Given Read online

  I turned from the mirror, and locked myself in a stall where I could go through the Latrine’s purse in privacy. Along with forty-five dollars in small bills and some change, my escort’s purse contained a collection of photo booth snapshots — her ex and his two boys making faces for the camera — and her Department of Corrections ID card.

  I took my few possessions, including a toothbrush, a change of clothes, prison issue pyjamas, a photograph of my son, and a clean sweatshirt out of the duffel bag, then turned the sweatshirt inside out so that the Heaven Valley logo didn’t raise any red flags at the check-in counter. I put the ID and the change in the pocket of my jeans, and slipped the rest of the money in my sock, then stuffed the Latrine’s wallet in the sanitary napkin disposer. I wasn’t proud of myself for doing that, but at least this way someone might find it and turn it in to the Lost and Found. I repacked my duffel bag, and left the washroom without glancing again in the mirror. Then I found a pay phone and called Vernal at his office in Vancouver, collect.

  I tried to tell him I’d been in a wreck but a gurgling, rattling sound came out of my throat, as if my breath were slogging through a slough of mucous. “My God, you sound terrible,” Vernal said. “You should see . . . don’t they have doctors down there . . . wherever you are? I’ll try getting someone on my cell . . . just hold on . . . is there someplace you can . . . you still with me?”

  I nodded into the receiver, furrowed my brow, wanting Vernal to stay calm, to know I was giving this question proper consideration, when really I knew he couldn’t see me and I felt lonely as the furthest stars. Bullying muzak blared from a speaker somewhere near my spinning head. Vernal kept asking if I was still there, had I had anything to drink? At first I thought he was asking if I was drunk, then realized he meant water, that I needed to drink water so I wouldn’t dehydrate. I promised him I would buy a bottle as soon as the world stopped turning so fast, and gave him the details, my new alias — he said he would book me a ticket home online. I waited until the dizziness passed and I could walk without drawing attention to myself, then rode an elevator up one floor to Departures.

  All around me people shouted the intimate details of their travel worries into the palms of their hands. I felt conspicuous, even though I blended with the crowed that was dressed, for the most part, casually, in jeans and sweatshirts like the one I wore. The only noticeable difference was my shoes.

  And my face, the face that had recently appeared on the cover of Newsmakers, a special issue profiling women waiting to die on Death Row. I’d signed the release forms though I hadn’t seen a copy of the magazine to date. I was death’s latest poster girl and my mug shot had been on TV, too, on more than one occasion — most recently on Executions Live! the night Rainy died.

  Nearly everyone I saw carried a bottle of water — hard to believe the planet would have had so many pure mountain springs (as Vernal would have said, “Evian is naïve spelled backwards.”) When I first met Rainy she used to wash her important parts with the bottled water we were issued, the tap water having been declared unpotable at the time: she claimed they made the taps in our cell sinks especially hard to turn on and off so that girls would break their fingernails trying to wash, and the institution would save money by not having to provide us with nail clippers. Frenchy said her logic didn’t make sense, that bottled water cost way more than nail files.

  Your point? said Rainy.

  You stupid? Frenchy shot back.

  I stopped at the first newsstand I came to, to buy my own bottle of water, and a copy of Newsmakers, then stood waiting to pay while the salesclerk, applying a layer of blue nail polish, talked on her phone. “When Carley broke up with him he wanted to kill himself so he ate a pencil.” She looked up at me, spreading her fingers to let the polish dry. “He wanted to give himself lead poisoning.”

  My eyes shifted to a nearby table, piled high with books that had been marked down — how to die with dignity, how to cheat death, how to write a foolproof will, an etiquette book including helpful hints on everything from planning an after-funeral soiree to the right coloured flowers to send the deceased’s family and Why We Live After Death — not the kind of escapist literature I could imagine anyone enjoying on their flight. The salesclerk must have read my thoughts because she removed her cell phone from her ear and volunteered that death wasn’t real popular in airports, the main reason why her manager had decided to clear their stock. “When people are travelling, they don’t want to think about, you know, not getting there type of deal?” I could tell she wanted to get rid of me so she could get back to her phone call, so I paid with cash and thanked her for her help.

