catalogue, on the front porch of a cabin in Vermont, wearing a down vest and jeans and fishing boots, living a simple life. A couple of acres, a couple of kids. Sounded like a plan, and I was all for it.

But after Henry and I married, great jobs in the biotech industry lured us to San Diego and we moved into a peach stucco palace with easy freeway access amid hundreds of other peach stucco palaces. The joke around the Olympic-size pool in our gated community was that the houses stood so close together, when you wanted to borrow a cup of margarita salt, your neighbour could pass it to you through the bathroom windows.

‘We can always retire in Montana,’ Henry said. While I floundered, then withered as a research assistant, aching to be wearing that down vest in the woods instead of a white coat in the lab, Henry thrived. He loved his job as a biochemist, loved the vast array of beaches and the non-array of weather, loved the sparsely furnished peach palace and our virgin SUV that never once ventured off the pavement to climb a mountain. It never even hauled kids to soccer games.

Then came all the miscarriages, all the misery that left us staring at each other on opposite ends of an empty, long dining room table. At Henry’s insistence, we each talked to lawyers. One said to me, ‘At least you don’t have children.’ I stared at her. I watched her flick a pea of lint off the sleeve of her expensive-looking jacket and fold her arms on the desk. ‘You’d be tied to him forever. You’d have to deal with him and then the stepmother, if he should remarry… which they always do. Immediately. Men want to be saved from single parenting and women want to save them.’ She raised a perfectly plucked eyebrow, her own Arc de Triomphe. ‘It’s a nightmare. The most you could hope for is someone who tolerates the kids.’ She shrugged. ‘Few people can really love a child the way a natural parent does. Consider yourself lucky.’

Henry’s meeting must have been just as dismal, because we both agreed to call off the lawyers and conquered the dividing on our own. I hadn’t remembered that lawyer’s words, how much they’d stung me then, and now they stung me again — for opposite reasons.

Gwen Alterman’s offices took up most of the third floor of a brick building in downtown Santa Rosa. She was older than she sounded on the phone, maybe in her early fifties, and larger than I’d pictured her. Photos of her and her husband and their three kids caught my eye. I wanted to ask her if she was a stepmom or their natural mother, but I didn’t. While she ate a Burger King chicken sandwich I told her my story. She handed me a box of Kleenex, which I gratefully took. I was on the clock, so I kept talking through the tears, apologizing, blowing my nose, telling her everything I could think of, even the fact that I was broke. She wrote notes and nodded, and once reached across her massive desk to pat my hand.

‘So,’ she said after I’d handed over the court documents and Joe’s divorce papers. ‘You’ve been hit. And hard. Let me ask you, were you ever appointed the children’s legal guardian? In case something did happen to your husband?’

‘No… no. We’d talked about it, but we never got around to it. Because it would require giving notice to Paige… and it didn’t look like she was ever coming back, anyway.’

‘I see. Well, that’s too bad. But even so, if there’s a God in this world, that woman shouldn’t have a chance. Judges usually look harshly on abandonment cases.’ She lifted her chained glasses from her matronly chest and set them on her face and began poring over the papers. I looked at the family photos and saw the unmistakable resemblance of both her and her husband to all three of their kids. No broken-blended family there.

Now Gwen Alterman looked at me over the top of her glasses and cleared her throat. ‘She claims to have attempted contact numerous times? That puts a different slant on things.’

‘Yes, but she’s lying,’ I said.

‘Do you know for a fact that she didn’t try to contact the children or their father? Because we’ve received a subpoena for those letters. If you have them, you have to turn them over.’

I shook my head. ‘I’ve been there since shortly after she left. I’ve never seen a trace of her.’ Except in Annie’s and Zach’s blue eyes and silky blonde hair, I thought. The one picture of her glowing and pregnant that I found in Joe’s Capturing the Light book. The paisley robe that Joe got rid of after the first night we were together.