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  Given

  Given

  SUSAN MUSGRAVE

  © Susan Musgrave, 2012

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Thistledown Press Ltd.

  118 — 20th Street West

  Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7M 0W6

  www.thistledownpress.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Musgrave, Susan, 1951-

  Given [electronic resource] / Susan Musgrave.

  Electronic monograph in HTML format.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-1-927068-34-2

  I. Title.

  PS8576.U7G58 2012 C813’.54 C2012-904715-5

  Cover illustration by Judit Farkus

  Cover and book design by Jackie Forrie

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Thistledown Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing program.

  Given

  For Given

  We lose our children not once, but over and over again.

  — Neil Gordon, The Company We Keep

  People sleep, and when they die, they awake.

  — Mohammed

  Contents

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  PART THREE

  PART FOUR

  PART FIVE

  PART SIX

  PART SEVEN

  AFTERWORD

  PART ONE

  Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.

  — Henry Ward Beecher

  SHOELACES ARE THE MOST POPULAR WEAPON IN prison. With no elasticity and a high breakage point they can be used to hang yourself or strangle other people.

  My shoelaces had been taken away from me when I was moved to the Condemned Row — the State didn’t want me turning myself into a wind chime before the governor had signed the warrant. I had grown accustomed to walking around with my shoes loose, flopping open, but now, standing beside the prison transfer van, I felt, in a strange way, naked.

  “What’s the first thing you plan on doing, you get yourself freed?” Earl, my driver asked, as he unlocked my waist chains and manacles and helped me into the back. There were, I saw, no door handles, which was why he’d felt secure enough to remove my shackles.

  I told Earl I’d always figured the first thing I’d do if I were ever released would be to return to South America to find my son. “Right after I get finished buying shoelaces.”

  Earl, a big man with grey hair mussed up as if he’d been tossed out of bed, and everything he felt hidden behind chrome mirrors, hefted my prison-issue duffel bag marked “Property of Heaven Valley Correctional Facility” onto the seat beside me. “That’s a long way to go to look for somebody,” he said, giving me an opening, but I wasn’t about to tell him I’d had to look in a lot more farther away places since I’d left my son’s body behind on Tranquilandia; I’d had to begin the search in the shrunken rooms of my heart, to find myself first, the hard way.

  “As long as you keep moving you can get anywhere you want,” Earl said, looking up at the sky. His view was that most people went from being alive one minute to being dead the next, without knowing the difference. “Half the people walking around, they don’t even know they’re already dead. The rest of them die before they ever learn to live.”

  He turned on the radio, volunteering, over the static, that he had some knowledge of my case. In his opinion “women of the female gender” didn’t belong behind bars; being locked up didn’t make them any easier to get along with. He said he believed prisoners of all genders should be set free and given jobs, so they could make themselves useful. In his country, for instance, during the ethnic cleansing, they had enlisted men serving life sentences for rape and murder, because they made the best soldiers. “There are men who like to see blood. Lots of it.”

  Officer Jodie Lootine, the guard everyone called the Latrine because of her potty-mouth, slid in next to Earl; it was her job to make sure I reached my destination without making a jackrabbit parole, the reason my destination remained a secret, surrounded by a bodyguard of lies. All I’d been told was that I was being transferred to a remand centre where I would be held pending a new trial.

  Years before, when I was first admitted to the Facility, I had been given a pamphlet called the Inmate Information Handbook. One of the first rules, right after “If you are a new inmate only recently sentenced by the courts, this will probably be an entirely new experience for you,” was “Don’t ask where you are going, or why, they will only lie to you anyway.” We had our rules, too, the rules of engagement with prison guards, wardens, classification officers, or even the all-denominations chaplain who came to wish you sayonara in the Health Alteration Unit, a.k.a. the death chamber. Don’t ask questions. It spares you the grief.

  Something else I’d learned from the Inmate Information Handbook. “You will feel completely alone, because you are.”

  I checked my Snoopy wristwatch — bequeathed to me by Rainy the night before she took her trip to the stars: it was still ticking. “Within a week you will forget you ever had friends.” Months had gone by since I’d lost Rainy and Frenchy, the two best friends I could never hope to find; (a Rainyism) but though they’d been executed they had never stopped being with me, carrying on the same way they did when they were alive. Sometimes it seemed they hadn’t really died so much as I myself had become a ghost.

  I know this much is true — Rainy and Frenchy never stopped suffering for their crimes. Rainy, who looked so frail it was hard to imagine her giving birth to anything heavier than tears, had borne conjoined twins who’d needed a medical intervention, one she couldn’t afford. When they were six-weeks-old she left them in a Glad bag on the railway tracks where, she hoped, they wouldn’t know what hit them. When a reporter asked Rainy to compare being given the death sentence to being run over by a train, she said “the train was quicker, the train was softer.” Rainy believed she’d one day be reunited with her joined-together twins. She was saving all her hope, she said, for the afterlife.

