Given (30 page)

I went to the kitchen window that overlooked the neglected garden, the scene of my mother's fatality. At one time I would have had a view of the heart-shaped swimming pool, but Vernal had filled in the pool after Brutus drowned.

I watched I-5 as he cleared most of a week's worth of coffee cups and dinner plates off the table and added them to a pile in the sink where lumps of congealed egg white, like beluga flesh, floated in the dirty water. The counters, too, were choked with cutlery, saucepans and empty sardine tins. Hooker said he'd bring in our luggage and I-5 repeated his earlier offer of help. I asked Hooker to put the coffin upstairs in a corner of Vernal's office where it wouldn't be in the way.

Frenchy had gone to explore the house with the HE; Rainy and the twins watched the log fire burn on TV, inching closer, trying to squeeze some warmth out of it. I heard Toop sighing through his teeth outside, and the Bomb flinging himself against the backdoor screen. I let them in. The Bomb, without his sunglasses, had a squinty expression on his face, and when I looked at him more closely I saw he was cross-eyed.

I opened the remains of the Two-For-One Pizza, and sat down at the kitchen table. The December issue of Martha Stewart's
Living
lay open next to a partially eaten can of sardines. I flipped through
Living
, wishing that “Holiday Stains and How to Treat Them,” was the biggest problem I had to contend with, and heard Hooker and I-5 re-enter the house, carrying the Chrysalis upstairs, laughing as they bumped into things. Hooker said, “your end needs to go up further,” and I-5 said something back, and they both laughed again, but they'd reached the upstairs landing, and I felt left out, I couldn't imagine what they had to laugh so hard about.

After a while Hooker came back downstairs. I heard him stop and check on Grace, before joining me in the kitchen.

“Well?” I said.

“She doesn't look good,” he said quietly. “But she's still breathing.” He picked the pineapple off the pizza, making a tipi out of it on his plate. I was about to suggest we call the hospital, have Grace admitted to Mercy
without
her consent, when I-5 interrupted us. He stood at the sink, with the Bomb under his arm, eating sardines, two at a time. “You swallow them in pairs, they don't get so lonely going down,” he said, glancing at Hooker.

He offered me a couple; I shook my head. Rice topped with a mixture of pasta and chopped sardines, or a soup of sardines thickened with pasta and potatoes, had been my daily diet while I was a hostage. I said I had never understood why people thought it was acceptable to eat every part of the sardine — bones, guts and excrement — just because it was small. “Sardines are all right, I guess,” Hooker said, as if he didn't agree with me. “Some of the time, anyways,” he added, when he saw the look of betrayal on my face.

I-5 asked if I had been talking to the
jefe
lately. I told him about Vernal's fall.

“That guy's gonna get himself an injury to himself one day,” I-5 said, pensively. “Why don't he just buy a bottle and do his drinking at home where he can pass out on the floor without hurting himself.”

I said I wished Vernal had thought of that years ago when we were newlyweds and our life together still had a chance, and asked I-5 if I could use the phone to call St. Jude's. When I enquired about Vernal, the receptionist said no one had been admitted under that name.

I had spoken to him less than a week ago. “He must have been discharged already,” I said. “Or else he checked out early.”

“He checked out he would have called home,” I-5 said. “He'd want a drink — they don't look after you so good in those places.”

Hooker laughed — a laugh I felt excluded from again, and I began to have strong feelings of resentment towards I-5 — how quickly I felt him intruding upon my life. I got up and left the kitchen as I-5 began regalling Hooker with stories of his depraved childhood, how he attended the sort of elementary school where you packed a box knife in your lunch box, but when you graduated to high school you needed a good Italian switchblade because it was over three inches to the heart, and shorter knives wouldn't go the distance.

Rainy and her twins had abandoned the fire — I found them upstairs with Frenchy, in Vernal's office. Frenchy had logged onto the Internet where she'd at last found a Twelve Step program that made sense to her, called
AfterLife Anonymous
(ALA). I listened to the First Step: “We came to believe we had attained a level of self-sufficiency not available to the living and that our lives, as we had known them, were finally over.” Rainy asked Frenchy to explain what this meant in plain English.

It mean you be MIA,
Frenchy said.
Once you accept that, you start to move on.
Frenchy said most people would feel a lot happier about being dead if they knew they'd lose weight and stop getting older; dead and naked you looked a lot thinner, and sometimes even younger. In death you grew older, you just didn't age.

The HE sat huddled in a corner picking shrapnel from his skin, making coughing up hairball noises, going
glock glock glock
. The Twin Terrorists had driven him from his end of the coffin where they lay planning their post-mortem martyr banquet, especially the kind of cake they'd like served at their funerals. Say Muh wanted it to be chocolate with coconut flakes, her favourite. Her sister thought angel food cake would be more fitting.

I went back downstairs where I-5 was rolling a joint, explaining to Hooker how he had killed a boy by accident with the knife, but he hadn't murdered anyone. “Killing is something the world makes you do — when there's no other way. Murder's something different. I've killed a few men, but I never committed murder.”

I stopped listening and went into the sunroom, expecting to find Grace where Hooker had left her, lying on her back next to the lifeless doll. I'd seen Rainy go through the same thing enough times when she tried to kick. It was never pretty.

Grace lay face down on the loveseat and didn't move when I shook her. Her limbs were flaccid, and I knew something wasn't right. When I turned her over I saw her blue lips, the needle sticking in her neck, and blood all over the blanket and the loveseat's upholstery.

