Given

by Susan Musgrave

  Frenchy let the HE out of his coffin so he could see the high-schoolers, standing in small groups waiting to go back inside. A few turned to stare as we passed. Hooker waved to a boy who stood apart from the rest — thin, with a shaved head and eyes that, even from a distance, looked empty in his head — but he didn’t wave back. No one waves to a hearse, I knew. It might make the people inside feel even sadder.

  Rainy had switched on Radio Peace and Love. “You are only fifteen-years-old. What was the main reason for you deciding to become a suicide bomber?” the reporter asked. A young girl replied, in Arabic, as a toneless translator drowned her out: “I did it because I didn’t want to go to school. My parents forced me to go to school and I didn’t feel like going. I wanted to be relieved of school.”

  You playing with power there, home girl, Rainy said to the shahida, the martyr-in-waiting. The Twin Terrorists leaned forward, one on either side of me, their ears tuned to the voice on the radio. I listened to the fifteen-year-old say that it is not possible for someone who is about to blow themselves up to look average or normal. “The height of bliss comes only with the end of the countdown,” she said. “Seven, six, five, four, etc. and then you press the button to blow yourself up and then the boom and then you sense yourself floating to another life.”

  “I wonder how she knows,” Hooker said, under his breath.

  The HE had moved to the back of the hearse, as far away from Toop as he could get. “A human being himself is a weapon. No need to carry him. He will walk and explode,” the young woman continued. I punched the radio off when she began speaking of personal sacrifice.

  Looking good be a sacricide, best believe, Rainy said under her breath. I get new shoes, my feet be killin me, that be shoe-icide.

  We were in traffic now. A crippled girl with legs as thin as the toilet plunger she carried in her hands, stepped onto the road, looking neither to the left nor right. I pumped the brakes and leant on the horn. Rainy covered her eyes, as if by not being able to see what would happen next, she could prevent it from happening. The girl didn’t look up, but kept pulling herself along like a broken cricket. She be street pizza, she do that enough times, Rainy said.

  Frenchy wanted to know why so many trees were decorated with lights, and why the lights didn’t go all the way to the ground.

  Jesus be the reason, said Rainy. Chrimas be the season. When people — don’t matter what they religion be — get together and worship Son Jesus. He rise up from the grave and cook hisself a turkey dinner.

  You think Jesus rise up on Christmas day, you think again,” Frenchy said.

  Rainy looked at her sideways. Be more than one way to tilt a jello salad, she said. She also informed Frenchy that the lower branches of the trees weren’t decorated because people traditionally stole the lights that were within reach, at least when she was growing up in the hood. God got a purpose for everythin he do, we don’t always know what that be.

  I tried to focus on the world outside, sensed myself floating back to another life. But there was little evidence of the village of Astoria where Vernal and I had shopped when we lived in the nearby walled community. A McDonald’s occupied the lot where the Scottish butcher had sold haggis and white sausages as thick as his fingers, and there was a coffee house on every other corner. The independent bookstore had been absorbed by Chapters; the Italian-run bakery where Vernal and I had bought weighty loaves of rye bread every Saturday morning had devolved into a pet deli called The Pawstry Shop.

  We drove through a lighted candy cane archway up the main street of town, and stopped at an intersection where, on an artificial snow-bound traffic island, a nativity scene (what Rainy called a “negativity” scene) had been erected. A homeless man sat with his back against the manger, shouting at passing cars. Fake snow stuck to his eyebrows and his hair.

  Painfully cheerful Christmas music leaked through the shop doors and windows onto the street and Frenchy, recognizing some of the carols, said they reminded her of the Condemned Row where every Christmas Eve a bunch of Salvation Army do-gooders had come to bring each of us a sack of leftover Halloween candy, and a copy of the New Testament. We also got a calendar, in a brown envelope stamped “Property of Heaven Valley Correctional Facility,” so we could start afresh in the New Year, X-ing off our days.

  Christmas hadn’t been a reason for celebrating much of anything back at the Facility. We didn’t have a real tree, just some contorted tree-shaped sculpture made from razor wire and meant to symbolize freedom or imprisonment — depending on which side of the fence you were on.

