Given

by Susan Musgrave

  Also on her dresser, in their glass cabinet, were the look-alike china dolls that as a child I’d been forbidden to touch. My mother had kept them locked up where even the dust could not violate them. She told me, years later, that the key had been lost, but today when I tugged on the tiny gold padlock it came apart in my hands. I opened the glass doors, and let the dolls breathe fresh air for the first time in so many years.

  I lay on my mother’s bed, unable to sleep. In the distance I could hear sirens, a night train’s mournful wail, and closer, in the hallway outside my room, Toop, missing Hooker, getting up, pacing back and forth, then lying down with a great exhalation of breath. I heard my heart, too, beating away in the darkness of my body. Only temporary, it seemed to say. Only temporary.

  I rose before daylight. Frenchy had already logged on to her ALA Meeting, and had skipped a few steps (when you were dead, she said, the order of things like the steps you took didn’t matter) — to the Fourth: “Forced ourselves to remember and relive every nauseating detail of our former lives (especially the way we treated our children).” The HE stared at her with his blind eyes that could appear playful when he didn’t have detonating on his mind.

  Rainy, with her twins propped up on either side of her like deadly bookends, sat on the living room floor, eating candy canes for breakfast in front of the TV where an all-male panel discussed the modern woman’s role in suicide bombings, in particular the recent terrorist attack by the all-female Army of Roses. There were long queues of young shahida’s-in-waiting more than willing to join the road to heaven, the panel’s moderator said. One panelist argued that we shouldn’t expect women, known to be bearers of life, to be efficient killing machines. Another said the very people we were least likely to suspect, the givers of life, might be those who were dying to kill. It was his opinion that a woman should be required to produce one son and one daughter before she be allowed to blow herself up. After she had fulfilled her demographic role, only then should she be permitted to participate in armed struggle.

  Holy Uterus be one more stinkin old needle sticker, Rainy said, lifting Baby-Think-It-Over from the Moses basket. This be where she hide her stash. She reached into the doll’s gutted body and pulled out the syringe, a spoon, and the fistful of empty flaps she’d discovered. She had also found the leather pouch where Grace kept her care-key and the ultrasound photo of her baby, under the loveseat in the sunroom. If you looked at it long enough, she said, you could see Son Jesus in the arms of the “Version” Mary in the black and white photo.

  I glanced at the grainy photo of Gracie’s baby swimming in his sea of dark. Rainy was hardwired for Jesus — she saw him everywhere she looked, and especially in everything she ate. Since I’d known her there’d been a Holy Tortilla, Christ crucified on a pretzel, and Jesus rising from his tomb out of a jar of Prego spaghetti sauce. Rainy had started toying with the needles that held her head on her neck. I hoped to God she wasn’t thinking about sticking one of Gracie’s needles in her arm, going back to her old ways, trying to blot out her life. I threw the doll to Toop. “Go and bury it in the garden,” I told him.

  Hooker had called during the night and left a message on the machine. I listened as he said Grace was going to be okay, and ran my finger around a heart-shaped bloodstain on the loveseat as he said he would stay in town where he could be close to her. His message was punctuated with long silences, as if he expected the machine to speak back. He didn’t leave a number; he didn’t even ask about Toop. He said he would try to call again in the morning.

  I went to the kitchen, wondering out loud how I was going to wash Grace’s blood off the loveseat; Martha Stewart’s holiday guide to stain removal hadn’t included bloodstains.

  I-5 volunteered a home remedy he had learned “from what he used to do for a living,” a paste made of meat tenderizer mixed with water and then rubbed into the fabric. I-5 had spent a lot of years in federal never-never land as a result of what he had done for a living. Besides retailing drugs he had been the sort of landscape artist who gives wooded areas a bad name. He lured people who didn’t pay him into the bushes and killed them. (It was from this career path that stemmed I-5’s need for Vernal’s services as a lawyer.) Vernal had got him off his most recent murder charge on a technicality. The Crown had claimed, in their written argument to the judge, that I-5 had “repeatedly” killed the deceased. Vernal argued that it should have been “reportedly.”

