Too Much Happiness

write a book. He needed an assistant and he could not call on the graduate students now as he could when he was still on the faculty. (She didn’t know if this was true or not.) She reminded him that she knew nothing about rocks, and he said never mind that, he could use her for scale, in the photographs.
    So she became the small figure in black or bright clothing, contrasting with the ribbons of Silurian or Devonian rock. Or with the gneiss formed by intense compression, folded and deformed by clashes of the American and Pacific plates to make the present continent. Gradually she learned to use her eyes and apply new knowledge, till she could stand in an empty suburban street and realize that far beneath her shoes was a crater filled with rubble never to be seen, that never had been seen, because there were no eyes to see it at its creation or throughout the long history of its being made and filled and hidden and lost. Alex did such things the honor of knowing about them, the very best he could, and she admired him for that, although she knew enough not to say so. They were good friends in these last years, which she did not know were their last years, though maybe he did. He went into the hospital for an operation, taking his charts and photographs with him, and on the day he was supposed to come home he died.
    This was in the summer, and that fall there was a dramatic fire in Toronto. Sally sat in front of her television watching the fire for a while. It was in a district that she knew, or used to know, in the days when it was inhabited by hippies with their tarot cards and beads and paper flowers the size of pumpkins. And for a while after that when the vegetarian restaurants were being transformed into expensive bistros and boutiques. Now a block of those nineteenth-century buildings was being wiped out, and the newsman was bemoaning this, speaking of the people who had lived above the shops in old-fashioned apartments and who had now lost their homes, and were being dragged out of harm’s way onto the street.
    Not mentioning the landlords of such buildings, thought Sally, who were probably getting away with substandard wiring as well as epidemics of cockroaches and bedbugs, not to be complained about by the deluded or fearful poor.
    She sometimes felt Alex talking in her head these days, and that was surely what was happening now. She turned off the fire.
    No more than ten minutes later the phone rang. It was Savanna.
    “Mom. Have you got your TV on? Did you see?”
    “You mean the fire? I did have it on but I turned it off.”
    “No. Did you see-I’m looking for him right now-I saw him not five minutes ago. Mom, it’s Kent. Now I can’t find him. But I saw him.”
    “Is he hurt? I’m turning it on now. Was he hurt?”
    “No, he was helping. He was carrying one end of a stretcher, there was a body on it, I don’t know if it was dead or just hurt. But Kent. It was him. You could even see him limping. Have you got it on now?”
    “Yes.”
    “Okay, I’ll calm down. I bet he went back in the building.”
    “But surely they wouldn’t allow-”
    “He could be a doctor for all we know. Oh fuck, now they’re doing that same old guy they talked to before, his family owned some business for a hundred years-let’s hang up and just keep our eyes on the screen. He’s sure to come in range again.”
    He didn’t. The shots became repetitive.
    Savanna phoned back.
    “I’m going to get to the bottom of this. I know a guy that works on the news. I can get to see that shot again, we have to find out.”
    Savanna had never known her brother very well-what was all the fuss about? Did her father’s death make her feel the need of family? She should marry, soon; she should have children. But she had such a stubborn streak when she set her mind on something-was it possible she would find Kent? Her father had told her when she was about ten years old that she could gnaw an idea to the bone, she ought to be a lawyer. And from then on, that was what she said she would be.
    Sally was overcome by a trembling, a longing, a weariness.
    It was Kent, and within a week Savanna had found out all about him. No. Change that to found out all he meant to tell her. He had been living in Toronto for years. He had often passed the building Savanna worked in and had spotted her a couple of times on the street. Once they were nearly face-to-face at an intersection. Of course she wouldn’t have recognized him because he was