Cargo of Orchids

by Susan Musgrave

  From what I had learned about Consuelo’s mother, she was not much different from the orchids she raised—both were masters at making a host of creatures do their bidding to ensure their survival. In the orchid world, as in the Black Widow’s, it was the survival of the most devious. Like her orchids, the Black Widow had evolved elaborate devices for luring hostages and pressing them into her service: one orchid enticed insects with the scent of food, another used sex as a lure, and a third variety drugged its prey.

  Yepez said he was glad he wasn’t an insect. They fell for the ruse, no matter how many times they had been deceived.

  I had just finished bathing Angel, and we were lying naked on the bed, when Consuelo came by to drop off another flap, then rolled a fat joint—maduro con queso (tobacco and marijuana mixed together with basuco). She poured herself a glass of aguardiente and sat on a corner of the bed, looking at me while Angel rested with one eye open. I loved him so much I always wanted to wake him when he started to nod off, as if I couldn’t afford a minute without him, as if we had so little time left.

  Consuelo picked up Angel and kissed him. Her face always relaxed when he smiled at her. I had to allow myself to believe she actually cared for him then, and I’ve gone on believing—it makes life easier now.

  “Mi chinita adorada,” Consuelo called him. My little angel. But her face changed as she squeezed his tiny, naked thigh between her thumb and her finger. “Maybe it is time you started weaning him. He is thin. Maybe he is getting sick from your drugs? When you are gone, he will not need a wet nurse; he will be looking for another connection.”

  When you are gone. It is interesting the words we choose to remember, the ones we forget. In court, the prosecutor used the word connection every time she got a chance. But she never mentioned my real connection to Angel, the connection that went far deeper than drugs or money or the fact that I smoked basuco and let Daisy do things to me I wouldn’t have let her do if I hadn’t been out there on a cocaine high.

  They say every grave holds a reason. I try to imagine my son standing over my grave, wondering why I’m down there under the grass and he’s up above, always looking for the connection that could make him feel so sweet and sad and good. Mrs. Dykstra, my counsellor, says these are morbid thoughts, ones I should banish from my mind.

  Angel gave Consuelo the lazy eye, balled his hands into fists and took an equally lazy poke at the air. I know I sound like a mother speaking, but he had something, that baby. It made people reach for him, as if they hoped that by touching him, some of his grace, his way of being in the world, would rub off.

  Outside, the sun had not yet cleared the borrachio tree, or sent its soothing rays to loosen the hold of the strangling creeper making its way around the tree’s trunk. Outside is where I wanted to be, but I turned my back on the window and stayed inside the room, inside myself. Angel made cooing sounds, like a pigeon fluttering in a coop, and when Consuelo left, locking the door after her, I lay on the bed, nursing him as best I could. And as Angel seized hold of my nipple I prayed, I actually prayed: let the drug take his small, perfect body. Let the annihilating angel take his heart, his lungs, his kidneys, even his soul—so that as long as he lived he would live life without feeling pain.

  When I next saw Consuelo, she said the words I had so longed to hear in the first interminable months of my captivity—that a plane would be leaving at the end of the week, and I would be on it. She believed I was a berraco, a person with courage, and because she did not feel any animosity towards me, she was prepared to help me.

  My eyes were fixed on the two jaguar kittens outside my window; they were tearing apart one of the tiny horses’ heads. I made myself turn away and went and stood by Angel’s cot; I looked at him looking out for me, an expression on his face that seemed to say he would always be there if I needed him.

  It would be a straightforward proposition, Consuelo said. Tiny would fly me directly into the States. But in case we ran into a problem, and were forced to make a controlled entry, I would accompany a coffin, pose as a bereaved mother. The papers were being prepared for me, a baby’s birth and death certificates. How well I played the part would determine Angel’s fate.

  Without Angel, I wouldn’t have to act. I would be grieving for my own, a fact Consuelo was counting on. I asked her what would happen to my son if I didn’t make it through. For everyone’s sake it was important, she said, that I thought only about success.

