White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

I sat with the jar in my hand, watching that winter sky’s blush, weak pink strained through blue haze, coming through the angle-pruned branches and weeping boughs of the elm. Sunset came so early now. She loved this time of day, loved feeling beautifully melancholy and sitting under the elm, looking up into its branches, dark against the sky.

  In the end, I didn’t take the pills. It seemed too grandiose, a big gesture, fraudulent. I didn’t deserve to forget that I had turned my back on her. Oblivion wiped the books clean. It was too easy. I was the keeper of the butterflies now. Instead, I dialed Ron’s pager, added the 999 that meant emergency. I sat back down and waited.

  RON SAT NEXT TO ME on the bed, his shoulders sagging like an old horse’s back and his face pressed into his hands, as if he could not look at one more thing. “You were supposed to watch her,” he said.

  “You were the one who left.”

  He gasped, and broke into long, shuddering sobs. I never thought I would feel sorry for Ron, but I did. I put my hand on his shoulder, and he pressed his hand over mine. It occurred to me I could make him feel better. I could stroke his hair, and say, It’s not your fault. She had problems we couldn’t have helped, no matter what we did. That’s what Claire would have done. I could have made him love me. Maybe he would keep me.

  He held my hand and stared down at her silk slippers beside the bed. “I’ve been afraid of this for years.”

  He pressed my hand to his cheek. I could feel his tears spill over the back, seeping between my fingers. Claire would have felt sorry for him if she weren’t dead. “I loved her so much,” he said. “I wasn’t a saint, but I loved her. You don’t know.”

  He looked up at me with his red-rimmed eyes, waiting for me to deliver my lines. I know you did, Ron. Claire would say it. I could feel Olivia too, pressing me. He could take care of me. A man’s world.

  But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Claire was dead. What did it matter if he loved her or not?

  I pulled my hand away and got up, started picking up some of the things I’d thrown on the floor. There was his Cross pen. I tossed it in his lap. “She had it all the time,” I said. “You didn’t know her at all.”

  He bent his head, touched her dark hair that I had brushed, ran his hand down her mauve angora sleeve. “You can still stay,” he said. “Don’t worry about that.”

  I thought it was what I’d wanted to hear. But now that he said it, I knew I’d feel better out on Sunset Boulevard with the other runaways, asleep on a piss quilt on the steps of the homeless church, eating out of the trash at Two Guys from Italy. I couldn’t stay here without Claire. I could never say the lines he wanted, paint on my prettiest smile, listen for his car in the driveway. My face in the vanity mirror was sharp and jagged. He was reaching out to me, but my face was beyond reaching.

  I turned away and looked out at the night and our reflection in the broken French doors: me in my silk pajamas, Ron on the bed, Claire on the pillow, bathed in the bed’s lampside glow, for once utterly indifferent.

  “Why couldn’t you just have loved her more?” I said.

  His hand dropped down. He shook his head. Nobody knew why. Nobody ever knew why.

  IT TOOK LONGER to pack than when I left Amelia’s. There were all the new clothes Claire gave me, the books, the little Dürer rabbit. I took everything. I only had one suitcase, so I packed the rest in shopping bags. It took seven bags to pack it all. I went into the kitchen, reached into the jewelry bag, and took the aquamarine ring that was always too big for her, and her mother too. But it fit me fine.

  It was almost midnight when a caseworker came in a minivan, a middle-aged white woman in jeans and pearl earrings. Joan Peeler had left DCS last year to work in development at Fox. Ron helped me carry my things out to the van. “I’m sorry,” he said as I climbed in. He fumbled for his wallet, pressed some money on me. Two hundred-dollar bills. My mother would have thrown them in his face, but I took them.

  I watched the house, the way it got smaller in the back window of the van as we drove off in the moonless night, the end of what might have been. A little Hollywood bungalow beyond the huge white trunks of the sycamores. I didn’t give a damn what happened to me now.

  22

  MACLAREN CHILDREN’S CENTER was in a way a relief. The worst had happened. The waiting was over.

