Given (9 page)

Vernal came back downstairs and sat next to me, put his hand on my knee and said how happy he was I was home. I got flustered, said I'd like to settle in, take a nap. “I'm sorry. Yesterday must have been a long day for you and I don't know about you but I didn't get much sleep last night,” Vernal said.

“I don't need an apology,” I said.

“I know you don't, but it doesn't mean I'm not sorry.”

Ever since I'd first known Vernal, his mantra had been “I'm sorry”. Once I'd accused him of saying, “I'm sorry” instead of “Good morning” when he got out of bed. He actually said, “I'm sorry I'm sorry.” The worst part was he meant it.

Vernal said he would sleep on the couch as he led me upstairs, my duffel bag over his shoulder, to the biggest room in the house, the only one with its own bathroom. I had a brief moment of panic when he stooped to kiss me, gently, on both cheeks. “I hope you'll be . . . as comfortable as you can . . . for now . . . if you plan on . . . we'll see what we can do . . . ”

Once I would have completed the sentence for him, out loud, but now I did it, quietly, to myself:
If you plan on staying here any length of time.
I was only looking at staying here, I told him, for the rest of my life.

I watched Vernal retreat down the hall, wanting to call after him to stay with me, but doing my best to hide my disarray. Like anyone who has ever loved, I knew that the more I needed the less I would be likely to receive. When he had gone downstairs I reached to open my door, thinking how many years it had been since I'd been able to touch something as ordinary as a doorknob, amazed at how smooth and cold it felt, wondering how long it would be before I started taking it for granted. It turned in my hand; I edged open the door, then stood savouring the moment before feeling for the light switch. I had been deprived of so many other ordinary things, too.

The curtains were closed, though that didn't keep daylight from peeking in. I switched on the overhead light, and the room — with walls the colour of old teeth, stained, perhaps by smoke from the fireplace that had long ago been boarded up — shivered to life. Vernal had furnished the room with objects that made me feel at home. A clock ticked on the mantelpiece above the fireplace — the same clock that had been in our bedroom at the Walled Off. Night after night I had lain awake listening to its heartbeat sound, so constant that after a while it became part of the silence. Above the clock hung a photograph that Vernal had taken of me on our honeymoon. My hair was longer then and my eyes half open. I wore a burgundy sundress and a smile on my face because Vernal refused to take the picture until I at least pretended to be enjoying myself. Vernal, like most people, wanted to deny any negative feelings, and always did his best to keep them out of the picture.

I flicked another switch and a fan on the ceiling began to
whirr
, making the staccato beat of a helicopter overhead, a throaty
thwap thwap thwapping
like the gunship that had landed in the big yard at Mountjoy Penitentiary the day I was taken hostage. On the night table beside my bed, between a stack of books and a radio-cassette player, I found my bracelet, a thick silver band with a frog design Vernal had acquired in lieu of a retainer from a client, and given to me for an anniversary gift. I slipped it on. It was the first thing I'd worn on my wrist in twelve years, other than handcuffs.

On the dressing table Vernal had left me a new toothbrush, a water jug and bowl, a hairbrush, and a black handgun-shaped hair dryer. I went to check out my bathroom that was twice the size of the cell I'd occupied for the last twelve years, the same length of time since I'd had a toilet that wasn't inches away from where I laid my head at night — a steel toilet that flushed automatically. I had a deep, clawfoot tub — I hadn't taken a proper bath since I'd left Tranquilandia, only inadequate showers — and my own sink, above which hung another mirror.

In prison we were allowed a “personal mirror” but the rules were it had to be kept in an “appropriate place” where you wouldn't be distracted by looking at it. Rainy said mirrors were mostly for thin, rich people who felt good about themselves. If you went into a house like the White House, she used as an example, even though she'd only ever seen it on TV, there would be mirrors on every wall from the ceiling to the floor.

I stared at my face, hard and long. My lips were sealed so tight they looked as if they had been sewn together, like the lips of the shrunken head that had hung in the cockpit of the small plane that had flown me to Tranquilandia. My eyes, once cold blue, had become the colour of ash, edged with shadows, bruised by all they had seen. One thing I didn't have to worry about: no one who might see my WANTED poster on a Post Office wall would recognize the person looking back at me from the mirror now.

I opened the cabinet doors so I would no longer have to face myself, and set my deodorant and dental floss, side by side, on the one empty shelf. Vernal had stocked the cabinet with everything he thought I'd need — toothpaste, sunscreen, mouthwash, wax earplugs, tampons, laxatives, insect repellant, cough syrup, and a bottle of Extra-Strength Tylenol labelled “These have been on the floor,” in my mother's failing handwriting.

I unscrewed the lid, poured them onto my palm and ate a handful — just because I could. It had been twelve years since I had been allowed to administer my own drugs. At the Facility they were stingy, to say the least, when it came to issuing any kind of medication for pain. A woman with lung cancer would be lucky if she received a baby aspirin to help her through the night.

I started a bath, then went back into the bedroom, turned the radio on, and heard a caller say it was time women everywhere appealed to Jesus to ask his help in reducing. I fiddled with the radio dial, marvelling at my own freedom to make choices. In prison your corrections team carefully selected what you watched or listened to. It was either
Executions Live!
or the God channel which, in my mind, amounted to the same thing.

