White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

  All afternoon, we watched Easter shows on TV. Pink-skinned evangelists and choirs in matching sateen gowns. Congregations the size of rock ’n’ roll concerts. Hands waved in the air like sunflowers. He is risen, Christ the Lord. I wished I believed in Him again.

  “We should be there,” Starr said. “Next year, we’ll do the Crystal Cathedral, Ray, let’s.”

  “Sure,” Ray said. He had changed out of his church clothes, back into his regular T-shirt and jeans. We played Chinese checkers with the boys and avoided each other’s glances, but it was work, being in the same room without touching, especially with Starr sitting next to him, one hand up high on his soft-washed jeans. I couldn’t stand it. After Davey won, I went outside and walked around down in the wash. All I could think of was her hand on his jeans.

  I was bad, I had done bad things, I had hurt people, and the worst of it was, I didn’t want to stop.

  Blue shadows climbed the tawny round slopes of the mountain, like hands modeling the shape of a lover’s thighs. A lizard perched on a rock, thinking he was invisible. I threw a pebble at him, watched him dart away into the chaparral. I tore up a leaf of laurel sumac and held it to my nose, hoping it would clear my head.

  I smelled him first, the smell of dope wafting on the twilight air. He was in the yard, sunlight striking his face and warming it like a stone. The sight of him caught in my throat. Now I knew I’d been waiting for him. I climbed onto a rise so he could see me, to the east, on the blind side of the trailer, then descended into a bowl of sand between the boulders.

  A minute later, I heard him walking up the riverbed, dry already though it was only April. I knew Davey would read all this tomorrow in our tracks. But the moment I touched Ray, I knew we could never be apart, no matter how much we wanted to, no matter who we hurt. His lips on my neck, his hands under my shirt, pulling my pants open, peeling them down. My thighs craved the naked touch of his hips, we fit together like magnets as we sank into the sand. I didn’t care about scorpions or the western diamondback. I didn’t care about rocks or who might see us.

  “Baby, what are you doing to me,” he whispered into my hair.

  THE LAST TIME I had heard two adults fight was the night my mother stabbed Barry in the hand. Smashing, crashing. I covered my head with the pillow, but I could still hear every word through the thin walls, Starr’s drunken screeching, Ray’s murmuring rebuttals.

  “You used to get it up fine, before you started fucking that lit-tle bitch. Admit it, you bastard, you’ve been fucking her!”

  I crouched deeper into my sleeping bag, sweating, pretending it wasn’t me, it was some other girl, I was just a kid, I had nothing to do with this.

  “Fuck my sponsor! God, I should have got rid of her when I had the chance!”

  I imagined Ray sitting on the edge of the bed, his back slouched, hands dangling between his thighs, not interrupting her, just letting her blow it off, warding off her drunken slaps, wishing she would pass out. I could hear his voice, still calm, soothing, reasonable. “Starr, you’re shitfaced.”

  “You perv. You like fucking kids? What’s next, dogs? You really like that skinny twat better than me? That no-tit baby?”

  The shame, knowing that the boys were listening, now they knew everything.

  “She got a tighter pussy than me? She suck you off like me? Does she take it up the ass? No, really, I want to know what kid fuckers do.”

  How long did I think I was going to get away with it? I wished I’d never come here, I wished I’d never been born. Yet I had to admit there was a part of me that was proud, even excited, that Ray couldn’t get it up for Starr. He couldn’t fuck her, no matter how big her tits were, no matter if she let him put it up her ass. It was me he wanted.

  “Fuck my sponsor, you call my fucking sponsor. I’m going in there and I’m going to cash her check.”

  I heard more crashing, yelling, and then suddenly the door to my room flew open. Starr in her Victoria’s Secret rose negligee all twisted around, both huge tits exposed, was waving the .38. I would see that sight for years in my dreams. She fired without aiming, one arm extended. I rolled onto the floor and the room was full of the smell of gunfire and flying chipboard. I tried to wedge myself under the bed.

  “You crazy.” Ray and Starr struggled. I moved out where I could see them. He twisted her arm behind her back and took the gun away. He was naked, and bent her backwards by her arm, so that his cock pressed into her buttocks, her tits pointing at the ceiling, shivering like small scared animals as he pushed her with his hips toward the door.

