Given (36 page)

Toop missed Hooker, I could tell. I would catch him sitting by the gate, his head cocked to one side, his eyes watchful. When it began to grow dark he would come to the back door, scratch at the screen, and I'd let him in. I'd tell him we were going home soon, and he would lie down, his face on his paws, and try his best to act as if there was nothing missing in his world.

The Bomb, given to spells of nervous fatigue, spent hours swooned on the loveseat in the sunroom. When this didn't get Toop's attention he would dart madly from room to room flinging himself into walls and against the furniture, barking at empty corners. After sniffing the floor in the kitchen where I-5 had stood, opening can after can of sardines, he spit up on the loveseat, chewed the telephone cord, snarled at the television, his food, or nothing at all.

At night Given slept in the Moses basket beside me and during the day I carried him, facing me, in the sling I had made — he liked the view from my shoulder. Having Given to care for and to love helped me as I waited for a call — from Hooker, Grace, or even Vernal — but by Monday I'd heard from no one. Missing the ones I loved had been, for years now, a kind of grieving for me, the grief being so much worse when the ones I missed weren't dead, but simply gone elsewhere.

When I finished clearing out the rooms upstairs, I went down to the basement. Given dozed on my chest; I sniffed the top of his head that gave off a warm, sleepy fragrance. My mother's freezer had been shoved to a far corner to make room for I-5's oddments that included boxes of dog food, canned sardines, back issues of Martha Stewart
Living
, cases of California wine, burlap sacks full of marijuana seeds, and a 12-gauge shotgun along with three boxes of shells.

I found the urn, after much searching: either Vernal or I-5 had packed it in an ice cream bucket that was nestled between a package of Pizza-Pops and a cracked Ziploc container of applesauce, and lifted my mother — who now weighed slightly less than a bowling ball — from the cold. I was about to close the lid when I remembered I-5 going down into the basement and coming back up with more cocaine. I had convinced myself I'd only had a “nice little relapse”, that one night when I-5's reindeer flew me somewhere I hadn't planned to go. I'd told myself, “no more, never again”. But in my heart, even as I said these words, I knew it was too late. Many years ago I had stopped wanting cocaine. From that point on it had wanted me.

At the bottom of the freezer I-5 kept an addict's Emergency Preparedness Kit — a bottle of Irish whiskey, a pound (at least) of BC bud, a selection of good Cuban cigars, and three ounce-bags of cocaine. If the end of the world ever came, I-5 had not planned to live through it straight.

I took the baggies upstairs to stash under the receiving blankets at the bottom of Given's Moses basket. Rainy and her twins were watching a Christmas special on the Faith channel. A man, whose face was as shady as the Shroud of Turin, said Jesus and the Virgin Mary's divinity was so blatant, their souls so expansive that when they died their spirits were distilled into atoms, and they coated the world, the way teflon coats a frying pan. He said it was time to take another break, “don't go away we'll be to be right back with our viewer's personal stories of Jesus and Mary sightings.”

I returned to the basement for my mother's remains, then sat at the kitchen table, placing her next to me on a chair, as if she were a guest who had dropped by for tea. When I heard Rainy and her twins heading for the kitchen, I got up and made formula for Given who had woken from his nap and seemed to sense my somber mood.

The twins had manifested themselves back into their red mist and Rainy was gnawing the ends of her hair. I imagined a knotted tumour of hair taking root and growing in her stomach.

She saw the ice cream tub and reached for a spoon.

“It's not what you think,” I said.

“Now I've seen everything,” Tod, at the rental agency said as he helped me hook up the U-Haul. “Old saying goes, you can't take it with you; you never see a hearse towing a U-Haul . . . ” He shook his head, a strand of thin hair falling in his face. “There's got to be a story.”

“My mother died,” I said. “She was a bit of a pack rat.”

“Tell me about it. My mother passed away recently, too,” Tod said, in that way people have of deflecting the tragedies of others onto their own. “Of course she didn't die without making the rest of us pay for it. Mothers never do.”

“Right,” I said. My mother had spent a lifetime refusing to die, by degrees, ever since I could remember — a process that had both wearied and exasperated me in equal measure.

“When mum died dad smashed every window out of the kitchen. It was the start of his healing journey,” Tod said, swiping at another renegade strand of hair. He knew it, he said, the very second his mother went into spirit. He felt her soul lifting out her body like when you pry a pit out of an avocado pear.

I'd felt nothing so physical when my mother died. No gust of wind shook my cell or flung open my door as if the keeper had kicked it harder than usual.

I asked Tod how much extra I'd have to pay for dropping the U-Haul at the ferry dock on Kliminawhit. One of his eyebrows shot up. “Kliminawhit, eh? I took my mother there for the weekend, before she forgot who I was and why I was calling her Mother.”

While he continued talking I saw the newspaper on the counter. “Investor's Son Victim of Mystery Island Slaying: Couple Sought for Questioning.”

“She thought my name was Ted. ‘Ted drove me around the Bend,' she liked to joke, but actually it was the other way around. I don't know how many times I told her, ‘it's Tod, Mum, not Ted. It's Tod, not Ted'.”

I listened with my nerves, not my ears, while I skimmed the article. A shoe, similar to the one the victim had been wearing, had been found, partially buried, after a search had been conducted of a property in the First Nation village of Old Mystic where the victim, Allan Lawrence Porscher, 35, had resided for some time. The victim's girlfriend and her brother were wanted for questioning though neither were considered suspects at this time.

