The Sad Truth About Happiness

by Anne Giardini

  Luba snapped a photo of the firefighter who carried poor Judy the cat out from the still smoldering building, and she caught in her lens the modesty and strength of the worker, his yellow jacket slick under the soft orange light, and the defeated grace of the victim, soft and small and wilted, carried like treasure in the firefighter’s upturned calloused hands. Her amateur but artful picture was carried in newspapers around the country. This is how Rebecca and I learned of the fire and the loss of our home. Rebecca came across the shot as she trawled the Internet in the morning, and she read the story out loud to all of us gathered at Silvie’s breakfast table.

  “You would have been killed, you know,” she said, lifting an eyebrow in my direction over the beige clamshell of her open laptop. “Your bedroom would have been the closest to the fire.”

  I wrapped my hands tight around my brimming bowl of café au lait and looked around the table at Silvie, Danielle, and Rebecca, who all looked back at me fondly. I closed my eyes and smiled.

  Pitched Roof

  There remained the problem of how to go home, cou-pled now with the further difficulty of having no home to return to.

  Gian Luigi and Ivetta Potenza, meanwhile, had established a temporary residence at a small downtown hotel owned by the ex-wife of a former business associate. The location was central, and the hotel was luxurious, discrete, and close to restaurants, shopping, and other diversions, and, most important, only a block or two from the Vancouver courthouse. From these comfortable quarters, Gian Luigi attended on his team of lawyers, and with them crafted affidavits and supporting documents of great complexity, persuasiveness, and credibility. His lawyers launched their case on the shortest allowable notice to Lucy and the lawyer she had hired, a young woman, a friend of a friend of a friend.

  The application was heard in the morning on December 22 by a single judge of the Supreme Court, a man of approximately Gian Luigi’s size, shape, age, tastes, background, and temperament. Gian Luigi and Ivetta presented themselves as the ideal couple, caring, loving, successful, well-to-do, able to offer Philip every advantage that his feckless mother demonstrably could not. Lucy was unemployed and possibly unemployable, for what skills did she have? Her carelessness was obvious; she had misplaced the baby within a matter of hours after his birth. She had no assets to speak of and no settled home. Her marriage plans were uncertain; in light of Philip’s disappearance, she and Ryan had put their wedding plans on hold. She had a demonstrable pattern of short-lived, stormy relationships. She had, in short, virtually nothing to offer an infant. What might have been her trump cards had been squandered. Courts are reluctant to separate a nursing baby from its mother, but Lucy had, for selfish reasons of her own, elected not to breast-feed her child. Courts are also likely to lean in favor of the status quo. The status quo was that Lucy did not have the child.

  The Potenzas were everything that Lucy was manifestly not. A picture-book couple, tall, handsome, educated, active—a mother-and father-in-waiting, lacking only a child. They were stable, having just celebrated their twentieth anniversary. They were established, well-regarded, sophisticated, and prosperous. Their extended family was large, close, and warm. If Philip were to live with them, he would have many first and second cousins. He would reside in a sprawling Roman apartment not far from the Coliseum during the school year, and would spend his summers fanned by cool breezes at the family’s seaside summer villa at Forte dei Marmi, an Italian coastal resort town.

  The judge didn’t even pause for a recess before rendering his decision. If Philip were to be found, and, provided blood tests confirmed that Gian Luigi was his biological father, which no one had seriously argued before him might not be the case, then custody would be granted to Gian Luigi, with generous access to Lucy, details to be worked out by counsel.

  Lucy’s lawyer walked out of the courtroom, went directly downstairs to the Court of Appeal registry, and filed an appeal. Her argument that the Court of Appeal should, in the circumstances, grant a stay of the decision of the Supreme Court immediately, was unsuccessful. During the winter break, the Court of Appeal would hear matters of only the utmost urgency. Anything else would have to wait until the New Year. And, since there was no baby, where was the urgency?

  You need to find the baby before he does, Lucy’s lawyer told Lucy.

  You need to find the baby before she does, Gian Luigi’s lawyer told Gian Luigi.

