This Is Happy

by Camilla Gibb

  We’re sitting on the front porch admiring our work one morning when Tito Mike points up and says, “What the fuck’s wrong with that bird?” For weeks a robin has been attempting to build a nest in a corner under the eaves. It has no apparent talent; every day we sweep twigs, bark and straw off the front steps. “It’s too late in the season,” my brother says. “It’s not going to lay eggs now. It’s probably gay.”

  “It’s the house where orphans come to roost,” I tell him.

  Word must be getting around.

  11

  In anticipation of moving out West, my brother has been asking questions about our father. He wonders if he might look him up en route across the country. He will leave us, his new-found family, and seek out the remnants of the old. We are each compelled by some need to put it all together, house the idea of family in a single frame. We remain hopeful, despite all evidence to suggest there is no reason to be. I have wondered sometimes whether hope is simply the human word for the animal impulse in us to survive.

  I haven’t wanted to point out the obvious to my brother, but twenty-two years ago, after our father had alienated everyone he knew and exhausted all possibilities here, he abandoned the meagre belongings of his life and set off for Vancouver. He didn’t tell us this is what he was doing; he simply disappeared from his last known address. Ara also went west. The men in my family run away, all of them bound for the same place, it seems—a city hidden behind distant mountains; a purgatory at the edge of the new world.

  A cop my brother knows has offered to do a quick search for my father. The cop comes back with nothing: no record, no driver’s licence, no trace. Same with the police in Calgary. He would be seventy years old now, assuming he’s survived the decades of hard living. There really is only one likely conclusion. It’s what I will tell my daughter, in any case.

  12

  Micah will be going west, while we will be heading east. We will be as far apart as it is possible to be in this country.

  When Miles and I had first met, I had reminisced about a brief visit to her small island fifteen years ago, specifically about a place where I had jumped off a bridge into a river and floated on a current out to sea. Hundreds of feet out, I had looked back to see this infinitely long and lonely expanse of sand. It was the most beautiful beach I had ever seen, a beach to rival any in the world.

  I had no recollection of where it was. Miles named the beach, showing it to me on a map. Before she was born, I had resolved to take my daughter there.

  In July we leave Tito Mike and set off in my Jeep—Miles and me up front, Tita and the egg in the back—on a road trip that takes us three days. The last leg involves crossing the Confederation Bridge, twelve and a half kilometres over the Northumberland Strait between New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. The steep clay cliffs of the south shore of the island come into view, glowing red in the late-afternoon sun.

  An hour later we arrive at Miles’s parents’ house just outside Charlottetown. She jumps out of the car and bounds across the grass into the middle of the vegetable patch her father is planting, throwing herself into his arms. The lonely gay comes from somewhere. This is her family, her home. Tita bursts into tears.

  Miles’s mother unearths her grandsons’ baby toys for my daughter. Miles’s father teaches Tita how to drive the tractor. Both her parents have effortlessly taken to calling their daughter Miles. We eat potato salad and macaroni salad and cold roast beef for dinner. Miles’s father was once the Island’s minister of agriculture. He’s an astute and impassioned politician. I tell him he should run for mayor of Charlottetown and he raises his eyebrows. They stay stuck there. From here on we will refer to him as The Mayor.

  I think later about Tita’s bursting into tears. I’m struck by an awareness that Miles and Tita share something I don’t. They have both had to venture out alone, leaving their families and their islands for better opportunities elsewhere. I don’t share their sense of longing for a place and people elsewhere.

  Tita keeps a large cardboard box at the end of her bed, which she fills with bits and pieces to send back to the Philippines. It’s full of my old clothes and baby clothes my daughter has outgrown. She sends dishes and soap and shampoo and toothpaste and condiments and chocolate and cookies. The box is called a balik bayan—a back-and-forth—although it travels only one way. The boxes Miles receives from her parents and sends to her siblings and nephews are called care packages.

