The Underside of Joy (2 page)

‘
This
doesn’t happen to Joe.’

Joe could swim for miles. He had two kids that needed him. He had me. I dug in the closet for my hiking boots. Joe was alive and I had to find him. ‘A little blood? He probably scraped his arm.’ I found the boots, pulled the comforter off the bed. He would be freezing. I grabbed the binoculars from the hall tree. I opened the screen door and stepped out on the porch, tripping on the dragging blanket. I called back, ‘Am I driving myself ? Or are you coming?’

Frank’s wife, Lizzie, loaded Zach into their Radio Flyer wagon with their daughter, Molly, while Annie stuck her arm through the handle and shouted through her cupped hands, ‘We’re taking the rowboat to shore. Watch for pirates.’

I waved and tried to sound cheerful. ‘Got it. Thanks, Lizzie.’ She nodded, solemn. Lizzie Civiletti was not my friend; she’d told me that, soon after I came to town. And yet neither was she unkind. She would protect the kids from any telltale signs of panic. As much as I wanted to go to them, to gather them up to me, I smiled, I waved again, I blew kisses.

Chapter Two

Frank drove the winding road with his lights spinning circles. I closed my eyes, didn’t look at the rolling hills I knew would be shimmering, dotted with what Joe called the ‘Extremely Happy California Cows.’
He’s fine. He’s fine! He’s disoriented. He hit his head. He’s not sure where he is. A concussion, maybe. He’s wandering the beach at Salmon Creek. That’s it! The wave pulled him out and dashed him down the coast a ways, but there he is. He’s talking to some high school boys. They have surfboards. Dude. Did you ride that gnarly wave? They’ve built a fire even though the signs prohibit it. They offer him beer and hot dogs. They forgot the buns, but here’s mustard. He’s famished. He has a flash of memory. It all comes back to him.

Us. Making up. Just the night before. Standing in the kitchen, easing our way back together, then falling into bed, relieved. We were lousy fighters, but we could win medals for making up. He had kissed my stomach in a southbound line until I moaned, kissed my thighs until I whimpered, until we both gave in. Later, as I drifted off, he propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at me. ‘I have something I need to tell you.’

I tried to fight the pull of sleep. ‘You want to
talk
?
Now?’
It was a noble effort to be more open, but, Jesus, right after sex? Wasn’t that womankind’s most annoying tactic? So I was a man about it and said, ‘You can’t go and get me this blissed out and then tell me we have to talk.’ I figured it was more bad news about the store.

‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow, then. We’ll make it a date. I’ll see if Mom will take the kids.’

‘Ooooh. A date.’ Maybe it wasn’t about the store. Hell, I thought. Maybe it’s
good
news.

He smiled and touched my nose. I hadn’t said,
No, we have to talk now.
I hadn’t fretted. I had immediately fallen asleep.

So, no. Joe could not be dead. He was eating hot dogs and drinking beer and talking surfing. He still needed to talk to me about something. I opened my eyes.

Frank sped through Bodega Bay – with its seafood restaurants and souvenir shops, the pink-and-white-striped saltwater taffy store the kids could never get past without insisting we stop – along the curved bayside road and its hand-painted sandwich signs advertising the latest catch, the air a mingle of smoked salmon and sea and wildflowers, up the curved ridge to Bodega Head, Joe’s favourite place on the planet.

There was the trailhead to the hike we’d taken so many times, along the cliff. On one side the sea down below, on the other a prairie of shore wildflowers – with the yarrow, or
Achillea borealis,
the sand verbena, or
Abronia umbellate
– down to the grassy dunes. Joe was always impressed with my ability to not only identify the birds and wildflowers, but rattle off their Latin names too, a gift I’d inherited from my father.

The parking lot was full, including several sheriff’s cars, a fire truck, paramedics, and there at the end by the trail, Joe’s old truck. He called it the Green Hornet. I grabbed the binoculars, got out of Frank’s cruiser, and slammed the door. A helicopter headed north, following the shoreline, its blades thumping, a thunderous, too-rapid heartbeat fading away.

I had no jacket, and the wind whipped against my bare arms, burned my eyes. Frank draped the comforter around me. I said, ‘Please don’t make me talk to anyone.’

‘You got it.’

‘I need to go alone.’ He pulled me into his side, then released me. I walked to Joe’s truck. Unlocked, of course. His blue down jacket, stained and worn in, just the way he liked it. I slipped it on. Warm from the sun. I left the blanket in the car so it would be warm for him too. His thermos lay on the floor. I shook it: empty. I lifted the rubber mat and saw his keys, as I knew I would, and stuck them in my pocket.