  Lucy and Ryan tried to get into my apartment that afternoon to search for clues about where I might have gone. They were turned away. All the entrances to the building had been secured. The watchman at the front door told them that the building was unsafe and might soon be condemned. The top storey in particular, where the apartment I shared with Rebecca was located, was unsound; the roof could come down at any moment, or the charred floors might collapse. There were ashes and dust everywhere, probably contaminated by asbestos from the ancient insulation, and lead from the melted layers of old paint. It was impossible to be allowed access to the building pending completion of a thorough engineering report. No one was working over the holidays, so nothing would be known and nothing could be done until the New Year.

  Gian Luigi had, it came out later, made arrangements for Lucy to be kept under careful watch in case she might lead him to the baby, so her visit to the building on Beach Avenue was closely observed. In exchange for a gift of a carton of cigarettes and fifty dollars toward any Christmas purchases he might choose to make, the security guard posted at the front door shared the small amount he understood of the reasons for Lucy’s attempt to gain access to my apartment. What little he knew was enough. That night, Gian Luigi and Ivetta made their way through a poorly secured rear door and up an unlit stairwell to my apartment. They stepped over and through what was left of our door, which the firefighters had smashed through with their axes.

  Gian Luigi and Ivetta enjoyed this adventure immensely. They had gone shopping first, at one of the department stores on Granville Street, and were dressed in matching black outfits, including black knitted caps, and flat-soled, silent, black canvas shoes. They carried slender, powerful flashlights, the kind with a brilliant, pin-prick, laserlike beam. They tested the broad floor boards carefully as they crept about the apartment, and they each kept a wary eye on the ceiling.

  They found little, however, to help them. I had left my address book locked in a drawer of my desk at the hospital. The hard drive of my computer had melted in the fire; the keyboard was a puddle of letters, set into a solid blob of alphabet soup. Gian Luigi found letters and business cards on Rebecca’s desk and took notice of her name. When they had given up poking in the dark in the burned-out apartment, he suggested to Ivetta that they take a look around in the darkened lobby. There, well away from the nodding watchman, behind a very large potted palm still green and glossy under a layer of ashes, they found a cardboard box containing batches of mail for the tenants. They took away mine and Rebecca’s, which they found secured cozily together inside a fat, blue rubber band. Once they were back in their suite, they methodically went through the bills and brochures and Christmas cards. Quite quickly, they came upon treasure: a Visa bill and an Air Canada frequent flyer report.

  Ivetta made a call to the Air Canada ticket office. She had enough of Rebecca’s information and was able to project a sufficiently convincing facsimile of charm to secure the critical information. Rebecca had booked two flights for Vancouver, leaving from Montreal at noon on Christmas Eve day.

  Chimney Pots

  Rebecca booked the tickets. We were to fly together back to Vancouver from Mirabel Airport, leaving in the middle of the day before Christmas. Because Vancouver is three time zones behind Montreal, it was possible, even probable, if the flight was on time, that we would be back home in time to join my family for dinner. In any case, we would wake up under my parents’ roof on Christmas morning and this felt to me like the right next place to go. I reasoned that clever Lucy and steady Ryan must have worked out by now some way to keep Philip safe from
Gian Luigi and Ivetta. Rebecca and I could contact our insurance companies, work out what needed to be done with our burned belongings, and Rebecca and, less certainly, I, could settle back into our work. Life would return to normal.

  There was very little time to prepare. It took us less than an hour to pack up our few belongings. We decided that we should keep Philip with us for our last night in Ste-Anne, so that we would be able to leave as early as possible in the morning. With luck, he would sleep during most of the drive to Montreal. Rebecca went to the drugstore to buy supplies for Philip for the trip, and I went over to Nicole’s for Philip.

  “Il n’est pas ici,” Nicole told me. “J’ai laissé les deux enfants avec ma cousine Françoise.”

  Philip wasn’t at Françoise’s house either. Françoise had gone out, her neighbor told me. She might be over at Stephanie’s.

