The Sad Truth About Happiness

by Anne Giardini

  I found the girl and the baby both in a pew near the back of the church, sitting at Mary’s red-slippered feet. Oriah was rocking the still miraculously sleeping Philip rhythmically back and forth and crooning in a low voice. Her long hair had fallen down around him like a cloak. Beside her on the pew was a large package of disposable diapers and at her feet was a bulky plastic bag. Then I saw the dark man off to the side. The man who knew about the windows. The nephew of Salvatore and Aurelio. He was watching the girl, although he hadn’t yet seen me, nor Oriah him.

  Ridiculous word, nephew, I thought, irritated to see him there at a time of day when the girl and I and the baby should have had the church to ourselves. This preposterous man was there at this odd, lost hour, doing nothing useful, dressed in black, his hands clasped in his lap, and sitting directly between me and the next part of my life. I stood for a minute watching the man watch the girl, who, in turn, sat gazing at the baby in her arms. She held Philip tightly, as if she was afraid that he might tumble to the floor. I felt a twist of sorrow somewhere under my breasts, a moral ache of some kind. It seemed to me in that instant that it might be a greater crime—for how are such things measured?—for me to take Philip from the girl than it had been for me to steal him away from my sister.

  Spare Room

  Oriah gave Philip to me without protest, although she did reach out a long, red-knuckled hand and stroke his brow gently, with the side of her thumb, in the manner of a blessing. “I bought him a soother too,” she told me, some emotion gentling her rough voice. “Babies seem to like them.”

  The man in black stepped forward out of the shadows and insisted on coming with me, to help me with Philip and the bags, although I told him that I would be fine walking home, only a few blocks away. He was insistent and I solved the impasse by permitting him to hail a taxi for me. I was growing increasingly anxious about the time it was taking me to get more than a block away from the hospital with Philip. The man helped me with my packages into the back seat of the taxi and stood on the curb with his absurd black gown whipping and billowing about him, looking down at me.

  “That girl,” I said, as much to distract him as to help Oriah. “Maybe you could talk to her. She’s lost a baby recently.”

  “Ah,” he said, not turning away, keeping his gaze fixed on my face. “Perhaps I will.”

  “Where to?” asked the cab driver and I had to turn and give him my address, although I was concerned, since it seemed to me that the man in black was listening intently. The taxi started forward with a slight lurch, and Philip startled, but settled again while he and I were ferried the dozen blocks to the apartment to the strains of a particularly plangent Hindi pop song, unmistakably one about a lonely, futile, unrequited love.

  “Can you wait?” I asked the driver when the cab pulled up in front of my building. “We’re going to the airport. I won’t be long.” He nodded, sighed richly, and reached to turn up the volume.

  Philip began to protest while we were riding up in the elevator. His cries, weak at first, grew steadily louder. When the elevator doors opened, his outrage spilled into the corridor. His crying brought Rebecca out of her closet-office into the hallway as we fell into the apartment. She rushed forward and removed the bags from my hands.

  “Is that Lucy’s baby?” she asked.

  “I had to take him. Lucy’s old boyfriend from Italy has come. With his horrible wife. He’s horrible too. They have some sort of a custody order. He and his wife are trying to take the baby away from Lucy and Ryan. He says it’s his, not Ryan’s.”

  “Is he?”

  “No! He’s Ryan’s. Lucy told me. No, she’s never actually told me, but I know, I mean we’ve all assumed.” We were shouting to hear each other over Philip’s wails.

  “What does Lucy want you to do with the baby? Hide him here?”

  “She doesn’t exactly know I have him. I tried to create a diversion. But she’ll work it out quickly, and she’s not the type to keep a secret for more than an hour. Even if she doesn’t tell, someone else will figure it out and they’ll come here to look for him. I have to take him somewhere else until Lucy and Ryan can get this thing sorted out. I have a cab waiting downstairs. I am just not sure where to go to.”

  “If anyone’s looking for you, you’ll be easy to track down. A woman with very long blonde hair with a newborn baby.” Rebecca looked at me closely. “A nervous blonde woman with a newborn baby. You won’t be that easy to hide.”

