White Oleander

21

CLAIRE WAS still sleeping when I woke up. I got up, careful not to disturb her, and went out to the kitchen. I poured myself some cereal. It was very bright, quiet, a pure crystalline light. I was glad Ron was gone. If he were here, there would have been phone calls, the whine of the coffee grinder, Claire might be up making breakfast with her smile painted on. I decided to stay in my silk pajamas a while longer. I got my new paints out and painted the way the light looked on the bare wood floor, the yellow tray of sunlight, the way it climbed the curtains. I loved when it was like this. I recalled days just like this when I was young, playing in a patch of sunlight when my mother slept in. A laundry basket over my head, squares of light. I remembered exactly how the sun looked and felt on the back of my hand.

After a while, I checked on Claire. She was still asleep. The room was dark gray, no morning light penetrated the west-facing French doors covered with blinds. It smelled stale. She had one hand flung across the top of the pillow. Her mouth was open, but she wasn’t snoring now.

“Claire?” I put my face right in hers. She smelled of sherry and something metallic. She didn’t move. I put my hand on her shoulder, shook her gently. “Claire?” She didn’t do anything. The hair stood up on my neck and arms. I couldn’t hear her breathing. “Claire?” I shook her again, but her head flopped like Owen’s giraffe’s. “Claire, wake up.” I lifted her by her shoulders and dropped her. “Claire!” I yelled at her, hoping she would open her eyes, that she would put her hand to her head and tell me not to shout, I was giving her a headache. It was impossible. She was playing a trick, pretending. “Claire!” I screamed into her sleeping face, pumping my hands on her chest, listening for her breath. Nothing.

I searched the bedside table, the floor. On the far side, I found the pills on the floor, along with the empty sherry bottle. It was what I’d heard falling when we were talking through the door. The pill bottle was open, the pills spilled out, small pink tablets. Butalan, the label said. For Insomnia. Do Not Take With Alcohol. Do Not Operate Machinery.

The sounds I was making were no longer even screams. I wanted to throw something into the fat ugly eye of God. I threw the Kleenex box. The brass bell. I knocked the bedside light off the nightstand. I pulled the magnet box from under the bed and threw it across the room. Ron’s keys and pens and clippers fell out, the Polaroids. For what? I ripped the blinds off the French doors, and the room blinked bright. I took a high-heeled shoe from the foot of the bed and smashed through the windowpanes with it, cut my hand, couldn’t feel it. I took her silver-backed hairbrush and threw it overhand like a baseball into the round mirror. I took the phone and beat the receiver against the headboard until it came apart in my hands, leaving dents in the soft pine.

I was exhausted and couldn’t find anything more to throw. I sat back down on the bed and took her hand. It was so cold. I put it against my hot wet cheek, trying to warm it up, I smoothed her dark hair away from her face.

If only I had known, Claire. My beautiful fucked-up Claire. I lay my head on her chest where there was no heartbeat. My face next to hers on the flowered pillow, breathing in her breath that was no longer breath. She was so pale. Cold. I held her cold hands, slightly chapped, the wedding ring that was too big. Turned them over, kissed the cold palms, my hot lips on the lines. How she used to worry about those lines. One ran from the edge of the hand and crossed the line of life. Fatal accident, she said it meant. I rubbed the line with my thumb, slick with tears.

Fatal accident. That thought was almost unbearable, but possible. Maybe she hadn’t meant to do it. Claire wouldn’t have planned it like this. She hadn’t even washed her hair. She would have prepared, everything would have been perfect. She would have written a note, explaining everything two or five ways. Maybe all she wanted was to sleep.

I laughed, bitter as nightshade. Maybe it was just an accident. What wasn’t an accident. Who wasn’t.

I picked up the squarish white bottle still half full of pills. Butabarbitol sodium, 100 mg. It practically glowed in my hands. The worst always happened. Why did I keep forgetting that? Now I saw this was not just a bottle, it was a door. You climbed through the round neck of the bottle and came out somewhere else entirely. You could escape. Cash in your chips.

I looked deep into the jar of pink pills. I knew how to do this. You took them slowly. Not like in the movies, where they took them by the handful. You’d just puke them up. The trick was to take one, wait a few minutes, take the next. Have some sherry. One by one. In a couple of hours, you passed out, and it was done.

The house was still. I heard the tick of the clock on the bedside table. A car drove past in the street. Fresh air came through the broken windows. She lay with her mouth open on the flowered pillow in her red bathrobe in the brightness of the morning. I rubbed my cheek against the wool of her robe, the robe Ron got her, she hadn’t taken it off for days. God, I hated that bathrobe, its cheery red plaid. It was always too bright. He never really knew her.

I put the lid back on the pills and dropped them on the bed. I had to get rid of that robe before anything. It was the least I could do. I pulled down the covers. The robe was all twisted around, bunched up in the back. I opened the belt and pulled her out of it, how thin she was, how light, her ribs were individually displayed. I laid her back down, careful, careful, I could hardly look at her. Like Christ in her shell-pink underwear. In her dresser I found a soft mauve angora sweater. This was more Claire, the soft color, the plush wool. I put my face into it, hungry for softness, let it soak up my tears. I sat her up. It was hard, I had to lean her against me, overwhelmed by the scent of perfume and her hair. I could hardly breathe, but somehow I pulled the sweater over her head, somehow threaded her arms through, pulled the softness down over her bony shoulder blades. I sat and hugged her, pressing my face to her neck.

