White Oleander - Janet Fitch [75]
I took it away from her and sprayed it over my head so the mist fell like light rain. Wash my sins away. Make me a girl who’d never seen the firestorms of September, who’d never been shot, who’d never gone down on a boy behind a bathroom in a park. A nursery-rhyme girl in a blue dress holding a pet lamb in a cottage garden. It was me, after all. I didn’t know quite whether to laugh or to cry, so I poured some more brandy in my glass.
“That’s enough,” she said, taking the bottle away.
The threads of my scars throbbed with alcohol. I knew it wasn’t up to Olivia to love me. She did the best she could, bought me a bit of childhood in a bottle, by appointment to the Queen. “Thanks, Olivia, really,” I said.
“That’s better,” she said.
I WOKE UP the next morning painfully curled on Olivia’s couch. Someone had taken my shoes off, the bottle of pink perfume still clutched in my hands. Either it was hot, or I had a fever, and a headache that beat the sides of my skull like an African drum. I slid my feet into my shoes, not tying the laces, and went looking for Olivia.
She lay on top of her bedspread in her crewel paisley canopy bed, completely passed out, still in her robe, bent legs at right angles like she was running in her dream. The clock past her pillow read eleven. I ran down the hall and hit the door.
I was halfway across Olivia’s garden when Marvel came out of the turquoise house, Caitlin’s Barbie car in her arms. She glanced up. Her mouth opened wide. The only color left on her face was the Autumn Flame of her hair.
If I hadn’t been so hungover, something might have sprung to mind. But we stared at each other and I knew I was caught, knee-deep in rosemary and alyssum, frozen as a deer. Then it was all screaming and confusion. She ran out the gate as I took a few feeble steps back toward Olivia’s. She seized me by my hair and yanked me back. Her head jerked as she smelled my breath.
“Drinking with the whore? Did you sleep with her too?” She smacked me in the face, not caring about my scars, her voice reverberating in my tenderized skull like a shot in a cave. She smacked me as she dragged me back over to the turquoise house, head, arms, anywhere she could get me. “What were you doing over there? Is that where you spent the night? Is it? Is it?” She hit me square on the ear and the Penhaligon perfume leaped from my hands and smashed on the blacktop.
I broke away from her, knelt down, the bottle broken inside its silver cage, perfume already soaking the pavement. I put my hands in the puddle. My childhood, my English garden, that tiny piece of something real.
Marvel gripped my arm, hauled me to my feet, screaming, “You ungrateful thing!”
I grabbed her around her arms and yelled in her face. “I hate you so much, I could kill you!”
“How dare you raise your hand to me!” She was much stronger than I had thought. She broke my hold in a second, smacked my face so hard I saw patterns. She caught me under the armpit and marched me back home, kicking me every few feet. “Get in the house, get in there!”
She opened the door and shoved me inside. I sailed into the wreckage of Christmas Eve, dirty glasses and bowls and gift wrapping. The kids looked up from their new toys, Ed from his football game. I staggered into the knickknack shelf and Marvel’s Little Women plate fell off and smashed.
She screamed and hit me on the side of my head, I saw patterns again. “You did that on purpose!” She shoved me on the floor, I was afraid she was going to grind my face in the broken glass. She kicked me in the ribs. “Pick it up!” The kids were screaming.
“Assi —” Caitlin ran toward me, arms spread. Marvel snatched her away. She bundled them out to the yard while I picked up the pieces, crying. I hadn’t done it on purpose, but I might have if I’d thought of it. She ’d broken my perfume, something real, by appointment to the Queen, made from pounds of English spring flowers, not a copy of a copy of a kid’s book illustration.