  Rebecca turned her attention to Philip who was continuing to howl. “What about your friend? The one who used to live here? Dana. Can he help?”

  “He’s all the way in Montreal.”

  “Perfect. Why don’t you see if you can settle the baby. I’ll pack.”

  Philip finished two of the small bottles of formula while Rebecca rushed around the apartment. He fell into a limp sleep only when he had sucked up the last bubble of moisture from the second bottle. He looked absolutely smashed, like a drunk in a ditch. Even after I had pulled out the nipple, which made a slight popping sound as it came free of his mouth, his lips continued to nurse the air. He looked as if he were dreaming of milk. He didn’t protest while I changed his diaper. When I had wrapped him up in his blankets again, Rebecca was ready to go. She helped me into my coat and shrugged on her own navy peacoat.

  “You don’t have to come to the airport with me,” I told her. “I have a cab waiting.” I couldn’t remember if I had told her that already.

  “It’s no trouble,” Rebecca answered. She picked up the two suitcases she had packed and followed me out the door. The driver was still in his cab in front of the building, working a crossword puzzle. He gazed at us neutrally from under his neat turban. Rebecca gave him directions and, when we arrived at the airport, directed me to sit on a bench with Philip while she arranged my ticket.

  “I’ll put them on my credit card,” she said, waving away my thick roll of money. “It would only attract attention if you paid in cash. And you might need that. You can pay me back later.”

  It wasn’t until we were walking toward the security area that I realized what Rebecca was doing. I stopped and turned toward her.

  “You can’t be thinking of coming too?”

  “There’s a conference in Montreal just starting that I was thinking of going to anyway,” she said. “And you need me for camouflage. They’ll be looking for one woman with a baby, not two. Also, since the plane doesn’t leave for another two hours, I can do something about your appearance while we’re waiting.”

  We spent the next hour locked in a small washroom marked with a handicapped sign near the gate from which the flight was leaving. By the time we boarded the airplane, my hair had been colored a medium shade of brown, more or less the same tone as Rebecca’s, and bluntly cut to just above my shoulders. I was also wearing a pair of Rebecca’s large sunglasses. I don’t think even Lucy would have recognized me. I kept reaching up with my free hand to feel the blunt ends of hair on my cheeks and on the back of my neck. I hadn’t had short hair since I was six and had my last pixie cut.

  “It suits you,” Rebecca told me. “You look younger, more confident.”

  Philip wailed when the plane took off, and again when it landed. Apart from that, he lay nested in my lap or in Rebecca’s and slept as if he were drenched in sleep. The first time he cried, we tried the soother that Oriah had bought, but found it to be far too large for his small mouth. The package disclosed that it was intended for older babies, eighteen to twenty-four months. Rebecca slipped one of her fingers into his mouth instead, and he nursed at it intensely until he was overcome again by sleep. A few minutes before we landed, we stretched Philip out on the seat between us and changed his diaper.

  The airplane, and then a taxi, carried us farther and farther from Philip’s parents, from my job, from Rebecca’s work, but Rebecca was behaving so matter-of-factly, so calmly conspiratorial in this abduction of Philip, that I might have lost sight of the terrible thing I was doing if it hadn’t be
en for Dana. He was not pleased when I arrived at his front door, in disguise and in the company of another woman and a baby.

  “Holy shit, Maggie,” he said, when I had explained the situation. “This is just so not cool. I can tell you right now that I don’t want to get mixed up in this.” He pulled his fingers through his hair and tugged at a few strands above his brow. “You don’t seem to realize that there’s a lot at stake here. Kidnapping, for god’s sake. That’s serious. It’s in the Criminal Code. It’s a major offense. You can’t just walk off with someone else’s baby. You have to trust the law to sort this kind of thing out. People fight over custody every day. That’s what the courts are for.”

  He picked up his phone and held it out to me. “I want you to call your sister right now. She’s got to be going crazy. Then we’ll take you to the airport and send you all back home. At this point, no lasting harm has been done.”

  “Lucy will have figured out that Maggie has the baby,” Rebecca pointed out. “She’ll know that he’s perfectly safe.”

