Given (32 page)

“And?”

“I already gave him a Xanax a couple of hours ago. He's been getting these hair balls around his, you know, his, you got to wonder what those two are getting up to when we're not looking. He hates it when I start cutting . . . ”

“What did Vernal say?” I interrupted. Something in my tone made I-5 look at me in a new way. He put down his toenail clippers and held up his hands in a gesture of surrender.

“Whoooa, killer. Don't get your shirt in a knot. The
jefe's
checked into some place . . . they don't allow contact with family members. Not for the first three weeks, they do some kind of assessment on him.”

“What sort of
place
?”

I-5 shrugged. “One of those treatment centre type of deals.

You want my opinion, the
jefe
needs a stiff drink, not rehabilitating.” He began clipping his own nails even though anyone could see they weren't in need of clipping.

“A drink is the last thing he needs.”

He shrugged again. “I got this friend of mine, gave up everything. Pills, booze, crack, junk, even quit smoking. Now he goes to church, his wife's divorced him, and his kids have to leave the property when they want to get high. When you're sober and clean, it's the rest of the world that's fucked.”

I realized, as he spoke, that Vernal wasn't doing I-5 a favour by having him live at the Walled Off, it was the other way around. As long as Vernal kept I-5 close, he would always have an excuse to drink and do drugs, especially since he wasn't planning on living forever, as he had reminded me numerous times.

I went upstairs to begin packing up Vernal's office. Frenchy was online explaining to her ALA group that because Step Four had encouraged her to dredge up and relive every nauseating detail of her former life (especially the way she had treated her son) she had decided to skip right ahead to Step Five: “Shared these details with the dead (as we understand them to be) who have begun to manifest themselves in unexpected ways.”

The Twin Terrors had driven the HE from the coffin again, and had removed their veils for the first time since manifesting themselves as martyrs-in-waiting; their faces looked at peace. The HE squatted on the opposite side of the room with the pocketful of rocks he had collected from the driveway, trying to drive the twins out of the coffin by throwing the rocks at their exposed heads. Even though he was blind, he was right on target. But the twins never lost their composure, not even when the gravel imbedded itself in their foreheads, or left pockmarks of blood on their cheeks.

Frenchy quit her meeting before it was over to take the HE for a time-out in the hall closet. When they'd gone I began emptying the drawers in Vernal's desk. Vernal had saved every letter he had ever received from me in prison, and tied them together with a length of butcher string. In prison we had relied on letters — both writing and receiving them — to combat the ills of daily existence. The longing I felt for certain letters — those from my family in particular — allowed me to remember what it was like to be real.

I had packed everything but the computer and started down the stairs when I came across Rainy sitting on the landing with a light bulb, like a giant white tear, between her knees. She had been on her way to replace the bulb that had burned out overhead, when she'd heard me coming.

Look like someone et up yo cake,
she said, turning the conversation away from herself. I told her it wasn't easy, packing up your dead mother's life, and that Vernal had checked into a residential treatment centre and I wasn't allowed to speak to him.

You make your grave, you lay in it, aight?
Rainy said. Rainy didn't have a lot of sympathy for other people's weaknesses, especially those who were wealthy enough they didn't have to steal to get high.
You rich and white you got a dependency problem,
she said.
You go on TV tell everybody you sorry, then check into a place for rich fuckups. You be poor and black with a crack pipe and a gatt you get shook down by the cops, get a beatin laid on you and yo sorry ass be hauled off to jail.

On Tuesday morning, I-5 woke me from a dreamless sleep. I went downstairs, picking at a shred of skin coming loose along the side of my thumbnail. It peeled away easily, but left a burning sore.

I put the phone to my ear, hoping it would be Hooker, but heard a small voice say, “It's me. Gracie?” the last syllable of her name rising like a question.

“I'm on a different ward, now,” she said. “I'm allowed visits. They even let me out of my room to make this phone call.”

Rainy didn't want to come to the hospital again, not
twice in one row.
Frenchy said she would take her to do some Christmas shoplifting, and I dropped them at the mall. A true gift, in Frenchy's eyes, was something you personally stole.
You
know
it come from the heart, person take time to steal it for you.

At the hospital I was informed that even though Grace had been transferred to a lower security unit, I would still have to leave everything I'd brought with me in a locker. I couldn't take items such as money, food, a comb, even a book or magazine, to the detox ward.

I locked up my car key, then followed the overhead signs; the double doors were electronically sealed and when I pushed the buzzer a male nurse peered at me through a wire-thread grid imprisoned in glass. The door opened inward, and the nurse, his face worn, featureless as his uniform, said he would escort me as far as Room C12.

The hall was dark, poorly lit. The only light I could see came from the ruddy glow of an “Exit” sign at the opposite end of the building. When I asked the nurse why the lights were off, he said, in the most matter-of-fact way, that light bulbs got stolen as fast as they could be replaced, their filament wire being just the right size for reaming the #25 needles junkies liked best. “Patients call this ward Drugless, what a joke.” When we passed the nurse's station I watched an orderly slip a condom over the mouthpiece of a telephone before putting it to his lips.

