Given

by Susan Musgrave

  Sometimes any memory of another can be godlike. I walked to the end of the wharf where I could hear the sound of each raindrop hitting the sea — each drip making a ripple that spread out from the centre — the lapping of waves. Looking down into the water I saw a white plastic bag billowing beneath the surface, caught in the current like a drowned swan.

  A hard rain began to pelt the dock, the wind got up in gusts, and was soon whipping the flag so hard the thwacking sounds echoed out from the pole it was attached to. An announcement came for all passengers bound for Kliminawhit to return to their vehicles for loading. I wasn’t dressed for weather like this, anyway, and sprinted back to the hearse, noting how much space the car behind us had left between his vehicle and ours. Not only do people dislike seeing a hearse, they especially don’t like waiting in line behind one.

  The lane next to us had filled up with a posse of RV’s, with names like Rustler and Nomad and Wilderness Trails, implying their drivers spent a lot of time avoiding main roads, when the opposite was true. Parked beside us was a truck with MOTHER CLUCKERS painted on the side. The noises coming from the truck’s cargo, packed together in crates the size of egg cartons, reminded me of the sounds some women on the Condemned Row made in their sleep.

  I climbed in beside Vernal as the cars ahead of us began to move.

  Rainwater beaded down the window as we drove onto the ferry like any ordinary couple riding towards their future in a hearse.

  Vernal found something to keep me dry — a grey waterproof cape he kept in his Emergency Preparedness Kit behind the driver’s seat. It fit over my head and shoulders, and was several sizes too big. “It’ll keep the rain from getting in, that’s what matters,” Vernal said.

  We climbed the stairs to the main passenger deck. Vernal stopped at the purser’s desk to pick up the key to our cabin and to book a table for dinner in the Fine Dining Lounge where he said he’d meet me in fifteen minutes. I stepped through two heavy doors onto the outside deck and smelled salt on the wind. A series of steel benches had been bolted to the deck and manacled to thick black posts at either end, as if someone were afraid the benches would be stolen. Piles of chain dotted the deck, coiled like great black helpings of spaghetti.

  I heard the throb of the engine change pitch, and felt the ferry lurch beneath me. I leaned into the wind, pressing myself against the railing. As we slipped out of the dock and entered open water I reached into my pocket for the Latrine’s ID, and dropped it over the ship’s side, watching it stutter on the breeze until it landed on the foam and was swallowed in the ship’s wake. Ocean look way-blue, way it do on TV, I heard Rainy whisper. Any ocean blue, not just on TV,” Frenchy shot back and then their otherworldly voices were drowned out by a recorded announcement welcoming us aboard.

  I went back inside and followed the signs to the dining lounge where I leaned against the door, feeling self-conscious in my ill-fitting rain cape. I waited until I got tired of waiting, then fell in behind a party of revellers who stumbled into one another as they tried to negotiate their way through the Driftwood Bar door. I had never felt at home in a bar — Vernal’s home away from home. I looked around for him, the way women for hundreds of years have done, standing lost in the doorway of a pub or lounge, wondering who they are married to and why it has come to this.

  I spotted him at once. Vernal nearly always chose a corner table, farthest from the drink, as if trying to keep as far away from temptation as possible. Before I’d left him and moved into my own apartment, he’d always kept his commodity in the liquor cabinet in the living room and made the trip back and forth — from his office or outside by the pool or to wherever he did his drinking. He didn’t like to have the bottle within arm’s reach, believing this was the first sign of addiction, and that getting up and going to another room and then pouring a drink meant you had were not powerless over alcoholism.

  On Vernal’s right sat the most unattractive man I had ever seen, and I’d seen a lot of human ugliness, both inside and out. His skin, the colour of canned tuna, bore deep circular pockmarks.