  If you succeed, send money; if you fail, don’t come home. But Consuelo didn’t just want money this time. She wanted something even more valuable than my life.

  “Angel belongs with me,” she said. “He is family.” She said she intended to raise my child like any other, to give him a normal life and prepare him for his future. She said that Las Blancas would benefit from his leadership one day, that Angel would have chosen this life for his only son.

  A normal childhood? The chance to grow up to be a drug lord and go to prison, or get gunned down? I hadn’t allowed myself to think of any kind of “normal” childhood for my son. The moment I could do my next line or take my next toke of basuco—that was what I’d come to see as normal I had slept on my poison, and my poison had kept me sleeping.

  And Daisy was right: it suited Consuelo to keep me this way. She gave me a bag with a rock in it the size of Angel’s fist. The finest yet, she said; una muestrica (a sample) de primera calidad: pharmaceutical-strength cocaine. I would be covering a planeload of this same product as far as Los Angeles. She would let me take all I could carry en la chocha.

  Now more than ever, my son depended on me, she said. If I did my job, delivered the load, stuck to my story and wrote about Las Blancas only in terms of its dedication to human rights, no harm would come to him. I would be free; I could go on with my life. “Y cuándo tu esté triste, recuerda que Angelito existe,” Consuelo said. And when you are sad, remember that Angel exists.

  God does not send anything we can’t bear.

  That was a lie. He had sent Consuelo. He had sent fear and cruelty and heartbreak in a world more full of weeping than He could ever know. And Consuelo, I knew, would not think twice about killing my child if it suited her to believe I had betrayed her.

  After she left, I felt so sick at heart I didn’t know what else to do—I broke off a chunk of the rock and chopped it with my X-acto blade, and before I knew it I was talking to angels again and my own baby was demanding to be fed. For the past few days he had been spitting up my milk, and no longer cried out for it. In a lifeless way he would begin to fuss, and then I wouldn’t feel like changing him or bathing him, or being a mother or eating the arepas Nidia brought me on a tray, with tinto and a plate of maracuya and papaya.

  Nidia fussed too: I must eat more food and make myself stronger; I was demasiado flaco, too thin; I had to get healthy; what would Señor Angelito do if I got thin and passed away? Away sounded like the sort of place I wanted to go, but only as long as I could take Angel with me. I snorted the lines and felt thick-headed and confused again, and then shivered, not from the cold, but from the slab of light that hits you in a new day, when the sun smears itself all over your morning window. I remember watching Angel on the bed, the sun striking him like a backhand across the mouth, the frown on his forehead—I hadn’t thought babies were old enough to have anything to frown about! That’s how much I had learned, or how much innocence I had lost.

  I smoothed his worried brow, kissed the hollow place in his chest. Then I held him tight in my arms and told him Consuelo was going to release me in a few days, but that I didn’t want to be free if it meant having to leave him: what would I do with freedom?

  Rainy asked me, one night, did I believe love was something you could stop and start? Did you have any control over it? Could you make yourself not love someone if loving that person hurt too much? I looked at Angel watching me with round eyes that seemed to say, don’t ever stop believing in the goodness of this world. I felt, even as I stood there holding him in my arms, that h
e was the one holding me; his strength, like an undertow, pulling me down deep into a place where I could see myself as I must have appeared to him. Women don’t have babies, I decided; babies give birth to us.

  I held Angel next to my heart as I stood by the window watching the trembling bougainvillea and the drunken tree with the white creeper, which seemed always to be struggling with itself—whether to break free or love what kept it bound.

  part seven / cover girl

  And yet all we have is somehow born in that murdering. Born in the fire and born in the breaking.

  —Jack Gilbert

  chapter twenty-five

  Death Clinic, Heaven Valley State Facility for Women

  All inmate correspondence shall be censored under the supervision of the Warden of Care and Treatment. No correspondence shall be approved which is critical of the policies of the State Department of Corrections.