Only four stations broadcast to Kliminawhit:
Weather or Not,
a community service that gave weather reports and ferry schedules;
Radio Peace and Love
that covered war and world hatred;
Radio Orca
transmitting the underwater squeaks and cries of migrating whales; and
God Listens
, with Christian oriented programming.

I settled on
Radio Orca
, where a human voice that also sounded as if it were coming from the depths of the sea, interrupted the whales. “Each pod has a distinct dialect,” the voice intoned. “Scientists have lowered microphones in various locations off the coast to monitor the whales conversations.” In the free world even whales were under surveillance.

I unpacked my belongings and set the photograph — the blur that was Angel — on my dressing table, propped up against the water jug. I had to struggle with the drawers that were swollen shut in the antique dresser, then laid out my pyjamas and the one change of clothing I'd been allowed to take with me when I left the Row.

When you first arrive on the Row, you are requisitioned three orange jumpsuits, one pair of orange sweat pants, five pairs of socks, useful for padding your three brassieres (white) that look like the mailbags they were always busy making and then unmaking (an exercise in futility that the guards called “making yourself useful”) back in the general population. It was the most degrading thing of all for most women — to be issued brassieres that were several cup sizes too big for them, and Rainy decided to make the best of a humiliating situation. After she had finished cleaning the chow hall she would empty the sugar containers down the front of her shirt, hoarding it in her 42-D cup bra for when she woke up in the middle of the night craving a sugar fix.

You are also issued five orange T-shirts, one pair of shoes (no laces) and seven pairs of coloured underpants, a different colour for every day of the week. If a guard caught you wearing yellow instead of red on a Monday or red instead of blue on a Thursday, it was considered an infraction of prison rules and you were subject to disciplinary action, which meant spending time in a punishment cell. I got an extra three days when my red underpants fell into some bleach by accident and turned orange (Rainy was sterilizing her needle) because I said aren't
all
cells punishment cells?

Some of the girls sewed their own clothes and the ones who got really good at it, like Frenchy, were hired to help make the guards' uniforms. Frenchy used to cut the khaki-coloured material on the bias, on purpose; we got no end of satisfaction watching a guard stop and try to straighten her twisted pant legs when she thought no one was looking.

I undressed and got in the bath and lay for the longest time luxuriating in the hot water, looking down at the length of my body, running my hands over my belly, thinking about what the
curandero
had told me — that the uterus is the last internal organ to decompose. I closed my eyes, let every part of me but my head slip below the surface; even after my bath the clean surface of my body felt like a thin shell around everything I couldn't wash away. I got out, towelled myself off, then went back to my bedroom. The bed looked inviting — not like the kind I had become used to with the lumpy mattress that lay there rubbing it in —
you're sleeping Single-O tonight —
or a bunk like I'd had on the ferry, but a big-ass bed, as Frenchy would have put it. I rubbed my fingers on the chenille bedspread, a nubble like Braille under my hands, and then climbed under the covers.

The sheets were soft, creamy flannelette. My head fell in love with my pillow the moment we met, and I lay there, staring at the ceiling, the molding a pattern of vulvic tulips, thinking this could be the first pillow I'd slept on in twelve years that hadn't been stained with tears. I always imagined I could feel those tears and the marks they'd left, as if they'd never quite dried, but stayed wet in memory of the last woman who had cried herself to sleep. I'm making it sound like a pretty sad place, the Condemned Row.

I lay awake listening to a newborn killer whale on the radio crying for his stranded mother, thinking of my son. When I had turned the doorknob and opened the door to my new room it was if I had opened up the old place inside me where I'd locked my grief. I'd thought there was nothing you could have told me about grief I didn't already know. Until I lost Angel.

I thought of the ways he had reached for me, as if to say
stay here, with me, for the rest of your life.
There were places where the heart could not rest, where the best you could do was be at home with the rootless.

When I woke the next morning, to a bird screaming in the trees beyond the house, Aged Orange lay curled at the foot of my bed. I'd spent most of the night in the fetal position to avoid kicking him. I stretched my legs out under him, but he didn't budge.

The whole room smelled sweet, a familiar unsettling kind of sweet, and when I looked around I saw that Vernal had filled a Wedgwood vase with Stargazer lilies he'd picked in the garden.

Their fragrance reminded me of my last days on Tranquilandia. Angel and I had spent the first night together at the only hotel in town, the Hotel Desaguadero (which translated as the Hotel Drain) at the end of La Camino de Penitencia, or the Road of Penance. The owner looked astonished to have guests and asked my driver how we had chanced upon the place, as if it were impossible that anyone might come to his establishment by choice. In the evening he served chicken necks, rice with gravel, and Coca-Cola on a patio under a crackling bug zapper; the scorched remains of flying insects fluttered down onto my plate. Our room, when we returned to it, was filled with orchids, orchids with bruised lips, slashed throats and bloodshot eyes.
Flores para los muertos.

The day I left Angel behind on that island I'd boarded a plane filled with the same intoxicating and seductive odour of sex and death. The coffin holding the baby whose body had been emptied out and filled with cocaine had lain on a bed of crushed Medusa's Head orchids, each one wet, as if it had been picked weeping.