White Oleander - Janet Fitch [107]
She nodded, head heavy on her slender neck, like one of her drooping tulips, the knobs of her spine like a diamondback’s rattle. “It’s so hot already. What will I do when summer comes?”
She was all skin and nerves, no substance, no weight. She was her own skin kite, stretched before dry violent winds.
“We should go to the beach,” I suggested.
She shook her head, fast, as if a fly had landed on her. “It’s not that.”
I was sitting on one of the jewels, it was digging into my hip. I freed one of my hands and reached under myself, pulled it out. It was an aquamarine, big as an almond in the shell. Aquamarines grew with emeralds, Claire told me. But emeralds were fragile and always broke into smaller pieces, while aquamarines were stronger, grew huge crystals without any trouble, so they weren’t worth as much. It was the emerald that didn’t break that was the really valuable thing.
I handed her the ice-blue stone, the color of my mother’s eyes. She put it on her forefinger, where it hung like a doorknob on a rope. She gazed into it. “This belonged to my mother. My father got it for her to celebrate an around-the-world cruise.” She took it off. “It was too big for her too.”
Next door, Mrs. Kromach’s parrot whistled the same three notes in an ascending scale, three and a half notes apart. An ice-cream truck rolled down the street, playing “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Claire lay down on her back so she could look at me, one hand behind her head. She was very beautiful, even now, her dark hair loose around her shoulders, wet at the hairline, her dark eyebrows arched and glossy, her small breasts curved in pink lace.
“If you were going to kill yourself, how would you do it?” she asked.
I turned onto my stomach, sorted through the jewelry. I tried on a gold bangle. It wouldn’t fit over my hand. I thought of my suicides, the way I would run my death through my fingers like jet beads. “I wouldn’t.”
She laced an Indian silver necklace onto her flat stomach, strands of hairlike tubes making metal into a fluid like mercury. “Well, say you wanted to.”
“It’s against my religion.” Sweat trickled down between my breasts, pooled in my navel.
“What religion is that?”
“I’m a survivalist.”
She wouldn’t allow that. I wasn’t playing. It was against the rules. “Just say you did. Say you were very old and had a horrible incurable cancer.”
“I’d get lots of Demerol and wait it out.” I was not going to discuss suicide with Claire. It was on my mother’s list of antisocial acts. I wasn’t going to tell her the surest way, the bone cancer boy’s plan, injecting an air bubble into your vein and letting it move through your blood like a pearl. I was sure her aunt Priscilla used that once or twice on the battlefield when the morphine ran out. Then there was a load of cyanide at the back of the tongue, the way they did it to cats. It was very fast. When you committed suicide, you didn’t want something slow. Some-one could walk in, someone could save you.
Claire clasped her hand to one knee, rocked a little, up and down her spine. “You know how I’d do it?”
She was pulling me down that road and I wasn’t going to go there. “Let’s go to the beach, okay? It’s so hot, it’s making us crazy.”
She didn’t even hear me. Her eyes looked dreamy, like someone in love. “I’d gas myself. That’s the way. They say it’s just like going to sleep.”
She reminded me of a woman lying down in snow. Just lying down for a little while, she was so tired. She’d been walking so long, she just wanted to rest, and it wasn’t as cold as she thought. She was so sleepy. It was the surrender she wanted. To stop fighting the storm and the enveloping night, to lie down in whiteness and sleep. I understood. I used to dream that I was skin-diving down a coral wall. Euphoria set in as the nitrogen built up in my bloodstream, and the only direction was down into darkness and forgetting.
I had to wake her up. Slap her face, march her around, feed her black coffee. I told