White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

  have been that attached.”

  “He’s dead,” I said. “You’re accusing me of being cynical?”

  She put a cigarette in her mouth and the lighter popped out. She lit it, filling the car with smoke. She exhaled up toward the slit in the window. “No, it’s not Kolker. You’re angry with her for abandoning you. Naturally. You’ve led six difficult years, and like a child, you point to the almighty mother. It’s her fault. The idea that she too is a victim would never occur to you.”

  Out the window, in the unairconditioned part of reality, a very red-faced jogger trotted by us, dragging a tired setter on a leash. “Is that what you’ll say if I tell the truth at her trial?”

  We watched her plodding down the sidewalk, the dog trying to sniff at the plants as they went by. “Something like that,” she said, the first honest thing I’d heard her say since I’d shaken her small hand. She sighed and flicked ash out the window. Some blew back in. She brushed it off her suit. “Astrid. She may not have been some TV mom, Barbara Billingsley with her apron and pearls, but she loves you. More than you can imagine. Right now she really needs your faith in her. You should hear her, talking about you, how she worries about you, how much she wants to be with you again.”

  I thought again about my imaginary trip with her, the sight of her, the magic of her speech. Now I was not so sure, maybe it was true. I wanted to ask this woman what my mother said about me. I wanted to hear her tell me what my mother thought about me, but I didn’t dare leave her that opening. Bobby Fischer had taught me better than that. “She’d say anything to get out.”

  “Talk to her. I can set it up. Just listen to what she has to say, Astrid,” Susan urged. “Six years is a long time. People do change.”

  My moment’s uncertainty faded. I knew exactly how far Ingrid Magnussen had changed. I had her letters. I’d read them, page by page, swimming across the red tide. I knew all about her tenderness and motherly concern. Me and the white cat. But now there was something that had changed. What had changed was that for the first time in my life, my mother needed something from me, something I had the power to give or withhold, and not the other way around. I opened up the airflow vent and let the air-conditioning kiss my face.

  My mother needed me. It sank in, what that meant, how incredible it was. If I went on the stand and said she did it, told about our trip to Tijuana, about the pounds of oleander and jimson weed and belladonna she’d boiled down in the kitchen, she’d never get out. And if I lied, said Barry was superparanoid, he’d developed a complex about her, he was crazy, about how she’d been so drugged when I saw her at Sybil Brand she hadn’t even recognized me, she might win an appeal, get a new trial, she could be out walking around before I was twenty-one.

  Reverend Thomas would not have approved of the emotion that filled me now, its sweetness was irresistible. I had her own knife to her throat. I could ask for something, I could make demands. What’s in it for me, that’s what I’d learned to ask, unapologetically, in my time with Rena. What’s my cut. I could put a price tag on my soul. Now I just had to figure out what I could sell it for.

  “Okay,” I said. “Set it up.”

  Susan took a last drag of her cigarette, threw it out the window, then raised the glass. Now she was all business. “Anything you want in the meantime, some spending money?”

  I hated this woman. What I had been through the last six years meant nothing to her. I was simply one more brick in the structure she was erecting, I had just slipped into place. She didn’t believe my mother was innocent. She only cared that there would be cameras on the courthouse steps. And her name, Susan D. Valeris, under her moving red lips. The publicity would be

  worth plenty. “I’ll take a couple hundred,” I said.

  I WALKED ALONG the river in the last afternoon light, my hands in my pockets, Baldy all pink in the east with reflected sunset, Susan’s money crumpled in my fist. I strolled north, past the contractor’s lot and the bakery loading bays, the sculptor’s yard at the end of Clearwater Street, painted trompe l’oeil like a little French village. A dog rushed the fence and the wide planks jerked as the animal struck it, barking and growling. Over the fence through the razor wire, shapes in bronze, balanced inside big metal hoops like Shiva, turned slowly in the wind. I found a chunk of concrete broken loose from the embankment and threw it into the river. It fell among the willows, and a flurry of whistling wings rose from cover, brown wading birds. It was happening again. I was being drawn back into her world, into her shadow, just when I was starting to feel free.

