White Oleander

"Doesn't matter," the lawyer said, taking her seat again. "The point is, you've been avoiding my calls." To my surprise, she pulled a pack of cigarettes from her Hermes Kelly bag, which I recognized from my Olivia days to be strictly genuine. "Mind if I smoke?"

 

I shook my head. She lit up with a gold lighter. Carrier — the gold pleats. "Cigarette?" she offered. I shook my head. She put the pack and the lighter down on the cluttered table, exhaled into the afternoon light. "I don't know why I never got around to quitting," she said.

 

"All the prisoners smoke," I said. "You can offer them a cigarette."

 

She nodded. "Your mother said you were bright. I think it was an underestimation." She looked around the crowded living room, the bentwood hatrack and the hi-fi and the records, the beaded lamp and the fringed lamp and the poodle lamp with the milk glass shade, the peasant woman with the orange scarf, and the rest of the artifacts in Rena's thrift shop. A white cat jumped into her lap and she quickly stood up, brushed off her navy suit. "Nice place you got here," she said, and sat back down, glancing for the location of the hairy interloper. "Looking forward to graduation? Making your plans for the future?"

 

I let my bookbag drop onto the dusty upholstered armchair, sending a cloud of motes up into the stuffy air. "Thought I might become a criminal lawyer," I said. "That or a hooker. Maybe a garbage collector."

 

She made no parry, kept her mind on her purpose. "May I ask why you haven't returned my calls?"

 

I leaned against the wall, watching her quick, confident movements. "Go ahead and ask," I said.

 

She put her slim red leather briefcase on her lap and opened it, removed a folder and a yellow legal pad. "Your mother said you might be difficult," she said. "That you blame her for what's happened." Susan gazed into my eyes, as if she got a point for every second of eye contact she could maintain. I could see her practicing in front of a mirror when she was in law school. I waited to hear the rest of the story they'd concocted. "I know you've been through a terrible ordeal," she said. She looked down at the file. "Six foster homes, MacLaren Hall. The suicide of your foster mother, Claire Richards, was it? Your mother said you were close to her. It must have been devastating."

 

I felt the wave of anger rise through me. Claire's death was mine. She had no right to handle it, to bring it up and somehow relate it to my mother's case. But maybe this too was a tactic. To get it all out in the open to begin with, so I wouldn't be sullen, withholding my feelings about Claire, difficult to draw out. An aggressive opening at chess. I saw that she knew just what she was doing. Going for the sore spot right away. "Did you ask your client about her involvement with that?"

 

"Surely you don't blame your mother for the death of a woman she only met once," Susan said, as if there was no question about the absurdity of such a statement. "She's not a sorcerer, is she?" She settled back on the couch, took a drag on her cigarette, watching me through the smoke, evaluating my reaction.

 

Now I was scared. The two of them could really pull this off. I saw how easily this bouquet of oleander and nightshade could be twisted around into a laurel wreath. "But I do blame her, Susan."

 

"Tell me," she said, holding the cigarette in the left hand, making some notes on the yellow pad with the right.

 

"My mother did everything she could do to get Claire out of my life," I said. "Claire was fragile and my mother knew exactly where to push."

 

Susan took a drag, squinted against the smoke. "And why would she do that?"

 

I pushed away from the wall and went over to the hatrack. I didn't want to look at her anymore, or rather, have her looking at me, sizing me up. I put on an old hat and watched her in the mirror. "Because Claire loved me." It was a straw hat with a net veil, I pulled the veil over my eyes.

 

"You felt she was jealous," Susan said in a motherly way, spewing smoke into the air, an octopus spraying ink.

 

I adjusted the veil, then tilted the brim of the hat. "She was extremely jealous. Claire was nice to me, and I loved her. She couldn't stand that. Not that she ever paid attention to me when she had the chance, but when someone else did, she couldn't take it."

 

Susan leaned forward, elbows on knees, eyes lifted to the rough, cottage-cheese ceiling, and I could hear her brain clicking, a mechanical readjustment, tapping and turning what I had just told her, searching for the advantage. "But what mother wouldn't be jealous," she said. "Of a daughter growing fond of a foster mother. Honestly speaking." She flicked her ash into the beanbag ashtray, shaping the cherry on the bottom.