Seré Halverson - The Underside of Joy

Lucy came running up behind me. ‘No wandering off alone.’

‘Pray tell, why not?’

‘You need a friend. And a good bottle of wine. Even better, a friend with her own vineyard.’ She held up a bottle of wine without a label; the designer was still working on it.

‘Okay, but let me bum a cigarette.’

She shook her head. ‘Don’t have any.’

‘Liar. You’re PMSing.’ I’d kicked a vicious habit fifteen years before in Advanced Biology at Boston U when they showed us a smoker’s lung. I’d transformed into a typical ex-smoker: a zealot who self-righteously preached about seeing the light of not lighting up. But that night a cigarette sounded like salvation. And Lucy was one of those rare breeds who could smoke a few cigarettes a few times a month when she was stressed, usually right before her period. I knew her cycle because it was the same as mine. Moon sisters. We’d met only when I’d moved to Elbow, but we immediately fell into an easy alignment that went way beyond our cycles. She had long black hair, but she said she should have been the redhead because her name was Lucy. Sometimes she called me Ella Mertz. She and David had become my closest friends. Besides Joe.

We ended up sitting on the bench by the garden, smoking without talking. The cigarette hurt my throat, made me light-headed. She handed me the bottle.

‘What, no glasses? Is this the latest craze in Sonoma wine tasting?’

‘Yeah, but usually we wrap it in a brown paper bag too.’

‘Distinguished.’ I tipped the bottle back and took a swig of pinot noir.

A voice came from behind us: ‘I just wanted to say good-bye.’ I jerked around to see Paige, who reached out her hand to me. I couldn’t extend my own because I was holding the bottle of wine in one hand and a Marlboro Light in the other. Class act if there ever was one.

‘Oh, sorry, here…’ I stamped out the cigarette and shoved the bottle back at Lucy. ‘I thought you left.’

‘I realized I hadn’t said a word to you since we got here, so I wanted to thank you for letting me come over. I know this must be a difficult time for you.’

I studied her, saw the origins of Annie’s eyes, Annie’s wilful chin, Zach’s noble forehead. ‘Thanks.’

‘You’ve done a good job with the children,’ she said, her voice cracking the slightest bit, a hairline fracture in the marble goddess. ‘I should be going.’

I stood. She raised her chin. I did not want a hug from her and figured she probably did not want a hug from me. But we had been hugging people all day — it was what you did at times like this — and so we gave each other stiff pats on the back, a stiff not-quite hug. She did smell good, much better than I did. Better than cigarette smoke and booze.

When I finally made it to bed, both kids had already left theirs and climbed into ours — mine — and were asleep. I was glad for their company. About two in the morning, Annie sprang up in bed and cried out, ‘Hi, Daddy!’ I jolted awake, expecting to see him standing over us, telling us it was time to get dressed and head out for a picnic.

Annie smiled in the foggy moonlight, her eyes still closed. I wanted to crawl inside her dream and stay there with her. Callie sighed and laid her head back down over my feet. Zach sucked noisily on his thumb while I tried to let the rhythm lull me back to sleep. Exhaustion had settled into my muscles, bones, and every organ — except my brain, which zigzagged incessantly through moments of my life with Joe. Now I tried to guide it to the few conversations we’d had about Paige, digging up the same information I’d once tossed into the No Need to Dwell pile. Back then, I didn’t want to live in the past, not his or mine. I didn’t ask the questions because I didn’t want to know the answers.

But I had wanted to make sure their ending was final, that there was no chance they could get back together. The last thing I wanted to be was a home wrecker.

At the house that first night I met Joe, the only evidence of Paige that I’d noticed was her bathrobe, and when I returned the next evening after a day of job hunting, the bathrobe was gone. Joe must have emptied the house of everything Paige, because I never found another indication that she existed, except for the one photograph of her pregnant.

‘Four months ago,’ Joe had said in his one offer of explanation soon after we met, ‘while the kids and I were at my mom’s for Sunday brunch, she packed up all her things.’ We had been lying in bed, a candle flame still creating moving shadows on the wall, long after our own shadows had stilled. ‘She took all her clothes except her bathrobe, which she’d practically been living in.’

He said Paige had been depressed. She got to the point that she’d forget to change clothes and take a shower. She went to live with her aunt in a trailer park outside of Las Vegas, so at least he knew someone was taking care of her. It was hard for me to imagine someone choosing a trailer park in the desert, leaving behind all the natural beauty of Elbow, the cosy home, let alone Joe and Annie and Zach. But she wouldn’t see him, wouldn’t talk to him. She’d left him a Dear Joe letter.

‘She said she was sorry but that she wasn’t meant to be a mother. That the kids would be better off without her. She said she loved them but she wasn’t good for them. She told me she knew I could do this, that I was a natural father in all the ways she wasn’t a natural mother, that my family would help me… blah, blah, fucking blah.’

‘It’s ironic,’ I told him. I thought about keeping my own failures, well, my own, but I’d already blown every dating rule, so there was no point in stopping then. ‘I’ve wanted to have children, but I haven’t been able to. I was depressed and lethargic, too… My ex-husband could tell you similar stories about me wearing the same clothes for three days and forgetting to bathe.’

I told him about the five babies that didn’t make it. We held each other tighter, as if our embrace could serve as a perfectly fitted cast that could help heal all the broken parts of us.

My mom had slept on the couch, had a fire going in the woodstove, and was already making coffee and oatmeal, toast and eggs, when I got up. My mother stood in my kitchen in her robe and moccasins, looking like an older version of me — tall, slim, a bit of a hippie — except her braid was salt-and-pepper. I got my red hair from my dad. She held out her arms to me, her silver bracelets clinking, and I entered her hug. Because her husband — my dad — had died when I was eight, she’d been through this, she knew things, but some of them couldn’t be spoken. I loved my mother, but we’d never had the kind of mother — daughter relationship my friends shared with their moms. I’d never screamed that I hated her; we didn’t go through that necessary separation of selves where I declared my individuality, because, truth be told, the shadow cast by my father’s death always loomed between us, keeping us polite and slightly distant. Still, I loved her. I admired her. And I wished, in a way, that I’d felt passionate and comfortable enough to dump my rage and teenage angst on her. Instead, I’d pecked her on the cheek and closed the door to my room and finished my biology homework.

I poured myself coffee and refilled my mom’s cup. Outside, the fog hadn’t budged since the previous night; the cold grey shroud wrapped itself through the trees, as if trying to comfort them from the very cold it was inflicting upon them. The house, though, literally sparkled. I’d inherited my lack of housekeeping skills from my mother, so she hadn’t had much to do with the cleaning. The night before, Joe’s mother had crouched on her arthritic knees, wiping the hardwood as she crawled out of the front door. She’d washed all the dishes, emptied the compost bucket, and thrown the bags of recyclables into the recycling bin. The only remnants of the funeral were the stuffed refrigerator, the stack of sympathy cards from old friends and new, and the proliferation of calla lilies, irises, lisianthus, and orchids that lined the counters and the old trunk we used as a coffee table.