Bridge To Happiness

by Jill Barnett

  The month Mike appeared on the cover of Business Week with the caption “It Only Looks Easy,” (it referring to the rise of the sport of snowboarding) Mickey, their fourth child, tried to ride his Transformer car down the stairs and had to have seventeen stitches in his forehead. Behind the accident were Scott and Phillip, caught standing in the corner of the upstairs landing and whispering sworn vows to not tell Dad what they did.

  Mike had grown up with an older brother and clearly understood sibling dynamics. Brad duped him enough times to make him remember all the bruises and challenges and dirty tricks. The antics between his older brother and him were a rite in natural family order.

  But it was his father’s reaction that changed the dynamic from brotherly prank to damage. Every time Brad got the better of him, Mike could see he became more and more of a fool in his dad’s eyes. Sometimes the darkest legacy between brothers was more about emotional scars than the physical ones.

  Through the coming years his own kids made his life fuller, even though they fought over Monopoly money, the biggest slice of cake, who would sit in the middle, which bedroom was better, often with Scott and Phillip so involved arguing with each other they never realized Molly just waltzed in and took what she wanted when they weren’t looking.

  Occasionally they managed to get even with her, like when they taught her to snap her fingers backwards or filled her bed with ants. But for Mike she was a butterfly who seemed to light upon the ordinary things in his world, making them seem rare and special. Her Mollyisms could paint the unexpected into a regular day.

  “Dad? Do you know where rainbows come from?”

  “Ireland?” He’d asked.

  “No, silly.”

  “Leprechauns?”

  She had giggled in that way little girls did, a simple sound that gave him a great sense of joy.

  “Light refracts through the water droplets,” she’d said. “And because water droplets are round, they cause the light to bend. A rainbow is really a full circle of colored light but the ground stops you from seeing the other half of the circle.”

  “Where are the pots of gold?” he asked to tease her. But he knew the real pot of gold was walking along side him, her red hair in long braids, the little girl who snapped her fingers backwards, explained scientific facts, got even with her brothers by rolling their boxer shorts in itching powder—payback for the ants—and constantly reminded him what a wonderful thing the imagination was.

  They were walking toward Alioto’s for oysters that day she told him about the rainbows and he stopped for a second. “Look at that, Shortcake.” He pointed to a white seagull feather on the ground. “Do you know what that is?”

  She reached down and picked up it up. “This is a feather.”

  “It’s also a message. A white feather is a gift from someone who loves you. Someone in Heaven. When I was about your age, not too long after Poppy, my grandfather, your great grandfather, died, I began to find white feathers in my shoes, my school notebook, stuck to my bicycle handle. One day my grandmother saw me pick up one and she was the one who told me they were from him. Signs that he missed me, she’d said.”

  He didn’t tell his daughter, looking up at him with her wide-eyed expression and wonder at a perfect white feather, that his father had told him to forget all that rubbish. Poppy was dead and the feather was only some seagull molting.

  For Mike, watching his children grow up, when the boys pulled funny but awful pranks on each other, or his imaginative daughter and her stories, and Mickey the fearless, who would try anything because his brothers did, made Mike understand what his own father has missed.

  Early on Mike made his decision about what kind of father he wanted to be: a father who kept the peace and used bargaining chips, who went out of his way to make everything even for his children as much as possible.

  He gave the older ones both the same bike on the same Christmas. Each child always had the same number of gifts, even the same dollar amount spent; it was a pattern which lasted until the two oldest boys were teenagers, when work ethic came into play and he made Scott and Phillip earn the right to use the car or boat keys.

  But for most of their lives, he had chosen to be a father who measured the cake into even sections before anyone ever cut it. Unlike March, who from the time when the kids were young, would let them battle it out or choose to make her life easier by picking the winner with some trumped up reason the boys always bought into without a lick of resentment.

