Seré Halverson - The Underside of Joy

‘Not entirely…’

‘Ella.’

‘Well? What happened to Paige? Something must have scared the bejesus out of her when she was little. Something her mom did… She obviously did love Annie and Zach. It’s not like she ran away with some Hells Angel to find herself.’ I tore open the next envelope, no longer caring about evidence and tampering.

May 1, 1997

Joe,

The court order came today. You got custody only because I didn’t fight it. Make the most of this time, because you know it’s only temporary.

Maybe you don’t think I’ll ever have it in me to fight. But that’s because you don’t know the new me. The me that has forgiven my mom and myself. And maybe someday, even you.

∼Paige

There were several more letters pleading with Joe to work things out, telling him about her new career, then threatening to call the kids, threatening a legal battle. And then this:

February 16, 1999

Joe,

I’ve been hesitant to see Annie and Zach without your cooperation. My attorney wants me to move forward with a custody action, but I keep hoping you’ll return my calls or letters. For Annie and Zach’s sake, if not for mine.

What have you told them about me? Did you tell them I died? Is that why you’re not responding?

It’s for their sake that I haven’t just knocked on the door or called them. Talk about temptation. I fight it every day. But I’ve tried to be patient and give you time and space to adjust to the idea of me being back in their lives as well as making absolutely sure I was ready emotionally and financially. I’ve tried, but every day without them tears away at me.

If we get in a full-blown legal battle, it won’t be good for anyone. Please, Joe. You have a new life. You don’t have a right to keep me away from my kids.

∼Paige

I opened the last letter. Sent six days before Joe drowned. Five days before Joe said he had something he wanted to talk with me about.

June 15, 1999

Joe,

I’m going to call you today at the store and send this. After that, you’ll hear directly from my attorney. Please work with me. I am literally begging you. I have to make things right with Annie and Zach. I’m ready and I’m done waiting for you to be ready.

∼Paige

I folded the last letter and put it back in its envelope, as if it were an object I could simply put back in its place. The fire rifled a loud pop. ‘What am I going to do?’ was all I could think to say. ‘What the hell should I do?’

‘Ella.’ Lucy took my hand in hers. ‘That is a question I simply cannot answer.’

‘What would you do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Lucy, throw me a bone here.’

‘No way. No. This is something only you can decide. Dig deep, El. You’ll know what to do. In the meantime, and afterwards, I’ll be here no matter what. Now try to get some sleep.’

‘Yeah. Right.’

She hugged me and left. Somehow, when I climbed into bed, the mattress pulled me with a swift, relentless force into a maze of sweaty dreams.

I woke feeling damp and salty and disoriented, the sun already cresting the treetops. I jumped out of bed, not wanting the kids to think I was slipping away from them again.

Everything looked different, as if I had journeyed through another country and just returned. My bedroom, the bathroom, the hallway… all imprinted with new knowledge, a weary traveller’s perspective. How had I not seen it before? This home had a history. Joe and I had made no major changes in the house since my arrival, except for the wall we’d torn down between the kitchen and living room. Maybe Joe was afraid walls could speak.

He had come home one afternoon that first summer and, instead of his usual roll around the floor with Callie and the kids, he paced in the narrow kitchen.

‘Doesn’t this kitchen bother you?’ he asked.

I shrugged. ‘No. Why?’

‘It’s dark, don’t you think? And cramped. And the living room is too small. Don’t you find the whole thing extremely depressing ?’

‘Not really.’ Depressing didn’t even sound like Joe.

‘This wall — it could come down easily. It’s not even a load-bearing wall. It’s not a thick wall. It’s just a wall. A wall that should have never gone up in the first place. I don’t know why it wasn’t kept open in the first goddamn place.’

‘Joe?’

He left the house and headed for the barn. On the stove the beets from the garden simmered, bobbing in their ruby liquid. Joe walked in with an axe.

‘Joe. What are you doing?’

‘Take the kids outside to play. We all need light. We need space. We need air. ’

‘Are you okay?’ He didn’t look like a man who had simply decided to start a home-remodelling project. He smiled, but his lip was twitching. His eyes shone, daring me. For a second, a cold fear passed through my body — we had only been together a month or so, and I thought, Okay, this is where my loving guy turns out to be an axe murderer. But I saw a tear slip from his eye, a tender vulnerability cross his face. He took the axe to the wall like he was hitting a baseball. It tore through the plaster with a sullen crack.

‘Daddy!’ Annie called from the hallway.

‘Take the kids outside. Please?’ And then he swung again, breaking through to the other side, yellow swells of sun already seeping through.

When, two hours later, we returned from our walk to the school playground, Joe was sweeping up the debris in the new dappled light. He kissed me, kissed Zach in the backpack, picked up Annie, who exclaimed, ‘Wowee!’

‘Welcome,’ Joe said, ‘to our official Not-So-Great Room.’ I said, ‘But it is great.’

‘I don’t know why I never thought to do this. I should have done it a long time ago.’

Now I understood why that particular day, he did think to do it. He’d received Paige’s letter about the kitchen. The only letter he’d opened after I’d come into the picture. It was another letter instructing him to never call again. But was his motivation in tearing down the wall to bring Paige back? Or to make sure our life together never became what theirs had become?

Our walls were different, but we had them. Invisible walls. The illusion of light and space and even air. The kind you can’t see, that are fragile as glass. They work great until an unseen force pushes you into one and the illusion shatters, so that every step you take cuts you, cuts those who walk alongside you.

I opened the door to Annie and Zach’s room, and the kittens scrambled towards me. ‘Close the door or you’ll let them out,’ Annie said.

‘Him is mine,’ Zach said, grabbing and holding up a kitten.

‘No, Zachosaurus. Remember? They’re both both of ours.’ Even this sounded to me like a custody battle.

Annie explained that they had finally decided on names, Thing One and Thing Two. They just couldn’t agree on which was which.

I made coffee in what had once been Paige’s coffee maker. I stirred in milk with one of the spoons from her bridal-registry flatware and put the milk back in the same refrigerator on which she had once kept her family photos with magnets. I thought of that family photo she’d sent with her face cut out, and the words she wrote, I’ve cut my face out. Maybe you can glue in her face. I had walked in and slipped between their sheets. Hell, the very sheets she’d washed and folded and set in the linen closet before she walked out.

I didn’t think she would be a better mother to them than I was. But probably not a worse one, either. She had been hurt by her mother, she had been ill, apparently something was horribly wrong with her back, but none of that meant she wouldn’t be a good mother. And yet she hadn’t been completely honest in the mediation, hadn’t told Janice Conner that the first five letters she wrote to Joe told him she was never coming back, that he must never contact her. That’s when I stepped in. And then she had got help. She had eventually even got well.