White Oleander - Janet Fitch [47]
WHENEVER I WOKE, there was Demerol. Doctors in masks, nurses with soft hands. Flowers. Their smiles like nectar. There were IVs and other children, dressings and Tom and Jerry on the TV, balloons and strangers. Just tell us, just tell. Schutzstaffel. Plainclothes. How could I begin to describe Starr, with her nightgown all twisted around, unloading a .38 into my room. I preferred to think about Mexico. In Mexico the faces were weathered and soft as soap. These buzzing noises in my room were only the mosquitoes in our bungalow on the Island of Women.
ON A FULL MOON NIGHT, something moved her, and we left with only our passports and money in a belt under her dress. I threw up on the ferry. We slept on a new beach, far to the south.
The next day, she danced with a young man, Eduardo, on the rooftop, it was his hotel, all the windows were open and I could see the reef, the sea like a lens. The top floor wasn’t done yet, there were hammocks under a palm roof, and we could stay as long as we liked. We were happy in Playa del Carmen, driving with Eduardo around town in his black Volare, feeling very rich, ¡qué rico!, though the town only had two paved roads and a Michoacán ice-cream stand. Painted pictures of snowcapped volcanoes. The tourist boat stopped at Playa del Carmen twice a week, bobbing five stories high like an offshore wedding cake. My mother read tarot cards in the café perfumed with the fat smoke of grilled pollo and carnitas. I watched the man shave the stacks of meat onto tortillas with a machete. We ate well there.
At night Eduardo played guitar and sang gypsy songs with the guests at his hotel, as I rocked in my hammock like a bat folded into leathery wings. At night the air was full of bats. The fruit, my mother said, mangos and plátanos and papayas. Fairy circles of ringworm came out all over my body. A doctor in a block concrete clinic gave me medicine. Can’t we ever go home? I asked my mother. We have no home, she told me. I am your home.
How beautiful she was barefoot in a bathing suit and a tablecloth wrapped around her hips. My mother loved me. Even now, I could feel myself rocking in that hammock while Eduardo and my mother danced. You were my home.
But the weather turned and Eduardo closed the hotel for the season, went back to Mexico City, where his parents lived. He said we could stay on if we liked. It was sad and scary. We closed the shutters and the wind began to blow, the gentle sea rose and ate the beach, running into the grape hyacinth. There were no tourists now. We ate from cans, frijoles refritos, evaporated milk. Cats poured into the hotel, skinny, feral, or just abandoned for the season. My mother let them all in and the sky was a yellow-tinged bruise.
The rain when it came arrived sideways, bleeding in through the shutters and under the doors. The cats hid in the shadows. Occasionally we felt the brush of their bodies or tails as we sat at the table, my mother writing by the light of a kerosene lantern. The cats were hungry but my mother ignored their mewing as we ate.
In the end, my mother locked up the hotel and some students took us to Progreso on the Gulf. The boat from Texas stank of fish. The captain gave me a pill, and I woke up on somebody’s couch in Galveston.
“WE GOT HER,” said the plainclothesman in his white socks. “We caught her trying to see the kid. Says she was visiting her sister. You know damn well she shot you. Why make up a story about burglars? She’s not even your mother.”
If I were Starr, maybe I