  Right until the very end Frenchy insisted she deserved to die for killing her son. They’d been robbing a bank, which they probably shouldn’t have been doing since they were both high on pharmaceuticals and also on probation at the time. The gun went off by mistake, Frenchy said. If her son had lived she would have made it up to him, though she didn’t know how you could say you were sorry enough times to make up for shooting a family member in the head.

  The newly dead use up a lot of our skull space. They were the ones we talked about when we got together, once a week, for mandatory group therapy. Rainy thought group therapy on Death Row was a joke; an even sicker joke was their insistence upon cleaning your arm with an alcohol swab before giving you a lethal injection. “It don’t look good, you die first from some bad-ass infection,” Frenchy tried to explain.

  “Can I ask you a question?” our care and treatment counsellor always asked, instead of going ahead and asking the question itself. “If you love something, aren’t you supposed to let it go free?” She talked like a fortune cookie and was something of a know-it-all. Rainy used to say she was so full of herself she didn’t have room to eat.

  We can be free of life, but can we ever be free of death? Rainy, who’d expected
nothing from life (“one door closes, another bangs shut,” she was forever saying) and hadn’t been disappointed, didn’t think death would be all that different, just more of the same walls painted avocado green, televisions tuned permanently to the God channel, and guards who tortured you with jokes you had to laugh at if you didn’t want them horking in your soup. In prison we learned to laugh about everything that had happened to us in the past, because not laughing hurt too much inside. You had to let it out, the rage that was ready to split you apart, like a wishbone, one way or another.

  Without acknowledging me the Latrine took a pair of aviator shades, Oakley’s Eternal, with opaque pink frames, out of her handbag and put them on. Earl, who kept stealing glances at my escort’s breasts, started the van and we pulled out of the Admissions and Discharges lot. It was bad luck, I knew, to look back, at least until the prison was out of sight. I didn’t intend to look back. Not now, not ever. Visitors to Heaven Valley say it’s the most beautiful prison in the world, but those of us who’ve done time inside that place know — the only beautiful prison is the one you are leaving behind.

  As we headed into the early morning smog that hovered over the City of Angels, Earl offered the Latrine a bottle of mineral water. She shook her head, dismissively. “Bottle of water costs more than a gallon of gas,” Earl said, as if he didn’t appreciate the rebuff. He rambled on about the hard time he took from the War Department — his pet name for the wife — how having that cancer hadn’t improved her disposition. She still tried to shove breakfast down his throat every morning when he’d sooner watch the TV. He said he had to drink bottled water to wash away the taste of the sausages and beans he choked down before leaving home, because eating was easier than arguing. “Some women think the way to a man’s stomach is through his mouth,” he said.

  He paused and took another swig, as if to prove his point, his eyes straying back to my escort’s breasts, groping at their yeasty rise and fall, and resting there.

  “I go along with it. I mean, if she wants to force breakfast into me so I’ll live longer, I’ll eat. It’s easier than paying for a divorce.” He made a face, as if the water had an unexpected bitter taste, too. “You married? Kids?”

  My escort stared straight ahead out the window. “Was. Once. Dickwad had kids but not me, personally. Fuck, no.”

  The traffic had slowed and Earl switched to a more philosophical mode. We hadn’t really made much progress out here in the modern world — a commuter on this six-lane freeway moved more slowly than an old-time horse and buggy, he said. When we rounded a bend in the road I saw the cause of the congestion: two women trying to hitch a ride beside the broken-down body of their van. One of them held a crying baby; Earl said “sorry ladies.” What with all the “criminal element and their ilk at large all over the place,” he said, you’d have to be crazy to pick up hitchhikers these days, even the fairer sex, because it could be a trap. “You pull over and the next thing you know you’re driving them down the road where they have a murdering party to go to. No sir. I’ve got enough problems in my life without stopping for more.”

  The Latrine turned her face, trying, I imagined, to block out our driver’s monologue, and lowered her window all the way. I took a big breath of the dust-and-eucalyptus-smelling late summer air as we entered a tunnel where the words NO MORE ACCIDENTS had been sprayed in day-glo red. “No such thing as an accident,” Earl said. He accelerated until we were back out in the hazy sunlight.

  “One daughter, she’s a hairdresser in Stockton,” he continued, in answer to a question I hadn’t heard asked. He switched lanes. “The son’s predeceased. Suicided himself.” He switched back again. “From the day he was born I never understood him.”

  I stared through the bars at the planes coming in for a landing, and saw the sign saying, “Airport Exit Ahead”. Earl lit a cigarette, then stubbed it out. “I’m supposed to stay quit,” he said.

  He didn’t continue right away but studied the road in front of him. “The boy, he was a peaceifistic kind of kid, hated guns, any kind of violence. He wanted to play the piano. You know what they say about kids. They don’t come with instructions.”

  Earl said a day didn’t go by when he didn’t wish he’d been more of a father. He wished he could have accepted his son the way he’d been. If he could turn back the clocks again he’d even pay for piano lessons.