  “Fuck you, Ray, fuck you!”

  “Anytime,” he said as he shoved her out.

  Maybe they would do it now and forget all about me. There was a hole in the closet wall. I started to get dressed. I wasn’t going to stick around anymore, not with that crazy drunk and a houseful of guns. I was going to call my caseworker tonight. I’d let Ray know where I was, but I couldn’t stay here.

  Then I heard fighting in their room, and Starr was back, firing at me as I was struggling into my clothes. Pain bloomed in my shoulder, raced fire across my ribs. I staggered for the dresser, to climb up and out the window, but then she fired again, and my hip exploded. I fell onto the floor. I could see her coral painted toenails. “I told you to leave him alone.” The ceiling, no air, the metallic smell of static and gunpowder and my own blood.

  LIGHT IN MY EYES. Hands moving me. Someone was screaming. God — uniforms, questions. Bearded man, woman, shirt buttoned wrong. Flashlight in my eyes. “Where ’s Ray?” I asked, turning my head from the light.

  “Astrid?” Davey, the light in his glasses. Holding me together. “She’s coming to.”

  Another face. Blond, doll-like. False eyelashes. Black shirt. Schutzstaffel. “Astrid, who did this? Who shot you?” Just tell us, tell us who.

  Davey shoved his glasses up his nose. Stared into my eyes. He shook his head, imperceptibly, but I saw.

  In the doorway, the two little boys huddled. Jackets over their pajamas. Owen with his broken-necked giraffe, head sagging over his arm. Peter with the jar of lizards. The foster kids. They knew what came next.

  “Astrid, what happened. Who did this to you?” I closed my eyes. Where could I begin to answer such a question anyway.

  Beard Man swabbed my arm, stuck the needle in, IV.

  “She going to be okay?” Davey asked.

  “Great job, son. Without you she’d have already bled to death.”

  Hands under me. Firestorms of pain as they lifted me onto the stretcher. Screaming. Fire. Fire. Beard Man held up the IV bag.

  “That’s it,” he said. “Just relax.”

  I stared into Davey’s eyes, knowing that who felt worse was a toss-up. He held my hand, and I held his, as hard as I could though the painkillers were knocking me out. “My stuff.”

  “We’ll get it later.” Caseworker. Couldn’t even button her shirt right.

  Davey started grabbing things, my mother’s books, my sketchbook, some paintings, the animal scat poster. But Ray... “Davey, my box.”

  Davey’s face darkened. He’d read the tracks. My brain fading into blue-greens and yellows, a coruscating flicker of Tiffany glass. “Please,” I whispered.

  “Let go now, sweetheart. You need to come with us.”

  He grabbed the wooden jewelry box, his face twisted like when his shoulder was dislocated. He stayed with me as they wheeled me out to the ambulance, shrugging off the blackshirt doll woman as she tried to lead him away. Overhead, the cradle moon shone like a silver hoop. Beard Man talking to me as he loaded me in the back of the ambulance. “Relax, you’ve got to relax now. We’ve got your stuff.” Then the rear doors closed, Davey went away, the night swallowed him, swallowed them all.

  9

  HER FINGERS MOVED among barnacles and mussels, blue-black, sharp-edged. Neon red starfish were limp Dals on the rocks, surrounded by bouquets of stinging anemones and purple bursts of spiny sea urchins. Her fingers touched an urchin’s stiff
bristles and I watched inert plant spines move, animate, and reach for my mother, feeling for her shape and intent. She wanted me to touch it too, but I was afraid. It amazed me to see the white flesh and purple spines communicating across a gap no less enormous than deep space, a miracle in six inches of water. She touched me that way, my cheeks, my arms, and I too reached out to her.

  El cielo es azul. We were on Isla Mujeres, the Island of Women. I was a little girl in a faded dress, sunburned, barefoot, hair white as dandelion floss. The streets were crushed shell where we stood in line at the tortilla shop every morning with the Mexican women. ¿Cuál es su nombre? Su hija es más guapa, they said, Your daughter is too pretty, and touched my hair. My mother’s skin peeling like paint. Her eyes bluer than the sky, azul claro.