  I coughed the dry hacking cough I’d had all spring, from smoking pot and the perennial mold at Rena’s. I dashed down the slope to the water, squatted and touched the current with my fingertips. Cold, real. Water from mountains. I put it between my eyes, the third eye spot. Help me, River.

  And what if she did get out? If she came walking up to the house on Ripple Street, if she said, “I’m back. Pack up, Astrid, we’re leaving.” Could I resist her? I pictured her, in the white shirt and jeans they let her change into when they arrested her. “Let’s go,” she said. I saw us standing on the porch at Rena’s, staring at each other, but nothing beyond that.

  Was she still in my bones, in my every thought?

  I squatted by the water as it flowed over the tumbled rocks, thought how far must they have come to have settled in this con-crete channel, the stream clear and melodious, the smell of fresh water. I didn’t want to think about my mother anymore. It made me tired. I’d rather think about the way the willows and the cottonwoods and palms broke their way through the concrete, growing right out of the flood control channel, how the river struggled to reestablish itself. A little silt was carried down, settled. A seed dropped into it, sprouted. Little roots shot downward. The next thing you had trees, shrubs, birds.

  My mother once wrote a poem about rivers. They were women, she wrote. Starting out small girls, tiny streams decorated with wildflowers. Then they were torrents, gouging paths through sheer granite, flinging themselves off cliffs, fearless and irresistible. Later, they grew fat and serviceable, broad slow curves carrying commerce and sewage, but in their unconscious depths catfish gorged, grew the size of barges, and in the hundred-year storms, they rose up, forgetting the promises they made, the wedding vows, and drowned everything for miles around. Finally, they gave out, birth-emptied, malarial, into a fan of swamp that met the sea.

  But this river was none of these things. It flowed serene and ignored past fences spray-painted 18th Street, Roscos, Frogtown, alive despite everything, guarding the secrets of survival. This river was a girl like me.

  A makeshift tent sat on a small island in the middle of the miniature forest, its blue plastic tarp startling amid the grays and greens. The here-and-now Hiltons, Barry used to call them. I knew whose it was. A tall, thin Vietnam vet in khakis and camouflage, I’d seen him around early in the mornings, the thin thread of smoke from his small coffee-can stove. I’d seen him in front of the Spanish market on Glendale Boulevard, the boarded-up side, playing poker with his friends in the long shadows of afternoon.

  Wild mustard flowered on the cracked banks, and I picked a bouquet for Yvonne. What was a weed, anyway. A plant nobody planted? A seed escaped from a traveler’s coat, something that didn’t belong? Was it something that grew better than what should have been there? Wasn’t it just a word, weed, trailing its judgments. Useless, without value. Unwanted.

  Well, anyone could buy a green Jaguar, find beauty in a Japanese screen two thousand years old. I would rather be a connoisseur of neglected rivers and flowering mustard and the flush of iridescent pink on an intersection pigeon’s charcoal neck. I thought of the vet, warming dinner over a can, and the old woman feeding her pigeons in the intersection behind the Kentucky Fried Chicken. And what about the ladybug man, the blue of his eyes over gray threaded black? There were me and Yvonne, Niki and Paul Trout, maybe even Sergei or Susan D. Valeris, why not? What were any of us but a handful of weeds. Who was to say wha
t our value was? What was the value of four Vietnam vets playing poker every afternoon in front of the Spanish market on Glendale Boulevard, making their moves with a greasy deck missing a queen and a five? Maybe the world depended on them, maybe they were the Fates, or the Graces. Cézanne would have drawn them in charcoal. Van Gogh would have painted himself among them.

  BUT THAT NIGHT I dreamed the old dream again, of gray Paris streets and the maze of stone, the bricked blind windows. This time there were doors of glass with curved art nouveau handles, they were all locked. I knew I had to find my mother. It was getting dark, dark figures lurked in the cellar entrances. I rang all the buzzers to the apartments. Women came to the door, looking like her, smiling, some even called my name. But none of them was her.

  I knew she was in there, I banged on the door, screamed for her to let me in. The door buzzed to admit me, but just as I pushed it in, I saw her leaving from the courtyard gate, a passenger in a small red car, wearing her curly Afghan coat and big sun-glasses over her blind eyes, she was leaning back in the seat and laughing. I ran after her, crying, begging.

