The Sad Truth About Happiness

by Anne Giardini

  “I’m not sure this is a good idea,” I said to Rebecca.

  “It can’t hurt him, Maggie,” she said. “Look at him.”

  I watched Philip nestle closer to the dark-haired woman. He relaxed his suction on her breast every few moments to take a deep shuddering sigh. His nose still bubbled with his past grief and his forehead was damp and red, his dark curls flattened against his hot head.

  “Listen,” said Danielle. “It is all organized. Nicole has a girl who has two months. She said she can take the boy for a few days until this affair with the husband of your sister is resolved. Silvie, she says that he has need of lait maternel. This other stuff,” she gestured toward my bag with its few remaining jars of formula. “She says it is not good for him. This is better until he can go back to his own maman. You can stay here if it pleases you, with my sister Silvie, or you can come back with me to Montreal. And Rebecca, too. You are also invited. In any case, it is not necessary to make a decision tonight. We can all decide what we will do tomorrow. For now, we sleep.”

  Although I objected, there was no strength in my protests, and Nicole left with Philip wrapped in her arms. Danielle and Silvie pointed out her house to me—it was only four doors away, down the street, past the family of snowy birch trees and contentedly tilting garage.

  Silvie steered Rebecca and me into what appeared to be a spare bedroom with a small, pink-tiled bathroom attached. We brushed our teeth and fell into the high double bed beside each other. Danielle disappeared down the hall with Silvie; I had the impression that they would share Silvie’s bed and likely not for the first time in their lives. I made myself comfortable under the pile of quilts and was asleep within the first minute. Rebecca was asleep even sooner and her ruffled breath was like a lullaby.

  I started awake in the very early morning, and lay quietly listening to Rebecca’s steady breathing. I willed myself to asleep again and plunged back into sleep headlong, like a diver, realizing as I fell that I had found that knack again. Something gained and something lost.

  Attic Stairs

  I began to resurface to wakefulness in the same moment that daylight began to lighten the night sky. I lay quietly for a few minutes in the bed beside Rebecca, whose lips still fluttered together in a hypnotic, motorial rhythm. I repressed an impulse to put an arm around her. I was so fond of her, so gratefully glad that she had taken charge. But I also felt an urgent need to appropriate some of her warmth. My muscles were tight, my teeth locked together, my jaw clenched. I was in, I recognized, a state of shock. What on earth had I done?

  I was reminded of the weeks after my friend Rachel died, when I was in high school. To the extent that I had anticipated her death, I had expected her absence to be more or less the same size and shape as her presence, as if someone were to have taken a pair of scissors and snipped her out of a photo. But that wasn’t the way it was at all. A person present is in one place, knowable, embraceable, contained. Her loss, I discovered, was both nowhere and everywhere. It shifted size and shape and density and form. It became a different thing from hour to hour: a sharp needle imbedded in my thoughts, rancid bile on my tongue, sandpaper on my spirit, a cold, heavy weight in my stomach, a dancing phantom, a damp fog, a sudden malaise, an icy headache, a searing lance of almost overwhelming regret, an overall, generalized ache like a flu.

  I felt somewhat the same way then, lying in bed beside Rebecca, as realization seeped in, at about the same rate that the morning light began to pierce the lace curtains at the window. What had I done so precipitously in Vancouver? My fears and anxieties, which were not quite regret—which I was certain even those despairing moments was what I would have been plunged into had I not snatched Philip and ran—grew, diminished, hardened, softened from one instant to the next. I felt cold with distress, then, in the next moment, flushed with a kind of shame. My crimes felt heavy, then weightless, meaningless. My only two absolute certainties were that Philip was being tenderly cared for in the house down the street and Rebecca’s very solid presence was beside me.

  My thoughts turned to my parents. What would they be doing to help or reassure Lucy? Would they blame me or think I had done the right thing? Then I thought of Leo, Angus, and Charles. What would they think of me if—when—they knew what I had done? Charles, I suspected, would be appalled. He liked order and believed that rules existed because it was generally a good idea to follow them. Angus was a father himself and bound to see things from a father’s point of view. I couldn’t guess at what Leo might think. He was a lawyer, compelled to respect the law. But he had a gentleness to his nature that might, I thought, ameliorate his point of view. I had no reason to imagine that Charles’s perspective would be the one I would never learn.