  In a big hotel colored pink and orange, a man with a dark mustache smelled like crushed flowers. There were taxis and music, and my mother went out in embroidered dresses pulled low off the shoulders. But then he was gone, and we moved on to the Island of Women.

  My mother was waiting for something there, I didn’t know what. We bought our tortillas every day, walked back to the little whitewashed bungalow with our string bag, past small houses with grated windows and the doors opened like frames. Inside were pictures on the walls, grandmothers with fans, sometimes there were books. We ate shrimp with garlic in outdoor restau-rants on the beach. Camarones con ajo. Some fishermen caught a hammerhead shark and dragged it up onto the beach. It was twice the size of the little boats the fishermen used, and everyone came to the beach to look at it, to pose alongside its monstrous head, as wide as I was tall. Battalions of teeth showed in its hu-morless grin. I was afraid when my mother left me on the beach to swim out on the soft blue. What happened if the shark came, and the water turned red and the bones came through?

  WHENEVER I WOKE, there was Demerol. Doctors in masks, nurses with soft hands. Flowers. Their smiles like nectar. There were IVs and other children, dressings and Tom and Jerry on the TV, balloons and strangers. Just tell us, just tell. Schutzstaffel. Plainclothes. How could I begin to describe Starr, with her nightgown all twisted around, unloading a .38 into my room. I preferred to think about Mexico. In Mexico the faces were weathered and soft as soap. These buzzing noises in my room were only the mosquitoes in our bungalow on the Island of Women.

  ON A FULL MOON NIGHT, something moved her, and we left with only our passports and money in a belt under her dress. I threw up on the ferry. We slept on a new beach, far to the south.

  The next day, she danced with a young man, Eduardo, on the rooftop, it was his hotel, all the windows were open and I could see the reef, the sea like a lens. The top floor wasn’t done yet, there were hammocks under a palm roof, and we could stay as long as we liked. We were happy in Playa del Carmen, driving with Eduardo around town in his black Volare, feeling very rich, ¡qué rico!, though the town only had two paved roads and a Michoacán ice-cream stand. Painted pictures of snowcapped volcanoes. The tourist boat stopped at Playa del Carmen twice a week, bobbing five stories high like an offshore wedding cake. My mother read tarot cards in the café perfumed with the fat smoke of grilled pollo and carnitas. I watched the man shave the stacks of meat onto tortillas with a machete. We ate well there.

  At night Eduardo played guitar and sang gypsy songs with the guests at his hotel, as I rocked in my hammock like a bat folded into leathery wings. At night the air was full of bats. The fruit, my mother said, mangos and plátanos and papayas. Fairy circles of ringworm came out all over my body. A doctor in a block concrete clinic gave me medicine. Can’t we ever go home? I asked my mother. We have no home, she told me. I am your home.

  How beautiful she was barefoot in a bathing suit and a tablecloth wrapped around her hips. My mother loved me. Even now, I could feel myself rocking in that hammock while Eduardo and my mother danced. You were my home.

  But the weather turned and Eduardo closed the hotel for the season, went back to Mexico City, where his parents lived. He said we could stay on if we liked. It was sad and scary. We closed the shutters and the wind began to blow, the gentle sea rose and ate the beach, running into the grape hyacinth. There were no tourists now. We ate from cans, frijoles refritos, evaporated milk. Cats poured into the hotel, skinny, feral, or just abandoned for the season. My mother let them all in and the sky was a yellow-tinged bruise.

  The rain when it came arrived sideways, bleeding in through the shutters and under the doors. The cats hid in the shadows. Occasionally we felt the brush of their bodies or tails as we sat at the table, my mother writing by the light of a kerosene lantern. The cats were hungry but my mother ignored their mewing as we ate.

  In the end, my mother locked up the hotel and some students took us to Progreso on the Gulf. The boat from Texas stank of fish. The captain gave me a pill, and I woke up on somebody’s couch in Galveston.

  “WE GOT HER,” said the plainclothesman in his white socks. “We caught her trying to see the kid. Says she was visiting her sister. You know damn well she shot you. Why make up a story about burglars? She’s not even your mother.”