  “I need somewhere to keep him, only for a few days,” I said. I hated the appeasing undercurrent in my voice, was angry with myself for having involved Dana in something he disapproved of so strongly. “Just until Lucy can get a lawyer to overturn the court order. We can’t run the risk that Gian Luigi will take Philip to Italy. She’ll never get him back if he’s taken there. Gian Luigi is a powerful man. He has connections. She could never see him again. It would kill her.”

  “I know where to take him.” Dana’s fiancée, Danielle, spoke for only the second time since we had arrived at their front door, at the top of a steep flight of stairs that led up from the street, and where she had greeted us by kissing us briskly on both cheeks and introducing herself.

  “My sister’s place. In Ste-Anne Desjardins. Everyone there has babies. Le p’tit Philippe will be a needle in a stack of hay.”

  Dana pressed his hands against his cheeks, then slid them apart so that his ears were covered. “I don’t want to have anything to do with this.”

  “You are right,” said Danielle. She reached up and patted Dana’s shoulder. “The less you are knowing will be the better.”

  Danielle did the driving. Philip sat with me in the back seat in a molded-plastic car seat that Danielle had dug out from behind a set of skis and a hockey bag in a closet. Rebecca sat in the front seat with Danielle. Danielle and Rebecca talked the whole way, a four-hour drive, while I held onto one of Philip’s compact feet and willed for him to be OK, for me to have done the right thing, for Lucy and Ryan not to panic, and for Rebecca, Dana, Danielle, and the girl on the street not to get into too much trouble. When Philip cried, I popped one of the little bottles of formula into his mouth and he opened his lips wide to accept these like a fledgling in its nest, although it seemed to me that he drank them with more and more reluctance.

  As we neared a town called Annonciation, Rebecca fell asleep, her head bouncing lightly against the inside of the car door. Philip woke up a few minutes later. His eyes flew open and his face screwed up into a purple, wrinkled mask of dismay. He drew a deep breath. In the same instant, Danielle, in the front seat, began to sing:

  Ils étaient trois garcons.

  Ils étaient trois garcons.

  Leur chant, leur chant emplit ma maison.

  Leur chant, leur chant emplit ma maison.

  Amis, où allez-vous?

  Amis, où allez-vous?

  Je suis si triste et si las de tout.

  Je suis si triste et si las de tout.

  Ami, viens avec nous,

  Ami, viens avec nous,

  Tu connaîtras des plaisirs plus doux.

  Tu connaîtras des plaisirs plus doux.

  Philip released his anxious breath. His face relaxed and he appeared to shift his attention subtly in Danielle’s direction. How much could he see or hear? His thumb bumped against his mouth and miraculously, accidentally, found its way into its pink folds. His papery eyelids flickered, opened, closed, opened again, then remained shut, while he sucked, furiously at first, then more slowly, on his tiny, perfect, purple thumb. I marveled at this demonstration of so many talents all at once. He seemed to me to be the smartest, ablest, cleverest baby alive. I held onto his warm foot, which felt as sturdy as the head of a walking stick, and as warm as a bun, and listened with him to Danielle’s lulling song.

  Tu connaîtras la paix,

  Tu connaîtras la paix

  Bien loin, bien loin de ce qui est laid.

  Bien loin, bien loin de ce qui est laid.

  Ils étaient venus trois,

  Ils étaient venus trois,

  Quatre partaient le coeur plein de joie.

  Quatre partaient le coeur plein de joie.

  The scenery had changed. The thronged, slushy streets, and billboards and neon advertising and street signs of Montreal, with its two-level brick houses tucked in tight, one against the other, to conserve materials, energy, and space, each with iron-railed steps leading down to the sidewalk from modest stoops, had fallen away. We passed first through snowy neighborhoods of modest single and two-storey suburban houses, with siding in cheerful shades of pink and blue and yellow, then through fenced fields and woods, where the snow billowed light and high in drifts, with unpaved roads leading off at regular intervals from the secondary highway we were following.

  The next road sign pointed toward the next town: “L’Ascension—50 km.”

