The Sad Truth About Happiness

by Anne Giardini

  It was over in a moment, although it was a prolonged and disordered sweep of time as we experienced it. The old car passed us in a whoosh in the nonexistent third lane that had been created in the space between the oncoming lane and our car, a space that Danielle had called into being by moving as far to the right as she dared. The right wheel of our car crunched a couple of times into the icy banked snow, which made the car slip and jolt and shudder and caused the wheels to fight to tilt the car even further toward the right. Danielle held her grip on the steering wheel and fought back. I caught a glimpse, as the other car swept past us, of its driver, an ancient woman, with a tangle of white hair, dark brows, and a misdirected streak of bright lipstick slashed across her mouth. She was scarcely taller than the dashboard and was hunched over, glaring between the knots of her fingers, which were gripped at eleven o’clock and one o’clock on the steering wheel.

  I imagined that I heard a click and I thought I saw the smallest glint in the half-second that the other car rattled past us. Philip gave a yelp and I realized that my hand had clenched itself tightly around his foot. I relaxed my grip and patted his foot reassuringly. “Sorry,” I said to him. “Sorry.”

  Danielle pulled the car to a halt a hundred meters farther along the highway, where a half-moon-shaped turnout had been left clear, and she turned off the engine. For a while, not one of us said anything except for Philip, who grizzled softly. I could feel the roadway tip and shudder under the still car.

  “She must have been confused,” I suggested. “Maybe she thought it was two lanes in her direction.” My voice sounded hollow in the silence, lost inside a thin ringing in my ears and a static haze inside my head.

  Rebecca opened her door and stepped out, pulling her coat closed around her. “My knees feel like water,” she called back to us. “I can barely stand up.” She walked around to Danielle’s side of the car. “Come and have a look at this,” she said.

  Danielle and I got out and joined Rebecca. She pointed to a fresh scratch and a dent in the middle of the driver’s side of the car.

  “It was the handle on that woman’s car,” I said. “It was the older kind, the kind that sticks out. I thought I heard something; that must have been when it hit us. I saw a spark, too. I thought I imagined it.”

  “We should make some sort of report,” Rebecca suggested. Since none of us had a cell phone, we agreed to stop and phone in a description of the ancient driver at the next gas station. But we knew it was hopeless. None of us had noticed the licence plate and we couldn’t even agree on the color of the car. White, I thought. Silver, Rebecca guessed. Or blue, Danielle ventured.

  Rebecca put her gloved hand on the sleeve of Danielle’s parka. “Do you want me to drive for a while?” she asked.

  “No, no, I’m fine,” Danielle protested, but, after she sat back in her seat and reached to switch on the ignition, she hesitated.

  “You are right,” she admitted. “Better for you to drive for a while. I need to refind my nerves.”

  Rebecca exchanged places with Danielle, took the wheel, and started the car. She scanned the road for a break in the traffic, and, in another minute, we rejoined the stream of cars and trucks headed southeast toward the city.

  Philip turned his gaze to me and blew a series of bubbles between his pursed lips. I reached over and folded a hand over one of his clenched fists, which, after a while, relaxed and went slack as he fell back into sleep.

  Back Path

  Rebecca drove all the way to the airport, following Danielle’s directions. At one point, when we were stopped at a light that seemed to have become stuck permanently on red, Philip woke up and began to cry his hungry cry, a pinched and plaintive wail that spilled over with sorrow and need. His cheeks reddened. His chin trembled. His fists flailed. I pointed the nipple of one of the bottles of formula into his mouth, but, after a few strong pulls on it, he thrust the nipple out of his mouth with his tongue and gave me a textbook look of disgust—nose and forehead wrinkled, brow lowered, eyes narrowed, lips pushed outward and pulled down at the edges. I switched to a bottle of sugar water that Silvie had prepared. Philip drank this down, watching me suspiciously all the while. When he had finished it, he sighed and began to knit his fine fingers together while his gaze followed nothing in particular in the space in front of him, floating air molecules perhaps—who knows what babies see?