  If I were Starr, maybe I would have shot me too. Maybe I would have painted the doorknobs with oleander like my mother, if Ray had said he didn’t love me anymore. It was hard for me to focus. Starr in her nightgown, my mother in her blue dress. Barry holding a cloth to my forehead. Why did it seem all the same, why did it melt together like crayons left in the car on a summer day? The only one who stood distinct was Davey. This cop was giving me a headache and I needed more Demerol.

  LETTERS CAME from my mother. A girl my age, a hospital volunteer, with fluffy brown hair and pale green eye shadow, tried to read them to me, but it was way too surreal, my mother’s words in her high ignorant voice, I made her stop.

  Dear Astrid,

  They say they don’t know if you will last until morning. I pace the cell’s three steps, back and forth, all night. A chaplain just came by, I told him I’d rip out his liver if he bothered me again. I love you so much, Astrid. I can’t bear it. There is no one else in the world but you and me, don’t you know that? Please don’t leave me alone here. By all the powers of light and darkness, please, please don’t leave.

  I read that paragraph over and over again, savoring each word, the way Starr would read her Bible. I drifted off to sleep hearing it in my head. You were my home, Mother. I had no home but you.

  Freude! Beethoven’s ninth, Ode to Joy, the Solti version, Chicago Symphony. To think that I almost lost you! I live for you, the thought that you’re alive gives me the strength to go on. I wish I could hold you now, I want to touch you, hold you, feel your heartbeat. I’m writing a poem for you, I’m calling it “For Astrid, Who Will Live After All.”

  News travels fast in prison, and women I’ve never spoken to inquire after your condition. I feel akin to each one of them. I could kneel down and kiss the stale earth in gratitude. I will try for a compassionate visit, but I have no illusions about the extent of compassion here.

  What can I say about life? Do I praise it for letting you live or damn it for allowing the rest? Have you heard of the Stockholm syndrome? Hostages begin taking the side of their captors, in their gratitude not to have been killed outright. Let us not thank some hypothetical God. Instead, rest and gain strength for the new campaign. Though I know, it’s candy stripers and Highlights, maybe a morphine drip if you’re a good girl.

  Be strong.

  Mother.

  And she never once said I told you so.

  A MAGICIAN CAME to entertain us, and I was mesmerized by his beautiful hands, his fluid, round gestures. I couldn’t stop watching his hands. They were better than any of his tricks. He pulled a bouquet of paper flowers out of the air and gave them to me with a courtly bow, and I thought love was like that, pulled out of the air, something bright and unlikely. Like Ray, molding me in his fingers like soft wax.

  Ray. I tried not to think of him, what had made him run when I lay bleeding on my bedroom floor, shot by his lover. I knew
why he wasn’t there when the ambulance came. It was how I felt when I thought of Davey, that I had ruined his life for him. Ray couldn’t face it. He hadn’t wanted us to happen in the first place, I was the one who created it, out of nothing but my own desire. It was like Ray knew it was going to happen from the very first time we touched. Every time he looked at me his eyes pleaded with me to leave him alone. I wished I could see him, just once, and tell him I didn’t blame him.

  Sometimes I woke up and I was sure he would come, disguised, that we would be together again. There would be a glimpse of a strange intern, an unfamiliar orderly, a visitor searching for the right bed in the children’s ward, and I was sure it would be him. I didn’t blame any of them. I should have known what could happen. After my mother and Barry, how could I not have known.

  The only innocent one was Davey. At first I wondered why Starr had left him behind. Probably thought she could make an easier getaway. Maybe she was so freaked out she completely forgot him. But now I knew it was Davey. That he had refused to go and leave me to bleed to death on the bedroom floor. He had refused to go. He had given up his mother to keep me alive for the ambulance. Knowing Davey, that was it. And I was deluged by fresh waves of shame and regret. He never knew when he met me that first day, when the little boys sat on the porch, that I would be the one to ruin his life the way Starr crushed his model in the living room. I stepped on it running to meet Ray.

  MY MOTHER sent me her poem “For Astrid, Who Will Live After All.” There were a couple of lines I couldn’t get out of my head: