The Sad Truth About Happiness

by Anne Giardini

  Each community was similar to the last, but also, in greater or lesser measure, different from the one we thought of as our own. Rebecca called one of these other towns, as we walked through, Ville Déjà-Vu, referring to the sensation it inspired of blurred familiarity. We had just turned a corner confident that the next block would include a Dunkin’ Donuts store and a Dépanneur Silvain, but found instead a Patisserie Rocheleau and a Quincaillerie Montagnais.

  One day, under a hard, cold, watery-yellow winter sun, we walked far to the north of the town and came across a frozen blue fan-shaped pond, its rough surface scattered with wisps of snow. The narrowest point of the pond was close to our feet at the edge of the road. There was a quiet, rushing sound; the water underneath the thick skin of ice seemed to spill from an underground culvert below the road. Danielle stumbled on a boulder hidden under the snow on the bank edge, and one of her boots kicked loose a chunk of ice the size of a lemon, which shot out and skittered across the surface of the ice. Thuck. Thock. Thock. Thick. Thick. Thck. It bounced and rebounded six or seven times, like a flat rock skipping across summer water, but with more spring and covering a greater distance, and the ice reverberated loudly with a higher tone each time ice glanced against ice. There may have been a layer of air between the ice and the water that formed a chamber in which the glancing sounds reverberated, creating music of the oddest sort, a natural, amplified glockenspiel. The ringing noise resounded again in the air, echoing against the leaning trees, white birch, feathered pine, and naked maple, rising in pitch as the sound waves expanded, clear, exuberant and ridiculous, like solitary laughter. We stood there for a full hour, taking turns tossing pieces of ice onto the frozen surface of the pond, making it ring and chime, and drinking in and echoing the hilarity of the cold ice music.

  We allowed ourselves to speculate over our morning coffees, and as we drove or walked, about what might be unfolding back in Vancouver. We had, of course, heard nothing; the silence was unsurprising but disconcerting nonetheless. Rebecca logged onto the Internet every day, miraculously connecting her laptop computer to the eventful outside world through the umbilical cord of Silvie’s slim telephone line. She scanned the newspapers available online, and searched in all the search engines, but she found no mention of Philip’s disappearance. This kind of case must not be uncommon, we concluded, although we were mystified about a world into which a baby could be so easily mislaid or borne away with so little fuss or comment.

  It was just remotely possible that Lucy had accepted that her son was safer with me, knowing that the alternative was for him to be snatched away by Gian Luigi. I found, however, that I couldn’t hold this acquiescent image of my turbulent sister in my mind for longer than a minute. It seemed far more likely that Lucy was trying to find Philip, that she was working to track me down. But if she was, it was also impossible for me to believe that Lucy wouldn’t find her son if she truly set out to do so. She had always known how to get what she wanted. Lucy was extraordinarily resourceful. And those years working in Italy had honed her skills. I believed on balance, though, that I was safe for the moment, that Philip was out of harm’s way, and that my sister and family must be working to solve the problem presented by Gian Luigi, and that all I needed to do was correctly judge when to reappear with Philip.

  I slept the sleep of the blameless those long winter nights in Silvie’s deep bed, surrounded by fat feather pillows, nested as if I were hibernating under drifts of quilts, with Rebecca’s sonorous nighttime noises as a lullaby. I began to describe to Danielle one morning over breakfast what this was like, the return of sleep after months as an insomniac, how sleep felt like water poured into a dry bucket of sand, how it seemed to soak into every part of me, my brain, my bones, my breast, how every morning I woke saturated, filled to the brim.

  Danielle listened intently, and then nodded and said, “This is a good comparison, water and sleep. It happens that the material that I teach to my engineering students is concrete, a significant material. Many important things are made of it. The ingredient most critical in making concrete is the water. It is the water that makes the powdered cement react and absorb water to itself, to make a pâte—a thick paste. The pâte covers all of the surfaces of the aggregate and sand and makes them to bond. Too much water makes the material more easy to work, but the concrete will be poor and weak. The right measure of water makes the concrete very strong. Not too much, not too little. This is like sleep, is it not? You need the right amount, but not too much.”

