Given (35 page)

With the child snug against my chest, I walked back inside the restaurant, with Rainy and I-5 right behind. The place had emptied, and Frenchy stood frozen by the front entrance where the HE was going
glock-glock-glock
, his eyes as fixed on Frenchy as the eyes of a newly dead person. Even by his own standards the HE didn't appear normal.

As I watched, he began to peel off layers of his clothing. I realized then what Frenchy's boy was about to do.

Beneath his robes he wore a vest that covered his entire upper body, a vest lined with cylinders of explosive. He started counting backwards from ten, at the same time fingering the on-off switch on the belt.

The height of bliss comes with the end of countdown then boom! You sense yourself floating to another life.

Bounce! Now! Out of his way,
Frenchy screamed, the words cutting through me like a blade of cold wind. I broke open the doors, dragging Rainy after me.

We hit the pavement and rolled into the street, just as I heard the dry
ker-boom
of the detonation. The echo of the blast continued to hang in the air for a moment before everything became so quiet it seemed as if the explosion had blown away all other sound with it. I turned and saw clouds of dust rising from the site where the fast food outlet had stood, and the remains of the fluorescent sign saying, “Billions and Billions Served”.

Neither Rainy nor I spoke as we drove. Frenchy, I assumed, was dead all over again, and I-5 hadn't made it out, either. All I could think of was getting away. Whenever we came to a red light I reached over and slid my little finger into the baby's tiny grasping hand.

I could hear sirens. Rainy held the baby in one arm as fiercely as she had held Baby-Think-It-Over. He was still loosely wrapped in crime-scene tape, but he had kicked free his skinny little legs, and wriggled with life, as if he could swim through the air. I saw no fear in his eyes, just a question, but then I looked at him again and thought, wasn't he too new to be capable of forming a question? One lazy eyelid fluttered like the heartbeat of a baby bird and his tiny mouth stretched into a lopsided O, so much like Angel, my heart did a double flip.

Rainy's mind, I could tell, was on Frenchy. When I went to touch her hand, she put her free arm around my shoulders.
Way I see it, Frenchy catch up wid us later, just like she say. Best believe.

I didn't answer, kept my eyes trained on the road.

I look at you, don't see no waterworks,
Rainy said.
You see me cryin tears?

I wanted to tell her, sometimes we cry with everything
except
tears, but I kept quiet.

Frenchy be dead again, we both be spoutin,
Rainy continued, studying the baby's wrinkled face.

She said this as we came upon a billboard, plain, white, with 1 Cross + 3 Nails = 4 Given in red. I remember Grace saying her baby was a gift, a hard gift to accept but one she'd forgiven the rapist for bestowing upon her. Staring up at that billboard then, I knew what her baby's name was going to be.

There was no convincing Rainy that Coffee-Mate wasn't a reasonable substitute for mother's milk. “Babies drink milk,” I told her over and over again, until we reached the mall where I stopped to buy formula and diapers. Formula, I tried to explain, was what you used when you couldn't produce your own milk.

When we got back to the house, and the twins saw Given, they abandoned
The Simpsons
and took turns holding him, as if they had finally discovered something more interactive than bombs
or
TV. When they hugged him, Given squeaked. The Bomb must have figured that Given was a life-size toy; he got so excited when he saw the baby he wagged his whole body and put his tail out of joint. Toop lowered his eyes and looked away, like a boy with a crush on his first grade teacher.

Rainy drew Given a bath, singing
Way Down in Bath-I-Am,
while I fixed a bottle and made a sling out of a towel. “I've got something else for you,” I whispered, as he gulped down the warm milk. I reached into my jacket pocket for the shoe, saw Given curling his toes the same way Angel always did whenever I tried to slip his foot into one of his little boots.

The shoe fit beautifully, as if it had been hand-tooled for his foot alone. Rainy spun around and disappeared upstairs, returning with a parcel she had been keeping for me, she said, underneath the bed. She insisted I open it now, even undid the tape for me, being careful not to tear the motivational gift wrap depicting a deserted beach and a lyrical sunset.

The beach looked like the one Hooker had taken me to on Kliminawhit. I peeled back the paper and began lifting the lid of the box, cautiously, as if something might be waiting to jump out at me. Rainy couldn't contain herself. She grabbed the box from my hands, tore off the lid, and held up the shoe, identical to the one I had found that day in the sand. I wiggled Given's foot into it — the perfect match to the smallest running shoe ever made.

Rainy, I could tell, was pleased with her gift. She'd found it in an odd-size bin at the Athlete's Feet and Frenchy had had no problem pocketing it. She beamed as she went through the Moses basket for baby clothes, then helped me unwrap the remainder of the crime-scene tape from Given's body. I showed her how to test the bathwater, with her elbow, to make sure it was the right temperature before lowering him in.

