Given (6 page)

The child in Grace's arms let out another
screak
, as if he sensed a threat. “Last night we couldn't get him to wake up for at least six hours,” Grace said, wiping the baby's mouth, then tucking the photograph back into the pouch.

“She tried to blame me for looking at him,” Al said, making his idea of an ugly face that seemed like an improvement over his real one.

Grace gave him a brief, tight smile. “We went to bed when it was getting light out, and Baby started to cry. I was glad. I thought we'd lost him for good.”

I reached for the glass of water Vernal had ordered but hadn't touched, thinking of the babies on the planes from Tranquilandia again, and their mothers — mothers like me — praying that other passengers wouldn't come down the aisle and say things like, “Isn't she precious?” “Is he yours?” “Can I hold her?” or that a flight attendant might become suspicious, especially if the plane was delayed and the baby didn't fuss. I longed to reach across the table, lay my hands on Grace's full belly and feel the fists and the heartbeat of her child, his earnest limbs jerking in unison as if he were practising running away. I wished babies were contagious.

Vernal took my hand saying he hoped Grace and Al would excuse us but we had a table reserved for dinner. Al said go ahead, they were sticking to their liquid diet these days, and ordered two more beers.

Gracie's baby wasn't exactly her own, Vernal hastened to explain in the dining lounge where we were shown to a table by the window. It was a life-size model of a baby that cried at random intervals, came with all the accessories, and was inescapable. Gracie had volunteered to participate in the Baby-Think-It-Over Program, designed by Social Services to teach young, drug-using mothers the realities of parenthood. As a trial parent she had to wear a “care-key” around her neck, and if she neglected her baby it would register in a computer chip inside the baby's head. A red light behind his eyes meant she was handling him too roughly, a yellow light that he had been left to cry longer than a minute, and a green light that he needed to be fed.

“If the lights go out, it means . . . what?” I said.

“Sounds like they had a close call last night, doesn't it?”

Our server set a pitcher of ice water in the centre of the table between us. I picked at the oysters Vernal had ordered for me — local oysters served on a bed of white rocks. I had no energy, or the desire, to eat the
steak au jus
that came next, especially after our server brought complimentary motion sickness bags.

Grace Moon's story got worse: her particular doll was underweight having been modelled on a crack baby, born addicted to the drug his mother smoked all during her pregnancy. The cries we'd heard were the tape-recorded cries of a real drug-affected baby, which explained why they sounded familiar. But not even Angel, as he lay sickening at the Clínica Desaguadero in the jungle, had screamed as desperately when I tried to quiet him in my arms after the faith healer swept his body with flowers and sweet basil, and suspended
amuletos
over his head to prevent the onset of
mal de ojo
, the evil eye.

“The program's supposed to change your mind about getting pregnant in the first place,” Vernal said, “but if it happens . . . in certain cases . . . Social Services wants you to think pretty seriously about giving the baby up for adoption.”

Vernal said Grace's social worker wanted Grace to sign her baby over before he was even born. Grace said no way, she didn't want anyone else raising her kid. “As you can imagine,” Vernal continued, “that Al's not stoked about being a stepparent, either.”

I asked what, if anything, Vernal knew about Al — if he had any idea why a woman like Grace would be attracted to such a man.

“Not much,” Vernal said, in response to the first part of my question.

“He can dress himself, at least,” I said. “He's got
that
going for him.”

Vernal scoffed at my remark. “As far as I can see his best quality is his bank account. His father owns, I don't know, all the hotels in Mexico. Al can stay high off his interest, if he's motivated enough.”

I laughed at this. Vernal came from old money himself, the kind so fusty with age and respectability no one remembers it was ever clean and new. Or how it was made, and who dirtied their hands in the process. We had argued from the day we met about the unfair division of wealth in the world. The Christmas we'd been burglarized the thieves took the telescope Vernal had given me so I could look out over the city to see how poor people lived.

“I say something to make you laugh?” Vernal asked. “I haven't heard you laugh like that since . . . I don't know when. Before we were married, come to think of it.” I didn't comment, and then Vernal added that he thought Gracie was wasting her life when she could be making her own millions modelling for Victoria's Secret. I said I didn't imagine Victoria's Secret used pregnant, intravenous drug users to model their lingerie.

“Trust me on this one, Grace is flying straight these days,” Vernal said
,
as he filled my water glass.

I watched as he took a drink from his own, then slipped an ice cube onto his tongue, and crunched it between his teeth. I hadn't seen ice since I'd left Tranquilandia. There it was generally believed that iced water must by definition be pure, regardless of its origins. At the Clínica Desaguadero it was offered to guests as a medicinal tonic, so clear and cold and western, so incompatible with the sticky cloying island heat. Buried in the ice cube, though, could be a germ that led to delirium and death. I learned quickly, because I had to: it's the thing you trust that does you in.

Vernal set his glass down, then reached for my hand. I could smell Grace's scent, like baby powder, on his skin.

The first time I'd slept with Vernal I swear I had to beg him to let me take his clothes off. He'd said he'd wanted time to think about it, to be quite sure, because he knew it would be more than just a casual undertaking. He actually used the word
undertaking
— as if I were a study in the dismal trade. And then when we finally did end up naked he told me to calm down.

In all things related to love and sex, Vernal exercised caution. A cautious lover was not what I had been looking for. I wanted the dumb thrust of life, not a man who apologizes for making you come so hard it hurts.

How could I have thought that marriage might be a solution? I was the one who proposed, though whenever Vernal told the story, he gave a different version. “I told her, this is for life. I want you to be my widow.”

Vernal, I soon discovered, lacked a number of social graces. I blamed the private school he'd gone to, one where the future leaders of our country are sent to learn how to behave like gentlemen. Sex education, otherwise known as the facts of life, was reduced to a single scrap of advice: when you get to the trough, don't act like pigs.

Sex education in prison hadn't been much more enlightened. Our care and treatment counsellor used a strip of masking tape stuck to her arm to describe the effects of multiple sex partners. The first time she used the tape it came away from her arm with bits of skin and hair attached. When she put the tape on someone else's arm it didn't stick as well and came away with their skin and hair, also. “Stick the tape to yet another person's arm and you've got biological matter from three people and a tape that doesn't bond very well.” People, she said, were like masking tape, too.

Our cabin had two bunks — an upper and a lower. Vernal sat on the bottom one, and pulled off his hiking boots. He wanted my opinion: did I think Grace capable of being a good mother?

“In what way?” I asked.

“I find other people interesting, that's all. I didn't mean to suggest anything
duplicitous,”
he said, defensively.

I squeezed into the bathroom and sat on the toilet to let Vernal finish undressing in privacy, wondering what point he was trying to make. He said that if he was looking for a wife again he would expect her to make sacrifices and that he would have to be faithful, too.

I remembered from living with Vernal that the more intense his feelings, the more likely he was to say the opposite of what he meant. He wanted, always, to maintain a high level of tension by keeping the dialogue evasive, filled with suppressed information and unstated emotions. Conversations with Vernal were like icebergs: most of their weight, their substance, was under the surface, where they could do their best harm.

“Are you trying to tell me something,” I said, pushing the door open with my foot. “Because if you are, get it over with.”

Vernal froze, one left leg halfway into a pair of sweat pants. “You haven't changed, have you,” he said. It wasn't a question.

The truth is, prison life detracts from a person's
savoir faire.
When you do years behind walls your idea of proper decorum becomes severely distorted. “Life on Death Row isn't all that conducive to personal growth,” I said.

“You take everything I say so . . . personally.”

“I'm a person,” I said. “How am I
supposed
to take it?”

Vernal gave me an exasperated look. “Can't we just have a conversation? It's like you have to have an argument, or you don't see the point in talking.”

I knew now for certain something was wrong. Ever since I'd got into the hearse he'd been looking at my face with a mixture of curiosity and pity, the way an undertaker would look at a face he was about to restore for viewing.

“You
are
trying to tell me something,” I said. Suddenly I felt like a stranger in my own life.

Now he looked defeated, as if he were fed up with the whole world, tired, especially, of trying to get love right. ”It's hard, when I'm still married to you, and people see us together, we get along so well. Dead lovers make tough rivals, you know what people say. It's hard on other women, you're hard for anyone to live up to.”

It hurt that Vernal thought of me as dead, but I wouldn't let it show. “When in the last twelve years has anyone seen us together?” I said.

“They don't have to physically
see
us together to know I'm still
with
you.” This was an old record: Vernal had always blamed me for the fact that none of his relationships outside our marriage had endured. I remembered, at Mountjoy Penitentiary, in the chapel where my baby had been conceived, a sign above the altar that said, “Marriage is the voluntary union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others”.

I had been married to Vernal, and yet —
I
had been unfaithful to him. It hadn't taken much. Just a man who looked at me, and smiled a particular way, as if there were no wound on earth love couldn't heal. Making love, that one time, with the man who was about to become the father of my child, was the beginning of my being something that no one else had ever been, or lived through.

I partially closed the bathroom door again so Vernal could finish getting into his sweats. “I'm not planning on remarrying . . . trust me . . . it's just that someday . . . in the future I might . . . want the option . . . again.”

Vernal was always saying, “Trust me”. But the fly side of trust is betrayal: how difficult to overlook indiscretions in one we had trusted ourselves to love. Then again there were women I knew, too, who believed that love, even love from the cruellest of men, was kind.

I told him I had to step more carefully around the trust part. Since I'd lost Angel I'd learned to set my foot down with distrust on the crust of this earth: it was thin.

”I didn't want to say anything when you were still . . . when you were . . . you know . . . where you were,” he continued. “I thought I might have been useful to you . . . otherwise I would have suggested we do this ages ago.” He paused as if hoping I would help him out, but I let him suffer. I could have dug my own grave and suffocated myself in dirt in the time it often took Vernal to finish a sentence. “It's a . . . just a . . . it would be a favour,” he added.

We had been together a total of four hours, we hadn't even tried to kill each other yet, and Vernal wanted a divorce. Deep down this didn't surprise me: Vernal and I had been destined for divorce since day one of our starter marriage. I came out of the bathroom, shutting the door behind me and locking it so it didn't keep us awake all night banging open and shut during our tempestuous crossing, but I couldn't think of anything to say, except that the moustache he was experimenting with looked like a caterpillar paralyzed by stage fright halfway across a melon, and he should consider shaving.

“I'm trying to be a man about this,” Vernal said.

At the moment I saw Vernal, not as a man, but as the abandoned boy who had fallen so far into himself that no one would ever reach him. I picked up my duffel bag and climbed the ladder to the top bunk. I slipped under the covers, still in my clothes. Everything — the sound of the ship's engine, the smell of toothpaste and work socks, even my grief — seemed alien to me.