  I found the American Airlines check-in counter and joined the long line snaking its way towards the only available ticket agent. The man in front of me was watching a rerun of Executions Live! on his laptop and I found myself sneaking glances over his shoulder. Since I’d been convicted and sent to prison, executions had become a spectator sport; on the night Rainy was dispatched to meet her maker, a contingency of pro-death advocates revved their motor homes and honked their horns and set off fireworks outside the prison gates. We didn’t know it at the time but Rainy, who had injected drugs for so long she didn’t have an uncollapsed vein left in her body, was undergoing a “cut-down”. Shortly before midnight as the pro-deathers fired up their barbecues and began grilling greasy slabs of bacon, corrections officers, who had no experience as surgeons, were in the process of slitting Rainy’s arm open, searching, desperately, for a usable blood vessel into which they could syphon their lethal cocktail.

  I’d been wrong when I’d assumed that in a culture as show business oriented as ours, televised executions would soon lose their appeal and be cancelled for poor ratings. More people watched Rainy die from a lethal injection than tuned in to the Super Bowl the next day.

  A second ticket agent arrived to open another check-in desk, and the line moved slowly forward.

  “Over here. Can I help the next person in line?” I saw she meant me, and toted my duffel bag up to the counter and placed it on the scales.

  The agent asked to see some ID, and I gave her the Department of Corrections card. She glanced at it, and then began tapping on her keyboard, her smile retreating behind her teeth.

  I took a deep breath, and removed the aviators so I could look her in the eye. She looked back at me, briefly, screwing up her face. She tapped on her keyboard again as if it refused to cooperate, then, without taking her eyes off the screen, asked me how many pieces of luggage I’d like to check.

  “Just this one.” I pointed at the scales, wishing I could fold myself like an old sweater and climb inside my duffel bag, worried that it was suspiciously light. The agent tagged my bag to Vancouver and apologized for the time it had taken to get me checked in; the system was making her life hell today, which accounted, I assumed, for her terse manner. She printed my ticket: Vernal had warned me that tickets were issued electronically now and not to act as if this came as a surprise to me.

  “Any carry-on baggage?”

  I shook my head. The agent gave me back my Corrections ID, and handed me my boarding pass. “Enjoy your flight to Vancouver, Ms Lootine,” she said, pronouncing “Lootine” to rhyme with “shootin”. When I stood there, staring at my e-ticket, unsure of what to do next, she lowered her voice and, as if sensing my hesitation, said, “You can go. You’re all free to go. Enjoy the rest of your day.”

  I walked towards Security, knowing I should feel grateful for something, if for nothing more than for the miracle of having made it this far; I thought of the wholeness the word free implied. A lot of people seem to believe that in prison you’re not allowed to have a life of your own. They are mistaken. In prison I had nothing but a life of my own. (Rainy argued that freedom was the only thing you didn’t get on the Row, but even there you were given the freedom to make a limited number of choices — for instance, which form of capital punishment was best suited to your personality — lethal injection, gas chamber, elec
tric chair, hanging, or the firing squad. When you couldn’t make up your own mind, they chose for you. “Dead if you do, dead if you don’t,” Rainy put it.)

  After clearing Security where once again I escaped being recognized, I headed for the departure lounge. I passed booth after booth, marvelling at how much was for sale — everything from sequin-covered running shoes to barbed-wire encased cigarette lighters. There was even a stand devoted to shoelaces — the kind you “never have to tie again” — and would have cost more than a month’s wages in prison. When I stopped to buy a coffee at Hooked, I saw the posters. “Missing. Have You Seen This Child?” The photographs showed a smiling, inquisitive face, beloved of someone, last seen going out a door, waiting at a bus stop, peddling towards a corner store.