  I lay in my narrow bed, low to the ground. Except for the two changes of clothes in the pressboard drawers beneath the mattress, all my things were in storage. My skin burned. I’d been deloused and still stank of coal-tar soap. Everyone was asleep but the girls in the hall, girls who had to be watched, the suicide girls, the epileptics, the uncontrollables. It was finally quiet.

  Now I found it easy to imagine my mother in her bunk at Frontera. We weren’t so different after all. The same block walls, linoleum floors, the shadows of pines against the outside lights, and the sleeping shapes of my roommates under their thin thermal blankets. It was too hot in here, but I didn’t open the window. Claire was dead. Who cared if it was too hot.

  I stroked the furry ends of my short hair with one palm. I was glad I’d cut it off. A gang of girls jumped me twice, once in the Big Field, once coming back from the gym, because someone ’s boyfriend thought I was looking good. I didn’t want to be pretty. I lay fingering the bruises blooming on my cheek, shading from purple to green, watching the shadows of the pines behind the curtain, dancing in the wind like Balinese shadow puppets behind a screen, moving to gamelan music.

  I had gotten a call from Ron yesterday morning. He was taking her ashes back to Connecticut, and offered to pay for my ticket if I wanted to come with him. I didn’t want to see Claire delivered back to her family, more people who didn’t know her. I couldn’t stand around like a stranger through the eulogy. She kissed me on the lips, I would have told them.

  “You didn’t know her at all,” I told Ron. She didn’t want to be cremated, she wanted to be buried with her pearls in her mouth, a jewel over each eye. Ron never knew what she wanted, he always thought he knew best. You were supposed to watch her. He knew she was suicidal when he took me in. That’s why I was hired. I was the suicide watch. Not the baby after all.

  The pine shadows moved across my blanket, the wall behind me. People were just like that. We couldn’t even see each other, just the shadows moving, pushed by unseen winds. What difference did it make if I was here or somewhere else. I couldn’t keep her alive.

  A girl out in the hall groaned. One of my roommates turned over, mumbled into her blanket. All the bad dreams. This was exactly where I belonged. For once I didn’t feel out of place. Even with my mother, I was always holding my breath, waiting for something to happen, for her not to come home, for some disaster. Ron never should have trusted me with Claire. She should have gotten a little kid, someone to stay alive for. She should have realized I was a bad luck person, she should never have thought I was someone to count on. I was more like my mother than I’d ever believed. And even that thought didn’t frighten me anymore.

  THE NEXT DAY I met a boy in the art room, Paul Trout. He had lank hair and bad skin, and his hands moved without him. He was like me, he couldn’t sit without drawing something. When I passed him on my way to the sink, I looked over his shoulder. His black pen and felt-tip drawings were like something you’d see in a comic book. Women in black leather with big breasts and high heels, brandishing guns the size of fire hoses. Men with bulging crotches and knives. Weird graffiti-like mandalas with yin-yangs and dragons, and finned cars from the fifties.

  He stared at me all the time. I felt his eyes while I painted. But it didn’t bother me, Paul Trout’s intense, blinkless stare. It wasn’t like the boys in the senior classroom, their stares like a raid, moist, groping, more than a little hostile. This was an artist’s stare, attentive to detail, taking in the truth without preconceptions. It was a stare that didn’t turn away when I stared back, but was startled to find itself returned.

  When he came around behind me to use the wastebasket, he watched me pain
t. I didn’t try to cover up. Let him look. It was Claire on the bed in her mauve sweater, the dark figure of Ron in the doorway. The whole thing bathed in red ambulance lights. Lots of diagonals. It was hard to paint well, the brushes were plastic, the poster paint dried fast and powdery. I mixed colors on the back of a pie pan.

  “That’s really good,” he said.

  I didn’t need him to tell me it was good. I’d been making art all my life, before I could talk, and after, when I could, but didn’t choose to.

  “Nobody here can paint,” he said. “I hate jungles.”

  He meant the hallways. All the hallways at Mac were painted with murals of jungles, elephants and palm trees, acres of foliage, African villages with conelike thatched huts. The rendering was naive, Rousseau with none of the menace or mystery, but it wasn’t done by the kids. We weren’t allowed to paint the halls. Instead, they’d hired some kind of children’s book illustrator, some wallpaper designer. They probably thought our art would be too ugly, too upsetting. They didn’t know, most of the kids would have done exactly what the hall artist did. Peaceable kingdoms in which nothing bad ever happened. Soaring eagles and playful lions and African nymphs carrying water, flowers without sexual parts.