  But then along came Mickey, the youngest and his namesake, who grew up trying to find a place amid all the strong Cantrell personalities. He was close to his mother in a way lost to Mike. To his sister Molly, he was half-pet and half annoying little brother, the one who chanted stupid kissing rhymes out the window during her teenaged years whenever a boy came to pick her up for a date. He was challenged by a pair of brothers who were more than a decade older, and who he worshipped at the same time he constantly tried to keep up with them.

  To level the playing field full of powerful 9.75 siblings, Mickey had to be a 10.0. He learned to throw caution and thought and fear out the window and ‘just do it.’ Following his brothers boarding down the toughest mountain faces made him fearless before he ever started school, and eventually turned him into a hotshot, the Cantrell who sought the limelight. In almost every moment of family video, Mickey’s antics dominated most of the camera time.

  Being the youngest he had to work hard to fight for a place in his family. It wasn’t easy to come after a sister like Molly and his older, dynamic brothers, who taught him he could only earn their attention by breaking all the rules.

  Suddenly there was no way Mike could even the playing field for his youngest son. Mickey spent more moments in the emergency room than all the other kids combined, was suspended from kindergarten, held back a year, but then went on to skip the third grade. In junior high, he was the only honor roll student suspended, after he managed to sneak into the administration building and change the school bell system so the bells rang every two minutes. The limelight was important to Mickey, whether the light was positive or negative.

  Mike had never been or wanted to be the kind of father who inspired fear in his kids, but Mickey tested his well-thought-out father plan to the limits. There wasn’t a book on parenting or child psychology in existence to help him prepare for raising his youngest son, or to make him understand that Mickey’s surprises were always waiting around the corner for him.

  Chapter Five

  March gave Molly her old Brownie camera when she was barely ten and bought her a good thirty five millimeter when she was in junior high and planning a trip to Washington DC with her class. By high school, Mike had built a darkroom for Molly in the back corner of one of the garages and she was chronicling Cantrell life moments in both black and white and color.

  One Sunday afternoon, post Forty-Niners’ football, Molly dragged Mike and her out with the excuse that she had an assignment to do a family portrait for a photography project in school.

  Indian summer burned through most of California in early October, days where the temperature in the city was still seventy five degrees at four in the afternoon and the later sunsets would turn the western skies red and purple. It was that warm when Molly insisted they travel across town to the hillside where March and Mike were married, and she took a couple rolls of film of them all over that hillside.

  There were moments that afternoon, sitting on a rock or leaning against a twisted cypress tree when March looked up and caught a certain look in Mike’s eye.

  He squeezed her shoulder. “I think this was where we were standing when May dumped that Singapore Sling on Rob.”

  March began to laugh and ruined their pose.

  “Mother! I can’t get a good shot with you bent over.”

  “Sorry. Your father’s making trouble.”

  “Daddy . . . please.”

  “Okay, Shortcake.” Mike leaned in and said, “I can still see your mother swatting b
ees with that huge straw hat.”

  March tried not to laugh again but failed at the image of her mother hitting Mike’s dad in the back of his bald head. “Your father looked pretty dumbfounded when he turned around and saw it was her. I felt sorry for her, standing there embarrassed. She was just so scared of bees.”

  “After your mother smacked him a good one, my first thought was to find some way to paint honey all over his head. Figured your mother could get even for the crap he’d put me through.”

  March looked at him and patted his hand. “I know. I don’t think he knew how to be any other way.”

  “Hel-lo. Earth to parents.” Molly stood in front of them, clearly annoyed. “Would you two please pay attention to me? I need you to look at the camera before I lose the perfect light.”

  Mike looked at her. “You need to stop making jokes, Sunshine. You heard your daughter. We need to look in the camera before she loses the perfect light.”

  March jabbed him in the ribs.

  Molly walked back, muttering, “You two are such a problem.”

  Mike looked at her. “We’re a problem.”

  “Good,” March whispered.