  I felt the hermetic seal of the bubble in which I had taken shelter give, just a little, but that was enough. A rush of anxiety found the opening, small as it was, and broke through. Danielle had not intended any criticism, but her words surfaced a current of unease that had formed an unacknowledged background or frame to my sense of peace. I couldn’t hide here in Ste-Anne forever. This wasn’t a rest cure or a vacation. A child’s future and my sister’s happiness were at stake. A feeling of apprehension began to expand inside me like a spreading stain. My thoughts were pulled to the people I had left behind. They appeared before me at first like ghosts or negatives. I could see through them. If I concentrated on Danielle, they shattered and shimmered like water when an oar is pulled through it. But it became more difficult to push them away from me. Their faces took shape and form and expression. I began to consider the events that had brought me here and to imagine what might happen next, and what might follow after that. Being in Ste-Anne had been much like being asleep, and the time was coming soon for this state to come to an end.

  Attic

  “It’s time to go back,” I said to Rebecca the next morning as soon as I heard her breath break from its regular nighttime rhythm. Her eyelids flickered and parted a fraction.

  “I’m not sure,” Rebecca said, considering. Then she sighed. “I can’t judge it one way or another. But it’s your family. We’ll have to trust your instincts.”

  I had been awake for hours, waiting for morning and considering the options that might be open to us. I had ruled out remaining in Ste-Anne. Danielle had promised us that we were welcome for as long as we wished to stay, that Silvie loved the drama we had brought with us and was enjoying our company. But I knew that a week was long enough for any guest to stay, however welcome. I was just as confident that a week was not long enough for Gian Luigi to have retreated from his mission to secure Philip for himself and his wife. I thought of going somewhere else but could not come up with any other place that would offer refuge to a small baby in the final wintry days of the millennium in a cold northern country. I had never played chess, but several times when I woke during the night it had occurred to me that it might have been useful if I had, that I might have benefited from some understanding of the tactics that chess masters used to break out of a difficult spot, to buy time or gain an advantage.

  The night that I lay awake in Silvie’s house and pondered what next to do began as the waning hours of December 21 and ended as the dawn of December 22. I had lost track of the days, but Rebecca had kept assiduous note of them, since she had taken on the task of checking the news every day. We had arrived in Ste-Anne Desjardins about a week earlier, in the final minutes of December 15. During the very few hours of that late December night when I did sleep, so lightly, so uneasily that I did not dream, a fire started back in Vancouver, in the apartment next door to the one that Rebecca and I shared.

  The tenant in the apartment next door, a single man of slight stature, someone we had encountered rarely, but who always managed to gave us the impression that he had no employment, plenty of money, and an intemperate social life—a modern version of a remittance man was what we had concluded—had noticed the day before that the upholstery on the wrought iron furniture that he kept outside on his balcony had been soaked through in a recent winter storm. He brought the cushions inside, propped them up in front of the gas fire that he had recently had installed in his living room, showered, dressed, and went out for dinner. He had planned the evening as a
seduction, and he was so successful that dinner progressed into a stay overnight at the bijou apartment in Yaletown owned by the object of his affections.

  Meanwhile, the cushions that he had left at home before the hearth dried steadily, but unevenly. Little by little, they began to curl toward the heat. Finally, at just past one o’clock in the morning, the cushions, scorching on the side nearest the fire, still sodden on the other, tumbled together, slowly, preposterously, irrevocably, headlong into the fire.

  A heavy pall of black smoke was drawn from the roasting foam and cotton and plastic like a spirit from a bottle, but the dark, toxic cloud expanded throughout his apartment, pressing against the walls and doors and windows, without triggering the alarm, because, unfortunately, the alarm had been disabled. Our neighbor had removed the batteries from his smoke detector a few weeks earlier, after they ran low and began to beep ominously and, more important to this story, annoyingly. He removed the spent batteries and tossed them in a drawer and had not got around to replacing them. So his alarm did not sound and the smoldering cushions were soon glowing with heat.