The nurse unlocked Gracie's room that had a green sticker on the door — a child in the fetal position, inside an eye shedding a tear. The nurse told me visiting hours were over at three, and locked the door behind me. Even though the room was brighter than the hallway — a barred window took up most of the outside wall — the darkness just got darker. I stood, feeling as if I were a prisoner again myself.

A TV screen hung suspended from the ceiling in the middle of the room where you couldn't reach it to adjust the volume or change the channel, just like the ones we had in our cells at the Facility, only this was tuned to the Weather network. TV, on the Row, had been used as a kind of electric Thorazine: an inmate who practised a slumping vegetable life in front of her TV was a tranquil inmate, cheap to accommodate. “Ladies who don't enjoy watching TV are the ones who get into the most trouble,” our care and treatment counsellor had said, when I went to ask her permission to have my television permanently disconnected.

There were four beds in Grace's room, three of them occupied. A girl with half a face looked up at me and moaned, “you pay me first then you take my fuckin' picture.” A woman with a birthmark shaped like an inflated kidney bean on her neck lay in the bed next to Grace by the one section of the window that opened; a breeze rippled the shadows of the bars that fell across her body, making her appear fragmented. Grace turned her head when she heard me enter. Her entire being looked sad, even her fingernails and her skin. She had that look people get when they are about to tell you something that will change your life.

Grace, and both the other women, had green stickers on their charts, the same as I'd seen on the door. She made room for me on the bed, told me to sit, and patted her belly as if she were encouraging the life inside her not to give up. I put my hand on top of hers, toyed with the plastic bracelet listing her allergies — penicillin and honey dew melon — on her wrist.

“You're the only one who came,” Grace said, after we'd sat in silence. “Hooker said he'd come back, but he didn't. When you look like you're going to die the whole world starts caring about what‘s going to happen to you. And then, when they save you, they get mad if you say you didn't want to be saved.”

“Hooker cares, Gracie.”

“Not even.”

“I've talked to him. He cares, he just doesn't know how to show it.”

Grace said he wouldn't have left her a prisoner on a locked ward if really cared. She said she didn't belong here. They fed her jello salad. The TV never changed, unless you could afford to pay for it. They had installed cubes of ultraviolet light in the bathroom so you couldn't find a vein to shoot up in.

She looked away as she spoke. “They don't trust us. They hate us. They make jokes behind our backs. They think we deserve to get AIDS. They hope we'll die.”

I said it wasn't true, everyone wanted her to feel better. Grace said she didn't
want
to feel better. She didn't want to live. She'd rather die a bleeding scabby death in a dumpster alleyway, than live this way. Her eyes came to rest at the bars on her window.

“Hooker cares,” I insisted. “You're all he's got.”

“Hooker only cares about himself,” Grace said. “Strike a match on his soul, he wouldn't even flinch.”

I sat, not knowing what to say, wanting to ask more about Hooker, wondering how much, if anything, Gracie knew. I told her about Vernal's call. Grace perked up at the mention of Vernal's name, when I said he had checked into a dry-out centre on the north shore.

Grace said she knew how he felt. She'd been in and out of detox most of her life. “The last time I checked in I thought this is crazy, I don't need this.

“The guy I was with, he wanted to stay high. When they wouldn't give him his keys he left on foot, towing his suitcase behind him down the road. I looked around the place and I started getting this wrong idea that I didn't need anybody's help, I could get clean again all by myself. I had will power. I called home. ‘
Naha
,' I said, ‘come and get me. No one here has any teeth.'

“‘Have you looked in a mirror lately?' my
naha
says. I looked in the mirror. I didn't have any teeth, either!”

Grace gazed somewhere beyond me. “One guy in that place, he lit himself on fire. I'm the one who found him — I tried to put him out. Normal people, when they burn, they burn with a blue flame. When a heroin addict burns . . . well . . . the flames are green.”

I'd been locked in the room with her for less than five minutes when another nurse came in, ostensibly to check Grace's blood pressure and take her temperature, but in fact, Grace told me after she left, to see if I had brought drugs with me that Grace hadn't had time to hide. The nurse looked in the drawer in the table beside Grace's bed, flipped through a stack of old magazines — including the
Newsmakers
with my face on the cover — and a Bible, checked under her tongue, and between her legs, then narrowed her eyes at me. Who else but another drug user, her eyes said, would be visiting an addict on Drugless?

“Any problem with your medication?” the nurse asked Grace, still looking at me as if I were a bad influence.

“I already told you,” said Grace, “there's a problem. I keep telling everyone, I don't want to take it.”

The nurse ignored her, as if she knew what was best, and handed Grace a small white paper cup with a hexagonal orange pill in the bottom, and a round white one. She waited until Grace went through the motions of putting them in her mouth and swallowing.

As soon as the nurse was gone, Grace spat the pills out and gave them to the woman with the birthmark on her neck. “She'll swallow anything,” Grace said, “even if she has to chew it first.”

She lowered her voice. “You bring anything, a pick-me up? Coke? Percocets? They don't let you have painkillers in here. It might make you feel less worse.”