Given Read online

  When you first arrive on the Row, you are requisitioned three orange jumpsuits, one pair of orange sweat pants, five pairs of socks, useful for padding your three brassieres (white) that look like the mailbags they were always busy making and then unmaking (an exercise in futility that the guards called “making yourself useful”) back in the general population. It was the most degrading thing of all for most women — to be issued brassieres that were several cup sizes too big for them, and Rainy decided to make the best of a humiliating situation. After she had finished cleaning the chow hall she would empty the sugar containers down the front of her shirt, hoarding it in her 42-D cup bra for when she woke up in the middle of the night craving a sugar fix.

  You are also issued five orange T-shirts, one pair of shoes (no laces) and seven pairs of coloured underpants, a different colour for every day of the week. If a guard caught you wearing yellow instead of red on a Monday or red instead of blue on a Thursday, it was considered an infraction of prison rules and you were subject to disciplinary action, which meant spending time in a punishment cell. I got an extra three days when my red underpants fell into some bleach by accident and turned orange (Rainy was sterilizing her needle) because I said aren’t all cells punishment cells?

  Some of the girls sewed their own clothes and the ones who got really good at it, like Frenchy, were hired to help make the guards’ uniforms. Frenchy used to cut the khaki-coloured material on the bias, on purpose; we got no end of satisfaction watching a guard stop and try to straighten her twisted pant legs when she thought no one was looking.

  I undressed and got in the bath and lay for the longest time luxuriating in the hot water, looking down at the length of my body, running my hands over my belly, thinking about what the curandero had told me — that the uterus is the last internal organ to decompose. I closed my eyes, let every part of me but my head slip below the surface; even after my bath the clean surface of my body felt like a thin shell around everything I couldn’t wash away. I got out, towelled myself off, then went back to my bedroom. The bed looked inviting — not like the kind I had become used to with the lumpy mattress that lay there rubbing it in — you’re sleeping Single-O tonight — or a bunk like I’d had on the ferry, but a big-ass bed, as Frenchy would have put it. I rubbed my fingers on the chenille bedspread, a nubble like Braille under my hands, and then climbed under the covers.

  The sheets were soft, creamy flannelette. My head fell in love with my pillow the moment we met, and I lay there, staring at the ceiling, the molding a pattern of vulvic tulips, thinking this could be the first pillow I’d slept on in twelve years that hadn’t been stained with tears. I always imagined I could feel those tears and the marks they’d left, as if they’d never quite dried, but stayed wet in memory of the last woman who had cried herself to sleep. I’m making it sound like a pretty sad place, the Condemned Row.

  I lay awake listening to a newborn killer whale on the radio crying for his stranded mother, thinking of my son. When I had turned the doorknob and opened the door to my new room it was if I had opened up the old place inside me where I’d locked my grief. I’d thought there was nothing you could have told me about grief I didn’t already know. Until I lost Angel.

  I thought of the ways he had reached for me, as if to say stay here, with me, for the rest of your life. There were places where the heart could not rest, where the best you could do was be at home with the rootless.

  When I woke the next morning, to a bird screaming in the trees beyond the house, Aged Orange lay curled at the foot of my bed. I’d spent most of the night in the fetal position to avoid kicking him. I stretched my legs out under him, but he didn’t budge.

  The whole room smelled sweet, a familiar unsettling kind of sweet, and when I looked around I saw that Vernal had filled a Wedgwood vase with Stargazer lilies he’d picked in the garden.

  Their fragrance reminded me of my last days on Tranquilandia. Angel and I had spent the first night together at the only hotel in town, the Hotel Desaguadero (which translated as the Hotel Drain) at the end of La Camino de Penitencia, or the Road of Penance. The owner looked astonished to have guests and asked my driver how we had chanced upon the place, as if it were impossible that anyone might come to his establishment by choice. In the evening he served chicken necks, rice with gravel, and Coca-Cola on a patio under a crackling bug zapper; the scorched remains of flying insects fluttered down onto my plate. Our room, when we returned to it, was filled with orchids, orchids with bruised lips, slashed throats and bloodshot eyes. Flores para los muertos.