  “This is the fourth time I’ve been here,” Paul Trout said.

  It was why I’d never seen him except in the art room. If you came back on purpose, ran away from your placement, you lost your privileges, your coed nights. But I understood why they came back. It wasn’t that bad here at Mac. If it weren’t for the violence, the other kids, I could understand how someone could see it almost as paradise. But you couldn’t have this many damaged people in one place without it becoming like any other cell-block or psych ward. They could paint the halls all they wanted, the nightmare was still real. No matter how green the lawn or bright the hallway murals or how good the art was on the twelve-foot perimeter wall, no matter how kind the cottage teams and the caseworkers were, how many celebrity barbecues they had or swimming pools they put in, it was still the last resort for children damaged in so many ways, it was miraculous we could still sit down to dinner, laugh at TV, drop into sleep.

  Paul Trout wasn’t the only returnee. There were lots of them. It was safer in here, there were rules and regular meals, professional care. Mac was a floor you could not fall below. I supposed the ex-cons who kept going back to prison felt the same way.

  “You cut off your hair,” he said. “Why’d you do that? It was pretty.”

  “Attracted attention,” I said.

  “I thought girls liked that.”

  I smiled, felt the bitter aftertaste in my mouth. This boy might know a lot about cruelty and waste, but he didn’t know a thing about beauty. How could he? He was used to that skin, people turning away, not seeing the fire in his lucid brown eyes. I

  could tell, he imagined beauty, attention, would feel like love.

  “Sometimes it hurts more than it helps,” I said.

  “You’re beautiful anyway,” he said, going back to his drawing. “There’s not much you can do about that.”

  I painted Claire’s dark hair, layering blue and then brown, blending in the highlights, catching the red. “It doesn’t mean anything. Only to other people.”

  “You say that like it’s nothing.”

  “It is.” What was beauty unless you intended to use it, like a hammer, or a key? It was just something for other people to use and admire, or envy, despise. To nail their dreams onto like a picture hanger on a blank wall. And so many girls saying, use me, dream me.

  “You’ve never been ugly.” The boy looked down at his hand filling the blank spaces in a science fiction scene. “Women treat you like you’re a disease they might catch. And if in a weak moment they let you touch them, they make you pay.” His mouth closed, then opened to say more, but closed without saying a word. He’d said too much. His mouth turned down. “Someone like you, you wouldn’t let me touch you, would you.”

  Where did he get the idea he was ugly? Bad skin could happen to anyone. “I don’t let anyone touch me,” I finally said.

  I painted in the pharmacy jar of butabarbitol sodium on the rag rug by her bed, the tiny pills spilling out. Bright pink against the dark rug.

  “Why not?”

  Why not? Because I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn’t come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them and then changed their minds.

  Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs.

  Because I could still see a woman in a red bathrobe crawling in the street. A woman on a roof in the wind, mute and strange. Women with pills, with knives, women dyeing their hair. Women painting doorknobs with poison for love, making dinners too large to eat, firing into a child’s room at close range. It was a play and I knew how it ended, I didn’t want to audition for any of the roles. It was no game, no casual thrill. It was three-bullet Russian roulette.

  I painted a mirror on the wall opposite Claire ’s dresser where there was no mirror, and in the red-tinted darkness, my own staring image, with long pale hair, in the crimson velvet Christmas dress I never got a chance to wear. The me that died with her. I painted a crimson ribbon around my neck. It made my neck look slashed.

  “Are you gay?” Paul Trout asked me.

  I shrugged. Maybe that would be better. I thought back to how I felt when Olivia danced with me, and the time Claire kissed me on the lips. I didn’t know. People just wanted to be loved. That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific — chair, eye, stone — but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn’t include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out. I thought of my mother’s lovers, Jeremy and Jesus and Mark, narrow-waisted young men with clear eyes and voices like slipper satin across your bare chest. I thought how beautiful Claire was, dancing in her own living room, jeté, pas de bourée, how I loved her. I looked up at him, “Does it matter?”

