Given (17 page)

I put the bottle under my pillow where Rainy couldn't get at it, and lay back down on the bed. She stretched out beside me, smelling worse than something dead that had been exhumed. I told her if she was going to stay in my room she had to start washing at least once a week. And I said I didn't want her, with those needles sticking out of her veins, always cozying up to me on the bed.

Rainy, who once told me she thought her heart was located in her neck, replied that the needles were there for a good reason — to keep her heart from falling out. Then she began to cry, the viscous tears stuttering down her cheeks. Rainy had the ability to work up a tsunami of tears that would send you scrambling for drier ground. In the broken heart of her life she was like the bottomless well grown-ups warned their children to stay away from.

Crying was the one thing she had left that could get my attention. Her tears were brown and pungent smelling; they leaked from her eyeballs and all her joints. Whoever had made Rainy over had done a terrible job.

I got a facecloth from under the bathroom sink, ran hot water into a bowl, and added a squirt of liquid soap to get rid of the vinegar smell. I hoped I wouldn't catch Rainy's crying disease — I'd kept my tears on the inside since I'd lost my son, and I and wanted it to stay that that way. “You got to hide things to keep love, coverin' up, puttin' everything on the outside and crying in yo oatmeal on the inside,” Frenchy, when we became friends, had explained.

I gave Rainy a towel and told her to dry her face and especially her neck to stop the needles from rusting any further. I said I was going downstairs; Frenchy complained I was no fun to be with anymore, all I did was read books and sleep ever since we had come to this house. Rainy had smeared the brown fluid all over her face with the towel so that it looked worse than ever.

Beyond my window the sky had turned the colour of old gravestones. I left the room when Rainy began reciting “Tree Bline Mice” to the HE's rat, as if it were a fundamental morality lesson, and the twins started shrieking in stereo and jumped up on my bed, hiking their long skirts up over their knees. I closed the door behind me, wishing I could lock it and lose the key. Knowing, at the same time, losing my two friends and their dead kids who'd come back to get the mothering they'd missed, wasn't an option.

Tree bline mice,

tree bline mice.

Dem suckers be runnin!

Dem suckers be runnin!

Dey all run atta dis white man wife,

She done whacked dare tail wid a fuckin knift.

Whassup, you ever see anything dat bad in yo life,

As tree bline mice?

Rainy and Frenchy had spent years of their lives arguing about God, and being executed had only further entrenched them in their positions.

God exist, why he walk on by?
Frenchy said. She figured God must be playing a big joke on people like Rainy who went around praying he would answer their prayers.
You think prayin's gon save you? God gon gatt yo ass one day, same's the rest of us.

Rainy, who sat on the floor, bent double, biting her toenails, wasn't fazed.
God just be doin his job,
she said,
policin the hood.

Frenchy got up from where she'd been sitting and curled up next to Rainy on the floor.

What colour you figure God be?
she persevered, as Rainy spat out another toenail. I told her to pick it up, but she ignored me.

I figure God be white and fat, weigh more than a secondhand Cadillac,
Frenchy continued.

Rainy looked up, and narrowed her eyes.
You barkin up the wrong dog,
she said, colouring what was left of her toenails Mauvelous with a Crayola from the box Frenchy had lifted.
Me, I figure everythin in this world be 'xactly the colour it stupposed to be.
She emptied the Crayolas into her lap, picked Burnt Sienna and began drawing a portrait of herself, and her twins, emerging from a pale brown mist, on the wall.

You got a broken brain,
Frenchy said.
It always been broke. Your daddy give you a money shot right in the soft spot before you pop out. You certified retarded, he get that extra money welfare gives people with dumbass kids.

Rainy stuck out her bottom lip.
You not the smartest crayon in the box, yo own self,
she said, selecting Lima-Been-Green for her twin's hair.
'Sides that, Holy Spit-it be the only father I got to look up at. Ain't nobody smoke his ass on Nintendo.

I listened to them argue and thought of our care and treatment counsellor who used to say, to Rainy and Frenchy, “You two, you bicker-nicker-natter. Like two peas and pods.”

Frenchy kept on at her.
God tough, like a $2 fry-steak maybe? What you think? God made of steel? Like yo mama's dildo?

Rainy shook her head. It sounded as if a bag of nails and bolts and other shrapnel the HE picked from his body had been dropped into a metal bucket and kicked across a pit of pointed rocks.

Ain't got no mama. My mama dead like a doorknob,
Rainy said. She sucked in her lower lip, scribbling over the drawing she'd just made with a fistful of jarring colours, obliterating herself and her twins. Frenchy said it was time her twins got names, like George Bush or Osama bin Laden.

Them tags been already used,
Rainy fired back. Rainy had refused to name her twins, from the moment she gave birth to them and saw how they were joined. When you named someone it made them harder to kill, and she hadn't wanted to get attached.

That Rainy and Frenchy had decided to come along for the wild ride I was on, hadn't struck me as strange. I wasn't surprised when my mother tried to make contact with me, either.