  —Inmate Information Handbook

  For a wound to heal, it has to close. Once it’s closed, you begin to forget. You bury the pain and by the time a scar forms, you have even forgotten what caused the pain.

  —May Browne

  Mark Twain wrote that he had suffered a great many catastrophes in his life, but most of them had never happened. Losing my child was one catastrophe that did happen, and I have suffered for it; forfeiting my life seems a small price. I feel almost as if I am being given a second chance at love, as if I might be going to meet my child on another, spiritual plane.

  Rainy wants to know if I’ve ever seen a real angel. I tell her no, not in person; I’ve felt one, though. There was an angel in the room with me when my baby was born.

  What proof do I have, Rainy says, if I haven’t ever seen one in the flesh? I ask her, How much proof do you need?

  “Any little thing,” Rainy says. “A pair of wings would do.”

  The first victim of lethal gassing at Heaven was a pig. (Even “Wanda,” the executioner, said pigs are the hardest things to kill.) If lethal gassing worked on a pig, the man who designed and built the gas chamber said, it’s sure to work on a woman.

  The pig was lowered into a wire cage that had been laid across the armrests of a stainless-steel chair inside the chamber. When the gas reached his snout, he jumped to his trotters, scrambled up the side of the cage as far as he could go and began bashing his head against the steel, trying to force his snout through the wire, beyond the reach of the choking fumes. Finally he fell to the floor, where he lay farting and grunting until the end.

  A reporter for the state Advocate wrote, “If the mercy of nepenthe comes as slowly for the human body as it did for the little porker, then there will be terrible things done to women’s souls and their tortured brains.…”

  Rainy wishes he hadn’t written that. There are already enough bloodthirsty people, she says; it will only encourage them. Within two days of the pig successfully dying in the gas chamber, more than three hundred people had put in their bids for ringside seats at the first killing of a woman in the gas chamber at Heaven.

  The guards wished the girl luck, Rainy says, which was nice of them. One guard, who was bawling her eyes out, told her to “break a leg.”

  “Then they leave, and you’re all on your sad and lonely.” It’s “Goodbye, cruel world,” Rainy says, as they slam shut the steel door, giving the bright red handles on the wheel a final turn, sealing the chamber tight.

  The warden is at her post, with the executioner and the attending croakers. Opposite them, on the other side of the chamber, are your witnesses and a TV crew. They stare at you through the thick glass, and you wonder if they’re worrying about any of the lethal gas escaping while they concentrate on shooting you from the best angle.

  The warden signals the executioner, who opens the valves, and sodium-cyanide pellets the size of pigeon eggs (manufactured by DuPont, they come in one-pound cans, Rainy tells me—trust her to find God in the details) fall into a pan filled with sulphuric acid beneath your chair. The poisonous gas begins to form, and your cell fills up with the sickening-sweet odour of bitter almond and peach blossoms.

  You inhale the fumes, feel dizzy, strain against the straps. You breathe—you try not to breathe. Your head aches, your chest aches, you’re slipping into unconsciousness. You can’t hold your breath, you can’t breathe. Your head jerks around a lot as your body fights, but it’s a losing battle. You stop fighting. Your heart stops.

  I ask Rainy how she knows all this; she wasn’t even there. She says each time the cyanide fumes choke out a life in Heaven, they also seep into the total chemistry of human society.

  A prison is no place to be, as Rainy frequently reminds me. There is no place noisier during the day, nowhere quieter at night. I have often woken up in the middle of the night since I’ve come to live on the Row, and I lie picturing the faces of the other condemned women glowing like the phosphorescence of tropical plants as they dream of a better place to be than in Heaven on their narrow cots. And I can hear my own heart beating, no matter how I try to block out the sound. I listen to the sound of my breathing, each breath fighting with the next to be let out, until the sandman begins to lean on me and I hear the rubber-soled squeak of Officer Gluckman’s shoes as she huffs down the range with her nightstick (held by a black leather strap to her belt), and the dying Nano. She drags her nightstick across the bars and then stands in front of my house, but I can barely hear his voice any longer, crying out to me, “I’m sick. Feed me.” Officer Gluckman’s the one who is sick, but a sickness like hers doesn’t deserve to be fed, so I don’t show any emotion as I brush my teeth or make my bed and then stand with my arms raised over my head, waiting for the angel of mercy to come with the Right Guard. You have to hide things to keep love—covering up, putting everything outside and crying on the inside. I keep all my tears inside, because when I left Angel behind my heart packed its bags and left home for good.

