The Underside of Joy (27 page)

Chapter Thirty-seven

In the earliest hours of the morning, we watched in wonder as Zach’s heart rate and oxygen levels rose steadily, his skin turned pink with the dawn, his eyes opened. He flung his arms, trying to remove the ventilator tube, but Paige and I reassured him while the doctors removed the tube from his throat. He smiled. He spoke; he complained that his throat hurt. He said, ‘Mommy.’ He said, ‘Mama.’

Dr Markowitz said, ‘I want to keep him here for another day or two, keep monitoring him. He seems like he’s made a full recovery. But there are some things we won’t know for years, as far as a diagnosis of brain damage. There may not be any. He’s a tough little guy, and he’s already shown great resilience. In the meantime’ – she smiled, stuck her hands in her lab coat – ‘celebrate.’

My mom, Gil, Lucy, Lizzie and Frank, Aunt Bernie – everyone came to welcome back Zach, an ongoing parade of balloons and teddy bears and dinosaurs and action figures in tow. Clem Silver sent a beautiful illustration of our cottage, with our garden billowing over the foreground and the redwood grove stoic in the background. Zach pointed to it and said, ‘Let’s go home.’

The room fell quiet. Paige and I shared a look. I said, ‘Let’s concentrate on getting better.’

Joe Sr, Marcella, Bernie, Paige, and I ended up going together to the cafeteria. I took a bite of a tuna fish sandwich, thinking about how strange this all was, sitting with ‘our’ in-laws, actually
chatting,
actually laughing. Bernie excused herself, said she needed to get back to her office, offered to walk Callie later. She was so polished and efficient; you’d never guess that back at home she lived among piles of silly things she couldn’t part with.

Paige looked at me, then took a deep breath. ‘So when I said I suppose you have everything you need now that this happened . . . to Zach. To persuade a judge to change the court order in your favour . . .’ I kept my eyes steady on hers. ‘I told you and I meant it. We are both responsible in our own ways. But Paige, Annie and Zach, they said they want
both
of us.’

Her eyes filled. ‘They really said that? They told you that?’

I nodded.

She covered her eyes with her hand. ‘You didn’t have to tell me.’ And then, ‘Thank you for telling me.’

I leaned over and said, ‘Paige? Would you ever consider coming back to Elbow?’

Marcella shook out her white embroidered handkerchief and blew her nose.

We waited. I took another bite of sandwich and chewed long after I could have swallowed it, afraid to move my hands again or change expression or do anything that might negatively affect the outcome of that moment threaded between the four of us, connecting us, tugging at our souls. All the hurtful things that had passed between us all hung there too, hooks we’d need to untie, one by one, with time.

Paige didn’t answer, just kept her hand locked over her eyes while her shoulders shuddered. Joe Sr reached out and put his hand on Paige’s other hand. I covered his with mine, and then Marcella extended her own hand, and we sat there, quiet, while the lunch crowd cleared, until all that was left was the circle of us.

The next afternoon, Dr Markowitz told us, ‘Go home. And don’t come back.’ She went over things to look for, but she said she had high hopes that Zach was going to be fine. ‘I’ve never seen a kid put away that much macaroni and cheese.’

When we left the hospital that day, Annie, Paige, and I packed up Zach’s things. David and Gil took armfuls of toys down to their car. A mural of Noah’s Ark adorned the wall leading to the lobby. Annie said, as she walked along, patting the picture, ‘Two giraffes, two monkeys, two lions.’ And then she stopped, letting us walk ahead of her, me pushing Zach in the regulation wheelchair, Paige carrying his balloons and suitcase. Annie gave us each a pat on our butts. When we turned, she grinned at us. She said, ‘Two moms.’

Epilogue

The magazine did end up running a four-page story, and while there was a line about lemons and lemonade, the article focused on the internment of Grandpa Sergio and Marcella’s father, Grandpa Dante, and wove in the family history and perseverance with the store’s transformations. Other magazine features have followed over the past five years.
Time
even did a short article. The story of the Italian internment during World War II caught the public’s attention, and many descendants of the interned – Italian, but also Japanese and German – have found their way to Elbow, and to the store, to enter the name of their relative in the book we keep open, to see the display Marcella and Joe Sr helped us arrange on the back wall – of Sergio’s and others’ Enemy Alien IDs and photos, the popular posters of the time with specific directions not to speak the enemy language, along with other memorabilia people have contributed.

There are also the hordes of foodies and wine connoisseurs that flock here because of the other, purely decadent write-ups in
Bon Appétit, Travel + Leisure, Gourmet.
David is making quite a name for himself as a chef, and I am making a name for myself as the person who does all the other stuff. Which is just fine with me.

As a way of singing the praises of the natural beauty of the area without having to actually sing, I work as a guide for Fish and Wild-life a few times a month. The other day, as I led a hike along the river, someone complained about the squawking crows. I gave my spiel about how smart they are, how adaptable. I told the story about how they drop nuts at a busy intersection in China, then wait for the cars to run over and crack them, then stand patiently on the corner, until the light changes, so they can eat the cracked nuts without getting crushed by traffic. Usually, that gets people smiling. But this one woman was an exceptionally tough nut to crack, so to speak. ‘I still don’t like them,’ she huffed. ‘They remind me of death.’

‘The
Corvus brachyrhynchos
are
so
smart and adaptable,’ I went on, ‘that they partake in cooperative breeding. In other words, they share in mothering, in all aspects of raising each other’s babies.
They
didn’t need anyone to tell them that it takes a village.’

Paige and I have found our own way to share in raising Annie and Zach, and though it’s not perfect, it is what you might call cooperative. She lives in the next town, and we brag to each other about everything from Zach’s soccer game to his reading abilities and his latest math
-
test grade. We know that other people don’t want to hear it. We know not to bombard the kid with our relief that he is okay. (He is eight now, and starting to roll his eyes sometimes when I cover his forehead with kisses. But only sometimes.) Depending on whose turn it is to have them spend the night, one of us will call the other, unable to wait another day to report, ‘Well, the guy aced his project. He seems to know his stuff.’ It is our way of saying,
Yes, we have made mistakes, mistakes that have hurt our children, but there is grace in this life of ours. Sometimes we still disagree. Sometimes we have misunderstandings. We are still finding our way. But I am bound to you by Annie and Zach; there is no one else on this planet who cares about them as much as you and I do.

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

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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