Through the binoculars the water flashed a multitude of lights, as if taking pictures of its own crime scene.

In March and April, we’d packed a picnic and brought the kids out to watch for whales. We’d searched the horizon with the same binoculars, marvelled at the grey whales’ graceful sky hopping and breaching. We told the kids the story of Jonah and the whale, how one minute Jonah was tossed overboard into the sea, and the next minute swallowed by the whale, along for the ride. Annie rolled her eyes and said ‘Yeah. Riiiiight.’ I’d laughed, confessed to them that even when I was a little kid in Sunday school, I’d found the story hard to swallow.

But now I was willing to believe anything, to pray anything, to promise anything. ‘Please, please, please,
please . . .
’

I headed down the lower trail, seeing Joe taking each step, strong, alive. An easy climb up First Rock, the white water swirling far below, unthreatening.
But you broke your own rule, Joe, didn’t you? The one you always told me and Annie and Zach: Never turn your back on the ocean.
The Coast Guard boat moved steadily, not stopping. I glanced over my shoulder at the cliff. It looked like the clenched fist of God, the clinging reddish sea figs its scraped and bleeding knuckles.
Please, please. Tell me where he is.

I climbed down the rock. The sun’s reflection off the water made me wince. Farther down, I saw it wasn’t the water, but metal wedged deep between two other rocks. I stepped over to investigate. Was it . . .? I scrambled down closer. There, waiting for me to notice it, lay Joe’s tripod. His camera was gone.

Wait. That’s it. That’s what he’s doing. He’s hunting for his camera. He’s sick about it. He’s in the dunes somewhere, lost. All those deer trails, confusing, every dune starts to look the same and it’s hard to tell what you’ve covered and the wind is whipping and you’re tired and you have to lie down. So cold. A doe watches tentatively but she senses your desperation and she approaches, lies down to warm you and she licks the salt off your nose.

You are fine! You’re just trying to find your way back. ‘Don’t be angry,’ you’ll say, wiping my tears with your thumbs, holding my face to yours, your fingers locked in my hair. ‘I’m so sorry,’ you’ll say. I’ll shake my head to tell you all is forgiven, thank you for fighting that wave, thank you for coming back to us. I’ll bury my nose in your neck, the salt will rub off on my cheek. You’ll smell like dried blood and fish and kelp and deer and wood smoke and life.

I wandered the dunes past dark, long after they called off the search for the day. The half-moon disclosed nothing. Frank said even less. Usually he never shut up.

Joe’s Green Hornet sat empty, the only vehicle in the parking lot other than Frank’s cruiser. I wanted to leave the truck for Joe, so I unlocked it, replaced the keys under the mat. I slipped off his jacket and left that for him too, along with the blanket.

I climbed in with Frank, quiet, as the dispatcher gave an address for a domestic dispute. I wanted to be with the kids but I didn’t want my face to let on, to drive a spike through their contented unknowing.

Frank offered to keep Joe’s parents and extended family away at least until morning. I nodded. I couldn’t hear his parents or brother or anyone else cry, couldn’t hear anything that would acknowledge defeat. We needed to focus on finding him.

Once home, I called the kids. ‘Are you having fun?’ I asked Annie.

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Lizzie let us take off all the cushions on all the furniture and build a house.
And
she said we can even sleep in it tonight.’

‘Too cool. So you want to spend the night?’

‘I think we better. Molly will only sleep out here if I’m with her. You know Molly.’

‘Yeah, then you better.’

‘Night, Mommy. Can I talk to Daddy?’

I leaned over, pulled the lace on my boot, swallowed, forced my voice to sound light. ‘He’s not here yet, Banannie.’

‘Okay, well then, give him this.’ I knew she was hugging the phone. ‘And this one’s for you . . . Bye.’

Zach got on the line just long enough to say, ‘I muchly love you.’ I hung up, kept sitting on the couch. Callie lay down at my feet and let out a long sigh. The hall light picked up objects in the dark room. I’d set up Joe’s tripod in the corner to welcome him. Its three legs, its absent camera now seemed a terrible omen. I stared at the Capozzi family clock ticking on the end table. Yes. No. Yes. No. I opened the glass. The swinging pendulum: this way. That way. I stuck my finger in to stop it. Silence. My fingertip steered the hour hand backward, back to that morning, when this time I felt Joe stretching awake, kissed the soft hair on his chest, grabbed his warm shoulder, said, ‘Stay. Don’t go. Stay here with us.’

