White Oleander

But he was never shy with you, was he? You had such long conversations — conspiring, head to head. I felt excluded. He was the one who taught you to draw. He would draw for you, and then you would draw after him. La mesa, la botilla, las mujeres. I tried to teach you poetry, but you were always so obstinate. Why would you never learn any thing from me?

 

I wish we'd never left Guanajuato.

 

Mother.

 

Alejandro the painter. Watching the line flow from his fingers, the movements of his arm. Was he a bad painter? It never occurred to me, as it never occurred to me that she could have felt excluded. She was beautiful there, she wore a white dress, and the buildings were ochre and yellow, her sandals crisscrossed like a Roman's up her leg. I traced the white X's when she took them off. The hotel with screens and scrollwork around the door, the rooms open to the tiled walkway. You could hear what everybody was saying. When she smoked a joint she had to blow it out the balcony doors. It was a strange room, ochre, taller than it was square. She liked it, said there was room to think. And the bands of mariachis competed in the street below, the sound of concerts every night, from our beds under the netting.

 

"So?" Rena said. "Is she getting out?"

 

"No," I said.

 

Driving up from San Miguel de Allende in his toy-sized Citroen car, his shirt very white against his copper skin. Was she admitting she made a mistake? If only she could admit it. Confess. I might lie for her then, talk to her lawyer, take the stand and swear beyond a shadow of a doubt that she never. Perhaps this was as close as she would get to admitting a thing. I wished we had stayed in Guanajuato too.

 

THEN NIKI moved out. She was joining a Toronto band, it was one of Werner's. "Come with me," she said as she loaded her pickup. I handed her a suitcase, zebra-striped. We both smiled, checked each other for tears. She left me some addresses and phone numbers, but I knew I wouldn't be using them. I had to face this, that people left and you didn't see them again.

 

Within a week, Rena moved two new girls into Niki's room, Shana and Raquel, twelve and fourteen. Shana had epilepsy, and Raquel couldn't read, it was her second time in seventh grade. More broken children for Rena Grushenka's discount salvage yard.

 

SEPTEMBER came with its skirts of fire. Fire up on the Angeles Crest. Fire in Malibu, Altadena. Fire all along the San Gabriels, in the San Gorgonio wilderness, fire was a flaming hoop the city would have to jump through to reach the blues of October. In Frogtown, we had three shootings in one week — a holdup at the ARCO station, a lost motorist caught on a dead-end street in a Van Gogh midnight, a woman shot by her out-of-work electrician husband during a domestic dispute.

 

It was in the furnace of oleander time that Susan finally called. "I had a trial," she explained. "But we're back on track. I've scheduled you a visit, day after tomorrow."

 

I was tempted to balk, tell her I wasn't available, make things difficult, but in the end I agreed. I was as ready as I would ever be.

 

So on a morning already surrendered to the scourging wind and punishing heat, Camille Barren, Susan's assistant, came for me, and we took the long drive out to Corona. In the visitors yard, we sat at an orange picnic table under the shade structure, drinking cold cans of soda from the pop machine, wiping them across our foreheads, pressing them to our cheeks. Waiting for my mother. Sweat dripped between my breasts, down my back. Camille looked wilted but stoic in her beige sheath, her fashionable short haircut limp and sweaty around the edges. She didn't bother to talk to me, she was only the errand girl. "Here she comes," Camille said.