  On the far side of town, in what had once been wilderness, we drove past a moonscape of used car lots, mini-storage units, a U-Haul rental company, and the Crossover Methodist Church. Next to the church, where there had once been a field of waist-high grass where Vernal and I had played hide-and-go-seek with Brutus, a new strip mall had gone up. The neon list of businesses included a food court, Heavenly Relics, a Colour Your World paint store, an Athlete’s Feet, and a Drugs R Us. Hooker suggested we stop and pick up a bottle of Tylenol for Gracie, though I knew it would take more than an over-the-counter painkiller to kill the kind of pain Gracie felt today.

  I entered the lot at the “Exit” sign and drove, against the arrows, in circles, looking for a place to park. Grace wiped her nose on her sleeve and said she only wanted to go back to the island, that she didn’t want her baby to die so far away from home. “Nobody’s going to die,” said Hooker, for the second time since we had arrived on the mainland. This time, though, his voice lacked the same degree of certainty.

  I slid into a space next to a sign that read, “Trust in God but Lock your Car”, beside a stand of artificial Christmas trees marketed as “Stays Green All Year, Unlike Lesser Trees”. Frenchy read the sign aloud and Rainy wanted to know what they meant by “lesser trees”. They be livin once, then chopped down, Frenchy said.

  Rainy looked away, her brown eyes loading up with tears. Same thing as us, she said. We be actual once.

  Frenchy told her to stop being a sucky baby, her blubbering was steaming up the windows and she didn’t want to miss anything, though I could see nothing to miss but grey fog and pavement beyond the steamy windows.

  Hooker said he’d stay with Grace but asked if I would bring them a pizza. Toop’s ears stood up. “Oh, and a chicken salad sandwich for His Royal Highness. Crusts off, remember?”

  The HE, who thought he was being left behind, began making the rat-tat-tat sound of machine gun fire followed by the thuck of bullets hitting a body. Frenchy said he could come, too, and then Rainy said her twins had never been in a shopping mall, either.

  We crossed the parking lot, through stacks of everlasting trees and baskets of plastic holly leaves, pinecones, and plump artificial berries. Rainy stopped to check out a fish-shaped plaque on a Toyota’s fender — one with DARWIN on its belly and two feet sticking out below. She wanted to know what the fish symbolized. I told her it was possible the car’s owner believed in evolution.

  Mean he born against Christians, Frenchy said, and Rainy smacked the Evolve plaque with the flat of her hand. She got down on the asphalt and began chipping away at the plaque with her long fingernails that broke into more pieces than the DARWIN fish plaque. I said evolution was notoriously difficult to stop, knowing, at the same time, that wouldn’t deter Rainy. She stopped to check each fender in the parking lot.

  Everything inside the mall reeked of a bleary artificiality, shops the colours of pigeon feathers selling everything from garden gnomes to robot vacuum cleaners. I felt light-headed, as if my brain were being deprived of oxygen. The air smelled as if it had been continuously recycled through a popcorn machine.

  We passed a wall of TVs, all showing the same image from the Middle East, an aid worker telling a reporter how much it hurt having to tuck children into bed every night in their small bloodied pyjamas. “For orphans, Christmas can be an even harder time of year,” said the head of a charitable organization, soliciting donations.
Rainy said you couldn’t help feeling sorry for kids who got partly blown up, who didn’t know they were being peeped out by millions of people on TV.

  The camera panned over the village where the Red Cross had built a makeshift orphanage. Most buildings on the look-alike screens had been reduced to piles of rubble. They got Sanity Claus over there? Rainy asked. Don’t look like nobody got a roof left for him to chill on.

  Frenchy asked Rainy if she knew why “Sanity Claus” had no kids of his own, and Rainy looked at her suspiciously. Because he only come once a year, and that be down a chimney, Frenchy said.

  Rainy thought about this. They got no roofs over there, they don’t got chimneys, neither.

  I left them on the verge of another argument and escaped to the food court where I ordered the Two-For-One pizza special with everything on it. I couldn’t find a chicken salad sandwich at any of the fast food outlets, so bought a ham and cheese instead, hoping it would do. By the time I got back, my friends had gone their separate ways.