  I found a group of four or five women at Stephanie’s, all having coffee together, but none of them had seen Françoise. Perhaps she had gone to exercise class at the community hall. They had a child-minding service there where she might have left the babies.

  A young woman at the community center pointed me down the hall to the nursery. There were a dozen children there, from small babies to boys and girls about eight or nine. I knew none of them.

  I was beginning to feel a sense of unease, with a sick edge of desperation. And of course my growing concern was shot through with guilt. How had I allowed it to happen that I had no idea where my nephew was? He was vulnerable, wholly dependent on me, and I had left his location and welfare entirely to chance, to the haphazard goodwill of people I barely knew.

  I tried the fellowship hall next door to the church next. It was dark and locked. I was frightened then, standing there pulling at the unyielding, solidly bolted doors. My knees began to rattle, and I began to pray in the manner of the godless. “Please let him be all right. Please let me find him.”

  I couldn’t think where to go next, and I ran back to Silvie’s house more from instinct than thought, to ask someone to help me. I charged through the front door, not even taking the time to push it closed behind me against the cold wind that had chased me along the street. I followed the thrum and harmony of female voices engaged in vigorous conversation down the hall to the living room. Silvie, Rebecca, and Danielle stared up at me as I burst in. Philip lay curled like a cat in Silvie’s great, red arms. His dark eyes wheeled in my general direction, and he emitted one of his random quivering smiles. I dropped down on my knees, put my head in Silvie’s wide lap beside him and cried and cried. I felt shattered with relief and remorse and undeserved fortune. Waves of sweet nausea pushed against the hard knot that had lodged in my chest like a stone during the hour’s panic. Silvie stroked my hair, and said tsk, tsk, and everyone else waited patiently for my fit to pass.

  “I could have lost him a hundred times over since we’ve been here,” I said to Rebecca a few hours later. I was sitting up in our shared bed, the covers tucked over my knees, watching her brush her hair. Rebecca was sitting on the small chair beside the dressing table. The chair had a plastic seat, coppery metal legs and a low back made out of the same red-orange metal twisted into a bow shape. The dressing table had a long ruffled skirt made of some synthetic material that appeared both ancient and impervious to age.

  “No one should be expected to look after a newborn infant all on her own, you know,” she said.

  Rebecca turned around in her chair to face me. She continued to pull the brush through her hair, her arm moving in sure, rhythmic arcs.

  “You’re being too hard on yourself. It’s unreasonable to expect that you can do everything on your own. Babies are enormously demanding. They make regular life just about impossible. Humans wouldn’t have survived the move from trees to savanna or made it as far as we have if mothers didn’t always have a lot of help. Think of it. The very earliest people: the father might help out with some hunting, but what if he got hurt or killed, or didn’t acknowledge the baby was his, or found another female he liked better? And why would any other man help out? He’d devote his energies to his own children. Mothers must always have needed other women to help them—sisters, grandmothers, great-aunts, older daughters, and cousins. Caring for babies has always been communal. A new baby is terrifying. It’s so vulnerable. A shock to the system. Then you have all these expectations imposed on top of everything. There are a few women who can do it all. Most of us can’t, that’s all. It’s too much. No one can ever measure up.”

  Rebecca got up and came over to inspect the top of my head. She parted my hair with a few bristles of her brush.

  “We’ll have to touch up this color soon. Your hair must grow a lot faster than mine. The roots are already showing.”

  “You don’t think I’m a monster? What kind of a person am I to let my own nephew be passed from hand to hand by strangers like luggage?”

  “Not strangers, friends. And anyway, however we’ve managed it, we seem to have done a fine job. Just look at him.”

  Philip was sleeping and performing a trick I hadn’t seen before, a diminutive, ruffling snore, like a scaled-down version of Rebecca’s. Nicole had come by at bedtime to feed Philip. He had nursed for a thirsty hour, and then fallen into a limp, satiated stupor. He would have one more visit with Nicole’s generous breasts in the morning, and then we would have to rely on formula and prayer for the rest of the trip. Rebecca and I had discussed how he would cope, but in the absence of any alternatives, we had decided just to try to make it home as fast as we could.