  Tita’s application for permanent residency includes an application for her husband. They will be reunited in Toronto eventually, make a new life together there. Miles’s trajectory will be different. She will make a family, as lone immigrants and gay people do, she will find them in the city, a chosen family. And right now we are that family. We are a family because of a baby girl.

  13

  We’ve settled into an Island rhythm: days at the beach, collecting driftwood, swimming, picnicking, roadside stops for ice cream, my daughter happy splashing in the water, eating sand, berries, corn.

  We are three women and a baby in a tiny rented cottage; four women when my mother comes to visit for a week, bombing around together in my Jeep exploring the island, fantasizing about real estate, visiting lighthouses, antique shops and provincial parks, stopping for fish and chips. The weather is blustery and unpredictable, quickly changeable. We make the most of every moment.

  Early one evening Tita and I are up to our ankles in mud at the end of our garden. Miles and the egg are digging in the sand on the shore. The sun is setting, and the tide is low, exposing the red mussel flats of the bay. Below the red surface, the sand is a primordial black, low in oxygen and reeking of sulphur. It will oxidize a silver ring in a second, stain your hands and feet, but we have cast aside our shoes and are raking through the thick mud with our hands, risking the pinch of rock crabs and the sting of jellyfish.

  We’ve been at this for twenty minutes and I’m feeling discouraged. Miles abandoned the project before we even started. Nothing but empty shells picked clean by birds. But Tita, with her leggings rolled up over her knees, is stubborn and determined. She is praying: Jesus, please give me ten mussels. And Jesus appears to be listening. After fifteen minutes she unearths her first barnacle-encrusted shell. She raises her arms in victory. She’s never collected mussels before—clams, yes, but never mussels. Her family’s farm is nine kilometres away from the ocean. She used to skip school with her cousin and friends and head to the water. They would collect clams, which they ate raw, dipping them in vinegar and chilies and salt. She taught herself how to swim and stole mangoes from trees on the way home.

  For Miles the beach was the place where you did everything for the first time. People stole cars and booze from their parents’ houses, drove the back roads in the middle of the night to avoid the police, built fires of driftwood, lobster traps and tires, swam, drunk and naked, had sex and returned home, underpants full of sand.

  “You had sex?” says Tita. “You didn’t worry about your future, Miles?”

  “Hell no,” says Miles. “There was no future. That was it.”

  We scrub those mussels and steam them in wine, chopped tomatoes, onion, garlic and parsley. We miss Tito Mike: he’d love this Island supper. There is brown bread from the local bakery. A lot of butter. We eat before the sun goes down, and go to bed shortly after, all of us on egg time. Eat/sleep/play, eat/sleep/play.

  Tito Mike sends a text tonight as if he has heard us. “I miss you guys so much,” he says. “That gay robin has finally built himself a nest.”

  14

  Tito Mike has waited for our return. He has the remnants of a little blue shell to show me. The gay robin had laid a single egg, hatched it, then gone off, presumably in search of a bigger nest. Now Tito Mike is ready to move out West and Tita is packing a suitcase for the Philippines, going home for a month to see her family.

  “Next time, we’re coming with you,” I say to Tita.

  “Yeah, right,” she says, rolling her eyes.


  “I wish you didn’t have to go,” I say to my brother.

  “Oh, Min,” he sighs. “Why can’t you just enjoy it for what it is?”

  I’m trying to hold on to something that neither of them quite believes in, wants or needs in the way that I do. I don’t want my daughter to lose her uncle. I don’t want to lose my brother. We had our first Christmas together as a family in fourteen years. I want Tita to come back before she has even left. I don’t want to lose this sense of family that has surrounded us both for much of her first year. We celebrated all of our birthdays this year in this house. Tita turned thirty, Miles thirty-three, my brother forty-one, me forty-three. The egg will soon turn one.

  We’re having a final supper, sending them off with spaghetti and meatballs. Tita, watching my daughter’s delight in flinging a meatball overboard, says: “I don’t believe now that a pregnant mother’s mood affects the baby.” It’s an Asian belief she’d held on to, one that my daughter’s constitution seems to dispel.

