Given Read online

  I thought, too, about a road trip to the interior one fall when the trees were turning, and we had only been married a few months. I’d fallen asleep and Vernal had shaken me awake to write down the lyrics to a song he’d started composing as we’d passed Hell’s Gate. I scribbled his words with a purple crayon on our tattered road map. It had felt so romantic, as if love couldn’t get any better than that.

  We had our first fight hours later, at the only motel in Hope that had a vacancy, the Paradise Motel. My purple scrawl had been illegible, the words to Vernal’s first and last love song, lost.

  We took the coast road north out of Mystic, with Vernal pointing out the sights — the blackened shell of the fire hall he said had burned down on Halloween, with the fire truck parked inside; the road to the municipal airport. The cemetery on the outskirts of town was growing even more quickly than the town itself, Vernal said. He saw an excellent investment opportunity in cemetery futures.

  Next to the graveyard was a square grey building with barred windows overlooking a gravel parking lot.

  “Church of the Holy Brew,” Vernal said. The only way Father Tunney had been able to get a following had been to convert the Catholic church to a bar and off-license — there was no pub on the island and a lot of people liked to socialize when they drank — and it had become the place you could go and share a beer and a plate of traditional bar food during Holy Hour and gossip with your neighbours. The church still presided over weddings and funerals, Vernal said. Some things never changed.

  Vernal chose this moment to confess he had made changes in his own life since he’d started spending more time on the island. He had stopped using drugs, and — “just for today” — stopped drinking. Vernal, who’d always said a room without a TV was like a room without a view, was learning to live simply, without a television. He hadn’t weaned himself off the telephone yet. Since there was no cell phone service to the island he had had a landline installed so his clients could reach him if they had to.

  He wasn’t taking on many new clients these days, he had enough repeat offenders. As for money, he needed much less of it than he had done when we’d met, “in the beginning”. He said in the beginning as if we had been Adam and Eve, oblivious in our walled Eden.

  He had also started going to church. “It’s not what you’re thinking. I’ve joined . . . a support group. There’s a meeting every night — in the church basement. Noon hour meetings, too. Over the lunch hour. Obviously.”

  In the past, whenever I’d suggested Vernal consider attending AA, he had resisted. If I tried having a conversation with him about how I was afraid he was drinking himself to death, he would say the graveyard is full of sober men. He’d once described an unusually sober judge as embodying all those characteristics that men found distasteful in other men, meaning he didn’t drink. I had decided, long ago, that Vernal had chosen alcoholism over our future.

  My window had fogged making me feel that no other world existed, for the moment, outside the car. We drove, each of us wrapped in our own silence — Vernal wiping his side of the window with a rag he kept on the dashboard just for that purpose — along the Bend, the winding, cratered road, named after a pioneer, Orbit Bend, that led from the Port of Mystic all the way to the Yaka Wind First Nations village of Old Mystic on the northern tip of the island. Islanders’ favourite pastime was enquiring of tourists, “What you doing today, going round the Bend?”

  Grace Moon lived in Old Mystic, Vernal said. He wondered if her baby was going to be a boy or a girl. When I said I wouldn’t hazard a guess, he went on to say he regretted not having had at least one child of our own; he wished he had had his vasectomy undone. When I’d married him he hadn’t told me we would never be able to have kids, he saved that surprise until after we said our “I do’s”. He’d told me he hadn’t had the courage to say anything before we got married because, back then, he had been too afraid of losing me.

  Our marriage hadn’t been altogether childless. There’d been Brutus, with Canine Attention Deficit Disorder, dog acne, a pacemaker, and low self-esteem. It probably hadn’t helped that Vernal had named her Brutus. After she drowned in our swimming pool, Vernal had vowed that he’d never again fall in love with anything or anyone capable of loving him back.