  A pregnant woman dressed in a short, sleeveless, loose-fitting tunic made of deer hide, combed the man’s knotted waist-length mullet with the fingers of her right hand. She had eyes the same colour as the middle of a Mars Bar, so big they seemed to swallow the rest of her face, and cheekbones you could cut yourself on just from looking, and she cradled a little bundle in the crook of her other arm. She looked too young to be a mother, and to be expecting again so soon. Her own hair fell from her shoulders, a tantrum of red, which, if you weren’t beautiful and fearless, you might consider an affliction. She was tall, almost too thin — she be dying or else she be rich, Rainy whispered. She’d slipped off her sandals, and kicked them under Vernal’s chair.

  As I stood watching, the woman leaned down and kissed the man I could barely stand to look at, the way new lovers do. Maybe he hadn’t always been so ugly, I thought. Maybe he’d been handsome once and then, after the acid had disfigured him, she’d stayed with him out of the goodness of her heart: when you were beautiful you could squander goodness. Perhaps, being so beautiful, she didn’t know how to be unkind.

  I considered sneaking out, going to wait for Vernal in our cabin, but then remembered — Vernal had the key. Besides, it was too late — he had seen me, and was signalling me over.

  I slid in next to him, and he introduced me — as “a ghost from the past” — to Grace Moon and her friend, Al. Grace, who had a soft, feline quality, wore three carved gold bracelets on one arm, a giant key and a medicine pouch around her neck. I saw her scarred throat, the stitches stretching from one side of her neck to the other.

  When she reached across the table to shake my hand, I saw more scars up her arms — slash-marks that followed her veins all the way from her wrists to her elbows — not just your run-of-the-mill cry for help. Rainy used to say Frenchy was lucky to have scars you could see, what was the use of having scars on the inside where you couldn’t show them off to anyone? Where another girl might have had a broken heart tattooed on her breast, or a handcuff with a broken link on her wrist, Frenchy spent a lifetime tattooing her rage on her skin, bringing blood to the surface where everyone could see her pain.

  I pulled my hand back, startled, as the bundle in Grace’s lap let out an inhuman wail. Grace lifted him into the air and began rocking him with such fervour I worried she was going to shake to death the source of the terrible sound.

  “I’d kill for a fix right now,” Al muttered into his beer. His ugliness had not improved with proximity.

  Grace’s tawny eyes looked frozen gold, and her smile clicked off. “That’s just Al,” she said, looking at me apologetically, as if being “just Al” were an excuse for any kind of bad behaviour. She rocked the inconsolable creature in her arms; Al — not, I hoped, the baby’s father — reached up and pushed his snagged locks out of his eyes, which was when I noticed his forearm covered in sores, the kind Rainy used to get from the repeated use of dirty needles. I wanted to feel sorry for Al, but I didn’t have enough sorry in me for anyone that unpleasant.

  “He can’t help it — he’s programed that way,” Grace said, looking down at the bundle in her arms, and then back at Al. I didn’t know whether she meant the baby, or “just Al”.

  Vernal rubbed the stubble on his chin with the heel of his hand. I could tell, by the fewness of his words, he was uncomfortable being around Al. Al wanted us to know this was their anniversary, the reason they were celebrating; he’d met Grace exactly one week ago when he was fresh out of rehab and looking for a buzz. Grace said she had stayed off drugs ever since her visit to the hospital to have photographs taken of the baby inside her — but she’d let him buy her one for the road. Grace drank her beer straight from the bottle, draining it, then, when the bottle was empty, picking at a corner of the label and peeling it off in little strips.

  “She’s drinking for two,” Al said.

  Grace lowered her eyes — now she was the one looking emb
arrassed. She said she believed her baby was going to be born with special powers — she had heard him drumming and singing from the inside of her. She reached into the pouch around her neck and took out a grainy ultrasound photo of her unborn child, stroking his tiny body, lightly, up and down, with her index finger, the way I had stroked my baby’s eyelids when he was fitful or too tired to fall asleep.