  Box Room

  We arrived in Ste-Anne Desjardins a few minutes before midnight. Danielle drove through the town, which was dark, unlit even by streetlights, aside from the occasional desultory glow from an all-night gas station and dépanneur. We followed straight, quiet streets to a white house that was set off to the back at one side of a large lot. A clothesline bare of clothes ran from the right side of the house to a stand of six or seven birch trees, thigh-deep in snow, huddled together beside a one-car garage that leaned at a friendly angle toward the house. Danielle stopped the car and turned off the motor. Philip started awake in the sudden quiet. He stiffened and launched instantly into a concerted, anguished cry. “I’m hungry!” I understood him to be saying. “Where is my mother?” “Who is my father?” “Why am I so far from home?”

  We opened the car doors, and his lamentations poured out into the sleeping street. Danielle released Philip’s car seat from the seat belt. “Oop-la!” she said. She lifted him up still strapped into the plastic seat, carried him to the front door of the house and balanced him on her knee while she felt for and rang the bell.

  It was difficult to tell whether the bell was working around the din of Philip’s screams. Philip had kicked his blankets loose, and he was beginning to turn purple and stiffen with rage. He was hardly taking the time to draw breath. His body shook and his complaints multiplied with each gulp of air that he pulled in to replenish his lungs. I began to believe that it might be possible for him to choke to death in his own rage and dismay.

  The door was thrown open all at once by a thickset woman in a white nightgown with a disordered mass of curling brown hair around her round, red face.

  “Qu’est-ce que vous . . .” she began, her round, thyroidal eyes bulging into the dark night. She stared first at the screaming baby, then shifted her gaze to Danielle. “Danielle! Qu’est-ce que tu fais ici? Et avec ce bébé?” She stepped back and spread her arms wide in an embrace and welcome, gesturing for us all to come in out of the cold night.

  The house was warm, and had a comfortable smell, like toast or fresh ironing. We followed the woman down a narrow hall to a sitting room that was crowded with furniture and decorated with doilies under plastic and religious figurines and pictures. There were several wooden plaques on the wall depicting folded hands and prayers in French. The couch and the two armchairs were strewn with knitted afghans, in alternating zigzag stripes of yellow, brown, orange, and gold.

  “Assoyez-vous,” the woman said. “S’il vous plaît.” She nodded sharply toward me and Rebecca. “Please. Sit
down.” Then the woman looked at Danielle and turned her palms upward, inviting an explanation.

  Danielle began speaking rapidly in French, gesturing from time to time toward me, Rebecca, and Philip. Philip continued to cry, his tone becoming even more urgent. I rummaged in the bag that held his things, found a bottle of formula, pulled off the top and stuck a nipple on the end of the bottle. I handed it to Rebecca, who pressed the nipple against the purple O of Philip’s mouth. He turned his head from side to side in rejection, and released a new wave of outrage.

  The woman continued to murmur with Danielle, but she was distracted by Philip’s outpouring of dismay. She glanced sideways at him, then down at the rejected bottle of formula. Her lips pursed and her forehead wrinkled. She turned her full attention to Philip and frowned, as if she were silently working through the many steps of a complex calculation.

  “Attendez,” she said at last and picked up the phone.

  “Non, non,” said Danielle. She placed a hand on the woman’s plump arm. “Ce n’est pas nésessaire, Silvie.”

  Silvie ignored Danielle. She spoke rapidly into the phone. No more than five minutes after she put down the receiver there was a ring at the door. Silvie left the room and returned shepherding a yawning young woman with pale, unlined skin and short, thick dark hair. She was wearing a wrinkled pink nightgown, a purple velour robe, and pink fleecy slippers.

  “Eh! C’est celui, ci?” asked the young woman, pointing with her chin toward Philip, who had stopped screaming, and was now crying in his car seat softly and steadily in a way that scraped against my heart. The dark-haired woman released Philip from the straps of the car seat and gathered him into her arms. She sat down on the couch beside Danielle, opened her gown, and positioned Philip against her round, rosy breast. Philip’s mouth softened, he fell silent and butted his head once, twice against the woman’s chest. Then his lips fastened around her nipple and he began to pull at it. I sat forward, alarmed.