  “Doesn’t anything matter to you?”

  “Survival,” I said, but even that sounded untrue now. “I guess.”

  “That’s not much.”

  I painted a butterfly in Claire’s room. Swallowtail. Another, cabbage white. “I haven’t gotten any farther than that.”

  WE WALKED the Big Field together when he got his privileges back. The girls called him my boyfriend, but it was just another word, it didn’t quite capture the truth. Paul Trout was the only person I’d met there I could talk to. He wanted to see me on the outside, asked for an address, a phone number, someplace he could reach me, but I didn’t know where I’d be, and I couldn’t trust my mother to forward anything. Anyway, I’d decided not to give her my new address. I didn’t want anything more to do with her. He gave me the name of a comic book shop in Hollywood, said he’d check there, wherever he was. “Just mark the letters Hold for Paul Trout.”

  I was sorry when he got his placement, to a group home in Pomona. He was the first kid I’d really enjoyed spending time with since my days with Davey, the first one who could remotely understand what I had been through. We were just getting to know each other, and now he was gone. I had to get used to that. Everybody left you eventually. He gave me one of his drawings to remember him by. It was me as a superhero, in a tight white T-shirt and ragged shorts, my body clearly the subject of much observation and thought. I’d just vanquished a biker archvillain, my Doc Marten bootheel planted on his bloody bare chest, a smoking gun in my hand. I shot him through the heart. I don’t let anyone touch me was printed over my head.

  OUTSIDE the junior boys’ cottage a few days after Paul left, I sat at an orange picnic table, waiting for my interview. I ran my hand through my chopped hair, let the winter sun warm my scalp. The families weren’t supposed
to be shopping, it was supposed to be a “getting to know you” visit, but it was an audition and everyone knew it. I wasn’t worried. I didn’t want to get placed. I’d rather stay here until I was eighteen. Paul was right, there was lots worse than Mac. I didn’t want to get involved with anybody ever again. But nobody got to stay.

  At a table under the big pines, another interview was taking place, a sibling set. They were always the worst. The cute little brother in the woman’s lap, the older brother, past cute, pubescent, downy-lipped, standing off to the right, hands in his pockets. They only wanted the little one. Big brother was trying to convince them how responsible he was, how he’d help take care of the little guy, carry the trash, mow the lawn. I could barely watch it.

  I had my first interview on Tuesday. Bill and Ann Greenway from Downey. They’d been foster parents for years. They just had one go back to her birth parents. They’d had her three years. Bill wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as he told it, Ann blinking back tears. I studied my shoes, white Keds, blue stripes down the sides, oversized lace holes. One thing in my favor, I wasn’t going back to my mother anytime soon.

  I didn’t say much. I didn’t even want to look at them. I could get to like them. I liked them already. Their kindnesses made small sucking noises at me, like water in the bathtub. It would be easy to let them take me home. I could see their house, bright and comfortable, on a street of tract houses but nice, maybe two-story. Pictures of kids on the tables, old swing set in the backyard. The sunny high school, even their church sounded inviting, nobody got fanatic there, or worried too much about sin or damnation. I bet they called their minister by his first name.

  I could have gone with them, Ann and Bill Greenway of Downey. But with them, I might forget things. All the butterflies might fly away. Pressed wildflowers and Bach in the morning, dark hair on the pillow, pearls. Aida and Leonard Cohen, Mrs. Kromach and picnics in the living room, pâté and caviar. In Downey, it wouldn’t matter that I knew about Kandinsky and Ypres and the French names for the turns in ballet. I might forget black thread through skin, a .38 bullet crashing through bone, the smell of new houses and the way my mother looked when they handcuffed her, the odd tenderness with which the burly cop held his hand over her head so she wouldn’t hit it getting into the squad car. With Ann and Bill Greenway of Downey, they would dim, fade away. Amsterdam and Eduardo’s hotel, tea at the Beverly Wilshire and the way Claire stood trembling when that bum smelled her hair. I would never again look at homeless kids in doorways off Sunset and see my own face staring back.