  The day I left Angel behind on that island I’d boarded a plane filled with the same intoxicating and seductive odour of sex and death. The coffin holding the baby whose body had been emptied out and filled with cocaine had lain on a bed of crushed Medusa’s Head orchids, each one wet, as if it had been picked weeping.

  I pulled the curtains and opened a window, hoping the smell of Vernal’s flower arrangement would fade. “Meow,” I whispered, and the cat’s ears twitched. The breeze ruffled his fur.

  On the Camino de Penitencia I’d found a dog lying at the side of the road, tail twitching, oblivious to all forms of life going on around it — a Zen dog, slumbering in the sun, seemingly at peace. He was the first dog I’d encountered in that forsaken place who hadn’t either attacked me or slunk away, tail between its legs, when I’d extended a friendly hand, but, when I went to pet him, I realized he was dead. The breeze that stirred his tail came from the traffic rushing by.

  Two flies buzzed against the glass and another lay dazed on the sill, intoxicated, perhaps, by the Stargazer’s lurid odour. I reached to stroke Aged Orange, and his tail began wagging the way it does when a cat’s trying to decide whether to rip your face off or just scratch out your eyes. At the same time I heard the mournful bird crying again, followed by a scream that sounded like “hellllllllllp hellllllllllp,” then a more plaintive dove-like call, “ohhhhhhhh ohhhhhhhhh.” I could hear other noises — the sound of life going on — below me in the kitchen.

  I propped myself up and picked through the stack of books Vernal had left beside my bed, including Beloved, one novel I hadn’t had the opportunity to finish on the Row because the copy I’d borrowed from the prison library had been missing its final chapter. Frenchy confessed: she had mutilated hundreds of books this way. If her life was to be cut short, she reasoned, she wanted others to know what it felt like. Rainy, who had never learned to read or write, who thought a sentence was something you had to serve, didn’t think anyone was going to miss the last chapter of a book. “You don’t know what a book be about before it get to the end, you ain’t never gon’ know,” she said.

  I read for a while, then turned on my side, and went back into a half-sleep, coming fully awake again when Vernal knocked at the door, sometime later, with a bowl of Fruit Loops and a pot of tea. Aged Orange scooted across my head, and then burrowed down beside me, between the bedspread and my sheets. Vernal said if he got too hyperactive to turn on Radio Orca — the whale songs had a calming effect. He asked if I needed anything else and I said no thank you there’s nothing I need.

  I stayed in bed, petting Aged Orange, who seemed anything but hyper, listening to the world going on without me as it had done during my absence. I wanted darkness to fall again, to silence the bird at the periphery of my hearing, hurting me with his cries. Later, when the cat wrestled himself from my grip, I recognized panic, like a rat the trap has snapped on, who hobbles to his hole with his freight of pain, dragging the source of it after him. Vernal had asked me once in a letter if I’d ever thought of “taking the easy way out.” I said there never was, there never would be, an easy way.

  When Vernal came to check on me, early in the evening, he found me with my eyes staring wide, full of a sadness I couldn’t explain, except to say I missed something, the way you feel when you’re a child and someone you love goes away, you watch them leaving in the rain. Vernal said I shouldn’t expect to feel anything but sad. He touched my ch
eek with the back of his hand. In rare moments like this, Vernal took hold of my affections in a profound way.

  When I woke again it was dark and he was lying beside me, turning his flashlight on and off, making little animals of light that prowled our walls. I rolled away from him. Vernal could be kind. Had I become a woman who believed that love, even from the kindest of men, could only be cruel?

  I lived to kill time in those endless first weeks of my new life on Kliminawhit. Vernal brought me three meals a day and after the first week it seemed we had never lived any other way. I wondered if there would come a time when I no longer defined myself by where I’d been, but by where I intended to go. And if I would ever feel whole again, capable of walking down a flight of stairs without fear of falling into an imagined abyss, or opening a door that led to the outside world, or any door other than the one that opens inward?

  When I slept I dreamed about Angel. In one dream I opened a can of sardines and found him curled up inside. I ate him — like eating an eyebrow — and woke up thinking why would I eat my child? So he would be safe, so I’d know where he was, inside me.