I remembered the first time I'd given Angel a bath, how hard I'd fought to keep hold of his skinny arms and legs, slippery as cooked spaghetti. Then I'd taken him into bed with me — something I'd been afraid to do lest I rolled over on top of him in my sleep — and felt so — glad. Such a small thing, but you don't always know what will make you glad when you think back on it. Or what you will wish you had done differently.

Back then I thought my choices would always be in front of me. Now it felt like the important events of my life had already happened, and when I conjured up Angel I pictured a little ghost, weighing less than a puff of wind. Most of the catastrophes I had suffered in my life had never happened but losing my child was one catastrophe that
did,
and I had been willing to forfeit my life for him. I'd wanted to die so badly at one time because then I could have joined him in that black, unappeasable earth under the guaiac tree, the Tree of Life.

Toop barked once; it startled Given enough to make him open his eyes wide, and look at me to see if either of us were in any danger, as if he wanted the world to continue a while longer just so we could be together. The Bomb sat poised at the bathroom door, ready to leap into the water and rescue him, if I gave the word.

Given's tiny body seemed dwarfed by the ocean of the bathtub; I held on to him so tightly he must have felt my fear. I cupped his head in one hand, to keep it out of the water, and squeezed a sponge over him with the other, then plucked him from the bath, dried him off, and balanced him on the palm of my hand, where he quivered like a soap bubble. It felt so fine — to be able to hold all that mattered to you in the palm of one hand.

Vancouver's first suicide bombing was all over the six o'clock news. Rescue crews had recovered a green bandana with
Allah Akhbar
on it. This meant, “Our God is better than your God,” the reporter explained with the breathlessness of a sports announcer caught in the spirit of competition. A police officer was interviewed saying, “There is no way to stop ‘these people' once they make up their minds. What are we supposed to do? Threaten to shoot if he blows himself up? We're dead if we do, dead if we don't,” as if suicide bombing had become a feature in our lives. The camera panned to workers at the Sally Ann covering their windows with bombing net, and a dumpster filled to the brim with broken glass.

A priest tried to make sense of the event from a religious extremist's point of view. “We can't stop it. A living person, to these people, they're nothing. As a dead person you can become a hero. It doesn't make any difference to him anymore whether he's shot dead while throwing stones or he blows himself up.” A municipal worker said they were considering padlocking all the garbage cans in the downtown core so people couldn't leave their bombs in them. “All they have to do is push a button that will trigger the time mechanism so it will explode an hour later. They have time to get away.”

A bystander who had been to Jerusalem on a bus tour was interviewed as an expert. “The worst thing is when someone blows himself up in a bus: it takes weeks for you to escape from the smell of burnt flesh. You never forget it.” A soldier who'd been on a peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan said, “It's hard to believe the dawn of civilization began over there.

They don't even have a McDonald's.” A panhandler, with a Starbucks cup full of the spare change he'd earned said he thought the problem had to do with immigration, and that “whoever did this should be consequenced.”

Rainy kept quiet as we watched, holding the twins close. She said she would clean out their coffin so Son Jesus would have a place to crib, but I told her I didn't want to see another baby in a coffin again, ever, and laid him in the Moses basket Gracie had woven for him. Rainy cried
yo!
and I looked up in time to see Gracie's picture flash across the screen.

A police officer said he hoped Grace would give herself up. “We want to help her, to get help for her as best we can.” Anyone with information was asked to call the number that flashed across the bottom of the screen.

Rainy snorted.
Since when they want to help anyone? They rather bust her ass. Haul her sorry ass off to jail where cops eat Score bars in front of her when she be jonesin and sick. I never seen any situation so bad cops don't make it worse.

Given squeaked and Toop stuck his nose in the basket, sniffing. He licked dribbled formula from Given's chin. Given didn't object; he wasn't a complaining baby.

The professional couple who'd planned on adopting the newborn declined all interviews. They'd been through enough, their lawyer said. After the lawyer, a social worker said they were concerned only for the welfare of the baby who was withdrawing from crack cocaine and cried all the time.

That be a lie,
Rainy said, indignantly.
Son Jesus never cry, he only squeak.
She told me not to worry, once everyone realized the baby wasn't white, she said, they would stop caring about his plight. Not too many people were interested in trying to save a crack-addicted Indian baby.

I shifted Given in my arms. He had hold of a strand of my hair, the way Angel used to grab on to it, and was twisting it around in his fingers. When I gazed at Given I still felt Angel's spirit, connected to me by something deeper than blood.

When you are born, if you are one of the lucky ones, you begin your life at the mercy of two people who love you. Good luck, I knew from experience, was often just as baffling as the bad, but Given stared up at me again the way Angel used to do, as if to say never stop believing in the goodness of this world. From now on he would have me to love him, and, looking at him, I knew
I
was the lucky one.