  Yvonne shook me awake. She took my head in her lap, and her long brown hair draped over us like a shawl. Her belly was warm and firm as a bolster. Through the strands of her hair wove the colored strands of light I still saw, cast by a kid’s carousel bedside lamp I’d scavenged on trash day. “We get all the bad dreams, ese,” she said, stroking my wet cheek with the palm of her hand. “We got to leave some for somebody else.”

  30

  THE MATERNITY WARD of Waite Memorial Hospital reminded me of all the schools I’d ever gone to. Sand-textured walls painted the color of old teeth, lockers in the hall, linoleum floors dark and light brown, acoustic tiles packed with string. Only the screaming up and down the halls was different. It scared me. I didn’t belong here, I thought, as I followed Yvonne down the corridor. I should be going to third period, learning something distant and cerebral, safely tucked between book covers. In life, anything could happen.

  I brought all the things we’d learned to use in baby class, the tennis balls, the rolled-up towels, the watch, but Yvonne didn’t want to do it, puff and count, lie on the tennis balls. All she wanted was to suck on the white terry cloth and let me wipe her face with ice, sing to her in my tuneless voice. I sang songs from musicals I used to watch with Michael — Camelot, My Fair Lady. I sang to her, “Oh Shenandoah, I long to hear you,” that Claire had once sung on the banks of the McKenzie. While all around us, through the curtains, women screamed in their narrow labor beds, cursing, groaning, and calling for their mothers in ten languages. It sounded like the laboratories of the Inquisition.

  Rena didn’t stay long. She drove us there, dropped us off, signed the papers. Whenever I started liking her, something like this happened.

  “Mama,” Yvonne whimpered, tears rolling down her face. She squeezed my arm as another contraction came. We’d been here for nine hours, through two shifts of nurses. My arm was bruised from hand to shoulder. “Don’t leave me,” she said.

  “I won’t.” I fed her some of the ice chips they let her have. They wouldn’t let her drink anything, in case she had to have anesthesia. They didn’t want her puking into the mask. She puked anyway. I held the small plastic kidney-shaped pan up under her chin. The fluorescent light accused us.

  The nurse looked up at the monitor, stuck her fingers up Yvonne to check her dilation. She was still eight centimeters. Ten was full dilation, and they told us over and over again there wasn’t much they could do until then. Now was what they called transition, the worst time. Yvonne wore a white T-shirt and green kneesocks, face yellow and slick with sweat, her hair dirty and tangled. I wiped the stringy vomit from her lips.

  “Sing me a song,” Yvonne said through her cracked lips.

  “If ever I should leave you,” I sang into her spiraled ear, pierced all the way up. “It wouldn’t be in summer...”

  Yvonne looked huge in the tiny bed. The fetal monitor was strapped to her belly, but I refused to look at the TV screen. I watched her face. She reminded me of a Francis Bacon painting, fading in and out of her resemblance to anything human, struggling to resist disappearing into an undifferentiated world of pain. I brushed her hair out of her face, made braids again.

  Women’s bravery, I thought as I worked on her hair from bottom to top, untangling the black mass. I would never be able to go through this. The pain came in waves, in sheets, starting in her belly and extending outward, a flower of pain blooming through her body, a jagged steel lotus.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the body, what a hard fact it was. That philosopher who said we think, therefore we are, should have spent an hour in the maternity ward of Waite Memorial Hospital. He’d have had to change his whole philosophy.

  The mind was so thin, barely a spiderweb, with all its fine thoughts, aspirations, and beliefs in its own importance. Watch how easily it unravels, evaporates under the first lick of pain. Gasping on the bed, Yvonne bordered on the unrecognizable, dis-integrating into a ripe collection of nerves, fibers, sacs, and waters and the ancient clock in the blood. Compared to this eternal body, the individual was a smoke, a cloud. The body was the only reality. I hurt, therefore I am.

