Given (37 page)

Having Given to care for I had started dwelling on Angel again, in the place inside myself where I kept him alive, in the dark, unloved part of my heart. I lifted Given into a hug, heard the soft moaning of the world inside me mourning itself. Rocking Given back and forth, I knew that Angel was somewhere out there waiting for me to let him go, that the roots of the guaiac tree had worked their way into his sorrowing body, and set his spirit free.

When Rainy came upstairs with the twins she wiped my eyes with a corner of Say Muh's veil and brought me a roll of “cry paper” so I could blow my nose.
Don't matter how many tears you let go, you end up blowing your nose.
It wasn't only tears that were causing my nose to run. I needed to stash my flap of cocaine somewhere other than in the Moses basket where it wouldn't be so easy to reach. As long as I had to walk from one room into another to cut myself a line, I could convince myself I didn't have a problem.

Before it got dark we dressed in the warmest clothing we could find and went back outside so I could show Rainy how to make a snow angel. Rainy decided, after testing the snow with one bare toe, it wasn't safe to walk on anything that white, and stayed in the house, watching me from the doorway. I found a clean patch of snow, and lay down with my hands at my sides, drew them up over my head, then got to my feet, carefully, so as not to disturb the impression.

Rainy had asked me, once, if I'd ever seen a real angel. I said not in the flesh, though there'd been one in the room with me the day my baby was born.

Rainy wanted proof; what proof did I have that an angel actually existed?

How much proof did she need? I asked.

A pair of wings,
she said.
Even a feather would do.

After we had eaten, and Given had been bathed, Rainy wanted to trim the tree. While she struggled to get it to stand up straight in a bucket full of rocks, I searched through my mother's boxes for the treasured ornaments she had wrapped in red or green tissue paper, on which she had attached a history of where each one had been purchased, along with the year, and how much it cost. Some of them dated back to my childhood; I remembered being allowed to choose the wooden snake though my father said he couldn't see what a snake had to do with Christ's birthday. When he chose a dill pickle, the following year, I made the same argument, but now, holding the fragile pickle in my hand, I appreciated my father's oddball choice. I hung the pickle at the very top of the tree, where the angel was supposed to be. The papier mâché angel had been eaten by rats the year my mother made the mistake of storing the Christmas decorations in the attic.

I dug out the gifts I had brought with me from the mainland, and arranged them under the tree. Later, when we sat down to listen to the news, Rainy said she would rather watch the snow.

I followed her gaze out the window. A full moon had risen over the trees and hung motionless in the sky like a frozen bloom. In so much brightness I could see the shadow of the smoke from our chimney on the snow. I picked up Given from his basket and carried him to the window where we both stood, bathed in moonlight, until he kneaded his head into my chest his lazy eyelids closing out the light, then carried him upstairs to bed.

I couldn't sleep, and when he had drifted off I got up and set to work cleaning the house. I scrubbed the floors, the walls, the insides of cupboards, scoured both the upstairs and downstairs bathrooms. I dusted, and when Rainy tried to help by sweeping the shadows in each room, it raised even more dust. I watched her trying to sweep the dust into the dustpan; no matter how carefully she swept there was always a thin line of residue that eluded her. The line got smaller and smaller until you couldn't see it anymore, but she knew, and I knew, it was still there. Letting us know there was always more, that the sweeping, the dusting of our lives, would never be finished until our day was done.

And, later still, when her twins lay in their coffin, dreaming, and I lay awake, still unable to sleep, I heard the sound of weeping below my window. I got out of bed and looked out to see Rainy, lying in the snow next to where I had made my snow angel, lifting her arms over her head, bringing them back to her sides, then getting to her feet to see what kind of impression she was made. There was nothing, no sign of her having laid her body down in the snow. She tried again; she tried over and over. Finally she stopped, and looked up at me out of all that white emptiness, and I thought in this moment Rainy had finally come to believe that her life, as she had known it, was over. Rainy understood now that she was dead, and that when death came, it would not go away.

The snow fell all through Christmas day. It fell in clumps, hiding the hearse under a downy shroud. It covered the angel I had made and it covered the emptiness where Rainy had lain.

I opened the kitchen door and watched Toop kicking up joyfully in the snow. I wouldn't let the Bomb follow him and he whined at the door for an hour before curling up like an albino cashew nut by the fire in the living room.

I'd stuffed an eggplant, in lieu of a turkey, for our Christmas meal, but when I took it from the oven it looked like a collapsed heart and I didn't have the stomach to enjoy it. Instead I watched Given, dressed in a red velvet one-piece outfit lying in his Moses basket, in the middle of the table like a Christmas centrepiece. His cheeks were fire-engine red to match and he looked uncomfortably hot. I undid the little zipper and let him kick loose, his legs working overtime as if he were trying to run away from this life. Rainy figured I should find someone who'd be like a father figure to Given, someone to teach him Nintendo games and how to program a VCR.