  The sky, as we drove north, became more foreboding. The paved road ended and I saw a sign in the middle of a field where a small herd of horses, with ribs like radiators, stared at the dead grass: “Christian Vegetables Ahead”. As we hit the gravel Vernal swerved, but too late, and I felt the hearse juddering beneath me. “Potholes,” he muttered, then swerved back into the right lane to avoid another one, turning right off the main road at the honour stand where a plywood square nailed to a stake bore the hand-scrawled message, “Count on the Lord,” next to another, a list of commandments: “No Loitering. No Trespassing. No Soliciting. No Dogs.” Vernal said I could count on one thing and that was getting a new self-serving platitude there every week. A man wearing a green beret and army fatigues stood guarding a bin of zucchinis the size of incendiary rockets. Yet another sign — this one not homemade — had been bolted to the bin and warned, “Video Surveillance”.

  “So much for honour,” Vernal said. “I make it a point never to buy any of his wretched Christian vegetables.”

  He slowed over the washboard surface of the unpaved dusty road and then turned left at

  PARADISE FARM B&B

  Stay Here for the Rest of Your Life.

  I recalled that after our aborted trip to the interior, Vernal had said “remind me to avoid any place that uses ‘paradise’ as an enticement.”

  “The previous owner’s sign, not mine,” Vernal said, as if he knew what I was thinking. “I keep meaning to take it down, but . . . well, it’s on my list of things to do around here. I still get people driving in, wanting a room for the weekend, asking if we take kids or pets. I even tried locking the gates but that didn’t stop them.”

  The long driveway, overhung with dark evergreens, ended in front of a barn. A marmalade cat sat washing himself, and didn’t move until we were almost on top of him.

  “Aged Orange. The only cat I know who plays chicken with a hearse,” Vernal said, as he eased the Cadillac, with wet, white feathers still sticking to it, into the barn, as if bringing it home to roost.

  The barn had been constructed of bottles, what looked to be 26er’s. I assumed Vernal had found a creative use for his empties — before he found AA — one that didn’t require him lugging a Blue Box as far as the end of the driveway every recycling day — but he hastened to explain how each bottle had been filled with nothing more potent than embalming fluid, once. The barn, he said, was another of his predecessor’s many creative endeavours. Slab Ceese believed that a true artist — one at the height of his powers — ought to be good enough to bring death back to life. “He needed bodies to prove it — ergo the B&B. Problem was his guest book didn’t balance. He had more clients checking in than checking out. “They checked out all right, but not in the usual sense of the term.

  “No one ever found any bodies,” he continued, “to back up the Crown’s claim — it’s all hearsay as far as I’m concerned. You know how irrational people can get about anyone who dares to be different. And at the end of the day, though, the judge didn’t buy my artistic license defence either.”

  I wanted to say most people would consider killing your guests more than a little different, but who was I to judge? Vernal said Slab’s wife had filed for divorce shortly after she had retained Vernal to act for her husband on the criminal matters. Vernal said he’d been warned by the real estate agent that he would be moving into a distressed house.

  The air was filled with sweet-smelling hay, the scent of late summer rain on dry cedar, warm moss, and the punky forest floor. I could hear rushing water. A creek ran through the property on the other side of the house — I’d have a good view of it, Vernal said, from my bedroom window.

  From somewhere beyond the creek, deep in the woo
ds, I heard a deep-throated songbird singing his dark-hearted song as Vernal picked up my duffel bag and led me towards my new home. Silvered by time and exposure to the wind and rain it rose, mind over matter, from the earth. Even if Vernal hadn’t told me about the artist who had found a way of bringing the dead back to life, it was, I could see, a house ripe for haunting.

  Vernal’s laptop lay face down in the driveway. “It crashed,” he said, miming its descent from an upstairs window.

  I stepped around the computer and an enormous hunk of cement at the foot of the front steps, a mounting block that Orbit Bend, who’d built the original farmhouse, had laid.

  “Orbit thought motorcars were a fad. He went everywhere on horseback right up until the day he got thrown off his horse and ended up in a wheelchair,” Vernal said, as we climbed the steps to the long shady porch my mother would have called a verandah.

