White Oleander - Janet Fitch [152]
“We’re at Pitzer College, out in Pomona. We studied her in Women’s Studies. We visit her every week. She knows so much about everything, she’s really incredible. Every time we go she just blows us away.”
What was my mother thinking, sending these college girls? Was she trying to grind me into talc, flour for some bitter bread? Was this the ultimate punishment for my refusal to forget? “What does she want from me?”
“Oh, no,” Hannah said. “She didn’t send us. We came on our own. But we told her we’d send you a copy of the interview, you know?” She held up a magazine she had rolled in her hands, blushed deeply. In a way, I envied that blush. I couldn’t blush like that anymore. I felt old, gnawed pliant and unrecognizable as a shoe given to a dog. “And then we thought, you know, now that we knew where you lived, we could —” She smiled helplessly.
“We thought we ’d come and see if we could help you or something,” Julie said.
I saw that I scared them. They thought my mother’s daughter would be something else, something more like them. Something gentle, wide-open. That was a riot. My mother didn’t scare them, but I did.
“Is that it?” I asked, holding out my hand for the magazine.
Hannah tried to straighten out the curl of the magazine on her flowered knee. My mother’s face on the cover, behind chicken wire, on the phone in the seclusion room. She must have done something, usually you get to be at the picnic tables. She looked beautiful, smiling, her teeth still perfect, the only lifer at Frontera with perfect teeth, but her eyes looked weary. Contemporary Literature.
I sat down next to Julie on the splintered front steps. Hannah took a seat a step down, her dress flowing in a curve like an Isadora Duncan dance step. I opened the piece, flipped through it. My mother’s gestures, flat of palm to forehead, elbow on the ledge. Head against the window, eyes downcast. We are larger than biography. “What do you talk about with her?” I asked.
“Poetry.” Hannah shrugged. “What we’re reading. Music, all kinds of things. She sometimes talks about something she saw on the news. Stuff you wouldn’t even think twice about, but she gets some take on it that’s just incredible.”
The transformation of the world.
“She talks about you,” Julie said.
That was a surprise. “What’s she say about me?”
“That you’re in a, you know. Home. She feels terrible about what’s happened,” Hannah said. “For you most of all.”
I looked at these girls, college girls, with their fresh makeupless faces, trusting, caring. And I felt the gap between us, all the things I wouldn’t be because I was who I was. I was graduating in two months, but I wasn’t going to Pitzer, that was for sure. I was the old child, the past that had to be burned away, so my mother, the phoenix, could emerge once again, a golden bird rising from ash. I tried to see my mother through their eyes. The beautiful imprisoned poetic soul, the suffering genius. Did my mother suffer? I forced myself to imagine it. She certainly suffered when Barry kicked her out of his house that day, after sleeping with her. But when she killed him, the suffering was somehow redeemed. Was she suffering now? I really couldn’t say.
“So you thought you’d come out and what?” I asked. “Adopt me?”
I laughed but they didn’t. I’d grown too hard, maybe I was more like my mother than I thought.
Julie gave Hannah a “told you so” look. I could see this had been the sandy girl’s idea. “Yeah, well, sort of. If you wanted.”
Their sincerity so unexpected, their sympathies so misplaced. “You don’t think she killed him, do you,” I said.
Hannah shook her head, quickly. “It’s all been a terrible mistake. A nightmare. She talks all about it in the interview.”
I was sure she had. She was always at her best with an audience. “Something you should know,” I told her. “She did kill him.”
Hannah stared at me. Julie’s gaze fled to her friend. They were shocked. Julie stepped protectively toward her gauzy friend, and I felt suddenly cruel, like I’d told small children there was no tooth fairy, that it was