Given (8 page)

Vernal sat on a bench outside the post office, a selection of newspapers in his lap. “You get killed in a car crash, you become a saint overnight,” he said, without looking up at me. For a minute I thought he was talking about Earl, or my potty-mouthed escort.

“‘Teen Angel Dead: Driver Charged,'” Vernal read. “‘She always had a smile for everyone.'” Why is it that kids who die are never the unsmiling miserable depressed ones who smoke crack and swear at their parents who nag them to take out the garbage?”

“You die, things get forgiven.”

“You have to wonder.”

A journalist I'd heard interviewed described how war had changed her life, because going to Bosnia, albeit to write about the war, changed the way others saw
her
. They took her seriously now, she said, as if she'd proven herself to be a person of substance.

Prison had been a test for me: there could be no doubt about that. And doubtless, too, it would change the way the rest of the world would regard me from now on. Had I died in the crash in LA, would I have gone from Killer Mom to sainthood overnight in the press? Highly unlikely, given my particular circumstances.

I felt like I'd been given a reprieve. We returned to the Snipe — the red pickup had gone. When we got back in the hearse Vernal set his newspapers on the seat between us and I remembered how different it had been when we were first together, how he would pull me close to him and drive, one arm over my shoulder, his hand inching down for a feel of my breast.

I thought, too, about a road trip to the interior one fall when the trees were turning, and we had only been married a few months. I'd fallen asleep and Vernal had shaken me awake to write down the lyrics to a song he'd started composing as we'd passed Hell's Gate. I scribbled his words with a purple crayon on our tattered road map. It had felt so romantic, as if love couldn't get any better than that.

We had our first fight hours later, at the only motel in Hope that had a vacancy, the Paradise Motel. My purple scrawl had been illegible, the words to Vernal's first and last love song, lost.

We took the coast road north out of Mystic, with Vernal pointing out the sights — the blackened shell of the fire hall he said had burned down on Halloween, with the fire truck parked inside; the road to the municipal airport. The cemetery on the outskirts of town was growing even more quickly than the town itself, Vernal said. He saw an excellent investment opportunity in cemetery futures.

Next to the graveyard was a square grey building with barred windows overlooking a gravel parking lot.

“Church of the Holy Brew,” Vernal said. The only way Father Tunney had been able to get a following had been to convert the Catholic church to a bar and off-license — there was no pub on the island and a lot of people liked to socialize when they drank — and it had become the place you could go and share a beer and a plate of traditional bar food during Holy Hour and gossip with your neighbours. The church still presided over weddings and funerals, Vernal said. Some things never changed.

Vernal chose this moment to confess he had made changes in his own life since he'd started spending more time on the island. He had stopped using drugs, and — “just for today” — stopped drinking. Vernal, who'd always said a room without a TV was like a room without a view, was learning to live simply, without a television. He hadn't weaned himself off the telephone yet. Since there was no cell phone service to the island he had had a landline installed so his clients could reach him if they had to.

He wasn't taking on many new clients these days, he had enough repeat offenders. As for money, he needed much less of it than he had done when we'd met, “in the beginning”. He said
in the beginning
as if we had been Adam and Eve, oblivious in our walled Eden.

He had also started going to church. “It's not what you're thinking. I've joined . . . a support group. There's a meeting every night — in the church basement. Noon hour meetings, too. Over the lunch hour. Obviously.”

In the past, whenever I'd suggested Vernal consider attending AA, he had resisted. If I tried having a conversation with him about how I was afraid he was drinking himself to death, he would say the graveyard is full of sober men
.
He'd once described an unusually sober judge as embodying all those characteristics that men found distasteful in other men, meaning he didn't drink. I had decided, long ago, that Vernal had chosen alcoholism over our future.

My window had fogged making me feel that no other world existed, for the moment, outside the car. We drove, each of us wrapped in our own silence — Vernal wiping his side of the window with a rag he kept on the dashboard just for that purpose — along the Bend, the winding, cratered road, named after a pioneer, Orbit Bend, that led from the Port of Mystic all the way to the Yaka Wind First Nations village of Old Mystic on the northern tip of the island. Islanders' favourite pastime was enquiring of tourists, “What you doing today, going round the Bend?”

Grace Moon lived in Old Mystic, Vernal said. He wondered if her baby was going to be a boy or a girl. When I said I wouldn't hazard a guess, he went on to say he regretted not having had at least one child of our own; he wished he had had his vasectomy undone. When I'd married him he hadn't told me we would never be able to have kids, he saved that surprise until after we said our “I do's”. He'd told me he hadn't had the courage to say anything
before
we got married because, back then, he had been too afraid of losing me.

Our marriage hadn't been altogether childless. There'd been Brutus, with Canine Attention Deficit Disorder, dog acne, a pacemaker, and low self-esteem. It probably hadn't helped that Vernal had named her Brutus. After she drowned in our swimming pool, Vernal had vowed that he'd never again fall in love with anything or anyone capable of loving him back.

The sky, as we drove north, became more foreboding. The paved road ended and I saw a sign in the middle of a field where a small herd of horses, with ribs like radiators, stared at the dead grass: “Christian Vegetables Ahead”. As we hit the gravel Vernal swerved, but too late, and I felt the hearse juddering beneath me. “Potholes,” he muttered, then swerved back into the right lane to avoid another one, turning right off the main road at the honour stand where a plywood square nailed to a stake bore the hand-scrawled message, “Count on the Lord
,”
next to another, a list of commandments: “No Loitering. No Trespassing. No Soliciting. No Dogs.” Vernal said I could count on one thing and that was getting a new self-serving platitude there every week. A man wearing a green beret and army fatigues stood guarding a bin of zucchinis the size of incendiary rockets. Yet another sign — this one not homemade — had been bolted to the bin and warned, “Video Surveillance”.