  Nicole came by in the morning as promised, just before dawn, and we tickled Philip’s feet to rouse him enough to drink. He took the daintiest of draws on Nicole’s breasts, which were, I noticed, bulging and blue with the milk that had accumulated overnight. When Philip pulled back his head, milk spurted out in every direction, like a wonky showerhead. Philip lolled back into sleep a few times, and we shook him gently, urging him on with the task of drinking as much as he could hold. He sighed each time, with a resigned and wise expression, like an old man, and opened his mouth to receive the offered nipple.

  “You’ll have too much milk for just Emilie, after we go,” I pointed out.

  Nicole shrugged and Philip, in the crook of her arm, rose and fell with her motion, like a small boat on a great maternal sea. “Only for a day or so,” she said. “Ce n’est pas grave.”

  I gave Nicole a gold chain with a locket on which I had asked the local jeweler to engrave two letters, E and P, entwined. “He is her milk-brother, now,” I told her. “Son frère de lait.” I had also bought a pair of gold earrings for Nicole, thick, heavy loops with a vinelike design running around them. We wrapped Philip up and deposited him, drowsy and full, in the car seat in which he had arrived at Ste-Anne eight days before. Nicole bestowed a kiss on his brow. Then she yawned, drew the lapels of her housecoat up around her neck, said “Au revoir” to Rebecca and me, and “A bientôt” to Danielle. She turned and made her way carefully through the ice and drifts back up the street to her own small house where her husband and children were still sleeping.

  We drove through silent streets toward the highway. The low red sun cast long blue shadows on the drifted snow banks. At the edge of town, Danielle swung the car in the direction of Montreal. We stopped just once, to fill the tank with gas and buy coffees and patisseries at a service station near L’Ascension, and we drove along after that without talking. Danielle kept the radio on low, and we listened to carols sung in French, the chatter of radio hosts, and sprightly advertisements for the kinds of things that other people were rushing out to buy now that Christmas crouched a relatively few hours away. The coffee was hot and bitter, and the pastries flakey, sweet and filling. Philip dozed, his nose and lips emitting a fine rumpled purr of sleep and trust.

  I held on to Philip’s warm foot, as I had on the drive to Ste-Anne, and wondered whether the fact that it felt larger in my hand was a hopeful trick of my imagination. There was no doubt that he looked fuller and rounder afte
r the days on Nicole’s good milk, more filled out, less provisional, less newly arrived. His movements, when he shifted his head, or swung a balled fist, or kicked a leg, were smoother, more practiced, more assured. Eventually, this small, tender, untested foot would walk, run, skate, kick a ball, carry him through schools, to his life’s work, to his life’s partner, through children, pleasure, and illness. Eventually, his moon-white toenails, perfect flakes of mica, would thicken and yellow; perhaps someone now unborn would trim them for him, gently, lovingly, as he lay past caring in his final bed.

  An hour after we had finished our coffee and pastries, I was roused from a drowsy daydream by Rebecca, who said to Danielle, “Why isn’t she moving over?” Her tone was sharp, edged with alarm.

  I looked at the road ahead and saw that a car some distance away, headed in the other direction, had swung into our lane in order to pass a long truck ahead of it. It was moving quickly and, although it passed the truck easily, it remained in our lane, headed straight toward us.

  “I don’t like this,” said Danielle. She tightened her hands on the steering wheel, eased her foot off the gas, and began to steer our car as far to the right as possible, which wasn’t very far, since a snowplow had recently passed and the snow that had been cleared from the highway had been pushed onto the shoulder. The approaching car was less than a hundred meters away by now, holding steady in our lane, overtaking cars that were where they should be, in the single oncoming lane. The errant vehicle continued to rush toward us. We could see now that the car was old, low-slung, and rusted, with one broken headlight, and then in another instant we became aware that a collision was all but inevitable. Danielle’s knuckles whitened against the steering wheel, and Rebecca reached forward to brace herself on the dashboard. I closed my eyes and leaned sideways, curling against Philip in his car seat.