White Oleander

She reached out her hand, as if to touch my face, like a blind woman, but she couldn't reach me. I would burn her if she touched me. The hand stayed in the air, hovering in front of my face. I saw, she was afraid. "You were the one thing that was entirely good in my life, Astrid. Since I came back for you, we 've never been apart, not until this."

 

"The murder, you mean."

 

"No, this. You, now." The gesture, the attempt to reach me, faded like sunset. "You know, when I came back, you knew me. You were sitting there by the door when I came in. You looked up, and you smiled and reached for me to pick you up. As if you were waiting for me."

 

I wanted to cut through this moment with the blue flame of an acetylene torch. I wanted to burn it to ash and scatter it into the wind, so the pieces would never come back together again. "I was always waiting for you, Mother. It's the constant in my life. Waiting for you. Will you come back, will you forget that you've tied me up in front of a store, left me on the bus?"

 

The hand came out again. Tentatively, but this time it lightly touched my hair. "Are you still?"

 

"No," I said, brushing her hand away. "I stopped when Claire showed me what it felt like to be loved."

 

Now she looked tired, every day of forty-nine years. She picked up her shoes. "Is there anything else you want? Have I fulfilled my end of the bargain?"

 

"Do you ever regret what you've done?"

 

The expression in her eyes was bitter as nightshade. "You ask me about regret? Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately, as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself? I've given more thought to this question than you can begin to imagine."

 

I never thought I'd hear the day my mother, Ingrid Magnussen, would admit to regret. Now that she stood in front of me, shaking with it, I couldn't think of anything to say. It was like watching a river run backwards.

 

We stood there staring out at the empty road.

 

"What are you going to do when you get out?" I asked her. "Where are you going to go?"

 

She wiped the sweat off her face with the collar of her dress. Secretaries and office workers and COs were coming out of the brick administration building. They leaned into the hot wind, holding their skirts down, heading for lunch, a nice air-conditioned Coco's or Denny's. When they saw me with my mother, they drew closer together, talking among themselves. She was already a celebrity, I could see it. We watched them start up their cars. I knew she imagined herself with those keys in her hand, accelerator, gas tank marked Full.

 

She sighed. "By the time Susan is done, I'll be a household icon, like Aunt Jemima, the Pillsbury Doughboy. I'll have my choice of teaching positions. Where would you like to go, Astrid?" She glanced at me, smiled, my carrot. Reminding me which end of the plank and so on.

 

"That's years away," I said.

 

"You can't make it alone," she said. "You need an environment, a context. People invested in your success. God knows, look at me. I had to go to prison to get noticed."

 

The cars started up, crunched over the gravel. Camille came out of the shelter, pointed at her watch. It was over. I felt empty and used. Whatever I thought knowing the truth would do for me, it hadn't. It was my last hope. I wanted her to hurt the way I did. I wanted it very much.

 

"So, how does it feel, knowing I don't give a damn anymore?" I said. "That I'll do anything to get what I want. Even lie for you, I won't blink an eye. I'm like you now, aren't I? I look at the world and ask what's in it for me."

 

She shook her head, gazed down at her bare tanned feet. "If I could take it all back, I would, Astrid." She lifted her eyes to mine. "You've got to believe me." Her eyes, glinting in the sun, were exactly the color of the pool we swam in together the summer she was arrested. I wanted to swim there again, to submerge myself in them.

 

"Then tell me you don't want me to testify," I said. "Tell me you don't want me like this. Tell me you would sacrifice the rest of your life to have me back the way I was."

 

She turned her blue gaze toward the road, that road, the beautiful road, the road women in prison dreamed about. The road she had already left me for once. Her hair like smoke in the wind. Overhead, the foliage blew back and forth like a fighter working a small bag in air that smelled of brushfire and dairy cattle. She pressed her hands over her eyes, then slid them down her face to her mouth. I watched her staring out at the road. She seemed lost there, sealed in longing, searching for an exit, a hidden door.