Seré Halverson - The Underside of Joy

The next day a Swiss tourist found Joe’s body, bloated and wrapped in kelp, as if the sea had mummified him in some feeble attempt at apology. This time I opened the door for Frank and hugged him before he could speak. When he leaned back, he just shook his head. I opened my mouth to say No but the word sank, soundless.

I insisted on seeing him. Alone. Frank drove me to McCready’s and stood beside me while a grey-haired woman with orange-tinted skin explained that Joe wasn’t really ready to be viewed.

‘Ready?’ A strange, high-pitched laugh eked past the lump in my throat.

Frank tilted his head at me. ‘Ella…’

‘Well? Who the hell is ever ready ?’

‘Excuse me, young —’ But then she shook her head, reached out and took both my hands in hers, said, ‘Come this way, dear.’ She ushered me down a carpeted hallway, past the magnolia wallpaper and mahogany wainscoting, from the noble facade to the laboratorial back rooms, the hallway now flecked green linoleum, chipped in places, unworthy of its calling.

How could this be? That he lay on a table in a cooled room that resembled an oversize stainless-steel kitchen? Someone had parted his hair on the wrong side and combed it, perhaps to hide the wound on his head, and they covered him up to his neck with a sheet — that was it. I took off my jacket and tucked it over his shoulders and chest, saying his name over and over.

They had closed his eyes, but I could tell the way his lid sunk in that his right eye was missing.

I used to tell him his eyes were satellite pictures of Earth — ocean blue with light green flecks. I joked that he had global vision, that I saw the world in his eyes. They could go from sorrow to teasing mischief in three seconds flat. They could pull me from chores to bed in even less time. Their sarcastic roll could piss me off, too, in no time at all.

His amazing photographer’s eye with its unique take on things — where had it gone? Would Joe’s vision live on soaring in a gull or scampering sideways in a nearsighted rock crab?

His hair felt stiff from the salt, not soft and curly through my fingers. I pushed it over to the right side. ‘There, honey,’ I said, wiping my nose on my sleeve. ‘There you go.’ His stubbled face, so cold. Joe had a baby face that he needed to shave only every three or four days, his Friday shadow. He said he couldn’t possibly be Italian; he must have been adopted. He’d rub his chin and say, ‘Gotta shave every damn week.’

He was handsome and sexy in his imperfection. I ran my finger down his slightly crooked nose, along the ridge of his slightly big ears. When we first met, I’d guessed correctly that he’d been an awkward teenager, a late bloomer. He had an appealing humility that couldn’t be faked by the men who’d managed to start breaking girls’ hearts back in seventh grade. He was always surprised that women found him attractive.

I slipped my hand under the sheet and held his arm, so cold, willed him to tense the thick ropes of muscles that ran their length, to laugh and say in his grandmother’s accent: You like, Bella? Instead, I could almost hear him say, Take care of Annie and Zach. Almost, but not quite.

I nodded anyway. ‘Don’t worry, honey. I don’t want you to worry, okay?’

I kissed his cold, cold face and laid my head on his collapsed chest, where his lungs had filled with water and left his heart an island. I lay there for a long time. The door opened, then didn’t close. Someone waiting. Making sure I didn’t fall apart. I would not fall apart. I had to help Annie and Zach through this. I whispered, ‘Good-bye, sweet man. Good-bye.’

I don’t even pretend to know what might happen to us after we die because the possibilities are endless. I have a degree in biology and feel most at home in nature, yet I’m confounded by human nature, by those things that cannot be observed and named and catalogued, a woman of science who slogs off the trail into mystery and ponders at the feet of folklore. So I often wonder if Joe had watched us that morning while we were playing Ship, in those bridging moments between before and after. Had he watched us from the massive redwoods he so revered, then from a cloud? Then from a star? The photographer in him would have delighted in the different perspectives, this after-a-lifetime chance to see that which is too deep and wide to be contained by any frame. Or was that him, that male fuchsia-throated Anna’s Hummingbird, Calypte anna, that hung around for days? He flittered inches from my nose when I sat on our porch, so close, I could feel his wings beating air on my cheek.

‘Joe?’ He took off suddenly, making giant swoops like handwriting in the sky. I know the swoops are part of their impressive mating ritual. And yet now I can’t help wondering if it was Joe, panicked, attempting to write me a message, frantically trying to tell me his many secrets, to warn me of all that he’d left unsaid.

Frank drove me home from McCready’s, then left to pick up the kids. I sat at our kitchen table, staring at the pepper grinder. A wedding gift from someone… a college friend of mine, I think. Joe had made a big deal about that gift, thought it was the perfect pepper grinder, and I’d made fun of him, said, ‘Who knew? That there was a perfect pepper grinder out there and that we would be so lucky as to be its proud owners?’

Zach and Annie pranced onto the porch, in the front door. Their singsong Mommymommymommy! broke through to me, through my new watery, subdued world, and with them, a slicing clarity. I forced myself up, upright, steady. I said their names. ‘Annie. Zach.’ Joe told me once that they were his A to Z, his alpha and omega. ‘Come here, guys.’ Frank stood behind them. I knew what I had to say. I would not try to sugarcoat this, like my relatives had with me when I was eight and my own father died. I would not say that Joe had fallen asleep, or had gone to live with Jesus, or was now an angel, dressed in white with feathered wings. It would have helped if I’d had a belief system, but my beliefs were in a misshapen pile, constantly rearranging themselves, as unfixed as laundry.

Annie said, ‘What happened to your knee?’

I touched it but couldn’t feel the bruise from the fall I’d taken in the hallway only a day ago.

‘You better get a Band-Aid.’ She gave me a long look.

I knelt down on my other knee. I pulled both of them to me and held on. ‘Daddy got hurt.’ They waited. Frozen. Silent. Waiting for me to reassure them, to say where he was, when they could kiss him. When they could make him a get-well-soon card and put it on the breakfast tray. Say the words. They have to hear them from you. Say them: ‘And he… Daddy… he died.’

Their faces. My words were carving themselves into their sweet, flawless skin. Annie started to cry. Zach looked at her, then sounding somewhat amused, said, ‘No, he didn’t!’

I rubbed his small back. ‘Yes, honey. He was at the ocean. He drowned.’

‘No way, José. Daddy swims fast.’ He laughed.

I looked up to Frank, and he knelt down with us. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Daddy is a good swimmer… Daddy was. But listen to me, Zach, okay? A big wave surprised him and knocked him off the rock. Maybe he bumped his head; we don’t know.’

Annie wrung her hands and cried, ‘I want my daddy. I want my daddy !’

I whispered into her hair, ‘I know, Banannie, I know you do.’

Zach turned to Frank. ‘It’s not true. He’ll swim back, won’t he, Uncle Frank?’

Frank ran his hand over his crew cut, covered his eyes for an instant, sat back on his heels, and took Zach onto his lap. He held him. He said, ‘No, buddy. He’s not coming back.’ Zach whimpered against Frank’s chest, then flung himself backward while Frank maintained his hold. Zach let out a howl that rang with the rawness of unfathomable loss.