Once a month I had been allowed to make a phone call from the Facility. Most times when I called home my mother seemed to remember who I was, but occasionally she would apologize and ask me to tell her again where I had been for so many years, and why I had never come to see her, why, especially, hadn't I come when my father had been ill and asking for me. I reminded her, as gently as I could, that they didn't issue day passes from Death Row, not even to attend funerals. Their rationale? “You knew your father was old and would probably die one day. You should have thought about that
before
you committed your crime.”

“I don't know from one day to the next whether I'll even have a place to live,” my mother had said, the last time I'd called. “Vernal's got the house up for sale. I suppose he didn't mention it?”

“He told me he doesn't expect it to sell,” I'd said, quickly. “Not anytime soon. I know he's happy to have you living in the house, Mother.”

“Vernal wouldn't know what it's like to be a burden on anyone,” my mother sighed. “He doesn't even call. Unless he wants something — last time it was the car. I told him the tires needed rotating and if he took it and something happened to him, your father and I would never be able to forgive ourselves. You know how your father feels about lending his car; he'd rather lend his toothbrush. At least if something happens to a toothbrush, it's replaceable.”

My father had been dead for six years. I didn't think he'd mind lending his car
or
his toothbrush under the circumstances.

I never got to say goodbye to my mother. She died two weeks before I was permitted a call to let her know I was being transferred and that if my new trial went according to my lawyer's plan, I would be coming home to take care of her.

Now with Vernal out of the house, the phone calls began: the first came when I was getting ready for bed, and by the time I got downstairs to answer it, the caller had hung up. The second call came a little earlier, around nine o'clock on Tuesday evening. But while I heard nothing but laboured breathing over the line, I could hear a familiar impatient grinding at the edges of my own words.

“Mother, it's me. I know you're there. Please talk to me.”

She didn't speak, and I began picking at the dry skin around my fingernails, then biting, tearing the skin off in shreds, with my teeth. I'd picked up Frenchy's flesh-eating habit — the way she kept trying to consume herself, bit by bit, before the world swallowed her whole — when we were in prison. Frenchy used to say she wished she could have been something normal, like an alcoholic or a heroin addict, because then she would have had Twelve Step programs like AA.

“Mother?” I repeated, emptily. Two of my fingers were bleeding and I was working on the third. I had half-hoped, in that way in which we never stop being our mother's child, that she might ask how
I
was getting along, but that was selfish of me, I knew.

Be patient, I told myself. Be kind. I remembered the last words I'd heard my father say: “Hasn't she hurt us enough?” How much is
enough?
How much more could I do?

Rainy and Frenchy were still at it when I went back upstairs, the sound of their bones rustling like insect wings through the darkening room. Frenchy wanted to know who I'd been talking to, and why I was bleeding like a nailed-to-the-cross Jesus.

I climbed into bed and drew the covers over me. The HE, who had been trained to feel at home in a coffin, had made up a bed for himself in one of the Chrysalises; the Twin Terrorists had taken possession of the other that they'd moved as far away from the HE and his white rat as possible. Rainy wouldn't go near them — she believed they were “attempting fate”.
Coffins be for dirt napping, best believe.
Gooey brown tears began oozing from the corners of her eyes, and around the needles in her neck, whenever she saw her twins lying in repose. The HE had found my blow dryer; he turned it on, shooting hot air into Rainy's face until she started to melt. Then he turned it off and tossed it onto the floor, where it lay clicking as it cooled.

I closed my eyes. Rainy, her face a bloated mass of wet darkness crawled in beside me. She whimpered like a small animal and I wanted to put my arms around her but was afraid I'd get jabbed by the needles. Frenchy got under the covers on my other side. She said Rainy and I had all the blankets, and Rainy said
she
didn't get any pillow; Frenchy said Rainy didn't need a pillow because her neck was full of spikes so she couldn't lay her head down anyway.

You dissin me? I be doin aight,
Rainy said.
You try holdin yo neck up, walk round like a pincushion.

I lay in the middle, growing more awake by the minute. I realized I'd have to go and sleep downstairs on the couch, that perhaps this was what they were hoping for, that I would vacate the bed so they could lie in it, side by side, and bicker-nicker-nacker all night.
Two peas and pods.
I made a motion to get up, but Frenchy reached over to hug me with her helplessly out-of-control arms.

Don't go,
she said.
Chill here wid us.
I wasn't used to hearing such tenderness coming from Frenchy's sloppy mouth.

I lay awake between them until they fell asleep, listening to the cry of the peacocks, and beyond, in the forest, the cedars speaking in tongues, the giant spruce trees creaking like old planks. Overhead the buzz of a jet drilled in the reminder there was nowhere, finally, you could go to be alone. Not even up there close to heaven, where flight attendants were moving through the cabin distributing complimentary headsets for the movie about to begin. And suddenly I felt a tremor, a series of tremors, in my heart, as if it wanted to share with me the secret of how it went on beating while being locked inside a place of inescapable darkness, alone.