  I watched I-5’s hands as he sponged off the meat tenderizer-paste, thought about the blood that had stained them, the blood on the hands of a man who kills but does not commit murder. When he’d finished, and left the sunroom, I sat down to use the phone. The first call I made was to Mercy.

  An operator informed me visiting hours were from one to three, adding that patient Moon was in B-Unit — as if I would understand the implications — and there were no phones in any of the rooms for reasons that had to do with security.

  I called St. Jude’s, and asked for Vernal again. The receptionist was more helpful than the last one and told me Vernal’s doctor had discharged him three days ago, and moved him to a recovery centre.

  By noon, when I still hadn’t heard from Hooker, I decided to drive to Mercy to visit Grace myself. Rainy and Frenchy wanted to come for the ride, but the twins had found The Simpsons on TV and insisted on staying behind. The HE remained upstairs, guarding the coffin that he had repossessed, picking at the shrapnel trapped beneath his skin.

  I’d spent less than twenty-four hours at the Walled Off but already I had started feeling the way I’d felt in prison when I didn’t own the keys; I was glad when a guard waved us through the front gate and we were free. I took a back road into Vancouver, to avoid the busy highway, a route that led past the Perpetual Life Pet Cemetery where there had always been more flowers on any given day than in its human counterpart further along the road. It was easier, I supposed, to love something when there was a good chance it wouldn’t outlive you.

  I switched on the radio where there was nothing but Christmas music, and turned it off again. We stopped at a red light as we headed into the downtown core and I watched a garbage bag being buffeted about, caught in a whirlpool of air, a lost soul trapped in the centre of the intersection. Rainy wanted to jump out and rescue the bag, but then the light turned green and we left it, fluttering and ragged, a wind-grieved ghost in the middle of the road.

  Our Lady of Mercy had been built as a mental hospital at the turn of the century, and after that had served as a remand centre, a dismal place where prisoners were held awaiting trial. In recent years it had become a hospital again, with an infamous psychiatric unit and a ward for the criminally insane. It was, too, as Grace had said, the hospital for hardcore addicts.

  The parking lot in front of the hospital, reserved for doctors and emergency vehicles, had been built around a fountain in the middle of which a nude boy cavorted with dolphins. The public lot in the back was full, but I found a vacant spot in an area marked Shipping and Receiving, parked and stuck the “On Appointment” sign in the front window. We walked back around to the entrance where two gold-painted lions lay in repose on either side of the steps leading up to the main doors. Rainy asked why the fountain boy’s swipe wasn’t hard. Boy’s swipe only be publicly hard in kiddie porn on the Internet, Frenchy told her.

  Once inside we passed a gift shop selling an array of forlorn looking objects the mental patients made in their occupational therapy sessions. I bought flowers, blue and green carnations because it was all they had, and went into the waiting room where I took a number and sat in one of the chairs bolted together in multiples of threes. People — it was hard to tell which were patients and which were visitors — stood in little groups around the room. A man in a wheelchair backed into my legs and told me to watch where I was going. Dudes in wheelchairs they be used to pushin people round, Rainy said.

  A notice on the wall advised that anyone with information leading to the arrest of individuals bringing drugs or other contra
band into the hospital should report it at once, “anonymity assured.” The hospital, though, seemed to be trafficking in drugs of its own. A poster showed a mother and child skipping together across a flawless stretch of sand. Beneath the grainy photo, a note scrawled in crayon, “Thanks, Paxil. I got my mommy back.” Another depicted a woman just out of bed but impeccably groomed, wearing a white terry cloth robe. A marmalade cat, a youthful version of Aged Orange, perched on a shelf above her bathroom sink. The woman breezily tickled the cat’s chin with her toothbrush. “A new day. A brighter outlook. Make it happen. The Zoloft morning.”

  A newspaper lay on the floor under the seat across from me. I drew it towards me with my foot and scooped it up as the receptionist called my number.