  The child in Grace’s arms let out another screak, as if he sensed a threat. “Last night we couldn’t get him to wake up for at least six hours,” Grace said, wiping the baby’s mouth, then tucking the photograph back into the pouch.

  “She tried to blame me for looking at him,” Al said, making his idea of an ugly face that seemed like an improvement over his real one.

  Grace gave him a brief, tight smile. “We went to bed when it was getting light out, and Baby started to cry. I was glad. I thought we’d lost him for good.”

  I reached for the glass of water Vernal had ordered but hadn’t touched, thinking of the babies on the planes from Tranquilandia again, and their mothers — mothers like me — praying that other passengers wouldn’t come down the aisle and say things like, “Isn’t she precious?” “Is he yours?” “Can I hold her?” or that a flight attendant might become suspicious, especially if the plane was delayed and the baby didn’t fuss. I longed to reach across the table, lay my hands on Grace’s full belly and feel the fists and the heartbeat of her child, his earnest limbs jerking in unison as if he were practising running away. I wished babies were contagious.

  Vernal took my hand saying he hoped Grace and Al would excuse us but we had a table reserved for dinner. Al said go ahead, they were sticking to their liquid diet these days, and ordered two more beers.

  Gracie’s baby wasn’t exactly her own, Vernal hastened to explain in the dining lounge where we were shown to a table by the window. It was a life-size model of a baby that cried at random intervals, came with all the accessories, and was inescapable. Gracie had volunteered to participate in the Baby-Think-It-Over Program, designed by Social Services to teach young, drug-using mothers the realities of parenthood. As a trial parent she had to wear a “care-key” around her neck, and if she neglected her baby it would register in a computer chip inside the baby’s head. A red light behind his eyes meant she was handling him too roughly, a yellow light that he had been left to cry longer than a minute, and a green light that he needed to be fed.

  “If the lights go out, it means . . . what?” I said.

  “Sounds like they had a close call last night, doesn’t it?”

  Our server set a pitcher of ice water in the centre of the table between us. I picked at the oysters Vernal had ordered for me — local oysters served on a bed of white rocks. I had no energy, or the desire, to eat the steak au jus that came next, especially after our server brought complimentary motion sickness bags.

  Grace Moon’s story got worse: her particular doll was underweight having been modelled on a crack baby, born addicted to the drug his mother smoked all during her pregnancy. The cries we’d heard were the tape-recorded cries of a real drug-affected baby, which explained why they sounded familiar. But not even Angel, as he lay sickening at the Clínica Desaguadero in the jungle, had screamed as desperately when I tried to quiet him in my arms after the faith healer swept his body with flowers and sweet basil, and suspended amuletos over his head to prevent the onset of mal de ojo, the evil eye.

  “The program’s supposed to change your mind about getting pregnant in the first place,” Vernal said, “but if it happens . . . in certain cases . . . Social Services wants you to think pretty seriously about giving the baby up for adoption.”

  Vernal said Grace’s social worker wanted Grace to sign her baby over before he was even born. Grace said no way, she didn’t want anyone else raising her kid. “As you can imagine,” Vernal continued, “that Al’s not stoked about being a stepparent, either.”

  I asked what, if anything, Vernal knew about Al — if he had any idea why a woman like Grace would be attracted to such a man.

  “Not much,” Vernal said, in response to the first part of my question.

  “He can dress himself, at least,” I said. “He’s got that going for him.”

  Vernal scoffed at my remark. “As far as I can see his best quality is his bank account. His father owns, I don’t know, all the hotels in Mexico. Al can stay high off his interest, if he’s motivated enough.”

  I laughed at this. Vernal came from old money himself, the kind so fusty with age and respectability no one remembers it was ever clean and new. Or how it was made, and who dirtied their hands in the process. We had argued from the day we met about the unfair division of wealth in the world. The Christmas we’d been burglarized the thieves took the telescope Vernal had given me so I could look out over the city to see how poor people lived.