  So they spent a Sunday on a hillside, smiling into a camera lens, Mike goosing her or poking her, and annoying their daughter when they laughed too hard. Later, whenever March asked to see the shots Molly was always too busy. She showed them one or two shots that were not as good as March knew Molly could produce. When March said as much, Molly told her she had turned her only good prints into her teacher and she would make more copies when she had time.

  They spent Christmas that year at their house in Lake Tahoe. On Christmas morning under the tree was a best gift March could ever remember. The photo Molly took of Mike and her was amazing. Their daughter had caught all the love and humor between them as they looked at each other, the best they could each be because they were together, and Molly had captured that look forever in celluloid.

  Chapter Six

  March had started her official life as a Cantrell on a San Francisco hillside, and four kids and almost thirty four years later she was still on a San Francisco hillside. Though her generation had once sung about the sounds of silence, the sounds of the city were what she loved: those white mornings when the plaintive notes of foghorns floated above the bay, the deep water and moisture-thick air magnifying every sound so that whispering wasn’t really secretive at all.

  At noon, there was the chatter of people at the corner deli on short lunch hours ordering salami and Jack cheese on fresh sourdough (Dijon mustard and pepperoncini, no pickles.) Muni trams rattled regularly on tracks over the Avenues, and freeway traffic during rush hours hummed like distant swarms of bees. Horns honking, voices and air brakes, close to home the distant clanging of a cable car bell at Leavenworth & Hyde and the soft rumble of an automobile changing into low gear to power up the hill were merely single moments in a day where the constant din of life was going on around her.

  For her, there was something incredibly grounding about a place where she’d taught her children to ride a bike to the ringing of a cable car bell and the applause of tourists, and where the call of gulls was a much a part of the air she breathed as oxygen.

  The noise of the city was most noticeable in the old brick courtyard at the center of their home. Mike called it March Country—an oasis where on temperate mornings she drank her coffee surrounded by raised planters and huge stone pots spilling over with flowers the color of a fall sunset. Some of the wind chimes from their wedding hung from courtyard posts, ringing out occasionally in the October wind.

  March looked up from the kitchen sink when she heard her grandson cry. Sixteen month old Tyler was out in the courtyard trying to scale the seven foot brick wall and not one bit happy that he was failing. She dropped the pasta strainer, and wiping her hands on her shirttail, she was through the French doors in a heartbeat. “Hey there, sweetie. What are you doing out here alone? Escaping?” She scooped him up and headed inside. A minute later she stood in the door of the media room, Tyler hooked on her hip while a good minute and a half of Sunday afternoon, Forty-Niner’s football passed without a single male in the room noticing them. “I think you lost something, Scott.”

  Her oldest son looked at her, then quickly glanced at the corner where a five foot square rainbow of bright Fisher Price toys lay abandoned.

  “Daddy!” Tyler shouted. Her grandson had great timing.

  Scott was up and made a beeline for her. “Damn, Mom. Sorry.” He took his son. “You okay, buddy?”

  “Daddy!” Tyler rubbed his hands on Scott’s cheeks.

  Scott groaned. “What’s all over his mouth and hands?”

  “Dirt. He was trying to climb the courtyard wall.” She held out an open container of baby wipes.

  “One play,” Scott muttered. “I only looked away to watch one play.” He cleaned up his son and wiped his own face. “He fell off the back of toilet last week when I was watching him. Renee will kill me.”

  “Then you’re lucky she’s out with Molly and Keely,” she told him.

  Her eldest son looked at her over his son’s head, thickly-covered in his same black curly hair, and Scott grinned at her, knowing she wouldn’t say anything to his wife.

  For just one second, one small heartbeat of memory, there stood Mike in another time and place holding Scott and giving her that same grin. Those moments were why she wouldn’t want to be twenty five again. The future was always a blank, out of control; it lay out there as unclear as morning fog on the horizon. But the past was familiar and kept coming around and around in tender, special moments that gave her some measure of contentment about her choices in life.