“So much for honour,” Vernal said. “I make it a point never to buy any of his wretched Christian vegetables.”

He slowed over the washboard surface of the unpaved dusty road and then turned left at

PARADISE FARM B&B
Stay Here for the Rest of Your Life.

I recalled that after our aborted trip to the interior, Vernal had said “remind me to avoid any place that uses ‘paradise' as an enticement
.”

“The previous owner's sign, not mine,” Vernal said, as if he knew what I was thinking. “I keep meaning to take it down, but . . . well, it's on my list of things to do around here. I still get people driving in, wanting a room for the weekend, asking if we take kids or pets. I even tried locking the gates but that didn't stop them.”

The long driveway, overhung with dark evergreens, ended in front of a barn. A marmalade cat sat washing himself, and didn't move until we were almost on top of him.

“Aged Orange. The only cat I know who plays chicken with a hearse,” Vernal said, as he eased the Cadillac, with wet, white feathers still sticking to it, into the barn, as if bringing it home to roost.

The barn had been constructed of bottles, what looked to be 26er's. I assumed Vernal had found a creative use for his empties — before he found AA — one that didn't require him lugging a Blue Box as far as the end of the driveway every recycling day — but he hastened to explain how each bottle had been filled with nothing more potent than embalming fluid, once. The barn, he said, was another of his predecessor's many creative endeavours. Slab Ceese believed that a true artist — one at the height of his powers — ought to be good enough to bring death back to life. “He needed bodies to prove it — ergo the B&B. Problem was his guest book didn't balance. He had more clients checking in than checking out. “They checked out all right, but not in the usual sense of the term.

“No one ever found any bodies,” he continued, “to back up the Crown's claim — it's all hearsay as far as I'm concerned. You know how irrational people can get about anyone who dares to be different. And at the end of the day, though, the judge didn't buy my artistic license defence either.”

I wanted to say most people would consider killing your guests more than a little different, but who was I to judge? Vernal said Slab's wife had filed for divorce shortly after she had retained Vernal to act for her husband on the criminal matters. Vernal said he'd been warned by the real estate agent that he would be moving into a distressed house.

The air was filled with sweet-smelling hay, the scent of late summer rain on dry cedar, warm moss, and the punky forest floor. I could hear rushing water. A creek ran through the property on the other side of the house — I'd have a good view of it, Vernal said, from my bedroom window.

From somewhere beyond the creek, deep in the woods, I heard a deep-throated songbird singing his dark-hearted song as Vernal picked up my duffel bag and led me towards my new home. Silvered by time and exposure to the wind and rain it rose, mind over matter, from the earth. Even if Vernal hadn't told me about the artist who had found a way of bringing the dead back to life, it was, I could see, a house ripe for haunting.

Vernal's laptop lay face down in the driveway. “It crashed,” he said, miming its descent from an upstairs window.

I stepped around the computer and an enormous hunk of cement at the foot of the front steps, a mounting block that Orbit Bend, who'd built the original farmhouse, had laid.

“Orbit thought motorcars were a fad. He went everywhere on horseback right up until the day he got thrown off his horse and ended up in a wheelchair,” Vernal said, as we climbed the steps to the long shady porch my mother would have called a verandah.

He shouldered open the heavy wooden door and motioned me inside. I bent to take my shoes off just as Aged Orange darted between my legs, almost knocking me down.

“He's not used to anyone else being in the house,” Vernal laughed. “It's been just the two of us rattling around together.”

One glance inside told me there was not much space in which to rattle around in. Even the mudroom was piled high with boxes — Vernal said he had been emptying our house in Astoria bit by bit, but hadn't had time to properly unpack. He hurried me into the living room, apologizing for the chaos. He had tried to be ruthless, he said, but it was always hard to know what to keep, and what to give away.

He excused himself to go upstairs to make sure my room was “in order”; I plunked myself down on our old forest-green leather couch that faced a bare wall where, judging from the ganglion of wires issuing from a hole in the woodwork, the previous owner's entertainment centre had been. The liquor cabinet stood empty, too: in our old house it would have been crammed full, at all times, with every type of alcoholic drink we didn't need. Vernal's explanation for the wide variety was you got an hour's free parking downtown if you bought a bottle of booze.

After Brutus died Vernal took to leaving our bed in the middle of the night to quench his grief with a bottle. I'd find him downstairs in the early hours of the morning, his arms wrapped around his commodity, plead with him to come back to bed with me, where I could lie listening to him breathe, so exquisitely aware of his suffering that every detail on which my eye fell — the crease of the sheet, the fissure in a tile, the slight discolouration on the wall around the doorknob — commanded attention and became significant, as if my perceptions were trying to divert me out of self-preservation, in the way one might offer candy to an incorrigible child. Now I remembered an argument we'd had in a Vancouver café where I'd noticed, for the first time, the word “zen” in “Frozen”. It became something for me to hang on to, as he harangued me about the fact that he didn't want to have kids. He'd seen enough unwanted mothers in this world.