The next day a Swiss tourist found Joe’s body, bloated and wrapped in kelp, as if the sea had mummified him in some feeble attempt at apology. This time I opened the door for Frank and hugged him before he could speak. When he leaned back, he just shook his head. I opened my mouth to say
No
but the word sank, soundless.

I insisted on seeing him. Alone. Frank drove me to McCready’s and stood beside me while a grey-haired woman with orange-tinted skin explained that Joe wasn’t really ready to be viewed.

‘Ready?’ A strange, high-pitched laugh eked past the lump in my throat.

Frank tilted his head at me. ‘Ella . . .’

‘Well? Who the hell is ever
ready
?’

‘Excuse me, young –’ But then she shook her head, reached out and took both my hands in hers, said, ‘Come this way, dear.’ She ushered me down a carpeted hallway, past the magnolia wallpaper and mahogany wainscoting, from the noble facade to the laboratorial back rooms, the hallway now flecked green linoleum, chipped in places, unworthy of its calling.

How could this be? That he lay on a table in a cooled room that resembled an oversize stainless-steel kitchen? Someone had parted his hair on the wrong side and combed it, perhaps to hide the wound on his head, and they covered him up to his neck with a sheet – that was it. I took off my jacket and tucked it over his shoulders and chest, saying his name over and over.

They had closed his eyes, but I could tell the way his lid sunk in that his right eye was missing.

I used to tell him his eyes were satellite pictures of Earth – ocean blue with light green flecks. I joked that he had global vision, that I saw the world in his eyes. They could go from sorrow to teasing mischief in three seconds flat. They could pull me from chores to bed in even less time. Their sarcastic roll could piss me off, too, in no time at all.

His amazing photographer’s eye with its unique take on things – where had it gone? Would Joe’s vision live on soaring in a gull or scampering sideways in a nearsighted rock crab?

His hair felt stiff from the salt, not soft and curly through my fingers. I pushed it over to the right side. ‘There, honey,’ I said, wiping my nose on my sleeve. ‘There you go.’ His stubbled face, so cold. Joe had a baby face that he needed to shave only every three or four days, his Friday shadow. He said he couldn’t possibly be Italian; he must have been adopted. He’d rub his chin and say, ‘Gotta shave every damn week.’

He was handsome and sexy in his imperfection. I ran my finger down his slightly crooked nose, along the ridge of his slightly big ears. When we first met, I’d guessed correctly that he’d been an awkward teenager, a late bloomer. He had an appealing humility that couldn’t be faked by the men who’d managed to start breaking girls’ hearts back in seventh grade. He was always surprised that women found him attractive.

I slipped my hand under the sheet and held his arm, so cold, willed him to tense the thick ropes of muscles that ran their length, to laugh and say in his grandmother’s accent:
You like, Bella?
Instead, I could almost hear him say,
Take care of Annie and Zach.
Almost, but not quite.

I nodded anyway. ‘Don’t worry, honey. I don’t want you to worry, okay?’

I kissed his cold, cold face and laid my head on his collapsed chest, where his lungs had filled with water and left his heart an island. I lay there for a long time. The door opened, then didn’t close. Someone waiting. Making sure I didn’t fall apart. I would not fall apart. I had to help Annie and Zach through this. I whispered, ‘Good-bye, sweet man. Good-bye.’

I don’t even pretend to know what might happen to us after we die because the possibilities are endless. I have a degree in biology and feel most at home in nature, yet I’m confounded by
human
nature, by those things that cannot be observed and named and catalogued, a woman of science who slogs off the trail into mystery and ponders at the feet of folklore. So I often wonder if Joe had watched us that morning while we were playing Ship, in those bridging moments between before and after. Had he watched us from the massive redwoods he so revered, then from a cloud? Then from a star? The photographer in him would have delighted in the different perspectives, this after-a-lifetime chance to see that which is too deep and wide to be contained by any frame. Or was that him, that male fuchsia-throated Anna’s Hummingbird,
Calypte anna,
that hung around for days? He flittered inches from my nose when I sat on our porch, so close, I could feel his wings beating air on my cheek.

‘Joe?’ He took off suddenly, making giant swoops like handwriting in the sky. I know the swoops are part of their impressive mating ritual. And yet now I can’t help wondering if it was Joe, panicked, attempting to write me a message, frantically trying to tell me his many secrets, to warn me of all that he’d left unsaid.