  Lolo, my stepfather, drives Tita to the airport early in the morning. I cry to see her go; my daughter has only once been apart from Tita for more than a weekend and I have not been a mother for any real stretch of time without Tita. Relief is on its way to the Philippines.

  My stepfather stuffs a twenty-dollar bill into Tita’s hand and tells her to buy something to eat during the layover in Hong Kong. “Like a real father,” Tita texts me after checking in. “He make me cry!”

  Two days later it’s Tito Mike’s turn. He has sold his truck and his hunting rifles. The old Volvo I gave him in exchange for renovating the basement is packed, two Muskoka chairs strapped to the roof.

  He doesn’t drag out the goodbye.

  “Are you sure you’ll be safe?” I ask through the window.

  “Min, I could find drugs anywhere,” he says, annoyed by the question.

  But Vancouver isn’t just anywhere. For all its gloss and glorious scenery, Vancouver is the last stop for many, and not just because it doesn’t have the punishing cold of the rest of Canada. When you have drifted from place to place, you suddenly find yourself at the edge of the continent. There is nowhere left to go.

  Vancouver has a side to it I haven’t seen elsewhere. Micah will live within spitting distance of the Downtown Eastside, a neighbourhood where many people lie on the street, shooting up on the sidewalk. The city started the first needle exchange in North America there. The neighbourhood houses the first supervised injection site, serving hundreds of users a day.

  Micah assures me that all that is behind him. He’s free of drugs now—the methadone, even the prescription pills. He tells me he has never felt more supported and accepted than during this past year with us. But then, he doesn’t expect very much. When I clipped a coupon from a magazine for him a couple of months ago he told me that it made him feel so loved. Two Big Macs for the price of one. Like the twenty dollars stuffed into Tita’s hand.

  My brother puts the car in drive and lights a smoke. He honks the horn as he pulls away. I have a terrible feeling I might be losing him for good, that my little girl will never know her uncle, he who was such an important part of her first year. In my experience, the men who set off for Vancouver never return.

  The egg has been subdued since Tita left a couple of days ago, clinging to me in a way she hasn’t before. First signs of separation anxiety. Perhaps she’s picking up something from me.

  1

  It’s so hot now, this August, that I have taken to lying on the basement floor. There are stretches, hours long, when I’m alone—Micah out West, Tita in the Philippines, my daughter’s visits with Anna growing longer as she gets older—completely alone for the first time in a year.

  I lie here and I think about how all our lives can be read as histories of love. A cycle of fantasies, fulfillments, failures.

  I am stuck on the failures, full of the sense of endings. In my life I have dismissed, disappeared, drifted, detonated. And I have been ditched, outgrown, unrequited, abandoned.

  Until a year and a half ago, I had some sense of what the rest of my life might look like. There is no longer a map. It’s not a question of finding my feet, but of growing new ones. Trying to be a parent, teach a child how to be in the world, when I have lost the way.

  It is easier (and certainly more presumptuous) to imagine the futures of others. Tita will be reunited with her husband, I assume Miles will find a partner one day, even if she is less optimistic about this than I am, and the egg will grow up and away from me. My brother asked me why I couldn’t just enjoy our time together for what it was. He recognized the impermanence of our domestic arrangement, its transience.

  We have not done well with families. Micah was married once. For three weeks. And yet, he still harbours a white-picket-fence fantasy.

  I find myself thinking about a woman I used to know, a woman who loved me well before I was ready to be loved well. I have always wondered if we were somehow fated to be together. But then, I behaved very badly. Why she would ever trust me again, I cannot imagine.

  I think about a younger man I barely know. A man who told me about his trip to New Zealand. I fantasize about moving there with him, spending six months a year in Canada renovating an old monster of a house, six months on the South Island with my hands deep in the antipodean earth. But his girlfriend wouldn’t like it very much.