  The nurse came in, looked up at the monitor, checked Yvonne’s contractions, blood pressure, her movements crisp and authoritative. The last shift we’d had Connie Hwang, we’d trusted her, she smiled and touched Yvonne gently with her plump hands. But this one, Melinda Meek, snapped at Yvonne for whining. “You’ll be fine,” she said. “You’ve done this before.” She scared me with her efficiency, her bony fingers. I could tell she knew we were foster children, that Yvonne wouldn’t keep the baby. She’d already decided we were irresponsible and deserved every bit of our suffering. I could see her as a correctional officer. Now I wished my mother were here. She would know how to get rid of Melinda Meek. Even in transition she would spit in Melinda’s stingy face, threaten to strangle her in the cord of the fetal monitor.

  “It hurts,” Yvonne said.

  “Nobody said it was a picnic,” Melinda said. “You’ve got to breathe.”

  Yvonne tried, gasped and blew, she wanted everyone to like her, even this sour-faced nurse.

  “Can’t you just give her something?” I said.

  “She’s doing fine,” Melinda said crisply, her triangular eyes a veiled threat.

  “Cheap-ass motherfuckers,” the woman said on the other side of the white shower curtains. “Don’t give poor people no damn drugs.”

  “Please,” Yvonne said, clutching at Melinda’s white jacket. “I beg of you.”

  The nurse efficiently peeled back Yvonne ’s hand, patted it firmly onto her belly. “You’re already eight centimeters. It’s almost over.”

  Yvonne sobbed softly, rhythmically, hopelessly, too tired to even cry. I rubbed her stomach.

  Nobody ever talked about what a struggle this all was. I could see why women used to die in childbirth. They didn’t catch some kind of microbe, or even hemorrhage. They just gave up. They stopped caring whether or not the baby came. They knew if they didn’t die, they’d be going through it again the next year, and the next. I could understand how a woman might just stop trying, like a tired swimmer, let her head go under, the water fill her lungs. I slowly massaged Yvonne’s neck, her shoulders, I wouldn’t let her go under. She sucked ice through threadbare white terry. If my mother were here, she’d have made Melinda Meek cough up the drugs, sure enough.

  “Mamacita, ay,” Yvonne wailed.

  I didn’t know why she would call for her mother. She hated her mother. She hadn’t seen her in six years, since the day she locked Yvonne and her brother and sisters in their apartment in Burbank to go out and party, and never came back. Yvonne said she let her boyfriends run a train on her when she was eleven. I didn’t even know what that meant. Gang bang, she said. And still she called out, Mama.

  It wasn’t just Yvonne. All down the ward, they called for their mothers. Mommy, ma, mom, mama. E
ven with husbands at their sides, they called out for mama. Nine hours ago, when we came in, a woman with a voice like a lye bath alternately screamed at her husband and called for her mother. A grown woman sobbing like a child. Mommy... I was embarrassed for her. Now I knew better.

  I held on to Yvonne ’s hands, and I imagined my mother, seventeen years ago, giving birth to me. Did she call for her mother? I imagined her screaming at my father, calling him worthless, a liar, useless, until he went out for a beer, leaving her alone with the landlady on a cold November morning. She had me at home, she ’d never liked doctors. I could imagine how her screams and curses must have pierced the quiet of the walk street in Venice Beach, startling a kid going by on a skateboard, while the land-lady smoked hash and rifled her purse. But did she call out, Mami, help me?

  I thought of her mother, the one picture I had, the little I knew. Karin Thorvald, who may or may not have been a distant relation of King Olaf of Norway, classical actress and drunk, who could recite Shakespeare by heart while feeding the chickens and who drowned in the cow pond when my mother was thirteen. I couldn’t imagine her calling out for anyone.

  But then I realized, they didn’t mean their own mothers. Not those weak women, those victims. Drug addicts, shopaholics, cookie bakers. They didn’t mean the women who let them down, who failed to help them into womanhood, women who let their boyfriends run a train on them. Bingers and purgers, women smiling into mirrors, women in girdles, women on barstools. Not those women with their complaints and their magazines, controlling women, women who asked, what’s in it for me? Not the women watching TV while they made dinner, women who dyed their hair blond behind closed doors trying to look twenty-three. They didn’t mean the mothers washing dishes wishing they’d never married, the ones in the ER, saying they fell down the stairs, not the ones in prison saying loneliness is the human condition, get used to it.