White Oleander

I didn't know how she could stand to watch this, it was as phony as an ad. I couldn't help thinking of the adopted mother who'd raised the girl, how sick it must make her feel to see her carefully raised daughter in the arms of a stranger, applauded by the talk show audience. But I knew Yvonne was imagining herself coming back into her baby's life twenty years from now, slim, confident, dressed in a blue suit with high heels and perfect hair, her grown child embracing her, forgiving her everything. And what were the chances of that.

 

I sat down next to Yvonne and looked through my mother's letters, opened one.

 

Dear Astrid,

 

Why don't you write ? You cannot possibly hold me responsible for Claire Richards's suicide. That woman was born to overdose. I told you the first time I saw her. Believe me, she's better off now.

 

On the other hand, I am writing from Ad Seg, prison within a prison. This is what is left of my world, an 8x8 cell shared with Lunaria Irolo, a woman as mad as her name.

 

During the day, the crows caw, dissonant and querulous, a perfect imitation of the damned. Of course, nothing that sings would alight near this place. No, we are left quite alone with our unholy crows and the long-distance cries of the gulls.

 

The buzz and slam of the gates reverberate in this great hollow chamber, roll across poured cement floors to where we crouch behind a chain-link fence, behind the slitted doors, plotting murder, plotting revenge. I am behind the fence, they say. They handcuff us even to shower. Well they should.

 

I liked that idea, my mother behind the fence, handcuffed. She couldn't hurt me from there.

 

From the slitted window in the door, I can see the COs at their desks in the middle of the unit. Our janitors of penitence, eating doughnuts. Keys glitter important at their waists. It's the keys I watch. I am hypnotised by keys, thick fistfuls of them, I can taste their acid galvanisation, more precious than wisdom.

 

Yesterday, Sgt. Brown decided my half hour in the shower counts as part of the hour I'm permitted out of my cell each day. I remember when I had hoped he would be a reasonable man, black, slender, well-spoken. But I should have known. His deep voice seems not to issue from his meager frame, it's as artificial as a preacher's, steeped in an overblown sense of his own importance, the Cerberus of our concrete Inferno.