  All of the lanes leading up to the departures level of the airport were filled with cars dropping people off for holiday flights. We were forced to double-park a long way from the entrance. A tall van promptly triple-parked beside us; its many doors flew open and it began disgorging an extensive and noisy family with an endless number of children in colorful knitted sweaters, aunts in saris, uncles in tweed jackets, suitcases, bags, and parcels.

  “Eh bien,” said Danielle. Then, “You are certain?” She was not convinced that returning to Vancouver so soon was a good idea. She had invited us to stay with Dana and her until after the holidays. “Just a little more of time,” she had said. “Until the New Year.”

  “Thank you, Danielle,” I told her, when we had unloaded our two suitcases and Philip, who looked solemn and regal in his car seat, which we were taking with us. He raised his right hand, fingers partly unfurled, in the manner of the Christ child in a Renaissance painting.

  “I’ll say you a secret,” said Danielle. She unfolded her right hand and pressed it against the middle of her stomach. “A baby. Following another seven months.”

  “Does Dana know?” I asked her after Rebecca and I had given her hugs and congratulations.

  “Not yet,” said Danielle. “I am going to tell him tonight after I am at home.” She smiled. “Maybe we call him Philippe.”

  Danielle embraced us both, then placed a kiss on the fingers of her right hand, and deposited it on Philip’s forehead.

  “A bientôt,” we all promised. Rebecca took a suitcase in each hand, and we turned and fought our way through the throngs to the entrance of the airport and, once inside the airport, toward the ticket counter. Philip began to cry and my purse, which was hanging on its strap on my arm below his car seat, thumped uncomfortably against my thigh as I struggled to keep up with Rebecca. We weren’t certain where to go, but eventually joined the end of a long queue that seemed to be snaking toward the right counter. I stood and jostled Philip’s carrier back and forth, trying to soothe him, but I resisted offering him a bottle of formula, reasoning that he would be more likely to accept it when he became genuinely desperate. The tone of Philip’s crying increased in woe and intensity, and, when we hadn’t advanced after ten minutes, and no one had validated our choice by electing to stand behind us, Rebecca decided to go to see if she could find someone who might take pity on us and suggest another way to get our boarding passes.

  The terminal was a chaos of bright lights, rushing people, and amplified Christmas music, overlaid with announcements and messages that could scarcely be heard above the general noise and confusion. I kept imagining that I heard my name being called. Carts heaped with luggage loomed and then receded. Dogs in travel cages woofed and whined. Children called for parents. Parents admonished children. People lamented to each other or to themselves about the heat inside and the weather outside, which was about, it was rumored, to turn dramatically for the worse. A blizzard was sweeping in. All flights east were being canceled, a woman worried. Not so, said a man, the weather system is out west; it’s the westward flights that can’t get out. We’ll be stuck here through the holidays, another man prophesied.

  I resorted to Rebecca’s trick and offered Philip a forefinger to suck on. He was plastered with hot, wet grief. Where was Rebecca? How much time had gone by? She had taken the tickets with her, and I couldn’t remember the time we were meant to be leaving or our flight number. Was that a Vancouver flight that had just been called? Were they paging a Ms. Selgrin or a Mr. Pellegrin? I could feel pressure building in my brow and throbbing painfully down into my right eye.

  At last Re
becca reappeared, one hand aloft waving a fan of white boarding passes. Relief eased my headache. I popped my finger out of Philip’s avid mouth and bent down to pick up my suitcase. “We have to move quickly, she said. “This might be the last flight out. They are terribly overbooked because some earlier flights were canceled, but they took pity on us because of Philip.”

