White Oleander - Janet Fitch [18]
“Astrid, they can’t keep me,” she said. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back in an hour.”
She said. She said.
I sat on Michael’s couch, slept and waited, the way dogs wait, all day, and then the next. A week went by, but she didn’t come. She said she would, but she never did.
WHEN THEY CAME to get me, they gave me fifteen minutes to make up my mind what to take from our apartment. We never had many things. I took her four books, a box of her journals, the white kimono, her tarot cards, and her folding knife.
“I’m sorry,” Michael said. “I’d keep you if I could. But you know how it is.”
How it was. How it was that the earth could open up under you and swallow you whole, close above you as if you never were. Like Persephone snatched by the god. The ground opened up and out he came, sweeping her into the black chariot. Then down they plunged, under the ground, into the darkness, and the earth closed over her head, and she was gone, as if she had never been.
So I came to live underground, in the house of sleep, in the house of plastic sheets and crying babies and brown roses in drifts, forty down, ninety-two across. Three thousand six hundred and eighty brown roses.
ONCE THEY BROUGHT me to see her behind glass. She wore an orange jumpsuit, like a car mechanic, and there was something wrong with her. Her eyes were all clouded over. I told her I loved her, but she didn’t recognize me. I saw her there in my dreams, again and again, her blind eyes.
It was a year of mouths, opening and closing, asking the same questions, saying the same things. Just tell us what happened. Tell us what we want to know. I wanted to help her, but I didn’t know how. I couldn’t find words, I had no words. In the courtroom she wore a white shirt. I saw that shirt when I was awake and I saw it when I slept. I saw her on the stand in that shirt, her eyes blank as a doll’s. I saw her back in that white shirt walking away. Thirty-five to life, someone said. I came home and counted roses, and slept.
WHEN I WAS AWAKE, I tried to remember the things she taught me. We were the wands. We hung our gods from trees. Never let a man stay the night. Don’t forget who you are. But I couldn’t remember. I was the disability girl, stones in my mouth, lost on the battlefield, plastic sheets on the bed. I was the laundry monitor, I helped the niece take the laundry to the Laundromat. I watched the laundry go around. I liked the smell of it, it made me feel safe. I slept until sleep seemed like waking and waking like sleep. Sometimes I lay on my bed in the room with the roses and watched the girl in the other bed make scar tattoos on her ashy dark skin with a safety pin, a diaper pin with a yellow duck. She opened her skin in lines and loops. It healed over into pink pillowy tissue. She opened them again. It took me a while, but finally I understood. She wanted it to show.
I dreamed my mother was hunting me in the burnt-out city, blind, relentless. The whole truth and nothing but the truth. I wanted to lie, but the words deserted me. She was the one who always spoke for us. She was the goddess who threw out the golden apples. They would stoop to pick them up, and we’d make our escape. But when I reached into my pocket, there was only dust and dried leaves. I had nothing to protect her with, to cover her naked body. I had condemned her by my silence, condemned us