White Oleander - Janet Fitch [21]
“You see a lot,” I said.
He smiled. He was a boy who wanted to be seen. He told me his name was Davey, he was Starr’s real son. There was a daughter too, Carolee. The other two, Owen and Peter, were foster like me. But even her natural children had been in foster care, when Starr was in rehab.
How many children had this happened to? How many children were like me, floating like plankton in the wide ocean? I thought how tenuous the links were between mother and children, between friends, family, things you think are eternal. Everything could be lost, more easily than anyone could imagine.
We walked on. Davey pulled at a bush with bright yellow flowers. “Deerweed. Pea family.” The breeze came up the canyon, making the trees flicker green and gray. “Paloverde’s got the green bark. The other’s ironwood.”
The quiet, the solidness of the mountain, the white butterflies. Green scent of laurel sumac, which Davey informed me the local Indians had used to sweeten the air in their wickiups. Clumps of giant ryegrass, still green, but already crackling like fire. Two hawks circled the seamless blue sky, screaming.
THAT NIGHT, motifs of cowboys on broncos, lariats, and spurs decorated my sleeping bag bed, where I lay zipper open to the coolness watching Carolee, sixteen years old and tall as her mother, a sullen girl with pouty lips, zipping her top. “Thinks she ’s going to ground me,” Carolee said to her reflection. “That’s what she thinks.”
On the other side of our thin wall, the mother and her hippie boyfriend were making love, the headboard knocking against the partition. It was not the night magic, my mother and her young men, murmuring to strains of imperial koto in the scented dusk.
“Lord almighty!” Starr wailed.
Carolee’s mouth twisted into something not quite a smile, her boot on her bed, she was doing the laces. “Christians don’t say, ‘Fuck me baby.’ Actually they’re not supposed to do it at all, but she’s got the sin virus in her blood.” She posed in front of the mirror, lowered the zipper of her top an inch, so it showed the well between her breasts. She bared her teeth and wiped them with her finger.
A dirt bike whined, and she pushed the screen out, climbed onto the dresser, narrowly missing her basket of makeup. “See you in the morning. Don’t close the window.”
I got up and watched her on the dirt bike disappearing up the road. It was wide and white in the moonlight, the darkness of mountains darker than the sky, a perfect vanishing point of the road and the telephone poles. I imagined you could follow that road through the vanishing point, come out somewhere else entirely.
“WITHOUT JESUS, I’d be dead today,” Starr was saying as she cut in front of a semi, which punished us with its air horn. “That’s the God’s honest truth. They’d taken my kids, I was ready for roadkill.”
I sat in the passenger seat of Starr’s Ford Torino while Carolee slouched in the back, ankle bracelet glittering, a present from her boyfriend, Derrick. Starr drove too fast, bumping up the road, and chain-smoked Benson and Hedges 100s from a gold pack, listening to Christian radio. She was talking about how she used to be an alcoholic and a cokehead and topless waitress at a club called the Trop.
She wasn’t beautiful like my mother, but you couldn’t help looking at her. I’d never seen anyone with a figure like that. Only in the back pages of the L.A. Weekly, chewing on a phone cord. But her energy was overwhelming. She never stopped talking, laughing, lecturing, smoking. I wondered what she was like on cocaine.
“I can’t wait for you to meet Reverend Thomas. Have you accepted Christ as your personal savior?”
I considered telling her that we hung our gods from trees, but thought better of