White Oleander - Janet Fitch [34]
Carolee bought me a mirror for my purse and Owen and Peter gave me a lizard in a jar with a bow. From Davey I got a big sheet of cardboard on which he ’d taped animal scat and Xeroxes of animal tracks to match, with carefully printed labels. Starr’s gift was a green stretchy sweater, and the social worker brought me a set of rhinestone barrettes.
The last gift was from Ray. I carefully opened the paper, and saw the wood, carved and inlaid in the pattern of an art nouveau moonflower, the cover motif of my mother’s first book. I held my breath and took it out of the paper, a wooden jewelry box. It smelled of new wood. I ran my fingers over the moonflower, thought of Ray cutting the pieces, the sinuous edges, fitting them so perfectly you couldn’t feel the transitions in the woods. He must have done it late at night, when I was asleep. I was afraid to show how much I loved it. So I just said, “Thanks.” But I hoped he could tell.
WHEN THE RAINS CAME, the yard turned to deep mud, and the river rose, filling its enormous channel. What had been a big dry wash littered with rocks and chaparral was transformed into a huge dirty torrent the color of a coffee milkshake. Parts of the burnt mountain sighed and gave way. I never thought it could rain so much. We kept putting pots and cartons and jugs under the leaks in Starr’s roof, emptying them in the yard.
It was the break in a seven-year drought, and the rain that had been held back was being delivered, all at once. It lasted without a break through Christmas, leaving us crammed inside the trailer, the boys playing road race and Nintendo and watching a National Geographic double video of tornadoes, over and over again.
I spent my days out on the porch swing, staring out at the rain, listening to its voices on the metal roof and the runoff thundering down the Tujunga, boulders tumbling, trees washed away whole, knocking into one another like bowling pins. Every color turned to a pale brownish gray.
When there was no color, and I was lonely, I thought of Jesus. Jesus knew my thoughts, knew everything, even if I couldn’t see Him, or really feel Him, He would keep me from falling, from being washed away. Sometimes I read the tarot cards, but they were always the same, the swords, the moon, the hanged man, the burning tower with its toppled crown and people falling. Sometimes when Ray was home, he’d come out with his chess set, and we played and he got high, or we’d go out to the shed where he had his workbench set up and he ’d show me how to make little things, a birdhouse, a picture frame. Sometimes we’d just talk on the porch, listening to the streetfighting sound effect of the boys’ Double Dragons and Zaxxon video games muffled by rain. Ray propped himself against one of the posts, while I lay on the porch glider, swinging it with one foot.
One day, he came out and smoked his pipe awhile, leaning one shoulder on the porch upright, not looking at me. He seemed moody, his face troubled.
“You ever think about your dad?” he asked.
“I never met him,” I said, stirring with my dangling foot slightly to keep the glider moving. “I was two when he left, or she left him, whatever.”
“She tell you about him?”
My father, that silhouette, a form comprised of all I did not know, a shape filled with rain. “Whenever I asked, she’d say, ‘You had no father. I’m your father. You sprang full-blown from my forehead, like Athena.’”
He laughed, but sadly. “Some character.”
“I found my birth certificate once. ‘Father: Anders, Klaus, no middle name. Birthplace: Copenhagen, Denmark. Residing in