  Because the cushions were made of urethane, the smoke cloud contained lethal amounts of hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide. At about one-fifteen, our neighbor’s ancient tabby cat, Judy Garland, dozing on her pillow in the kitchen, drew in three or four shallow breaths, sneezed, coughed, and died where she lay.

  The acrid smoke poured, too, into my bedroom, which shared a common air duct with our neighbor’s living room—where the cushions were fully alight now and beginning to release dirty orange sparks into the air—and spilled down the white wall onto my empty bed. It churned and twisted its inky way across my blue-and-white-striped pillowcase and pale blue bedspread, leaving a film of gray as it passed, then seeped into the hall that led to Rebecca’s room, where it finally came into contact with and touched off the alarm in the hallway ceiling.

  The cushions in our neighbor’s apartment were now frankly, merrily, ablaze. They burned with such great heat that everything around them caught fire—the mantle over the fireplace, the lacquered wood floor, the furry throw rug. The fire reached the couch and two armchairs. They burst into flame instantly and it was at about this point that the escaping smoke and heat reached the building’s other alarms and sensors and caused the valves of the building’s sprinkler system, which was almost but not quite up to code, to open. Because of an undiagnosed fissure in the system that fed the sprinklers with water, the spray was weak, half-hearted, so by the time the fire trucks arrived at one-forty-five, in a glorious explosion of speed, light, urgency, and noise, smoke was pouring from the windows on the upper floor of the Beach Avenue building, flames could be seen behind all of our neighbors’ windows, and the asphalt shingles on the roof had begun to smolder.

  The other tenants, pulled from sleep by shrieking alarms, falling water, and chaotic shouts, streamed out of all four of the apartment building’s exits. They were dressed in pajamas, housecoats, sweatpants, winter coats, jeans, leggings, whatever they were wearing or had taken the time to pull on when the alarms sounded and sprinklers began to spurt. They carried in their arms such of their possessions as they had the presence or absence of mind to take hold of before they hurried to get out of the burning building. Not one of them thought that this might be a false alarm; they could all smell the bitterness of the burning foam, drywall, and electric wires, mixed with the campfire scent of burning wood and the classroom odor of scorched fabric and old dust. And they could feel something different in the night air, which was charged, somehow, as if with extra ions. All experienced a general, unnamable sensation that something serious was happening, something momentous and irreversible, even before they saw the confirmatory smoke and flames.

  One man, short in stature, with very white close-cropped hair, wearing quite an elegant scarlet smoking jacket–like bathrobe over red-and-cream-striped pajamas, walked out onto the front lawn brandishing the water glass that he always kept half-filled on his bedside table. He had snatched up his water glass, he advised anyone who would listen to him, and many who would not, including the fire chief himself who was just arriving, and had brought it with him in case he encountered open flames on his path down the hallway toward the exit, which he had not, although this did not diminish to any degree his interest in his tale of the half-full water glass, which was really, of course, a story about himself and his qualities of foresight and preparedness, of which he was quite proud, although they are the type of trait that are often overlooked or underappreciated.

  Another man emerged holding his treasured black cat tenderly in his arms, and he murmured into its naturally sooty ears fond words of comfort and solace (words that of course he intended mainly for himself) as they stood in the most inconvenient very middle of the chaotic too-ings and fro-ings of the other tenants and of the valiant, yellow-booted, hard-hatted firefighters with their heavy hoses and thick breeches and authoritative shouts.