  Looking back was the best way to understand destiny—something she’d always believed in because how could life and all its complications be completely accidental? There had to be a master plan, a book somewhere, like something out of an episode of the Twilight Zone, that foretold who, why and where everyone existed.

  “Tyler’s part monkey. Takes after you, big brother.” Phillip set down his beer and grabbed a handful of chips. “You’ve always been the live and hairy proof that Darwin was right.”

  “You’re just pissed because I actually have hair.”

  “I have hair. See?” Phillip bent over and rubbed his dark-stubbled scalp. “Keely loves this. Women go for men with the confidence to shave their heads. Think Willis. Think Agassi.”

  “Think MiniMe,” Scott finished.

  Mike set a box of Wheat Thins on the table and stood, stretching. “Remember the time Scott disappeared, Sunshine? You were a climber, too, son,” he said to Scott. “We looked for you for almost an hour. Your mother was frantic, crying like crazy, certain you had somehow gotten out in the street and been kidnapped. Eventually we found you sitting on a ceiling beam watching us.”

  “I was just glad you were safe,” March told him.

  “So I guess that means I’m not going to get much sympathy from either of you.”

  “Payback is hell,” she and Mike said at the same time.

  “See?” Phil said laughing. “I keep telling you. I’m the perfect son. That’s why they like me best.”

  Scott looked at Tyler. “Do you want to go to Uncle Phil?”

  “Yes!” (Tyler’s favorite word.)

  Scott set his son in Phillip’s lap, sat down in a club chair and picked up his beer. “Daddy is smarter than Uncle Phil, isn’t he?”

  “Yes!”

  He took a swig of beer. “And Daddy is more handsome than Uncle Phil, isn’t he?

  “Yes!”

  Phil just shook his head and turned to Scott, who said, “Uncle Phil has big, ugly, jug-handle ears, right?”

  “Yes!”

  Phillip smiled, familiar, a little wicked, the same way he had as a kid when he just passed Go, collected two hundred dollars and owned Broadway with a hotel. He glanced at Scott, then held up Tyler in front of him and said, “Your daddy likes to dress up in your mommy’s clothes, does
n’t he?”

  “Yes!” Tyler said in perfect toddler Pavlovian.

  “I’ll get the kid gate,” Mike said, laughing.

  “It’s in the laundry room,” March told him.

  Mike swatted her on the butt as he walked by. “I know.”

  On the third Sunday of every month, like today, March cooked for the entire Cantrell clan, kids, wives, grandkids. Most of the year they met in the house in the city, except during the winter season, when they spent weekends at their place in Tahoe. Years back, Cantrell, Inc created the roving three day week during the months of snowboarding season, so everyone from the top down could take advantage of the Sierra snow. They worked longer hours, a little harder in late summer and early fall to get ready for the new season, but when the lifts were running, at least one week a month the whole company worked three days and took off four.

  Already into late fall, the past week had been crazy with Mike working fourteen hour days, Mickey in the beginning of his senior year with college selection on the horizon, and an auction and benefit March was chairing coming in mid-October, all pre-snow season.

  While she was still intimately involved in the family company, she didn’t spend the time there she used to. Other than the board meetings, and there was one this coming week, she had hired good managers for the graphics side of the business. The graphic designs for the new season had been selected months ago, so she had home time now, time for some charity work, her grandkids, and a gourmet cooking class she took from one of the top chefs in the city.

  Tonight the menu wasn’t gourmet, just the kind of food her family liked on these evenings: salad, hot bread, lasagna and anything chocolate and gooey for dessert.

  March was spinning lettuce dry when she heard her granddaughter Miranda chattering even before she heard the sound of the electric garage door closing.

  “G-Mo! G-Mo! Look what I made for you!” Miranda came running across the courtyard from the open door to the garage, followed by her daughters-in-law Renee and Keely, then her own Molly.