White Oleander - Janet Fitch [121]
I remembered the day she took me to Cal Arts. I was intimidated by the students, they seemed pretentious for people with funny haircuts, and their work was ugly. It cost ten thousand dollars a year to go there. “Don’t think about money,” Claire said. “This is the place, unless you think you want to go east.” We’d sent in the application in November. I had to forget all that now.
I sat cross-legged next to her on the bed, counted the pills in the jar. For Insomnia. There were still plenty. More than enough, and the last person who would ever think about me was gone. My mother? She just wanted possession. She thought if she could kill Claire, she would get me back, so she could erase me some more. I felt the pull of that dark circle, the neck of the bottle. It was a rabbit hole, I could jump down it and pull it in after me. You never knew when help might come. But I knew. It came and I turned my back, I let it go down. I pushed my savior out of the life raft. I panicked. Now I reaped my despair.
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,