  An hour later, we were, miraculously, being borne upward, into the early evening sky. Philip, worn down, accepted a bottle of formula, which he drank thirstily. He then fell into a light sleep, his fists drawn up tight against his cheeks like an infant pugilist. The jangling approach of the drinks cart woke me from a dreamless doze a few hours later. I accepted, gratefully, a shallow cup of deep orange tea and a package of shortbread cookies nested together in a plastic wrapper printed with a pattern of red and green bells. Through the window I could see the night sky, vast, dark, bottomless. Below were fields of snow. The farms were divided by black roads laid out in a grid, evidence of the scale of the land grants to the farmers who first settled this area and staked these neatly ruled-off quarter-section claims. The lights of small towns shimmered icily in the distance. I could see as far as an incandescent fringe where the fields met the star-specked heavens and I was suffused with a sense of the earth turning slowly, serenely, safe and sleeping, tucked in like a child beneath the infinite, uncaring skies. The finely engineered airplane, with its rows of identical seats, riveted metal walls, tempered glass, and tirelessly droning engines, felt like another medium, outside of time and neither of the world nor of the skies.

  We stumbled out of the plane, exhausted, into the middle of another seething scene. Vancouver’s airport was as hectic as Montreal’s, with the same level of frantic chaos. Rebecca went to find our luggage while I tried to reach my parents on the phone. The line was busy, and they don’t have an answering machine, so I was unable to leave a message. I tried Janet’s number. No one answered. I left a message that Rebecca and Philip and I would be at Mom and Dad’s house soon.

  “Is Margaret, yes?” A tall, dark-haired man wearing an impressively luxurious wool navy coat approached me as I set the receiver back in its metal collar. A half-step behind him was a woman wearing a similar coat, but with a fur collar.

  This must be someone from the airline, I thought, stupid with the time change and the sudden expulsion from the airplane’s warm, stale air and rhythmic, mechanical thrum into the loud, bright airport. A new service, perhaps, or one laid on for the holidays; a smart woman in public relations must have dreamed up the idea of having someone to help with infants and young children and awkward items of luggage. The man thrust an authoritative navy wool arm out toward the handle of Philip’s car seat.

  “I take the baby from you,” the man said. I hesitated only an instant, then realized that what he must have meant was “I take the baby for you.” My head pulsed. I glanced down at Philip. His eyes fluttered under his red-blue eyelids, which remained determinedly closed. He looked resigned. I handed over the carrier. The man gripped the handle of the carrier professionally, coolly, but the woman behind him lunged forward and brought her face in close to Philip’s.

  “Ahhhhh,” she said.

  I had heard that sigh before, a sound like the air being let out of a tire, a noise that flew the tall man and the thin woman up and out of the crowded airport and deposited them in Lucy’s hospital room, into the exact center of my memory of the argument over Lucy’s baby.

  My heart swelled, trapped inside the bones and muscles of my chest, which suddenly constricted, one or more sizes too small for my lungs. My limbs buzzed and trembled. I was electrified, unable to draw breath. My arms reached stupidly for Philip; I could see, as if from a great distance, my hands moving clumsy and slow through the thick, silent air. Gian Luigi swung Philip easily out of my reach and somehow his navy wool shoulder and Ivetta’s arm came between me and the baby carrier. Ivetta thrust herself forward, all dark hair and angles and elbows. She was wearing blood-red gloves made of kid leather, exquisitely sewn.

  “No!” I cried. And then, “Stop!” I was confident that I would be rescued, that this scene would be obviously what it was—a kidnapping—to the hundreds of milling travelers. Someone would intervene.

  The cleverest place to commit a crime can be in plain view of as many people as possible. Just think of that scene at the end of Muriel Spark’s novel The Girls of Slender Means, when, in the midst of multitudes celebrating the end of the war, a sailor slips a knife between the ribs of his girlfriend. Even before she can fall, so enmeshed is she in the pressing horde, her lover is away, swimming against the surging mob, and you know that he will never be found, and even if he is, nothing could be established against him, there will be too few witnesses, or too many, each with conflicting stories.