  A woman tenant, young, naturally blonde, single, soft-chinned, smooth-browed, known to her friends and family to be not terribly clever but exceedingly kind, thinking to reach for something to take with her only as she passed across the threshold of her apartment door, came out holding her sisal doormat with its pattern of three sunflowers, which she knew was ridiculous—of all the things to save!—but she refused to relinquish it even when the Red Cross arrived and pressed on her a cup of coffee, with cream and sugar already added, and an egg salad sandwich. She consumed these awkwardly but avidly, although she took her coffee black and didn’t like onions, huddled with the other dazed and dazzled residents on the sidewalk across the street from the burning building, solving the problem of the sisal mat by placing it under her slippered feet. Finding that the mat protected her feet nicely from the cold damp ground, she offered to share it with another evacuee, a quite good-looking young man from down the hall. Everyone escaping a fire should have one, they agreed, leaving the woman with the mat elated that fate had led her to take from her apartment precisely the right thing. Which she had, as it turned out, since the young man, a personal trainer at the YMCA of Italian heritage, with a romantic flair as wide and deep and substantial as his mother’s unbound bosom, was smitten with her then and there and married her six months later on the semi-anniversary of the fire. All the tenants were invited, including Rebecca and me, although we had missed the fire, and the fire crew as well, and the Red Cross volunteers.

  Another woman, the tenant who had resided in the building the longest, since the early 1940s it was rumored, heard the alarm and telephoned 911 on her bedside phone, which was the kind no one else has anymore, high and black and solid, with a round, slow-moving dial. She gave extremely precise instructions as to her location and condition, and was found and carried down into the street by two fire-fighters, who locked their arms together in a kind of sling under her antique bum. The residents let out a cheer as they saw her being borne in this manner through the front door. She added an indisputable flair to their otherwise fairly blandly attired group on the far sidewalk; she wore a red satin nightgown and a black negligée; her abundant white hair was swept up in a black lace mob and she wore on her feet a pair of red mules, the kind with high transparent heels, and feathery fluff at the toes. A Red Cross worker opened out a folding canvas stool for her, draped a coarse gray blanket around her narrow shoulders, and placed a paper cup of muddy coffee in her hands, but her presence was undiminished—she was a bird of paradise who had deigned to land among the sparrows.

  The amazing, efficient firefighters cordoned off the burning building with swathes of yellow tape that twisted and glittered and shone like ropes of gold in the streetlights and headlights. Ambulances arrived, and well-organized teams of paramedics alighted—they looked like old-fashioned carhops in their eagerness and starched, pressed uniforms. They assembled and then examined a long queue of displaced residents, assessing them one by one for possible burns and the side effects of smoke inhalation. A few evacuees were given tiny vials of
eyedrops that they were told to instill (wonderful word!) into their stinging, dilated eyes. All were pronounced fit and free to go.

  At about four o’clock, a glorious blossom of sweet, pungent odor rose up over the crowd, discharged through an open window in one of the basement apartments. Someone’s sizable marijuana stash was ablaze. The fire had traveled through the walls of the building to the underground room where an entire crop had been spread out on newspapers and left to dry, ready to be cut, weighed, packaged, and sold. The watchers—tenants, reporters, newscasters, neighbors, friends, and family—burst into applause or laughter or words of reproach, depending on their perspective on such things.

  By dawn, all of the residents had found shelter with friends or family, or in the nearby Lydia Hotel, which had generously opened its doors and offered free breakfast to all, as well as rooms at discount rates for the displaced. There remained only the fire crew and cleanup workers, a bleary-eyed insurance adjuster in a suit with his frayed tie loose around his neck, an arson investigator, also in a suit, but with his cuffs shot and his silk tie perfectly knotted and draped, and a few die-hard observers, including Luba, who had received news of the fire from a friend at the radio station where she worked and had come to watch on my behalf. It was from her that I learned all of what I relate here, since I was far away tucked into Silvie’s bed in fitful, unsettled half-sleep, unaware of what I had missed.

  It was a night of miracles, starting, of course, with the fact that no casualties were suffered aside from the loss of our neighbor’s incontinent tabby cat. A firefighter lifted her bony, curled-up body from where she lay and carried her out, leaving behind him a badly burned room that was greasy and black with soot except for the spot—perfectly round—on the cushion on which she had been resting. This one place in all the building was unspoiled. Everything else, from attic to crawlpace was ruined, by smoke or fire or water or the firefighters’ axes exploring the walls and ceilings for hot spots and other hidden trouble.