  “Will that be a Blast or a Belt,” said the boy waiting to take my money, after I’d decided on a macchiato, then changed my mind because I didn’t know what a macchiato was, and asked for a cappuccino instead. I could hear the hint of impatience in his voice. “Blast or Belt?” he repeated, looking at me as if to say where had I been all my life.

  “Small?” I said.

  “The smallest you can order is a Buzz,” he explained, the way one might speak to a recalcitrant child. “Small is really a Short. We call it a Buzz. Tall’s what you get if you ask for, like, a small, but it’s not really, it’s like, that’s why we call it a Blast. Large is a Belt, and Super Large is, like, a Bloat?”

  “Okay, then. Tall.”

  “Excellent. You want a Skinny or a 2%? Sprinkles on top, extra foam, mini-marshmallows, cinnamon, nutmeg or chocolate crunch?”

  “Surprise me,” I said.

  The boy rolled his eyes, exasperated with me, it was clear. I took off my shoe and reached into my sock for the money to pay for my coffee but when I looked up again I saw him staring at me, and my first thought was that now, knowing where I kept my stash, he would hunt me down later and rob me, but I had to remind myself: I wasn’t at the Facility anymore. And people, citizens in the free world, didn’t keep their money in socks, especially not in socks inside shoes that had no laces.

  The boy wiped an already clean counter and rearranged a display of juice bottles — “Freedom of Choice — Big Gulp Brand.” I cancelled the coffee and asked for a bottle of the turquoise-coloured juice instead. The colour made me think of the sky, the day I’d left Angel behind on Tranquilandia.

  I’d spent my years on the Row not allowing myself to think of my son as being dead. What had helped me to live, at first, was to believe my son’s life was going on somewhere without me, just as putting my own life in danger, living from moment to moment on Death Row, helped me forget what I had lost. But now everything that reminded me of Angel went through me like a spear. I held him in my thoughts as I held on to life, clumsily, but with a big, “Open 24 hours” heart. In every child I caught sight of I saw what my boy might have become. I saw him as the baby in the arms of the woman in white shorts and a pink cardigan; I saw him in the frown of the two-year-old refusing to let go of a piece of chewing gum he had picked out of an ashtray; I saw him in the six-year-old missing his two front teeth.

  Missing. One word but it summed up a lifetime. Missing my son was how I lived, and now I imagined him running on ahead of me and disappearing into the play area for children, hiding behind a purple cartoon plane cut out of plywood, with plucked birds poking their heads from the windows. The pilot looked like a demented child.

  I saw all this but in my heart I knew: the dead don’t age. They don’t grow up, they stay stuck. Angel, his perfect earlobes, his fists, his soft baby-head, would never grow older. The curtain sighing in the slight breeze along the wall would always be enough to make him stop nursing, and turn his head from my breast, as if he were listening to something I’d never be able to hear. Nació de pie, he was born on his feet, born all-knowing and streetwise, and he would stay that way, for eternity, stretching his tiny limbs into each new morning, beating up the very air we breathed with his fists. Missing my boy was the black and endless night I had tumbled into. It was where I lived.

  I didn’t have long to wait before they called my flight. Two youths, who looked as if they’d been on Spring Break since February, slumped into the seats across the aisle. “What does a person have to do to get a drink around here?” the one with a watch tattooed to his wrist (perpetually 4:20) said, letting everyone around him know that it was his constitutional right not to fasten his seat belt, either.

  “Dude,” his companion replied. “This ain’t no fuckin’ disco, dude. We like left that, like I don’t know when, you know, whenever?”

  I sat back, thinking it would be a long flight to Vancouver, and heard the whumping of baggage being loaded into the belly of the plane as a man of generous proportions took the aisle seat next to me, looking anxious the way people do when trying to settle into the small allocation of uncomfortable personal space that will be home to them for their flight. I lowered the armrest thinking, unkindly, that a person of his size should have paid for two seats.