  I think about a woman I met on holiday in Costa Rica years ago. She had served in the Gulf War. I’d never met anyone who’d been in the military. She had paid for university by joining the reserves and never expected to be called up. She lived in the southern States and her home had been destroyed by a hurricane. All her poetry had been blown away. She spent months combing the wetlands, picking up loose-leaf sheets and photographs. She had the most beautiful face.

  I think about Ted, with whom I still talk in my head sometimes.

  I think about David, who I eventually discovered had left me while I was in Cairo for an academic in California. Still, I called him once I had finished my PhD, to thank him for having set me on an academic path. And then I told him he was shit.

  I think about Hassan, who has remained in my life. We have written to each other for the past nineteen years. On thin blue airmail paper for the first few; then email, once access arrived in Ethiopia at the turn of the century.

  Hassan has become more religious over the years, having made the pilgrimage to Mecca shortly after I left, though he has always treated the developments in my life, including my marriage, with the same open-minded spirit he possessed as a young man. We speak to each other much more openly than his culture would permit. We found, early on, our own language somewhere halfway in between.

  I have never stopped thinking about Biscutti. After several years, though, I did stop asking Hassan about her. She would be in her twenties now. All Hassan would ever tell me was that she hadn’t developed normally. He comes from a culture of optimism, where no one wants to be the bearer of bad news, not even a doctor.

  Hassan has become a father. He married a cousin living in the United States quite a few years ago and they have two children, both of them U.S. citizens. Yet he remained in Ethiopia, despite having won that scholarship to study in America all those years ago. He was and will always be denied entry to the States. His future was completely rerouted because of an omission he made on his visa application. And then 9/11 happened. And his name is … well.

  He treats his fate as a blessing, though, one that has allowed him to become a devoted doctor to his own people, greatly needed in a country where there is only one doctor for every forty thousand people. He has come to specialize in hematology, making him one of only two hematologists in the entire country.

  It has been hard not to fantasize, at times, about the child he and I might have had together.

  I entertain various fantasies, try them on, hoping to find out where, and with whom, I might fit. I am trying to relocate myself in love, looking for another to give my life shape.

  2
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br />   I have a position as writer-in-residence at the university this fall. I ride my bike to campus on chilly fall mornings, take a streetcar if it rains. It takes twenty-five minutes either way; the first twenty spent missing my daughter, the last five trying to remind myself that I write for a living.

  I ensconce myself in an old sloped-roof office with water-damaged walls. I flick on my desk lamp and stare out the window at the green quadrangle and copper roofs of the college. It is comforting here, with colleagues likewise ensconced, phones ringing down the hall, pipes gurgling, a view of a quadrangle I know so well.

  I look out the window, into that quadrangle where a man once asked me why I was unhappy and gave me six thousand dollars to try to fix that.

  I realize in that moment that some things can only happen when you are young and have nothing to lose. Now the answer to what’s next is unlikely to be, or to be provided by, another person. If this were fiction I’d introduce a stranger at just this point in the story. But that would be a cheat, wouldn’t it. The truth is, our stories unfold in less dramatic ways, the transformations that occur are incremental, less governed by happenings in plot than by shifts in feeling.

  I try to imagine what a life lived without a partner would look like. I think of the adventures my daughter and I will have, the bike rides and kayaking and camping. Of the shared meals, midnight swims, cuddles and stargazing and sleep. Of the different parts of the world we will experience together. I remind myself of the privilege of our lives.

  At Easter, we went to Spain with Tamzin and her beautiful children. Louie and Little Lulu, long and lean and blond—the girl Tamzin and I joke is responsible for the fact that I now have a child. We sat on mountainside terraces in Andalucía, gazed at the stars, drank Rioja and ate tapas, while her kids ran around the table and took turns carrying the baby. The baby ate olives and lamb and Manchego cheese. We followed an Easter procession through the late streets of Grenada, walked the cobblestoned roads of mountain villages, played in the sun and the sand and the sea.