White Oleander

Ray. I tried not to think of him, what had made him run when I lay bleeding on my bedroom floor, shot by his lover. I knew why he wasn't there when the ambulance came. It was how I felt when I thought of Davey, that I had ruined his life for him. Ray couldn't face it. He hadn't wanted us to happen in the first place, I was the one who created it, out of nothing but my own desire. It was like Ray knew it was going to happen from the very first time we touched. Every time he looked at me his eyes pleaded with me to leave him alone. I wished I could see him, just once, and tell him I didn't blame him.

 

Sometimes I woke up and I was sure he would come, disguised, that we would be together again. There would be a glimpse of a strange intern, an unfamiliar orderly, a visitor searching for the right bed in the children's ward, and I was sure it would be him. I didn't blame any of them. I should have known what could happen. After my mother and Barry, how could I not have known.

 

The only innocent one was Davey. At first I wondered why Starr had left him behind. Probably thought she could make an easier getaway. Maybe she was so freaked out she completely forgot him. But now I knew it was Davey. That he had refused to go and leave me to bleed to death on the bedroom floor. He had refused to go. He had given up his mother to keep me alive for the ambulance. Knowing Davey, that was it. And I was deluged by fresh waves of shame and regret. He never knew when he met me that first day, when the little boys sat on the porch, that I would be the one to ruin his life the way Starr crushed his model in the living room. I stepped on it running to meet Ray.

 

MY MOTHER SENT me her poem "For Astrid, Who Will Live After All." There were a couple of lines I couldn't get out of my head:

 

After all the fears, the warnings

After all

A woman's mistakes are different from a girl's

They are written by fire on stone

They are a trait and not an error ...

 

It was worse than I told you so. I didn't want to believe it. I was still a girl, only fourteen. I could still be saved, couldn't I? Redeemed. I could live a different life, I would go and sin no more. I scowled when the physical therapist flirted with me, a lean young man, kind, handsome. It took half the day to walk up and down the corridor. They moved me from Demerol to oral Percodan.

 

IF I HAD had anywhere to go to, I could have been released after two weeks, but as it was, I recuperated on the county dollar until I could walk with a cane and the bandages came off. Then I was given a new placement, sent off with a thirty-day prescription for Percodan and my mother's letters and books, the wooden box, and a lost boy's poster of animal turds.

 

10

 

THE AIR IN VAN NUYS was thicker than in Sunland-Tujunga. It was a kingdom of strip malls and boulevards a quarter-mile across, neighborhoods of ground-hugging tracts dwarfed by full-growth peppers and sweet gums fifty feet high. It looked hopeful, until I saw a house down the street, and prayed, please Jesus, don't let it be the turquoise one with the yard paved in blacktop behind the chain-link fence.

 

The social worker parked in front of it. I stared. It was the color of a tropical lagoon on a postcard thirty years out of date, a Gauguin syphilitic nightmare. It was the gap in the chain of deciduous trees that cradled every other house on the block, defiantly ugly in its nakedness.

 

The bubble-glass door was also turquoise, and the foster mother was a wide, hard-faced blond woman who held a dumbfounded toddler on her hip. A little boy stuck his tongue out at me from behind his mother. She glanced at my metal hospital cane, narrowed her small eyes. "You didn't say she was lame."

 

The caseworker shrugged her narrow shoulders. I was glad I was high on Percodan, or I might have cried.

 

Marvel Turlock led us through her living room dominated by a television set the size of Arizona, where a talk show hostess admonished a huge bearded man with a tattoo, and down a long hall to my new room, a made-over laundry porch with navy-and-green-striped curtains and a ripcord spread on the narrow roll-away bed. The little boy tugged at her oversized shirt and whined, like music played on a saw.

 

Back in the TV room, the caseworker spread her papers on the coffee table, ready to bare the details of my life to this hard-faced woman, who told me to take Justin out to play in the backyard in a voice that was used to telling girls what to do.

 

The paved backyard was thick with heat and littered with enough toys for a preschool. I saw a cat bury something in the sandbox, run away. I didn't do anything about it. Justin roared around on his Big Wheel trike, smashing into the playhouse every round or two. I hoped he would decide to make a few mud pies. Mmm.