The Underside of Joy

in it so that my days became as dark and knotted as I imagined my uterus to be: a scary, uninviting hovel.
    Then I finally got pregnant.
    And then I lost the baby.
    I lay on the couch with old towels underneath me and listened to Henry make the phone calls in the kitchen, feeling as inadequate as the terminology implied. I lost the baby – like keys, or a mother-of-pearl earring. Or spontaneous abortion, which sounded like all of a sudden we didn’t want the baby, like we had made a quick, casual choice. And then there was miscarriage. The morphing of a mistake and a baby carriage.
    More trying. Trying to get pregnant, trying to stay pregnant. Trying shots, gels, pills, hope, elation, bed rest, more bed rest. In the end, despair.
    Again. And again and again and again. Five in all.
    And then one Easter morning – while the neighbourhood kids ran up and down the dwarfed aprons of lawns, their voices pealing with sugared-up joy, wearing new pastel clothes and chocolate smears on their faces, filling their baskets with a plethora of eggs – Henry and I sat at our long, empty dining room table and decided to quit. We quit trying to have a baby and we quit trying to have a marriage. Henry was the one who was courageous enough to put it into words: There was no us left apart from our obsession, and perhaps that’s why we’d kept at it with such tenacity.
    At that time, it seemed I would always be sad. Little did I know that the universe was about to shift just six months later, when I drove through Sonoma County and took the winding road someone had aptly named the Bohemian Highway. ‘Good-bye, Bio-Tech Boulevard!’ I shouted to the redwoods, which crowded up to the road like well-wishers greeting my arrival. At the bridge, I waited as a couple of young guys with dreadlocks, wearing guitars on their backs, crossed over to head down to the river’s beach, and they waved like they’d been expecting me. I turned into Elbow and stopped at Capozzi’s Market. Good-bye, Sadness in San Diego.
    Joe and I were the same height; we saw things eye to eye. We slipped into each other’s lives as easily as Annie’s hand slipped into mine that evening in front of the store. We didn’t sleep together on our first date. We didn’t wait that long. I followed him home from the parking lot, helped him change diapers and feed baby Zach and tell Annie a story and kiss them good night, as if we’d been doing the same thing every night for years. Though neither of us was pitiful enough to whisper the cliché that we usually didn’t do that sort of thing, we both admitted later that we usually didn’t. But the deepest wounds have a tendency to seep recklessness. He helped me carry in my suit-case, found a vase for a bucket of cornflowers – my Centaurea cyanus that I’d set on the passenger-side floor, brought along for good luck. We talked until midnight, and I learned that the wife whose paisley robe still hung from the hook on the bathroom door had left him for good four months before, that her name was Paige, that she had called only once to check on Annie and Zach. She never called in the three years that followed. Not once. We made love in Paige and Joe’s bed. Yes, it was needy sex. Amazing needy sex.
    But now I lay in bed thinking, All I want to do is go back. ‘We want you back,’ I whispered. I slipped my arms out from under Annie’s and Zach’s heavy heads and tiptoed into the bathroom. There was Joe’s aftershave, Cedarwood Sage. I opened it and inhaled it, dabbed it on my wrists, behind my ears, along the lump in my throat. His toothbrush. His razor. I ran my finger along the blade and watched the fine line of blood appear, mixing with tiny remnants of his whiskers.
    I turned on the basin taps so the kids wouldn’t hear me. ‘Joe? You gotta come back. Listen to me. I can’t fucking do this.’ The sleeper wave had come out of nowhere, and now I felt that wave in the bathroom, the inability to breathe, fighting the thunderous slam that ripped away Joe . . . Annie and Zach’s daddy . They’d already been abandoned by their birth mother. How much could they take? I had to pull it together for them. But at the same time I knew that their very existence would help hem me in, keep all my parts together.
    I dried my face and took a few deep breaths and opened the door. Callie pressed her cold black nose into my hand, turned and thumped me with her tail, licked my face when I bent to pet her back. I wanted to be