  “I shouldn’t have pigged out on that second helping last night,” he said, as if he had, in his sleep, gained the weight. “My mother’s always telling me, ‘son, push away from the gravy’.” His efforts at unnecessary conversation were answered by a measured sigh on my part, but not even that silenced him.

  In the bowels of the plane a dog began to bark. “I hope he don’t know something we don’t know,” my seatmate said. “Dogs have an inner instinct. They can sniff out things like epileptics and cancer.” He was sweating profusely and kept mopping his brow with the paper towels he produced from his jacket pocket.

  I nodded, once, hoping he’d get the hint, and reached for the safety instructions in the seat-back pocket in front of me and concentrated on the drawings of passengers calmly leaning forward, hands covering heads, to brace themselves for an imminent collision with Mt. Fujiyama. The cabin lights flickered, an alarm bell sounded, and the skyway was withdrawn.

  Once we were in the air another attendant came through the cabin distributing pillows and headsets, and small hot towels. The captain piped up to say passengers on the right side of the plane would soon be treated to a spectacular view of the San Andreas Fault, as if the earth had heaved and shifted thousands of years ago solely for their benefit. This seemed of little interest to the two across the aisle who had stripped down to their wife-beaters and were refreshing their armpits with the hot towels the flight attendant had given us. I stared at the empty air on the left hand side of the aircraft, wishing I could escape my circumstances, then remembered I had the magazine.

  “You on vacation?” my seatmate asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Business trip?”

  I shook my head again.

  “You look familiar,” he persisted. “We meet someplace before? Dallas? Fort Lauderdale, maybe?” He volunteered that he spent a good deal of his time in the air because of the exciting and interesting nature of his job. What he be, some kind of flu germ? I heard Rainy sniff.

  His company, he informed me, made plastic eyes for stuffed animals; he had a contract with Corrections because convict-made teddy bears had become hot commodities ever since executions started going live. “Eye-Yie-Eyes? You heard of us?” He seemed disappointed when I looked at him, blankly, and gave me his card. “Deacon Maplethorpe, Northwest Regional Rep.”

  Our fellow travellers across the aisle had passed out and were snoring. “Faggot dope dealers,” Maplethorpe said, in a voice so full of disgust that I wondered, for a moment, what he was hiding.

  Hope rhyme wid dope, I heard Frenchy snicker. You got any? Twelve years had gone by since the time I’d given up my life to the White Lady, but even now, at the thought it, my palms began to sweat and my mouth filled with saliva, remembering what I knew. I loved the ritual, getting high, being alone, way out there. But you never stop to think about what comes after.

  Maplethorpe took two packets of pretzels from the flight attendant’s tray and ga
ve me one of them. “They don’t even allow guns into Canada,” he continued. “You can imagine how they feel about dope dealers.” He had a high-pitched voice, hard to listen to, like a series of musical notes that kept getting higher, and slightly more off-key.

  “Some of my ladies are featured in this,” Maplethorpe said, pointing at my face on the cover of the magazine that lay, still unopened, on my lap. My cheeks reddened — I feared he might recognize me, even though the photograph had been taken over a decade ago, the day after my arrest. My hair had been described as “torrential” on the front page of every newspaper in the country (it had rained, and a muttersome wind had followed me from the detention centre to the courthouse), my skirt “slit up the side” (it had torn getting into the police van) and my face “expressionless”. Looking closely at my grainy image now, I thought: it was just that there had been no other way left to look.

  I flipped to the magazine’s centrefold that featured “Noosemakers: Seven Condemned Mothers Who Kill.” In each photograph I could see the dark stain at the core of the woman’s being, and the beauty fanning out from that centre. This beauty, the way the photographer had captured it, had a way of making pain seem almost desirable. The stain, and the same dope-sick look in their eyes, described the history of their hearts.

  People don’t hold grudges against drug-dealers or bank robbers given a decent lapse of history, but there’s no such thing as “used to be” when it comes to murder.

  “This girl — Charlene — I knew her back in Texas, she’s just had surgery on her hands,” Maplethorpe said. “Claims she can’t even open her painkillers now.