  This evening Officer Freedman interrupts me in my house, where I am peacefully watching another live execution (the channel they now keep my television permanently tuned to).

  “Heard the one about the gal who’s going to be executed, they offer her a last cigarette? ‘No thanks,’ she says, ‘I’m trying to quit.’ ”

  I keep my eyes tuned to the screen, where a girl who shot and killed a taxi driver after robbing him of $4.36 and his Medic-Alert bracelet is now going to die in the gas chamber.

  When Officer Freedman sees I have disappointed her again, that I am not going to die laughing, she turns her eyes to the TV too, because just as the girl finishes getting dressed in a new pair of jeans and a fresh white T-shirt without pockets (no underwear, no shoes, nothing where the gas can accumulate and kill the guards when they go in to untie her afterwards), she slices her tongue almost all the way off with a sliver of her personal mirror she has kept hidden in her mouth. She bleeds all over everything, especially her white T-shirt. Because her arms are slippery with blood, and because she can’t weigh more than ninety pounds, she manages to slip out of the straps holding her in the chair just after the executioner lowers the cyanide into the vats of acid. She races around the chamber, beating her fists against the window, but soon after she gets her first whiff of the gas, she stops screaming.

  “Feed me. I’m sick.” I turn from the horrible spectacle to another one—Officer Gluckman standing beside Officer Freedman, smiling at me. She dangles the dying Nano at the end of her leather strap and shakes her head. And when I say nothing, she decides to inspect my underwear; she’s disappointed when I lower my sweats to reveal I am wearing the right colour. Am I interested in last week’s TV Guide, she asks (she’s nuts—no point taking it personally), and then complains a lot about her back, which needs replacing, and how she was up again till after midnight reading reports, and how this place is understaffed and nobody understands how important her job is and how seriously she takes her work, and how no one else could ever do her job for her. I want to tell her the graveyard is full of people who think they are indispensable, but I do
n’t; I offer to trade places with her for a day instead.

  “With my luck,” she says, “I’d choose the day you go to get gassed.”

  I don’t let this cruel remark phase me. “My luck too,” I say, “because then I’d be doing your job for the rest of my life.”

  My mother writes that Vernal arrived in a taxi and “chauffeured her around town” so she could finally return the unreliable lamp. Vernal took her for lunch afterwards, and ordered her a Scotch while she waited for her soup to arrive. “The clam chowder was lovely,” she writes, “but I had to give Vernal the Scotch. I told him, ‘I wish I could drink whisky. I know it’s so good for you.’ ”

  I read an article in a magazine that says it becomes more difficult to love your parents the older you get, the same way it becomes harder to love your own children as they themselves grow older and begin to appreciate your love. I wish I could say I’d had the opportunity.

  There’s this to think about: If I hadn’t had Angel, I could have lived my life without ever wanting anything enough to hurt over.

  WHAT IF WE NEVER WANTED ANYTHING ENOUGH TO HURT OVER? I wrote this in big letters and stuck it on the wall in front of the table where I sit to write, and Rainy asked me if that was going to be the title of my book. No, I said, it was too many words.

  She thought about that for a while. “Well,” she said, “maybe I could use those words for the twins.” Her twins shared a grave and she had always wanted them to have a marker, but hadn’t been able to think of anything important enough to have carved in stone. But she liked What if we never wanted anything enough to hurt over? I told her it sounded like she was making an excuse for having to kill them, as if she’d loved them so much she had to leave them under a train, and she said finally someone got the picture.