In the late afternoon, as the sky loomed black in the west, we packed the last of my mother's belongings, the things I couldn't bear to part with, in the U-Haul. I tried, but there was no way I could find room for her television. The moment they saw me pick up the TV to return it to the house, Rainy's twins manifested themselves back into martyrs-in-waiting. They stared at me with eyes almost alive but gazing off in some infinite direction no living eye could follow, made a whistling sound meant to imitate mortars, and pleaded with Rainy, in one voice that was all sweetness — a lid of light over a cauldron of darkness and need — to make room for the TV set even if it meant leaving the dogs behind. Rainy placated them by promising we'd decorate a tree instead, something they could stare at all day, without being interrupted by commercials.

The weather had turned colder; the forecast predicted a white Christmas. I hoped we could make it back to the island before a storm hit and driving became hazardous. Rainy settled the twins, wearing their keys to paradise, in the coffin in the back. Toop and the Bomb had to be forced in the hearse after them, and lay between the rollers looking at me as if I alone were responsible for life's reasonless mess.

Rainy held the ice cream bucket containing my mother's urn on her lap next to Given, who lay on top of my stash in his Moses basket. She insisted we swing by the mall on our way out of town. I parked in the place reserved for Santa's reindeer but kept the motor running. There were still a few “stay beautiful the year round” Christmas trees left, and these had been marked down. Rainy got out, opened the back doors, reached for the closest tree, and tossed it in. A man who looked like he was used to getting paid walked towards us as Rainy vaulted into the front seat and drove her foot down on top of mine on the gas. She didn't remove it until Astoria had disappeared in the rear view mirror.

PART SEVEN

Given the world he created, it would be an impiety
against God to believe in him.
— John Banville,
The Sea

B
Y THE TIME THE FERRY DOCKED
, two hours behind schedule, the island lay buried under four feet of snow. Even the protestors had stayed home. The road hadn't been ploughed and we careened from one side to the other. Cedar trees, their branches burdened with snow, bent towards the ground. We passed cars in ditches, and others, featureless white mounds, abandoned at odd angles, in the deep drifts that had accumulated at the side of the road.

Rainy had never seen snow before and wanted to know if it came in any colours other than white. She couldn't wait to see if she could walk on it.
Way Jesus walk on water but don't sink in.

We drove back to the farm in a whiteout. I set Given on my lap, my seatbelt fastened tightly around both of us, a bottle propped in his mouth. Every so often he tried to stretch, but I had him well wrapped in a blanket so all he could do was exercise the muscles in his face.

The sign at the Christian vegetable stand said, “Lordy, Lordy, Look Who's Dead”, the only thing that stood out in a landscape obliterated by snow.
Where his muhfo Chrimas spit-it?
Rainy said.
We stupposed to have peace and earth and goodwill to ward off men.

We made it up our driveway but a hillock of snow blocked the barn's entrance so I had to park next to the mounting block. If the cold weather kept up we could be stuck here for days. I thought of the pioneers who had built this house, when there was no plow to make roads or driveways passable, and the Yaka Wind people who had lived here before them, who'd had to dig their way out, break paths through the drifts.

Aged Orange was not waiting in his usual place to play chicken with the hearse, and I worried that we had been gone too long, left him to his own resources until he got indignant enough, as cats will do, and taken off to find a more hospitable home. I didn't see any paw prints in the snow as I carried the quaking Bomb up the front steps, thinking of our neighbours in the suburb who kept their lawns heated in winter so they could still let their small dogs outside. I wouldn't be letting the Bomb out until the snow melted. He was too small, too white, and might easily disappear.

I lit a fire in the cookstove, and another one in the living room, where the twins sat on the chesterfield staring at the space where the television used to be. Rainy sat next to them reciting nursery rhymes, and decorating the ice cream bucket containing my mother's ashes with green and red ribbon. I removed the two remaining baggies from underneath Given's blankets, kept a flap for myself and put the rest in a jar to keep it dry, sealed the jar in a Ziploc bag, and hid it outside under the verandah.

I spent the rest of the morning unloading the hearse and sneaking into the bathroom to do lines. I fed the dogs, filled the cat's litter box and put it under the stairs so the Bomb wouldn't make a mistake in the house.

Don't wonder he be queer,
Rainy said,
muhfo stupposed do his business in kitty litter.

I took a break around noon, realizing I'd have to keep the U-Haul for at least another day, and lay down in my room upstairs with Given. I kissed each of his tiny perfect toes, watched as he responded with pleasure.
Nació de pie
. Like Angel, Given had been born on his feet, wary and wise to the ways of the streets before he was old enough to walk them. I used to look into Angel's eyes and think ‘he could have picked a pocket or hot-wired a car with those newborn eyes.' Angel's eyes had moved independently of one another, as if he could see, right from the start, he had been born into a world where it was every eye for itself. I think he had learned, while he was still in the womb, to see movement, to sense danger. Given's eyes were more of a team, working in tandem. Where one went, the other quickly followed.

I kissed his eyes and tiny eyebrows, the smell of his skin like the incense of rain. I could feel him growing stronger every day; he lay quietly in his Moses basket, his hands clasped over his heart, as if he were teaching himself to pray. There was a time, before I lost Angel, when I thought prayer would protect you from things that hurt. But the day I left Angel behind, my prayers lost weight, like ashes in a fire, and floated away.