White Oleander - Janet Fitch [48]
LETTERS CAME from my mother. A girl my age, a hospital volunteer, with fluffy brown hair and pale green eye shadow, tried to read them to me, but it was way too surreal, my mother’s words in her high ignorant voice, I made her stop.
Dear Astrid,
They say they don’t know if you will last until morning. I pace the cell’s three steps, back and forth, all night. A chaplain just came by, I told him I’d rip out his liver if he bothered me again. I love you so much, Astrid. I can’t bear it. There is no one else in the world but you and me, don’t you know that? Please don’t leave me alone here. By all the powers of light and darkness, please, please don’t leave.
I read that paragraph over and over again, savoring each word, the way Starr would read her Bible. I drifted off to sleep hearing it in my head. You were my home, Mother. I had no home but you.
Freude! Beethoven’s ninth, Ode to Joy, the Solti version, Chicago Symphony. To think that I almost lost you! I live for you, the thought that you’re alive gives me the strength to go on. I wish I could hold you now, I want to touch you, hold you, feel your heartbeat. I’m writing a poem for you, I’m calling it “For Astrid, Who Will Live After All.”
News travels fast in prison, and women I’ve never spoken to inquire after your condition. I feel akin to each one of them. I could kneel down and kiss the stale earth in gratitude. I will try for a compassionate visit, but I have no illusions about the extent of compassion here.
What can I say about life? Do I praise it for letting you live or damn it for allowing the rest? Have you heard of the Stockholm syndrome? Hostages begin taking the side of their captors, in their gratitude not to have been killed outright. Let us not thank some hypothetical God. Instead, rest and gain strength for the new campaign. Though I know, it’s candy stripers and Highlights, maybe a morphine drip if you’re a good girl.
Be strong.
Mother.
And she never once said I told you so.
A MAGICIAN CAME to entertain us, and I was mesmerized by his beautiful hands, his fluid, round gestures. I couldn’t stop watching his hands. They were better than any of his tricks. He pulled a bouquet of paper flowers out of the air and gave them to me with a courtly bow, and I thought love was like that, pulled out of the air, something bright and unlikely. Like Ray, molding me in his fingers like soft wax.
Ray. I tried not to think of him, what had made him run when I lay bleeding on my bedroom floor, shot by his lover. I knew why he wasn’t there when the ambulance came. It was how I felt when I thought of Davey, that I had ruined his life for him. Ray couldn’t face it. He hadn’t wanted us to happen in the first place, I was the one who created it, out of nothing but my own desire. It was like Ray knew it was going to happen from the very first time we touched. Every time he looked at me his eyes pleaded with me to leave him alone. I wished I could see him, just once, and tell him I didn’t blame him.
Sometimes I woke up and I was sure he would come, disguised, that we would be together again. There would be a glimpse of a strange intern, an unfamiliar orderly, a visitor searching for the right bed in the children’s ward, and I was sure it would be him. I didn’t blame any of them. I should have known what could happen. After my mother and Barry, how could I not have known.
The only innocent one was Davey. At first I wondered why Starr had left him behind. Probably thought she could make an easier getaway. Maybe she was so freaked out she completely forgot him. But now I knew it was Davey.