  My blinking gaze drew Rebecca’s eyes open. She smiled and raised her head from her pillow and tilted her chin toward me.

  “How does it feel to be a kidnapper?” she asked.

  A half-hour later, we were eating cornflakes and drinking café au lait from thick china bowls at Silvie’s kitchen table. Danielle provided Silvie with more details of our flight with Philip. Silvie, listening, moved about the kitchen, making satisfying tsking noises and murmuring softly sympathetic imprecations. At the end of the story, she swept her arms wide, as she had done when we had first arrived, noisy and late, at her door the night before.

  “Here, is safe. Tranquille. Faites comme chez vous,” she said smiling. “Vous avez trouvé ici un havre de paix!”

  Over Silvie’s objections, I washed the breakfast dishes while Rebecca made a telephone call to an old school friend who lived in Germany. Her friend agreed to send an e-mail from an Internet café to my sister Janet’s husband John at his work e-mail. We agreed on the text of the message: Philip is safe. I would return in a few days when I thought it likely the legal wrangling had produced a satisfactory result. I also asked if Rebecca’s friend would request that John contact my supervisor at the hospital and tell her that I had been called away unexpectedly and urgently, a family matter, and would return as soon as I could. We heard back from Rebecca’s friend within an hour. John had our message and would call Lucy to reassure her as best he could.

  After the dishes were done, Rebecca and I made up the bed we had shared and tidied our small room. Then we went with Danielle down the street to the house of Nicole, the woman who had taken Philip home in her arms the night before.

  A girl of four or five, dressed in jeans, a red sweater, and red socks, opened the door of Nicole’s house. She stood and stared at us, clearly thrilled.

  “Elles sont arrivées, maman,” she called back into the house—both sentinel and messenger—“Danielle et les deux dames anglaises sont ici.”

  The little girl spun around and thundered up the steep stairs that led from the narrow hallway. Danielle and Rebecca stepped into the hall and I followed the girl’s flashing red-stockinged feet up the stairs. She skidded to a stop at an open door on the second floor and adopted quite suddenly an air of exaggerated quiet.

  “Shhhhh,” she said, a finger at her lips. She motioned downward with the flat palm of the other hand.

  Nicole was in bed, asleep in a mound of sheets, blankets, and pillows. The pages of a newspaper, Le Journal, were scattered around her, along with an empty mug and a plate littered with crumbs. There was a sleeping baby on either side of her. One baby was blond and fat and pink. The other was Philip. The muscles in his cheeks contracted once, twice, and a vestigial smile trembled on his lips. I stood in the doorway beside the young girl, who stood still, in the manner of a deer, as if she thought any motion might make her visible, and together we gazed at the messy bed and three sleepers.

  Philip’s outflung hand rested alongside Nicole’s encircling arm. Against Nicole’s pale rose skin, Philip’s hand was red-gold. His dark hair curled like waves on his brow. His lips were dark red, a shade very close to purple. He looked—there was no way I could, even striving, fail to notice this—as Italian as if he had been born in Palermo or Venice or Naples inst
ead of downtown Vancouver. Shit, I thought. Shit. And then: But this is no reason for Gian Luigi and that hideous Ivetta to get him. He’s as much ours as theirs.

  “Ils dorment,” the girl at my side said in a loud whisper.

  “Comment t’appelles-tu?” I whispered back.

  “Marie-France,” the girl said. She wrinkled her mouth and nose together. “Mais je n’aime pas beaucoup mon nom. Je préférerais qu’on m’appelle Brittany.”

  “Alors, enchantée, Brittany,” I said, extending my right hand. Marie-France took my hand in hers and pumped it up and down several times.