  He shouldered open the heavy wooden door and motioned me inside. I bent to take my shoes off just as Aged Orange darted between my legs, almost knocking me down.

  “He’s not used to anyone else being in the house,” Vernal laughed. “It’s been just the two of us rattling around together.”

  One glance inside told me there was not much space in which to rattle around in. Even the mudroom was piled high with boxes — Vernal said he had been emptying our house in Astoria bit by bit, but hadn’t had time to properly unpack. He hurried me into the living room, apologizing for the chaos. He had tried to be ruthless, he said, but it was always hard to know what to keep, and what to give away.

  He excused himself to go upstairs to make sure my room was “in order”; I plunked myself down on our old forest-green leather couch that faced a bare wall where, judging from the ganglion of wires issuing from a hole in the woodwork, the previous owner’s entertainment centre had been. The liquor cabinet stood empty, too: in our old house it would have been crammed full, at all times, with every type of alcoholic drink we didn’t need. Vernal’s explanation for the wide variety was you got an hour’s free parking downtown if you bought a bottle of booze.

  After Brutus died Vernal took to leaving our bed in the middle of the night to quench his grief with a bottle. I’d find him downstairs in the early hours of the morning, his arms wrapped around his commodity, plead with him to come back to bed with me, where I could lie listening to him breathe, so exquisitely aware of his suffering that every detail on which my eye fell — the crease of the sheet, the fissure in a tile, the slight discolouration on the wall around the doorknob — commanded attention and became significant, as if my perceptions were trying to divert me out of self-preservation, in the way one might offer candy to an incorrigible child. Now I remembered an argument we’d had in a Vancouver café where I’d noticed, for the first time, the word “zen” in “Frozen”. It became something for me to hang on to, as he harangued me about the fact that he didn’t want to have kids. He’d seen enough unwanted mothers in this world.

  Vernal came back downstairs and sat next to me, put his hand on my knee and said how happy he was I was home. I got flustered, said I’d like to settle in, take a nap. “I’m sorry. Yesterday must have been a long day for you and I don’t know about you but I didn’t get much sleep last night,” Vernal said.

  “I don’t need an apology,” I said.

  “I know you don’t, but it doesn’t mean I’m not sorry.”

  Ever since I’d first known Vernal, his mantra had been “I’m sorry”. Once I’d accused him of saying, “I’m sorry” instead of “Good morning” when he got out of bed. He actually said, “I’m sorry I’m sorry.” The worst part was he meant it.

  Vernal said he would sleep on the couch as he led me upstairs, my duffel bag over his shoulder, to the biggest room in the house, the only one with its own bathroom. I had a brief moment of panic when he stooped to kiss me, gently, on both cheeks. “I hope you’ll be . . . as comfortable as you can . . . for now . . . if you plan on . . . we’ll see what we can do . . . ”

  Once I would have completed the sentence for him, out loud, but now I did it, quietly, to myself: If you plan on staying here any length of time. I was only looking at staying here, I told him, for the rest of my life.

  I watched Vernal retreat down the hall, wanting to call after him to stay with me, but doing my best to hide my disarray. Like anyone who has ever loved, I knew that the more I needed the less I would be likely to receive. When he had gone downstairs I reached to open my door, thinking how many years it had been since I’d been able to touch something as ordinary as a doorknob, amazed at how smooth and cold it felt, wondering how long it would be before I started taking it for granted. It turned in my hand; I edged open the door, then stood savouring the moment before feeling for the light switch. I had been deprived of so many other ordinary things, too.

  The curtains were closed, though that didn’t keep daylight from peeking in. I switched on the overhead light, and the room — with walls the colour of old teeth, stained, perhaps by smoke from the fireplace that had long ago been boarded up — shivered to life. Vernal had furnished the room with objects that made me feel at home. A clock ticked on the mantelpiece above the fireplace — the same clock that had been in our bedroom at the Walled Off. Night after night I had lain awake listening to its heartbeat sound, so constant that after a while it became part of the silence. Above the clock hung a photograph that Vernal had taken of me on our honeymoon. My hair was longer then and my eyes half open. I wore a burgundy sundress and a smile on my face because Vernal refused to take the picture until I at least pretended to be enjoying myself. Vernal, like most people, wanted to deny any negative feelings, and always did his best to keep them out of the picture.