  I found Rainy and the twins staring at a clothing store window display, photographs of Paris supermodels got up as Holocaust victims. The whole world, in the weeks leading up to Christ’s birthday, seemed to have been infected with a virus of bad taste.

  Frenchy and the HE sat on a bench outside Athlete’s Feet that sold Boss Angeloss brand running shoes, like the ones that washed up on Kliminawhit, only in pairs. A pack of teenaged girls, each wearing a fibre-optic holiday hat, blinking Ho Ho Ho in sequence with falling snowflakes sparking across the brim, took over the bench, forcing Frenchy and the HE to move. Frenchy’s boy took the festive atmosphere as a kind of personal affront, a reminder that his life had been cut short.

  Drugs R Us was our last stop, where I bought Tylenol for Grace and Frenchy stole vampire’s teabags and “clearless” nail polish for Rainy. On our way out of the mall we passed a shop selling floral bouquets and motivational cards. Rainy asked me what the sign said, and I told her, “Cut flowers.”

  Flowers hurt when you cut them? Rainy wanted to know, the water rising in her eyes like a river’s in flood time even before I answered. To see certain things clearly, I thought, you had to be Rainy, with tears rolling down into your ears. Was it possible you had to be hurt to see anything at all?

  We were almost at the hearse when Toop came slinking out from between two rows of Christmas trees, a single Boss Angeloss runner in his teeth.

  Hooker had the door open on the passenger’s side and Toop dropped the shoe in his lap. “Ten-and-a-half, left. Mission accomplished!” Hooker wiped Toop’s drool off the runner, and then gave him a kiss, too.

  “You shouldn’t encourage him,” I said.

  Hooker said you’re right. He kissed Toop again and then wiped his lips on the sleeve of his jacket.

  We sat without speaking after that, in the mall parking lot, sharing the Two-For-One pizza. The HE pointed an imaginary assault rifle at every shopping spectre he heard slide past, going glock-glock-glock as he mowed bodies down. From the way his eyes shaved the warm and fuzzy off whatever crossed his sights, you could tell the HE had gone way past the hobby stage of shooting birds out of trees or taking potshots at crowds from the tops of tall buildings on university campuses.

  I set the second pizza in the back between the rollers and Rainy, who had pulled out most of the hair on the right side of her head and had strands of it stuck in her front teeth, opened the box and began flicking pieces of red and green pepper onto the curtains — trying to make our ride look more Chrimassy, she said. Toop poked his nose into the ham and cheese sandwich I unwrapped for him, licked it once, then snapped his head back, as if he had been shocked.

  “Sorry,” I said. “It’s all they had.” Toop squeezed his body into the space at Hooker’s feet, his head between his paws, looking bleakly misunderstood.

  I drove to the gated community: a sign read, “Adult Living Restricted Entry: Authorized Persons Only”, with “Visitors Must Report to Front Gate Before Proceeding” in smaller print underneath.

  “Home sweet home,” Hooker said.

  “One of the reasons I left.”

  A video surveillance camera trained its unblinking eye on us as a sleepy-faced security guard approached, frowning as if trying to decide what our business might be. He bent down to inspect us through the window I had lowered. “Pick-up or delivery?” he asked.

  Who deliver pizza in a dead-wagon? Rainy said.

  I hesitated and before I could say anything Hooker leaned across me to speak. “Jus’ visitin’,” he said.

  The guard’s pen stopped halfway to the sheet of yellow paper attached to his clipboard, as if visitors were an anomaly within the walled city of his orderly world.

  “You got a name? Person you’re going to call on?”

  I gave him the address and his face relaxed, simplified itself. “I know the place,” he said, sounding relieved — he wouldn’t have to file an incident report. “Belongs to that lawyer fellow whose clients always get off?” His eyes flicked over to Hooker and me as if to say gates and fencing worked best on a stable property with non-criminal, mature residents, which didn’t include people like lawyers who defended social misfits who couldn’t keep their noses clean. I felt the urge to defend Vernal’s practice, tell the guard “you are only guilty if they can prove it,” but stopped myself, and smiled, insincerely, gesturing with my hands — palms up and open.