  Danielle and Rebecca must have begun to wonder what we were doing. They had made their way silently up the stairs and now joined us at the bedroom door. Nicole opened one eye, then the other.

  “Il était très sage,” she said, struggling to sit up without waking the babies. “Il a bien dormi, et bien mangé. Ils viennent d’avoir leur dejeuner et moi aussi, comme vous voyez.”

  With Danielle assisting where Rebecca’s and my French broke down, it was agreed that Rebecca and I would take Philip with us and come back with him when he was next in need of milk. Nicole loaned us some clothes for him and a pink snowsuit and a kind of sling that slipped over my shoulder in which Philip could nestle. Rebecca and I took him back to Silvie’s house and put him down to sleep in the middle of the big bed we had shared the night before.

  Nicole and Marie-France came over to Silvie’s house for lunch a few hours later, and Nicole woke Philip up and nursed him until he was drowsy again. She reassured us as she fed him that she didn’t mind feeding Philip along with her daughter, that with all of her children—this new baby girl was her fourth—she had produced enough milk for a village and had always had plenty to spare.

  “It runs in the family,” she explained, Danielle serving as translator. “My grand-mère, Agnès, told me when I had my first child, my son Antoine, that she was a good milker too—une bonne nourrice. They used to keep the women in hospital for a good two weeks when they gave birth in those days. Not like today when you’re in and out as fast as they can rush you. I didn’t even get a meal last time in; Emilie was born at ten at night and I had to go home at eight the next morning. My husband was late getting to work at the mill because he had to cook my breakfast before he left.

  “My grand-mère had eight children and each time they kept her in the maternity ward for as long as a month—once even longer. Some of the women had problems with their milk. It came in late, or not at all, or their nipples cracked and bled so the babies got as much blood as milk when they suckled, or their baby turned up their nose at it, or they just couldn’t get the trick of it. There wasn’t much else to offer. Cow’s milk or goat’s milk, and that was still sometimes unpasturized. They added corn syrup, or even maple syrup to it and hoped for the best. But my grandmother had milk enough for all the babies there. And so she was encouraged to stay on. All her meals were provided. No chores. She would lie in her bed propped up on pillows and feed baby after baby and talk to the other women and to the nurses. It was a closed world. Women only, except for the doctor of course, le maître, who came in once in the morning. No visitors allowed. The women would hold their babies up to the windows in the evenings to show them off to their papas down in the street. Do you know what my grand-mère told me?”

  We all leaned forward over our plates.

  “She said her milk came out with so much force that she could hit the wall at the end of the ward! As far away as over there,” Nicole pointed to a spot outside the kitchen door on the far side of the hall. “That’s what she said.”

  We all gazed at the gold-flocked hall wallpaper and marveled.

  “My mother always said that a drop of breast milk would cure warts.”

  “Yes, that sounds possible. It’s filled with antibodies, isn’t it?”

  “I saw a few drops of Mary’s milk in a church in France once. It was a blue-gray color, and it was still sloshing around in a little glass sleeve after two thousand years. The nun who led the tour said that it never dried up like ordinary milk. It remained liquid. A miracle, she said.”

  “It was a miracle anyway—virgins don’t produce milk!”

  “I’ve heard that mothers who adopt can sometimes get milk to come in by putting the baby to their breast.”

  “A friend of mine lived in Sweden for a year when her husband went there to manage a construction project. She couldn’t get a work permit, so she volunteered at a breast milk bank. It was like a blood bank. You could make deposits and withdrawals. Like your grandmother, Nicole, but more organized.”

  “Did you know they used to think that breast milk was made in the uterus, out of redirected menstrual blood. That was the reason they thought women didn’t get their periods while they were nursing—the blood was sent up to the breasts. I saw a picture once in a textbook of how they thought it worked. There was a duct leading from the uterus upward and it branched to the two breasts.”

  “You’d think that the first time they did an autopsy, they’d see there wasn’t any connection.”

  “Maybe they thought that it shriveled up when it was no longer needed.”

  “I was breast-feeding when I got pregnant with my second. . . .”