  Because my protests could not be heard in the general commotion, and because the airport was already a stage for countless major and minor scenes of irritation, impatience, and unwished-for partings, and also, to some extent, because, out of a natural and lifelong and classically Canadian aversion to causing a scene, I delayed making more than the most reasonable remonstration by a critical few moments, Gian Luigi and Ivetta were able to turn away from me, with Philip suspended in his plastic container in Gian Luigi’s robust arms, and make their retreat rapidly through the crowd; powerful Gian Luigi in the lead, opening their way, with feline Ivetta flowing along behind him. They left no gap that I could follow in their wake. I pushed rudely against people and was pushed just as rudely back. I grabbed arms, begged and explained, in short, gasped phrases: “My baby. That man. Let me through. I have to catch. Did you see a man and a woman just pass? With a baby? A small baby.” Some people I spoke to shook off my hand, shook their heads brusquely. Others stared at me quizzically. No one it seemed could make out what it was I wanted in the very short time I was before them, crazed, disheveled, distraught.

  I pressed on until I found myself in the center of a kind of hub, from which several hallways branched off in different directions, toward a choice of exits and gates. There was no way of telling which way Gian Luigi and Ivetta had taken Philip. I groaned and sank to the floor, flushed, out of breath, weighted with a sense of failure too oppressive to be borne. A flash of red caught my hopeful eye; not Ivetta’s incarnadine gloves but a telephone on the wall with the word Emergency printed in white letters above the headset. Even then I hesitated. Was this an emergency? My body decided for me. Before my mind could become in any way engaged in a debate of the point, I rose, picked up the phone, and said to the woman who was summoned instantly at the other end of the line, “Someone has taken my baby,” and I provided a full description of barrel-chested Gian Luigi and his whippet-wife, right down to the buckles on Ivetta’s narrow, spike-heeled navy shoes and the crested brass buttons on Gian Luigi’s substantial navy coat.

  Miraculously, they were found. They were spotted on a security camera in the parking garage, struggling to work out how to fasten Philip’s car seat securely into the seatbelt of their rented car. I had been led by then to a small, featureless room with beige walls. A lumpish and only mildly sympathetic security guard had provided me with a Styrofoam cup of tepid water and a box of tissues. I dabbed my eyes and cheeks, and was surprised to find them wet. Rebecca had not yet appeared, although she had been paged. The telephone on the table blurted an electronic bleat. The security guard answered, and, as he listened, began to eye me with greater interest. But he declined to impart any information to me after he hung up.

  After another few minutes, two police officers came to the door, a man and a woman. They nodded for the security guard to leave the room, and he complied, making no effort to suppress the sigh of someone who has been managing perfectly well but who has been displaced nonetheless.

  “We have located the baby, ma’am,” the male police officer said. He used the term “ma’am” not as an honorific but as a means of reinforcing his authority, nailing it tightly like a notice into the thick air between us. “But we have, I am af
raid, two very different stories.” He paused, providing me an opportunity to speak. I could not think what to say. “Just what is your relationship to the child?” he asked after a long pause and in a tone that implied disappointment that I was withholding information to which he was entitled, that I was willfully making his job more difficult.

  “Philip is my nephew,” I said. “I am bringing him back from a trip to my sister, his mother.”

  “Mr. Potenza asserts that he is the child’s father,” the woman officer said. “He has shown us various documents that appear to establish this fact. It appears also that he is in possession of a valid Italian custody order, and papers for the child. You should be aware that he and Mrs. Potenza are urging us to lay charges against you.”

  Rebecca arrived at the door as the other officer was reading aloud from a small blue card that he held stiffly in front of him. “. . . to retain a lawyer of your choice. . . . The right not to say anything, but anything you do say will be taken down and could be used against you in a court of law.” He read it all the way through, quite quickly, without looking up until he was finished. “Do you understand?” he asked.

  “I guess,” I said. “But, I can explain the situation.”

  “No, Maggie. Don’t say anything,” Rebecca prompted.

  The male officer rose to his feet, squared his shoulders, hitched up his pants, and hooked his thumbs around his belt. “I am afraid, ma’am, that I am going to have to ask you to wait outside,” he said to Rebecca. “I’ll call Leo,” Rebecca said. She rolled her eyes and pursed her lips toward me and delivered a short shake of her head toward the officer as she left.