  I told her I was here to see a friend, Grace Moon, in B-Unit. The woman looked away, somewhere over my left shoulder. “B-Unit’s a locked ward, under 24-hour surveillance; only immediate family members can visit a patient there.” When I didn’t make a move to leave, she looked at me as if I were yet another irksome member of the public trying to make her life difficult. “I can’t wait until this day is over,” she said, under her breath.

  I asked if I could leave a message for Grace, and she shrugged. “Suit yourself. There’s no guarantees. Even if it gets to her, and I can’t say it will, doesn’t mean she is under any obligation to read it.” I said I’d take a chance, wrote “Grace, call home,” and printed the phone number underneath.

  Bitch and a tampon do the same muhfo job, Rainy said, as we left. Both be stuck up cunts.

  The story appeared above the fold on the front page of the paper I brought home from the hospital: the charred remains of a man’s body had been found on Kliminawhit, in a wooded area near the Port of Mystic. Anyone with information should call the RCMP Homicide Division.

  I wondered if Hooker had seen the article, thought of what he’d said the night I’d left him at the dump: don’t worry, I always clean up after myself. I tried not to think the worst as I busied myself for the rest of the afternoon emptying my mother’s cupboards of everything from her ninety-six-piece Wedgewood Dinner Service (“some chipped”) to a box of toast caddies that needed replating. My mother had loathed the idea of people running their hands over her beautiful things once she had shuffled off, and here I was, doing what she had had reason to dread; my task was to reduce my mother’s life to a series of inventories — what to keep, what to be sent to the auction, what would be donated to charity and redistributed to the needy.

  I put aside a box labelled Hurt Books (my mother had not been the sort of person to pass up a book, or anything else in this life, because it had been damaged), and another of the empty picture frames she had bought at rummage sales, hoping to fill them with photographs of the grandchildren she never had. If I had learned anything from my mother it was how to appreciate everything that mattered to me, before it was gone. So much of what helped us through our lives, the things we really cared about, were things we took for granted, until they broke or stopped working: only then did we started paying attention to them. I remembered dropping a Venetian glass vase Vernal had given me, then weeping over the pieces. I had never realized how beautiful it was until it was on its way to the ground.

  I knew I had a lot to learn from the earless teacup, the silver teaspoon I had bent, as a child, trying to scoop rock-hard ice cream into a bowl, the wayward thread on a lacy tablecloth’s hem. Now I had to glue a handle on the teacup, unbend the spoon, tie off the thread on the hem. I would have to give these broken things a new life, and in doing so, find a simple gladness in my own, and learn to feel grateful.

  But would I ever find the time to reshape the wire coat hangers my mother had saved, the ones Vernal had straightened to break into his car when he’d locked himself out? Would I fix the spring on the broken mousetrap, sharpen the blunt nail clippers, restring the badminton racquets, patch the garden hose? My mother had always said even a broken thing of beauty could be a joy forever, but when it came to her cedar chest full of burned out Christmas lights — forever, I decided, would be stretching it; I set them aside for the dumpster. Thinking of the dumpster reminded me again of how I’d dropped Hooker with Al’s body at the Mystic dump, how I knew I was somehow more involved than I had ever intended to be. I was, as Vernal would say, “implicated.”

  I saved a few of my mother’s unbroken things with Christmas gifts in mind — an umbrella that still opened and closed, for Rainy, my mother’s tortoise shell hair brush, comb and mirror set for Frenchy, and the look-alike china dolls for the twins.

  By the end of the afternoon the dining room table was piled high with all the treasures I couldn’t throw away, but didn’t have room for in my life, like the carpets she’d stored under her bed so they wouldn’t fade in the sunlight and the box of pine-scented Christmas candles I remembered from my childhood. My mother had arranged them in the same centrepiece every year, but never lit them — that would have been wasteful. She had stored the candles in the linen closet next to the hot water heater, on top of the expensive linen sheets Vernal and I had bought her, and she had considered too good to use. The candles had melted on the sheets, leaving permanent red and green stains.

  I had just opened a shoebox containing my mother’s collection of thirty years’ worth of Christmas turkey wishbones, when I heard the phone ring. I heard I-5 say, “Will do, I’ll pass it on. Sure thing. You got it. We got everything covered. Yeah, yeah, okay boss. I’ll give her the 411.”

