Annie is eleven now, and the other day she told me that she is seriously considering medical school. ‘What kind of doctor do you want to be?’ I asked her.
‘The kind that saves people,’ she said. Annie still talks about when her daddy died and Zach almost died. ‘Or, perhaps, a trombonist.’
‘You could be a trombonist that saves people.’
‘Exactly.’
What I want to tell her, but what she will have to discover on her own, is that no matter what she chooses to do for her profession, she will save people, and she will also do people grave harm – and they will be the same people, the ones she loves.
Sometimes when she and Zach are with Paige, and I have the day off, after I’ve played for hours in the garden, the knees of my jeans damp with that wondrous soil, I follow Callie down to the redwood grove, our sacred arboreal cathedral. Often, my arms and hair are still warm from the sun, but the air under the trees is always cool and dim. I lie on my back and look up through heavy branches, up at unknown particles drifting in the shadowed light. I whisper, ‘My man of the Sequoia sempervirens. Peace be with you.’ I whisper, ‘I love you.’ I whisper, ‘I miss you.’
And so it has been for me in this place called Elbow, where the river bends and gives before it leads out to the Pacific, where years ago I stumbled upon a certain kind of happiness. I know now that the most genuine happiness is kept afloat by an underlying sorrow. We all break the surface into this life already howling the cries of our ancestors, bearing their DNA, their eye colours and their scars, their glory and their shame. It is theirs; it is ours. It is the underside of joy.
About the Author
Seré Prince Halverson lives in Northern California and worked as a freelance copywriter for twenty years while she wrote fiction. She and her husband have four grown-up children. She is a stepmum, and grew up with a stepmum.
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © Seré Prince Halverson 2012
Seré Prince Halverson asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-00-743891-4
EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780007438921
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The Underside of Joy Page 27