White Oleander

I carried all of them, sculpted by every hand I'd passed through, carelessly, or lovingly, it didn't matter. Amelia Ramos, that skunk-streaked bitch, taught me to stand up for myself, beat on the bars until I got what I needed. Starr tried to kill me, but also bought me my first high heels, made me entertain the possibility of God. Who would I give up now?

 

And in a blue suitcase with a white handle, the first and last room of the Astridkunsthalle. Lined in white raw silk, edges stained red, scented with violet perfume.

 

I sat on the floor in the gathering dusk of a gray afternoon on the threadbare carpet splotched in paint by generations of art students. This was my mother's time, dusk, though in Berlin winter it was dark by four, no timeless western twilights, surf on yellow sand. I opened the lid.

 

The scent of her violets always made me feel sad. The vial of tinted water was the exact color of the pool on Hollywood Boulevard. I sat in front of my mother's altar and built a set of drawings on clear plastic, watched the disjointed lines come together, until they formed the image of her in profile. Letters tied in barbed wire nestled in the suitcase bottom along with a spread of tarot cards, the queen of wands prominently featured. A row of glass fragments hung from the lid, I ran my fingers along them so they chimed, and imagined wind through the eucalyptus on a hot summer night.

 

We wrote a couple of times a month, using the comic book shop near the university as a letter-drop. Sometimes she had her lawyer send me a little money via Hana Gruen in Cologne, from her poems or more likely scammed off a fan. I told her I didn't want to know about her preparations for trial, but her letters boasted of offers lined up — Amherst, Stanford, Smith. Dangling the carrot of green college campuses. I imagined myself a professor's daughter, riding a bike to my classes. I could wear a camel's hair coat at last, have a roommate, play intramural volleyball, all paid for in advance. How safe it would be, contained, everything decided for me. I could be a child again, I could start over. Sure I wouldn't want to come home?

 

I reached out and touched a tine of the barbed wire, rang the chimes. The beauty and the madness, wasn't it. What was being weighed on the scales of the night.

 

LATER, I LAY under the feather bed, fully clothed, not for sleep but just to stay warm. The space heater buzzed and threw out the familiar smell of burned hair. The windowpanes were frosted over, and I could see my breath in the room. I was listening to a tape, a band called Magenta, our friends thought it was far out we knew the singer, Niki Colette. They were playing in Frankfurt next month, we already had tickets, a place to crash. I still heard from Yvonne at Christmastime, she was living in Huntington Beach with an ex-Marine named Herbert, with whom she had a son, Herbert, Jr.

 

I was waiting for Paul to come home, I was hungry. He was supposed to pick up some food after his appointment with a printer for his next graphic book. He was trying to get someone to print it cheap and take a piece of the sales. His last German publisher had OD'd in the fall, leaving us back at square one. But he had presold two hundred copies, not bad at all.

 

He came home about nine, took off his boots and climbed under the covers. He had a greasy paper bag of kebabs from the local Turkish fast food. My stomach growled. Paul threw a newspaper on top of me. "Guess who?" he said.

 

It was tomorrow's International Herald Tribune, still smelling of wet ink. I looked at the front page. Croatia, OPEC, bomb threat at La Scala. I opened it and there she was on page three: JAILED POET FOUND INNOCENT AFTER NINE YEARS. Smiling her half-smile, waving like royalty returning from exile, happy but still mistrusting the masses. She had made it through trial without me. She was free.

 

Paul ate his kebab sandwich, dropping pieces of salad back onto the bag as I quickly read the story, more shocked than I'd thought I would be. They'd taken the defense that Barry had committed suicide and made it look like murder. I was appalled that it worked. My mother was quoted saying how grateful she was that justice had been done, she looked forward to taking a bath, she thanked the jurors from the bottom of her heart. She said she 'd received offers to teach, to publish her autobiography, to marry an ice-cream millionaire and pose for Playboy, and she was going to accept them all.

 

Paul offered me a falafel, I shook my head. Suddenly, I wasn't hungry anymore. "Save it for later," he said, and dropped the bag by the side of the bed. His rich brown eyes asked every question. He didn't have to say a word.