  I flicked another switch and a fan on the ceiling began to whirr, making the staccato beat of a helicopter overhead, a throaty thwap thwap thwapping like the gunship that had landed in the big yard at Mountjoy Penitentiary the day I was taken hostage. On the night table beside my bed, between a stack of books and a radio-cassette player, I found my bracelet, a thick silver band with a frog design Vernal had acquired in lieu of a retainer from a client, and given to me for an anniversary gift. I slipped it on. It was the first thing I’d worn on my wrist in twelve years, other than handcuffs.

  On the dressing table Vernal had left me a new toothbrush, a water jug and bowl, a hairbrush, and a black handgun-shaped hair dryer. I went to check out my bathroom that was twice the size of the cell I’d occupied for the last twelve years, the same length of time since I’d had a toilet that wasn’t inches away from where I laid my head at night — a steel toilet that flushed automatically. I had a deep, clawfoot tub — I hadn’t taken a proper bath since I’d left Tranquilandia, only inadequate showers — and my own sink, above which hung another mirror.

  In prison we were allowed a “personal mirror” but the rules were it had to be kept in an “appropriate place” where you wouldn’t be distracted by looking at it. Rainy said mirrors were mostly for thin, rich people who felt good about themselves. If you went into a house like the White House, she used as an example, even though she’d only ever seen it on TV, there would be mirrors on every wall from the ceiling to the floor.

  I stared at my face, hard and long. My lips were sealed so tight they looked as if they had been sewn together, like the lips of the shrunken head that had hung in the cockpit of the small plane that had flown me to Tranquilandia. My eyes, once cold blue, had become the colour of ash, edged with shadows, bruised by all they had seen. One thing I didn’t have to worry about: no one who might see my WANTED poster on a Post Office wall would recognize the person looking back at me from the mirror now.

  I opened the cabinet doors so I would no longer have to face myself, and set my deodorant and dental floss, side by side, on the one empty shelf. Vernal had stocked the cabinet with everything he thought I’d need — toothpaste, sunscreen, mouthwash, wax earplugs, tampons, laxatives, insect repellant, cough syrup, and a bottle of Extra-Strength Tylenol labelled “These have been on th
e floor,” in my mother’s failing handwriting.

  I unscrewed the lid, poured them onto my palm and ate a handful — just because I could. It had been twelve years since I had been allowed to administer my own drugs. At the Facility they were stingy, to say the least, when it came to issuing any kind of medication for pain. A woman with lung cancer would be lucky if she received a baby aspirin to help her through the night.

  I started a bath, then went back into the bedroom, turned the radio on, and heard a caller say it was time women everywhere appealed to Jesus to ask his help in reducing. I fiddled with the radio dial, marvelling at my own freedom to make choices. In prison your corrections team carefully selected what you watched or listened to. It was either Executions Live! or the God channel which, in my mind, amounted to the same thing.

  Only four stations broadcast to Kliminawhit: Weather or Not, a community service that gave weather reports and ferry schedules; Radio Peace and Love that covered war and world hatred; Radio Orca transmitting the underwater squeaks and cries of migrating whales; and God Listens, with Christian oriented programming.

  I settled on Radio Orca, where a human voice that also sounded as if it were coming from the depths of the sea, interrupted the whales. “Each pod has a distinct dialect,” the voice intoned. “Scientists have lowered microphones in various locations off the coast to monitor the whales conversations.” In the free world even whales were under surveillance.

  I unpacked my belongings and set the photograph — the blur that was Angel — on my dressing table, propped up against the water jug. I had to struggle with the drawers that were swollen shut in the antique dresser, then laid out my pyjamas and the one change of clothing I’d been allowed to take with me when I left the Row.