  The guard told me I could apply for a coded Visitor ID card so I wouldn’t have a problem coming and going. I said I didn’t foresee any problems and he said “suit yourself, ma’am.” He handed me a booklet that I didn’t look at but passed to Hooker, the Visitor’s Guide to the Adult Community at Astoria: Your Search for Niceness Ends Here! that included a street map, the route to our former residence marked in red. The map let us know, in bold lettering, we were not to deviate.

  “A lot of elderly people live here,” the guard said, looking down at the hearse, as if he found it distasteful. “You are required to call Safe Arrivals when you reach your designated address.”

  I put up the window, and the electronic gates slid open to let us pass. We drove through an opening in a wall topped with broken glass set in concrete, much like the one surrounding the hacienda on Tranquilandia. Jagged glass that could shred a man’s hands into lace.

  The suburb had an eerie stillness to it, like the air before a dead wind rises. At one time it had been filled with the shouts of children playing street hockey at the end of the cul-de-sacs, and, in summer, their older siblings, lawn tennis on private courts. I missed the squeals of infants as their nannies fussed over them at the shallow ends of swimming pools. I missed the sounds of children growing up in a world where the worst pain they’d experience would be the sting of a parent’s rebuke. Now there were no children, anywhere, to miss.

  No poor people chill in this hood? Rainy said, as I cranked the wheel and turned right onto a wide, tree-lined street with no above-ground wiring.

  Price of housin keep them out, Frenchy said. If she had been born in a killer-clean hood like this, she said, — no drive-bys, no crack house on every corner — she might have had a chance growing up. She might not have ended up getting executed on Death Row for killing her only kid.

  Rich people don’t need to kill their kids, Rainy said. They hire up babysitters, they want to go out drinkin.

  God always been down on the poor, Frenchy said. She figured God must have invented poverty in order to entice poor people into doing mind-numbing jobs no one would think of doing unless they were flat broke first. Money was God’s most cruel invention — the only way He could get you out of bed and off to your minimum wage job. For once Rainy didn’t contradict.

  The competitive Christmas spirit thrived in this well-off suburb, and each outdoor tree outside every child-forsaken home was festooned with lights that went all the way to the ground. We drove past lawns studded with reindeer, penguins, carollers, candy canes and snowmen — many of them inside inflatable globes a-flurry wi
th snowflakes. There was a lone bear holding a dreidel beside a giant menorah flickering neon purple, green and orange — and a lawn that held a cluttered mysticism of its own: Santa with his sleigh and reindeer parked next to an inflatable manger surrounded by camels, donkeys, and a dozen pink flamingos.

  Sanity Claus be a fat-ass white muhfo, Rainy said.

  Same as God be, Frenchy said. Fat and white.

  “This is it,” I announced, “we’re home.” Aside from the “For Sale” sign mounted on the decorative stone wall, the word “Sold” imprinted on it, like a brag, the Walled Off and grounds looked the same as when I had left it behind, thirteen years ago. Now all the feelings I’d had of not belonging came lamentably back.

  Rainy and Frenchy stared in awe at the house where Vernal and I had tried to live. The twins raised their arms in a gesture of praise and the HE rubbed his blind eyes with his hands.

  I parked at the foot of the front steps and opened my door. Toop jumped out ahead of me, as a ball of fur the size of a tea cozy, wearing wrap-around sunglasses, darted from under the evergreen magnolia Vernal had planted to mark the celebration of our first anniversary, a tree that had never bloomed. The fur ball lunged at our tires, and when they failed to fight back, turned his attention to Toop, sniffing the place where his leg had once been.

  “He’s got an amputee fetish, what can I say?” a familiar voice came, as I started up the steps. When I looked I hardly recognized him, he’d aged that much. He wore his brown hair, now streaked with greyish-white, twisted at the back of his head into a small cluster of unruly curls. As I got closer I could see he had lost a few more teeth since we’d last met.

  But it was his nostrils — big enough to be vacuum cleaner attachments — that gave him away. In the early days of my marriage, I-5 had visited our home on a regular basis, packing a pocketful of cocaine and a pistol under his ruana. We hadn’t been close.