  I went into the kitchen as he was hanging up. “The jefe,” he said, as he picked up where he’d left off, clipping the Bomb’s toenails on an unravelling Persian carpet my mother had never allowed us to walk on. I-5 said that ever since Toop had come into their lives his pooch liked to be groomed more frequently.

  “And?”

  “I already gave him a Xanax a couple of hours ago. He’s been getting these hair balls around his, you know, his, you got to wonder what those two are getting up to when we’re not looking. He hates it when I start cutting . . . ”

  “What did Vernal say?” I interrupted. Something in my tone made I-5 look at me in a new way. He put down his toenail clippers and held up his hands in a gesture of surrender.

  “Whoooa, killer. Don’t get your shirt in a knot. The jefe’s checked into some place . . . they don’t allow contact with family members. Not for the first three weeks, they do some kind of assessment on him.”

  “What sort of place?”

  I-5 shrugged. “One of those treatment centre type of deals.

  You want my opinion, the jefe needs a stiff drink, not rehabilitating.” He began clipping his own nails even though anyone could see they weren’t in need of clipping.

  “A drink is the last thing he needs.”

  He shrugged again. “I got this friend of mine, gave up everything. Pills, booze, crack, junk, even quit smoking. Now he goes to church, his wife’s divorced him, and his kids have to leave the property when they want to get high. When you’re sober and clean, it’s the rest of the world that’s fucked.”

  I realized, as he spoke, that Vernal wasn’t doing I-5 a favour by having him live at the Walled Off, it was the other way around. As long as Vernal kept I-5 close, he would always have an excuse to drink and do drugs, especially since he wasn’t planning on living forever, as he had reminded me numerous times.

  I went upstairs to begin packing up Vernal’s office. Frenchy was online explaining to her ALA group that because Step Four had encouraged her to dredge up and relive every nauseating detail of her former life (especially the way she had treated her son) she had decided to skip right ahead to Step Five: “Shared these details with the dead (as we understand them to be) who have begun to manifest themselves in unexpected ways.”

  The Twin Terrors had driven the HE from the coffin again, and had removed their veils for the first time since manifesting themselves as martyrs-in-waiting; their faces looked at peace. The HE squatted on the opposite side of the room with the pocketful of rocks he
had collected from the driveway, trying to drive the twins out of the coffin by throwing the rocks at their exposed heads. Even though he was blind, he was right on target. But the twins never lost their composure, not even when the gravel imbedded itself in their foreheads, or left pockmarks of blood on their cheeks.

  Frenchy quit her meeting before it was over to take the HE for a time-out in the hall closet. When they’d gone I began emptying the drawers in Vernal’s desk. Vernal had saved every letter he had ever received from me in prison, and tied them together with a length of butcher string. In prison we had relied on letters — both writing and receiving them — to combat the ills of daily existence. The longing I felt for certain letters — those from my family in particular — allowed me to remember what it was like to be real.

  I had packed everything but the computer and started down the stairs when I came across Rainy sitting on the landing with a light bulb, like a giant white tear, between her knees. She had been on her way to replace the bulb that had burned out overhead, when she’d heard me coming.

  Look like someone et up yo cake, she said, turning the conversation away from herself. I told her it wasn’t easy, packing up your dead mother’s life, and that Vernal had checked into a residential treatment centre and I wasn’t allowed to speak to him.

  You make your grave, you lay in it, aight? Rainy said. Rainy didn’t have a lot of sympathy for other people’s weaknesses, especially those who were wealthy enough they didn’t have to steal to get high. You rich and white you got a dependency problem, she said. You go on TV tell everybody you sorry, then check into a place for rich fuckups. You be poor and black with a crack pipe and a gatt you get shook down by the cops, get a beatin laid on you and yo sorry ass be hauled off to jail.

  On Tuesday morning, I-5 woke me from a dreamless sleep. I went downstairs, picking at a shred of skin coming loose along the side of my thumbnail. It peeled away easily, but left a burning sore.