  I’d wake from my dreams and lie still, until I was sure the waking up part was not the dream; it was often hard to tell, in those first moments. After I was convinced I was in bed, in the ripe-for-haunting house, I’d turn my head to look at that photograph, as if needing further proof I was where I had determined myself to be.

  I slept, and when all the sleep had been wrung out of me, my mind would fill with thoughts. Thoughts is the wrong word: the lawless beauty of the imagination allowed me to lie in my bed full of drowsy pleasure, dwelling in the past; the future was something I could put off until tomorrow, like a chore I would get round to, eventually. But the future kept arriving; it arrived day after day, moment by moment, an assembly line of itself that kept me revolving with it.

  Some days at the farm it felt as if Rainy and Frenchy were right there, in my room, on either side of me on the bed. As I lay listening to the rain on the roof I heard Frenchy whispering in my ear, sound of the rain be better than a thousand mothers. Rainy liked to stay inside, where it was warm and dry. I be so sweet I go outside I dissolve like a sugar cube, the rain wet my head.

  One morning I woke suddenly, in that hour between black night and bright dawn, and saw the clock had stopped ticking during the hours I’d slept away. I had been dreaming I lay in a coma surrounded by strangers trying to decide whether to unplug me from a life-support system. A sign above my head (one I could read because I had separated from my body and felt as if I were a spirit floating loosely beneath my own skin) said, “Visitors to the dying must use the pay phone at the end of the hall where the smoking room used to be”. I wanted to call Vernal, but whenever I tried to pull the tubes out of my arms a nurse, who looked like Jodie Lootine, pushed me back on the bed.

  The morning after I arrived in Desaguadero, and every morning for the next four days, a small group of midwives led me and others who had been "slain in the spirit," to the borrachio tree where the curandero sat to perform his healings. Every day the Lord for the Body broke a raw egg over Angel’s forehead, to prevent Caída de Mollera, and then sprinkled cobwebs, used to stanch wounds, into the yoke. The curandero believed that because my baby was very beautiful he suffered from many mal de ojo ailments. When a child is beautiful people will admire him and not touch him, and this, the curandero insisted, would project negative forces into my boy’s heart.

  Once we had participated in the curandisimo Angel and I would be walked to the chapel in the centre of town where a famous folk saint was said to have been buried. Some women rolled with their infants in the dirt, others crawled on their knees, in imitation of the suffering of Christ. The chapel, at the end of the Camino de Penitencia, was crammed full of momentos — desiccated body parts, ones that had been removed through amputation or excision, in jars — a collection of fetuses in different stages of growth, and the shards of broken glass that the saint had used to perform his surgeries. Outside the church was a great pool of water where people bathed, laving themselves with the muddy water known to have miraculous healing properties.

  I lay with Aged Orange stretched out on my chest, scratching him under his greying chin, combing bits of fur from his back with my fingernails, afraid to move because he seemed so peaceful there. He made me think of the Chinese emperor’s cat who had fallen asleep inside the sleeve of his master’s kimono, how the Emperor had had the sleeve cut off rather than disturb the sleeping deity.

  After a while — when Aged Orange sprang from the bed for no apparent reason, as cats will do — I got up and opened the curtains that Vernal had closed. As Rainy used to say, whenever she caught me looking out the window in the chow hall at the Facility, “You got some place better you thinkin to go?” Most prisoners didn’t bother to look out any windows because we were no longer part of the outside world. Besides, all you could see was the Hill, where the unclaimed bodies of executed women were laid to rest. Something else I’d been warned: women who had been considered escape risks were buried in leg-irons.

  I opened the window to breathe the fresh air. (Vernal had removed the lilies, I noted with relief, and replaced them with a bouquet of pumpkin-coloured chrysanthemums.) The sun stole through the trees and spilled onto the blue-black rocks below where not so long ago the creek had overflowed its banks, and then receded, leaving twigs and dead branches of spruce and hemlock that had snapped off, in the rush of watery silk. I thought of my friends: Rainy, whose idea of nature was something that happened in beer commercials, and Frenchy for whom “outside” meant the place you had to go to get to the car.

