White Oleander - Janet Fitch [49]
MY MOTHER sent me her poem “For Astrid, Who Will Live After All.” There were a couple of lines I couldn’t get out of my head:
After all the fears, the warnings
After all
A woman’s mistakes are different from a girl’s
They are written by fire on stone
They are a trait and not an error...
It was worse than I told you so. I didn’t want to believe it. I was still a girl, only fourteen. I could still be saved, couldn’t I? Redeemed. I could live a different life, I would go and sin no more. I scowled when the physical therapist flirted with me, a lean young man, kind, handsome. It took half the day to walk up and down the corridor. They moved me from Demerol to oral Percodan.
IF I HAD had anywhere to go to, I could have been released after two weeks, but as it was, I recuperated on the county dollar until I could walk with a cane and the bandages came off. Then I was given a new placement, sent off with a thirty-day prescription for Percodan and my mother’s letters and books, the wooden box, and a lost boy’s poster of animal turds.
10
THE AIR IN VAN NUYS was thicker than in Sunland-Tujunga. It was a kingdom of strip malls and boulevards a quarter-mile across, neighborhoods of ground-hugging tracts dwarfed by full-growth peppers and sweet gums fifty feet high. It looked hopeful, until I saw a house down the street, and prayed, please Jesus, don’t let it be the turquoise one with the yard paved in blacktop behind the chain-link fence.
The social worker parked in front of it. I stared. It was the color of a tropical lagoon on a postcard thirty years out of date, a Gauguin syphilitic nightmare. It was the gap in the chain of deciduous trees that cradled every other house on the block, defiantly ugly in its nakedness.
The bubble-glass door was also turquoise, and the foster mother was a wide, hard-faced blond woman who held a dumbfounded toddler on her hip. A little boy stuck his tongue out at me from behind his mother. She glanced at my metal hospital cane, narrowed her small eyes. “You didn’t say she was lame.”
The caseworker shrugged her narrow shoulders. I was glad I was high on Percodan, or I might have cried.
Marvel Turlock led us through her living room dominated by a television set the size of Arizona, where a talk show hostess admonished a huge bearded man with a tattoo, and down a long hall to my new room, a made-over laundry porch with navy-and-green-striped curtains and a ripcord spread on the narrow rollaway bed. The little boy tugged at her oversized shirt and whined, like music played on a saw.
Back in the TV room, the caseworker spread her papers on the coffee table, ready to bare the details of my life to this hardfaced woman, who told me to take Justin out to play in the backyard in a voice that was used to telling girls what to do.
The paved backyard was thick with heat and littered with enough toys for a preschool. I saw a cat bury something in the sandbox, run away. I didn’t do anything about it. Justin roared around on his Big Wheel trike, smashing into the playhouse every round or two. I hoped he would decide to make a few mud pies. Mmm.
After a while, the toddler came out, a little blond girl with large, transparent blue eyes. She didn’t know how much I feared the color turquoise, that I wanted to vomit thinking of her mother reading my file. If only I could have stayed in the hospital, with a steady Demerol drip. The baby headed for the sandbox. I wanted not to care, but found myself getting up, scooping out the catshit with a pail, throwing it over the fence.
ED AND MARVEL Turlock were my first real family. We