The Underside of Joy

Grandpa Sergio in his forties, the typed words: Sergio Giuseppe Capozzi, his address in Elbow – the same as our address – along with his date of birth, August 1, 1901, his fingerprints.
    Those words struck me harder than the tiny bits and pieces of the story I’d heard. The fear. The paranoia. Enemy? Alien? Grandpa Sergio? Who loved this country, owned a little market. Who built this cottage . . . had his family ripped apart, as Marcella had yelled. It struck me how easily paranoia sets in during times of war, and I knew that my own fear of Paige – the whole family’s fear of Paige – wasn’t exactly fair, either. Still, what we’d all feared most had now happened, and my attempt to be fair had landed us here.
    I set the ID down too, along with pictures of Sergio and Rosemary standing in front of their new house, now our old house, and I felt connected to them in a way I hadn’t before. Their family had filled this house with its noise too – its laughter and arguments. Rosemary had walked these very rooms, filled with the vacancy of Sergio’s absence. She, too, knew the way an expanding emptiness pressed on the walls, the ceilings, the floors.
    I pulled out another box; it turned out to be the box with Paige’s robe. The robe Joe had covered her secret with, the robe she’d hidden in all those months of depression. I put it on, over my clothes. Embarrassing to admit now, but I guess I saw it as a necessary piece of the puzzle. I pulled out more boxes until I’d covered the floor in the living area, and started in the kitchen, then down the hall. I left curving paths that spiralled out from the centre of the room, reminiscent of the labyrinth Joe and I had once walked at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco the New Year’s after we met. We’d walked in silence, each holding a question in our minds. When we finished, we stood at the centre and Joe asked me if I would marry him. It turned out we’d both come to the labyrinth with the same question and had received the same answer while we walked it: Yes.
    I’d covered the not-so-great room and kitchen, part of the hallway, and half of Annie and Zach’s room when I ran out of pictures. I pulled out our own photos, the ones taken after I came into the picture, so to speak. And my shoebox of pictures of my own childhood, my mom and me clam digging, my dad and me posing on a rock, arms folded, wearing our birding binoculars. I lined more photos along the floor in the kids’ room and worked down the hallway and into our bedroom, finishing the path off on top of our bed because of the lack of floor space.
    I worked with a welcomed detachment from my present life, or even the lives represented in the pictures – completely absorbed in the structure of my creation, the pieces of the puzzle. It was all a bit crazy, but craziness made perfect sense right then. By the time I finished, the room had dimmed dark.
    I must have lain down then to sleep. The next morning I woke in a sea of pictures, staring at Annie holding up a salmon almost as big as she was. Pictures were stuck to my arms, my hands, my cheek.
    I climbed out of the bed, took it all in. I know how strange this sounds now, but I was intrigued with what I’d done. There was order, purpose. I felt I was on to something. So I made coffee, careful not to disturb the layout on the floor, and attended to my life’s current responsibilities: Callie, chickens, kittens, vegetables. I forced myself to eat some toast. I played with the kittens on the porch, then put them in their crate for a rest. And then I walked my labyrinth. And walked. And walked. Callie stared at me through the French doors, giving me her saddest face, and at one time, I swore she shook her head at me, What? You can’t even take me for a measly little walk and here you are walking in circles all pickin’ day? You won’t even let me in? Who is this person you’ve become?
    But I turned back to my task, took another step, studied another photo. See Paige and Annie in matching Easter dresses. See Joe sleeping. I wanted to crawl in next to him, but I wasn’t the one who’d taken the picture. It was taken before I knew Joe existed. When he loved Paige and Paige loved him. She loved him enough to want to capture him sleeping peacefully, his lips parted, his hair flattened on one side; looking the same way he had on mornings when I had watched him sleeping and loved him too.
    But see this: Annie, Zach, Joe, and me, in that very bed.