  I could see planes circling overhead. Earl increased his speed, seeming not to notice the roadworks up ahead. The Latrine grew more agitated as the freeway merged into one lane. I wondered if she was worrying about the same thing I was thinking: what would happen if we met another vehicle coming the opposite way?

  Earl narrowed his eyes, as if the white lines were leading him somewhere he had never intended to go. I followed his gaze, saw the world floating towards us on waves of breath, and when I glanced at him again his eyes had become hopelessly fixed on the Latrine’s breasts.

  “Holy fuck,” she cried; Earl had misjudged the distance between her side of the van and a tree covered with brilliant red blossoms. As he tried to get control, he missed the Exit to Departures and pulled a sudden, rash, U-turn on Airport Boulevard. I saw the giant billboard with its bigger question looming up in front of us:

  ETERNITY

  WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING?

  Earl, as if entranced, gunned the van towards it.

  After the crash I saw, in the shattered mirrors of his sunglasses, three red blossoms reflected, as if each one had been placed there in memory of our lives. I’d spent my life feeling that I was hanging on to the side of the planet with suction cups, and now all of a sudden I had been hurled into the luminous hereafter and my singing heart was full.

  Then came the usual crowd of the morbidly curious, like worms after rain, straining to get a closer look, a vicarious taste of mortality. A putrid, steaky smell filled the air. The volume on the van’s radio seemed to be getting louder with each breath I took. I looked at my watch, but the face had been smashed off.

  I lay for the longest time where I had been thrown clear of the wreckage, intoxicated by the pure feel of blood coursing through my veins. I tasted my own flesh, and heard sirens winding down. After a while my thoughts became the colour of water; I got to my feet, brushed myself off, and looked at the scene from my new perspective.

  Fate always gives you two choices: the one you should take, and the one you do. Earl had made the wrong choice, and now he lay face down in the stubble-grass next to my lifeless escort, his body so black it stood out like a hole in the day. How long, I wondered, before the police notified the War Department, who would forever wish she hadn’t forced breakfast down her husband’s throat before he’d left the house that morning, and would always feel guilty for not having kissed him goodbye?

  Fatty be fucked like a bologna pop tart, Frenchy whispered in my ear.

  Then my thoughts of Earl vanished, merging with the traffic that was, once again, beginning to flow. I picked up my escort’s purse and her aviator shades that lay on the grass a few feet away from me. I put the aviators over my eyes — I remember thinking then that nothing, not even your life, looks as beautiful as when you are leaving it behind — and turned to face the terminal building.

  Given time we begin to lose all interest in our past, but I still remember those first hours after the accident with a kind of detached curiosity. I expected I might feel everything more intensely than I had when I was a prisoner, but instead the world right away assumed an ordinariness that filled me with a mixture of homesickness and dread. For most of my life only the fear of death had prevented me from dying all the way. I felt afraid, now, of what I was about to become. Our care and treatment counsellor had reminded me every chance she got, “To free yourself is nothing, the real problem is knowing what to do with your freedom.” By escaping, I knew, I had exiled myself to the lonely recklessness of the fugitive. Suddenly I felt as if I had been cast adrift in a leaky boat without oars, no charts, no stars to go by, only an endless empt
iness, and the final consolation: sorrow and its truth.

  The airport was under construction and I had to enter at the Arrivals level. Everything I looked at seemed to shine with its own light — the plummy grains of wood in the panelling on the wall, the red blouse of a woman walking towards me, the eyeless GI in the wheelchair, the chunky brown dog hunched beside him, the poster advertising HEAD, a kind of footwear, the sign advising against making jokes, particularly about bombs or hijacking. They had a similar rule at the Facility: when you wrote a letter you weren’t allowed to joke — about anything: sex, politics, religion, or any aspect of institutional life.

  Two of my faithful correspondents had stopped writing to me when they died: my father in my sixth year on the Row, of heart failure, and my mother, six years to the very day later, following a freak gardening accident. After twelve years — thirteen if you count the year I was a hostage on Tranquilandia — I had lost touch with most of my friends; being on Death Row could be said to have tested the boundaries of what is meaningful between people and the way we are tied to each other without ever understanding why. There had been too much explaining to do, and in the end I had realized I really didn’t know anybody very well, not even my estranged husband. These days when I closed my eyes I couldn’t remember what Vernal looked like, or the taste of his skin, or the way he’d kept his eyes open when he kissed me, as if he’d been afraid I might disappear if he so much as blinked.

  The morning light struck the terminal windows like a backhand to the mouth. I had become so used to being led everywhere, having to ask permission or send in a written request before I made a move in any direction, that now, having abandoned myself to fate, I had become lost.

  I let my shadow lead me, trying to see whether I could catch the reflection of my face in other people’s dark glasses, to verify I was real. My shadow rounded a corner and I followed it into a public washroom where I removed the Eternals and hesitated for a moment, looking at myself in the wall of mirrors over the sinks, my eyes the ice blue of power-line insulators, my mouth turned down from the way things had gone. I put on the aviators again (What you do now? Win an Oscar? Rainy breathed in my ear) wanting to stay hidden.