White Oleander - Janet Fitch [178]
She sighed. “By the time Susan is done, I’ll be a household icon, like Aunt Jemima, the Pillsbury Doughboy. I’ll have my choice of teaching positions. Where would you like to go, Astrid?” She glanced at me, smiled, my carrot. Reminding me
which end of the plank and so on.
“That’s years away,” I said.
“You can’t make it alone,” she said. “You need an environment, a context. People invested in your success. God knows, look at me. I had to go to prison to get noticed.”
The cars started up, crunched over the gravel. Camille came out of the shelter, pointed at her watch. It was over. I felt empty and used. Whatever I thought knowing the truth would do for me, it hadn’t. It was my last hope. I wanted her to hurt the way I did. I wanted it very much.
“So, how does it feel, knowing I don’t give a damn anymore?” I said. “That I’ll do anything to get what I want. Even lie for you, I won’t blink an eye. I’m like you now, aren’t I? I look at the world and ask what’s in it for me.”
She shook her head, gazed down at her bare tanned feet. “If I could take it all back, I would, Astrid.” She lifted her eyes to mine. “You’ve got to believe me.” Her eyes, glinting in the sun, were exactly the color of the pool we swam in together the summer she was arrested. I wanted to swim there again, to submerge myself in them.
“Then tell me you don’t want me to testify,” I said. “Tell me you don’t want me like this. Tell me you would sacrifice the rest of your life to have me back the way I was.”
She turned her blue gaze toward the road, that road, the beautiful road, the road women in prison dreamed about. The road she had already left me for once. Her hair like smoke in the wind. Overhead, the foliage blew back and forth like a fighter working a small bag in air that smelled of brushfire and dairy cattle. She pressed her hands over her eyes, then slid them down her face to her mouth. I watched her staring out at the road. She seemed lost there, sealed in longing, searching for an exit, a hidden door.
And suddenly I felt panic. I’d made a mistake, like when I’d played chess with Ray and knew a second too late I’d made the wrong move. I had asked a question I couldn’t afford to know the answer to. It was the thing I didn’t want to know. The rock that never should be turned over. I knew what was under there. I didn’t need to see it, the hideous eyeless albino creature that lived underneath. “Listen, forget it. A deal’s a deal. Let’s leave it at that.”
The wind crackled its dangerous whip in the air, I imagined I could see the shower of sparks, smell the ashes. I was afraid she hadn’t heard me. She was still as a daguerreotype, arms crossed across her denim dress. “I’ll tell Susan,” she said quietly. “To leave you alone.”
I knew I had heard her but I didn’t believe it. I waited for something, to make me believe it was true.
My mother came back to me then, put her arms around me, rested her cheek against my hair. Although I knew it was impossible, I could smell her violets. “If you could go back, even part-way, I would give anything,” she said into my ear.
Her large hands gently stroked my hair. It was all I ever really wanted, that revelation. The possibility of fixed stars.
32
THE YEAR my mother’s new trial was held, February was bitter cold. I was living in Berlin with Paul Trout, in a fourth-story flat in the old Eastern sector, a sublet of a sublet some friends found for us. It was crumbling and coal-heated, but we could afford it most of the time. Ever since Paul’s graphic novels had become the codebook of a new secret