  I could hear the distraught bird again, calling from the trees, Ohhhhhhhhhhh ohhhhhhhh and another one, answering him, Aaaaahhh Aaaaahhh. I tried to shut out the noise by closing the window and turning on the radio: a woman said every night she had been forced to kneel at the foot of her bed, and pray for her mom and dad, her brothers and sisters, and the gun lobby. The radio dial had been turned from Weather or Not to God Listens.

  Puzzled, I turned it off, dressed myself, and went to make my bed. That’s when I found the wet patch in the spot where Aged Orange usually slept, next to me. He had disappeared for the moment but I vowed that when I found him I would make him sleep on the floor. Then I went to my bedroom door and reached for the knob with none of the hesitation I’d felt the first time I’d had to face the challenge of opening a door that someone was not going to lock behind me.

  Vernal met me at the foot of the stairs. “You should have woken me,” I said.

  “I’ve been letting you sleep. I figured you must have needed it.” I said I’d been sleeping my life away for the last twelve years, now all I wanted to do was wake up and live.

  The kitchen, a bright spacious room with a solid yellow cedar table in the middle, was a mixture of welcoming smells. Vernal had made coffee, real coffee, not the kind guards spit in if they’re having a bad day, but the kind that clears your head, like the high altitudes in which it is grown. He had set a place for me at the table: orange juice the colour of California poppies, half an onion bagel spread with peanut butter and jam, and a bowl of Fruit Loops. He had tried to make pancakes but had tripled the baking soda to make them rise, and they hadn’t turned out as he’d hoped they would. I laughed and said it was hard not to admire someone who, even though he is a catastrophe when it comes to reading a recipe or substituting ingredients, refuses to stop trying.

  I could smell lemon furniture polish, too. Vernal had always insisted his house be spotlessly clean, and had regularly disinfected his work space, the tables or shelves, on which his clutter was piled. When we were first married I used to tease him that he was the easiest of men to please — one who wished for nothing more than that his toilet bowl be clean enough to eat out of.

  Vernal’s idea of living simply included a collection of gadgets that promised to make living simply easier — a Dancing Can Opener that gyrated in time to the coffee grinder, an automatic i
ce-crusher. His most recent acquisition was a toaster that branded slices of toast with the day’s weather forecast — a sun, clouds, or raindrops — a prototype to show how Internet technology can be used in the average home. He hadn’t had a chance to use it yet. He first had to replace his computer.

  I didn’t need a toaster to see what kind of day it was, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings by being critical of his latest toy. I heard the squalling of crows and mentioned the screaming birds I’d heard in the trees; Vernal explained that the former owner had raised peacocks, but because he hadn’t always been around to look after them, they’d “gone native”, terrorizing the flower garden, flying up at dusk to roost in the cedars, well out of the way of predators, such as dogs and raccoons.

  His predecessor believed peacocks to be symbols of immortality. “He thought they were too godly to mate in the usual sense, but when the peahen drinks the tears of her mate, conception takes place. He couldn’t have been more wrong,” Vernal said; he had taken to using earplugs at night. In the mating season that he hoped would be over shortly, the rattle of their tails could be as noisy as a room full of skeletons playing dice.

  Their leader — a white peacock — would one day be supplanted by a young challenger, in a ritual fight to the death. “The white one is always the most vocal, especially when there’s a moon,” Vernal said. “You’re particularly vulnerable upstairs. They can keep you awake all night with their . . . and when they stop, it seems too quiet and then you start missing them.”

  I said the cries didn’t bother me. As long as I knew the bird wasn’t injured, or dying of loneliness at the top of a fir tree, I would sleep.

  I caught myself before asking Vernal’s permission, and stepped out through the patio door into the daylight. He had taken up gardening with a vengeance. His decorative planters were filled with bitter-smelling marigolds, fire engine red geraniums interspersed with chrysanthemums and purply blue heliotrope. The latter gave off the scent of baby powder that made me think of Grace again with her crack-addicted surrogate child.