White Oleander - Janet Fitch [127]
Butterflies suddenly filled the cab of the van — swallowtails, monarchs, buckeyes, cabbage whites — the fluttering wings of my too many feelings, too many memories, I didn’t know how Rena could see through the windshield for the heartbeat gossamer of their wings.
It was less than a year, I told myself. Eighteen and out. I would graduate, get a job, my life would be my own. This was just a place to live rent-free until I could decide what the next act was going to be. Forget college, that wasn’t going to happen for me, so why set myself up. I sure wasn’t going to let myself get disappointed again. I never let anyone touch me. Damn straight.
I concentrated on the shapes of the downtown towers as they emerged from the gloom, tops in the clouds, a half-remembered dream. We turned north on the 5, following train tracks around downtown, County Hospital, the warehouse area around the brewery, where the artists lived in their studios — we ’d been to parties there, my mother and I, a lifetime ago, so long it seemed like someone else’s memory, a song I’d heard once in a dream.
Rena turned off at Stadium Way, and there were no houses now, just tangled green freewayside foliage and concrete. We paralleled the 5 for a while, then passed underneath, into a little neighborhood like an island below sea level, the freeway a wall on our left. On the right, through the rain-smeared windshield, street after street rolled by, each posted No Outlet. I saw cramped front yards, and laundry hanging wet on lines and over fences in front of Spanish cottages and tiny Craftsman bungalows, bars on all the windows. I saw macramé plant holders hanging from porches, children’s toys in bare-dirt front lawns, and enormous oleanders. Frogtown, the graffiti proclaimed.
We pulled up in front of a glum cocoa-brown Spanish bungalow with heavy plasterwork, dark windows, and a patchy lawn surrounded by a chain-link fence. On one side, the neighbors had a boat in the driveway that was bigger than their house. On the other was a plumbing contractor. It was exactly where I belonged, a girl who could turn away from the one good thing in her life.
“No place like home,” said Rena Grushenka. I couldn’t tell if she was being ironic or not.
She didn’t help me carry my things. I took the most important bags — art supplies, the Dürer rabbit with Ron’s money hidden behind the frame — and followed her up the cracked path to the splintered porch. A white cat dashed in when Rena opened the door. “Sasha, you bad boy,” she said. “Out screwing.”
It took a moment to adjust to the darkness inside the small house. Furniture was my first impression, jumbled together like in a thrift store. Too many lamps, none lit. A dark-haired plump girl lay on a green figured velvet sofa watching TV. She pushed the white cat away when it jumped in her lap. She glanced up at me, wasn’t impressed, went back to her show.
“Yvonne,” Rena said. “She got more stuff. You help.”
“You,” Yvonne said.
“Hey, what I say you? Lazy cow.”
“Chingao, talk about lazy.” But she pushed herself up from the too-soft couch, and I saw she was pregnant. Her dark eyes under the skimpy cover of half-moon plucked eyebrows met mine. “Have you ever came to the wrong place,” she said.
Rena snorted. “What you think is right place? You tell me, we all go.”
The girl gave her the finger, took a sweatshirt from the old-fashioned hatstand, lazily pulled the hood over her hair. “Come on.”
We went back out into the rain, a fine drizzle now, and she took two bags, I took two more. “I’m Astrid,