  “It used to be the fashion for women of any means to send out their children to be nursed.”

  “I’ve heard that children from different families who were nursed together were considered milk-siblings, almost related.”

  “I once met a woman who nursed her son until he was four. He would walk over to her, lift her shirt, and latch on to her breast.”

  “Two is old enough. Once they can eat regular food.”

  “That long?”

  “You want to do what’s best for your child.”

  “My mother fed my sister and me canned milk with corn syrup, and we turned out fine.”

  Silvie sniffed and stood to clear the table. “Well,” she said. “There are mothers like that even today. Too busy or too proud to feed her own child.”

  Rebecca and I went for a walk through the town, while Philip napped and Danielle visited with Silvie. There was an hôtel de ville—the town hall—a small volunteer fire hall, two churches, three blocks of stores and businesses, and several small neighborhoods of houses. A frozen river looped through the modest downtown like a gray thread following a needle through cloth.

  We saw women with knitted scarves over their heads pushing strollers along the cleared sidewalks and guiding young children, clumsy and splay-footed in their winter boots and bundled up so that only their red, runny noses poked out, back to school for the afternoon. There were women behind the counters at the post office, the bakery, the bank, even the hardware store. Ste-Anne was a town run by women. The men, it seemed, all worked at the sawmill south of town. Steam from a stack at the mill telegraphed its location a kilometer or two downriver, at the spot where the railway track crossed the highway. Trucks loaded high with logs drove along the main road in the direction of the mill, the long, orange-ribboned log ends bounding and recoiling jauntily with each turn of the wheels.

  Over the next few days, Rebecca, Danielle, and I fell into a kind of dreamlike interlude, an unintended and virtually complete escape from our usual lives. Rebecca took a holiday from her quizzes, the first break she had taken in several years, she admitted. Danielle had already set her students’ examinations, and was able to arrange by phone for an invigilator to oversee them. I was fairly certain that I no longer had a job to go back to and found that I was able to keep from worrying by electing to live entirely in the present.

  Philip spent more and more of his time with Nicole and her daughter Emilie. He was discernibly happier with them than he was with either Rebecca or me. He cringed in the cold outside air and relaxed into the warmth of Nicole’s house. He would pull at Nicole’s plump breasts until he fell into a milk stupor, and then fast asleep. Even after the nipple fell free of his mouth, his red lips pursed together like a kiss, nursing at air molec
ules. He took his naps with Emilie in her crib, one baby at each end, their feet turned toward the middle. When he was awake, Nicole often laid him beside Emilie, who would turn her head and gaze at him. Sometimes one of Emilie’s exploring hands would happen onto one of Philip’s and the two babies would cling together like castaways, their fingers knitted together so that it was difficult to tell where one baby ended and the other began. When Nicole was busy, she would pass both babies along to her cousin Françoise, who had begun to wean her one-year-old, but who was able to nurse Emilie and Philip if they became desperate for milk and Nicole had not yet returned for them.

  Rebecca and Danielle and I took Danielle’s little car and followed the roads that led to and from Ste-Anne in every direction. We were passed on the highways by trucks stacked with logs bound for the many local mills, or headed away from the mills loaded with lumber, woodchips, plywood, or strandboard. Noise-belching snowmobiles often kept pace with the car as we drove, following trails that ran alongside the road, swooping and dipping and soaring in brief bursts as the drifts rose and fell. We drove past solitary men sitting in lawn chairs in the middle of frozen lakes, fishing through the ice, beside huts built of scavenged lumber and plywood, stacks of beer cans at their feet.

  Whenever we reached another town, we stopped and got out in search of a cup of coffee or to stretch our legs. We walked on orderly streets, through different neighborhoods, along stretches of windswept lakes and rivers, through snowy parks and cemeteries. We brushed the snow from cenotaphs—every town had one—and read aloud the lists of names: Blanchard, LeBlanc, LaSalle, Martel, Levesque. We saw women everywhere, walking, shopping, talking, or working. Older women picking their way along the sidewalks with canes or walkers. Younger women leading their flocks of small children.