At 9:00 I turned on the news. Police were still investigating Vancouver's suicide bombing, and continued their search for the mother of the baby abducted from Our Lady of Mercy Hospital. A human ear had been found in a paint can outside a Colour Your World paint store in Astoria but police did not believe there was any connection to the kidnapping. Farther afield, in the Persian Gulf, sailors prayed for peace while sweeping the sea for mines. The twins complained that it was better to watch the news on TV instead of trying to listen to it happen on the radio in someplace you couldn't see.

When the news was over I set Given's basket under the tree so he could enjoy the decorations while we opened our gifts: Rainy insisted my mother's urn be allowed to watch as the twins unwrapped the look-alike dolls I had been forbidden to touch. The twins undressed the dolls and drew circles around their eyes with a permanent black marker pen, then chewed off their hair. Say Muh pinned her doll between her knees, and every now and then turned it over and beat its backside with the flat of her hand. Her twin was a little gentler. She stroked her doll's butchered head muttering what sounded like death threats, then laid her, face down, in the woven willow coffin.

They never get the motherin they need,
Rainy said, remorsefully. I didn't know if she meant her twins, or the dolls.

Rainy opened the paint scraper Frenchy had stolen for her from the Colour Your World Paint Store so Rainy could scrape the Evolve sign off heathen's cars. Before I let her open her present from me I made her guess what it was. “I'll give you a hint. It's long and it's straight.”

Rainy stuck out her lower lip and narrowed her eyes, as if contorting her features helped her think.
A dead leg?
she said.

I had a flash of Al's naked legs as Hooker and I hefted him into the hearse. “Guess again. “It's long, straight, and blue.”

A dead leg — wid jeans on?

“Go ahead,” I said, “open it.”

Rainy ripped apart the shiny red paper.
An underbrella!
she exclaimed, raising my mother's blue umbrella — something my mother would never have done inside the house — and twirling it above her head.
Now it be rainin inside me, but on the outside I be dry.

Frenchy had even shoplifted presents for the dogs, and we opened these last. Toop got a Santa bandana and a rawhide bone with a green and red ribbon around it; the Bomb a box of animal crackers shaped like humans, and a pair of holiday “rein-dog” antlers.

When Rainy opened the gift I had set aside for Frenchy — my mother's endangered-species vanity set — her face began undoing itself, her mouth moving from side to side. Rainy looked in the wrong side of the mirror, but this time I didn't take it away from her and turn it around. I understood, finally, what she had always known. Rainy had no reflection, the same way she had no shadow or couldn't leave an impression in the snow.

Rainy set the mirror on the floor, picked up the tub containing my mother's ashes, and began shaking it, angrily, as if she had had enough of the hurt she suffered, holding in her secret. That's when she told me she'd seen a vision: Frenchy, with her whole nine fingers and her ugly spot, in my mother's cremated remains.

She'd opened the ice cream container, she confessed, the same day I'd rescued it from the freezer. She'd heard Frenchy's voice, listing off sniper rifles, and prayed the Lord's Prayer that Frenchy would show her face again. Not only did Frenchy reveal herself to Rainy, she insisted she had living proof that the God Rainy believed in was dead. The vision of Frenchy, and her voice, she said, as she began to pry the lid off the urn, were growing stronger and more argumentative each day.

God be God, when he dead he don't have to stay dead,
Rainy said, speaking directly down into my mother's ashes.
He come back any time he choose. God be actual. He be a Glad bag layin there in some alley, got a hole in the bottom where shit fall through.

Rainy tipped the urn towards me so I could see Frenchy, too. Her face crumpled when she saw the barely contained bewilderment in my eyes.

At first I thought there'd been a mistake, as I sat peering into the ashes for longer than it would take most people to realize what they were looking at. My mother's ashes didn't look like ashes at all, though I'd never seen cremated remains before. These were like coarse sand, pasty white, mixed in angry fragments of bone. There was a final indignity in the fact that my mother had been reduced to something resembling cat litter.

Given had just fallen asleep in my arms when the phone rang. I froze, letting it ring until the answering machine clicked on.

“Merry Ho Ho Ho,” a familiar voice said. “I know you're there. Pick up the phone.”

I held Given in one arm, cradled the phone between my shoulder and my ear. I had been afraid it was Grace (scared she wanted to reclaim her baby) and had hoped it might be Hooker. “I thought I'd been barred from talking to you,” I said.

Vernal laughed, something I hadn't heard him do in a long time. “I am allowed to make one call. A compassionate call, because it's Christmas.” He paused, and when I didn't say anything, he said, “I've been worrying about you.”

“How's rehab,” I said. “I didn't think you'd last.”