I shouted her name, turned her over and hugged her to me, held her away from me and slapped her cheek, tried to make her sit up, but she felt like a dead weight however I positioned her. I grabbed a cushion and put it under her head, shouting for Hooker who came flying out of the kitchen, yelling at I-5 to call 911. Hooker and I lifted Grace off the couch and dragged her across the floor to the downstairs bathroom, knocking over everything in our path. I-5 said an ambulance was on its way, and helped Hooker lift Grace into the shower. Hooker told me to turn on the cold water while he tried to hold her up. Grace fell against a wall, her legs and arms flopping, no flicker of pain, or hope, no life on her face. It was as if her eyes had led the way out of her body and the rest of her had followed.

Hooker got her to her feet, gripped her from behind, and tried to make her stand, but nothing he could do would move her back to life. Each moment was crucial, I knew, but Grace had to make up her own mind whether or not to come back.

I heard I-5 trying to speak calmly, though his voice and Hooker's both began reverberating through me. “Hold her up! Walk her. Keep her moving. Don't let her fall.” He looked over at me. “You know what to do?” He pulled the syringe from Grace's neck and thrust it at me.

I remembered Frenchy telling me what to do “the next time” Rainy overdosed, but I couldn't remember how much salt to water you used, whether you boiled the water first, or heated it to make sure the salt dissolved. I raced to the kitchen, found the box of salt next to the baking soda, and spilled half of it on the counter trying to pour it into the syringe. My hands were shaking; I feared I was already too late.

I somehow managed to fill the syringe, then ran back with it to the bathroom. Hooker was still holding Grace upright and I-5 had lifted her inert arm to try and find a vein. I-5 grabbed the point and started poking, but nothing happened. “No veins left,” he said. Hooker said, “try her neck again,
”
but I-5 gave up and pushed the point into a muscle. Then he got behind her again, took her under her arms and started shaking her, violently, as if he could shake death out of her. Hooker kept trying to feel for her pulse. I listened for a breath. Nothing.

I heard the siren, and wondered what the guard would think: first a hearse, now an ambulance, both going to the same address. Usually it went the other way around. Hooker said he figured the ambulance attendants wouldn't be able to get a stretcher through all my mother's clutter, so the three of us heaved Grace's body into the entrance hall.

Hooker said he would ride with Grace and asked me to look after Toop, who tried to jump into the ambulance with him. I held on to him long enough for the paramedics to get the door shut, but then the Bomb began to wail, harmonizing with the siren, as the ambulance sped away. Frenchy said he sounded like a peacock in heat.

Rainy and Frenchy took the guest room across the hall from Vernal's office. Neither of them liked the idea that I would be so far away from them, sleeping downstairs in the room Vernal had renovated for my mother, and where she must have spent a lot of lonely hours during the last few years of her life. I told them I needed the space, it was my way of saying goodbye to my mother who, for all her idiosyncrasies, had been a good mother to me.

She never leave you in a dumpster, walk away?
Rainy said.

My mother used to say she was glad she raised me before child abuse was invented, but I'll say this much for her — she would have given me up for adoption before leaving me in the trash. “My mother wouldn't have known what a dumpster was, let alone where to find one,” I said.

Rainy's definition of a good mother was one who left her baby in a dumpster but then had a change of heart. She took great pride in the fact that her own mother had left her for dead, then come back for her before she was compacted with the day's garbage.

My mother's room had not been touched, as if I-5 had known at some level she wouldn't have approved of him going through her underwear drawer or her medicine cabinet. The room looked as if she had just finished making her bed and had walked out the door into the garden she called her labour of love where she would spend most of the day trying to impose order on the “riot” other people called nature.

My mother's tortoise-shell hairbrush, comb and mirror set, sat side-by-side on her dressing table. The brush still had strands of her hair in it, thin and white, and I pictured her sitting in front her mirror brushing her waist-length hair, counting out a hundred strokes, up until the end. There was a vase full of tea roses that had shrivelled and turned black. They were beautiful, in their own way, but my mother would have dismissed them as ‘deadery', and tossed them out.

Also on her dresser, in their glass cabinet, were the look-alike china dolls that as a child I'd been forbidden to touch. My mother had kept them locked up where even the dust could not violate them. She told me, years later, that the key had been lost, but today when I tugged on the tiny gold padlock it came apart in my hands. I opened the glass doors, and let the dolls breathe fresh air for the first time in so many years.

I lay on my mother's bed, unable to sleep. In the distance I could hear sirens, a night train's mournful wail, and closer, in the hallway outside my room, Toop, missing Hooker, getting up, pacing back and forth, then lying down with a great exhalation of breath. I heard my heart, too, beating away in the darkness of my body.
Only temporary
, it seemed to say.
Only temporary.

I rose before daylight. Frenchy had already logged on to her ALA Meeting, and had skipped a few steps (when you were dead, she said, the order of things like the steps you took didn't matter) — to the Fourth: “Forced ourselves to remember and relive every nauseating detail of our former lives (especially the way we treated our children).” The HE stared at her with his blind eyes that could appear playful when he didn't have detonating on his mind.

Rainy, with her twins propped up on either side of her like deadly bookends, sat on the living room floor, eating candy canes for breakfast in front of the TV where an all-male panel discussed the modern woman's role in suicide bombings, in particular the recent terrorist attack by the all-female Army of Roses. There were long queues of young
shahida
's-in-waiting more than willing to join the road to heaven, the panel's moderator said. One panelist argued that we shouldn't expect women, known to be bearers of life, to be efficient killing machines. Another said the very people we were least likely to suspect, the givers of life, might be those who were dying to kill. It was his opinion that a woman should be required to produce one son and one daughter before she be allowed to blow herself up. After she had fulfilled her demographic role, only then should she be permitted to participate in armed struggle.