  “I say something to make you laugh?” Vernal asked. “I haven’t heard you laugh like that since . . . I don’t know when. Before we were married, come to think of it.” I didn’t comment, and then Vernal added that he thought Gracie was wasting her life when she could be making her own millions modelling for Victoria’s Secret. I said I didn’t imagine Victoria’s Secret used pregnant, intravenous drug users to model their lingerie.

  “Trust me on this one, Grace is flying straight these days,” Vernal said, as he filled my water glass.

  I watched as he took a drink from his own, then slipped an ice cube onto his tongue, and crunched it between his teeth. I hadn’t seen ice since I’d left Tranquilandia. There it was generally believed that iced water must by definition be pure, regardless of its origins. At the Clínica Desaguadero it was offered to guests as a medicinal tonic, so clear and cold and western, so incompatible with the sticky cloying island heat. Buried in the ice cube, though, could be a germ that led to delirium and death. I learned quickly, because I had to: it’s the thing you trust that does you in.

  Vernal set his glass down, then reached for my hand. I could smell Grace’s scent, like baby powder, on his skin.

  The first time I’d slept with Vernal I swear I had to beg him to let me take his clothes off. He’d said he’d wanted time to think about it, to be quite sure, because he knew it would be more than just a casual undertaking. He actually used the word undertaking — as if I were a study in the dismal trade. And then when we finally did end up naked he told me to calm down.

  In all things related to love and sex, Vernal exercised caution. A cautious lover was not what I had been looking for. I wanted the dumb thrust of life, not a man who apologizes for making you come so hard it hurts.

  How could I have thought that marriage might be a solution? I was the one who proposed, though whenever Vernal told the story, he gave a different version. “I told her, this is for life. I want you to be my widow.”

  Vernal, I soon discovered, lacked a number of social graces. I blamed the private school he’d gone to, one where the future leaders of our country are sent to learn how to behave like gentlemen. Sex education, otherwise known as the facts of life, was reduced to a single scrap of advice: when you get to the trough, don’t act like pigs.

  Sex education in prison hadn’t been much more enlightened. Our care and treatment counsellor used a strip of masking tape stuck to her arm to describe the effects of multiple sex partners. The first time she used the tape it came away from her arm with bits of skin and hair attached. When she put the tape on someone else’s arm it didn’t stick as well and came away with their skin and hair, also. “Stick the tape to yet another person’s arm and you’ve got biological matter from three people and a tape that doesn’t bond very well.” People, she said, were like masking tape, too.

  Our cabin had two bunks — an upper and a lower. Vernal sat on the bottom one, and pulled off his hiking boots. He wanted my opinion: did I think Grace capable of being a good mother?

  “In what way?” I asked.

  “I find other people interesting, that’s all. I didn’t mean to suggest anything duplicitous,” he s
aid, defensively.

  I squeezed into the bathroom and sat on the toilet to let Vernal finish undressing in privacy, wondering what point he was trying to make. He said that if he was looking for a wife again he would expect her to make sacrifices and that he would have to be faithful, too.

  I remembered from living with Vernal that the more intense his feelings, the more likely he was to say the opposite of what he meant. He wanted, always, to maintain a high level of tension by keeping the dialogue evasive, filled with suppressed information and unstated emotions. Conversations with Vernal were like icebergs: most of their weight, their substance, was under the surface, where they could do their best harm.

  “Are you trying to tell me something,” I said, pushing the door open with my foot. “Because if you are, get it over with.”

  Vernal froze, one left leg halfway into a pair of sweat pants. “You haven’t changed, have you,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  The truth is, prison life detracts from a person’s savoir faire. When you do years behind walls your idea of proper decorum becomes severely distorted. “Life on Death Row isn’t all that conducive to personal growth,” I said.

  “You take everything I say so . . . personally.”

  “I’m a person,” I said. “How am I supposed to take it?”

  Vernal gave me an exasperated look. “Can’t we just have a conversation? It’s like you have to have an argument, or you don’t see the point in talking.”