White Oleander

I looked at the little woman, her black curls maybe one shade too black, her eyes a little mascara-smudged from the heat. The weariness was an act, but also the truth. Like so many things, the words hopelessly imprecise. I wished I had something to draw her with. She was in the process of becoming a caricature of herself. Not yet, now she was merely recognizable. But in five years, ten, she would only look like herself at a distance. Up close she would be drawn and frightened. "Honestly, aren't you just trying to punish her for being a crappy parent, and not for the alleged murder?" She cracked her window with the electric button, snapped in the car's lighter, and reached into her bag for her cigarettes. "What was Barry Kolker to you anyway, some boyfriend of your mother's. She had a number of boyfriends. You couldn't have been that attached."

 

"He's dead," I said. "You're accusing me of being cynical?"

 

She put a cigarette in her mouth and the lighter popped out. She lit it, filling the car with smoke. She exhaled up toward the slit in the window. "No, it's not Kolker. You're angry with her for abandoning you. Naturally. You've led six difficult years, and like a child, you point to the almighty mother. It's her fault. The idea that she too is a victim would never occur to you."

 

Out the window, in the unairconditioned part of reality, a very red-faced jogger trotted by us, dragging a tired setter on a leash. "Is that what you'll say if I tell the truth at her trial?"

 

We watched her plodding down the sidewalk, the dog trying to sniff at the plants as they went by. "Something like that," she said, the first honest thing I'd heard her say since I'd shaken her small hand. She sighed and flicked ash out the window. Some blew back in. She brushed it off her suit. "Astrid. She may not have been some TV mom, Barbara Billingsley with her apron and pearls, but she loves you. More than you can imagine. Right now she really needs your faith in her. You should hear her, talking about you, how she worries about you, how much she wants to be with you again."

 

I thought again about my imaginary trip with her, the sight of her, the magic of her speech. Now I was not so sure, maybe it was true. I wanted to ask this woman what my mother said about me. I wanted to hear her tell me what my mother thought about me, but I didn't dare leave her that opening. Bobby Fischer had taught me better than that. "She'd say anything to get out."

 

"Talk to her. I can set it up. Just listen to what she has to say, Astrid," Susan urged. "Six years is a long time. People do change."

 

My moment's uncertainty faded. I knew exactly how far Ingrid Magnussen had changed. I had her letters. I'd read them, page by page, swimming across the red tide. I knew all about her tenderness and motherly concern. Me and the white cat. But now there was something that had changed. What had changed was that for the first time in my life, my mother needed something from me, something I had the power to give or withhold, and not the other way around. I opened up the airflow vent and let the air-conditioning kiss my face.

 

My mother needed me. It sank in, what that meant, how incredible it was. If I went on the stand and said she did it, told about our trip to Tijuana, about the pounds of oleander and jimson weed and belladonna she'd boiled down in the kitchen, she'd never get out. And if I lied, said Barry was superparanoid, he'd developed a complex about her, he was crazy, about how she'd been so drugged when I saw her at Sybil Brand she hadn't even recognized me, she might win an appeal, get a new trial, she could be out walking around before I was twenty-one.

 

Reverend Thomas would not have approved of the emotion that filled me now, its sweetness was irresistible. I had her own knife to her throat. I could ask for something, I could make demands. What's in it for me, that's what I'd learned to ask, un-apologetically, in my time with Rena. What's my cut. I could put a price tag on my soul. Now I just had to figure out what I could sell it for.

 

"Okay," I said. "Set it up."

 

Susan took a last drag of her cigarette, threw it out the window, then raised the glass. Now she was all business. "Anything you want in the meantime, some spending money? "

 

I hated this woman. What I had been through the last six years meant nothing to her. I was simply one more brick in the structure she was erecting, I had just slipped into place. She didn't believe my mother was innocent. She only cared that there would be cameras on the courthouse steps. And her name, Susan D. Valeris, under her moving red lips. The publicity would be worth plenty.

 

"I'll take a couple hundred," I said.