I arranged her on the pillow like a princess in a fairy tale, in a glass coffin, a kiss should awaken her. But it didn’t work. I closed her mouth, smoothed the sheets and blankets, found the silver brush in the debris and brushed her hair. I found it comforting, I had done this for her when she was alive. She never even said good-bye. The day my mother left, she didn’t look back either.

I knew I should call Ron. But I didn’t want to share her with him. I wanted her all to myself for just a little while more. When Ron arrived, I would lose Claire for the last time. He didn’t know her, he could bloody well wait.

I couldn’t get it out of my head, I was right there when she died. If only I’d woken up. If only I’d imagined what could happen. My mother always told me I had no imagination. Claire called me and I didn’t go to her. Wouldn’t even open my door. I had told her the worst thing was to lose your self-respect. How could I have told her such a thing? Christ, that wasn’t the worst thing, not by a long shot.

Outside in the garden, the grass was uncut but very green in the clear winter sun. The Chinese elm wept like a willow. The bulbs were done, but the roses bloomed furiously, the red hallucinatory glow of Mr. Lincoln, the pale blush of Pristine. The ground underneath was pooled with red and white petals. In here, the room was steeped in L’Air du Temps from the bottle I’d shattered. I picked up the top, the frosted birds. Now they looked like something to decorate a headstone.

In a drawer, I found the book of pressed flowers she made from the gleanings of our walks on the McKenzie that summer. How happy she’d been in her Chinese hat, tied under the chin, canvas bag full of discoveries. Here they were, labeled in her round feminine hand, pressed on pages tied together with taupe grosgrain ribbon, Lady’s Slipper, Dogwood, Wild Rose, Rhododendron with their threadlike stamens.

What do you want, Astrid? What do you think? No one would ever ask me that again. I stroked her hair, her dark eyebrows, her eyelids, the delicate formation of cheekbone and eye socket and temple and brow, the sharpness of chin like a drop of water upside down. If only I’d gone to her right away. If only I hadn’t made her wait. I should never have left her alone with our disgust, Ron’s and mine. It was the one thing she couldn’t stand, to be left alone.

At ten o’clock, the mail came. At eleven, Mrs. Kromach practiced her electric organ next door, her parrot squawking along. I knew her entire repertoire. “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” She liked state songs: “Gary, Indiana.” “Iowa Stubborn.” “California, Here I Come.” “Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City.” She made the same mistakes every time. “She’s doing it to drive us crazy,” Claire would say. “She knows how to play those songs.” She’d never have to hear it anymore

At noon, a leaf blower droned in the air. At one, the Orthodox nursery school let out. I heard the high-pitched voices on the street, the cheerful querulousness of the Hasidic neighbor women in their guttural languages. How they frightened you, Claire, those simple women in their long skirts with their infinite broods, arrogant sons and big oafish daughters, strong enough to lift a truck but timid in gaggles with bows in their hair. You always thought they were trying to hex you. You made me paint my hand blue and print it on the white stucco above the doorbell, a spell against the evil eye.

My knee touched hers, recoiled. Her leg was stiff. She was far away now, she was passing through the seven mortal coils, going up to God. I ran my fingers down the pretty, pointed nose, along the smooth forehead, the slight indentation at the temple where no pulse fluttered. She never seemed more complete, more sure of herself. Not trying to please anyone anymore.

She loved me, but she didn’t know me now.

From 1:45 to 4:15 the phone rang five times. She missed her hair appointment with Emile. Two hang-ups. Ron’s friends were meeting for drinks at Cava. MCI wanted to give the Richardses a break on their phone bill. Each time the phone rang, I somehow expected her to jerk awake and answer it. She could never stand not answering the phone. Even when she knew it wouldn’t be for her. It might be a job, though she’d stopped going out on auditions. It might be a friend, though she had no friends. She could get involved in long winding conversations with boiler room operators, Red Carpet Realty, Gold Star Construction.

I couldn’t understand how she could be gone. What would happen to the way she had of opening a jar like an orchestra percussionist hitting a triangle, a single precise gesture? The reddish highlights in her hair in the summertime. Her aunt who served at Ypres. I was the one who had them now, like an armload of butterflies. Who else knew she put mirrors on the roof, or that her favorite movies were Dr. Zhivago and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, that her favorite color was indigo blue? Her lucky number was two. The foods she could never eat were coconut and marzipan.

I remembered the day she took me to Cal Arts. I was intimidated by the students, they seemed pretentious for people with funny haircuts, and their work was ugly. It cost ten thousand dollars a year to go there. “Don’t think about money,” Claire said. “This is the place, unless you think you want to go east.” We’d sent in the application in November. I had to forget all that now.

I sat cross-legged next to her on the bed, counted the pills in the jar. For Insomnia. There were still plenty. More than enough, and the last person who would ever think about me was gone. My mother? She just wanted possession. She thought if she could kill Claire, she would get me back, so she could erase me some more. I felt the pull of that dark circle, the neck of the bottle. It was a rabbit hole, I could jump down it and pull it in after me. You never knew when help might come. But I knew. It came and I turned my back, I let it go down. I pushed my savior out of the life raft. I panicked. Now I reaped my despair.

I sat with the jar in my hand, watching that winter sky’s blush, weak pink strained through blue haze, coming through the angle-pruned branches and weeping boughs of the elm. Sunset came so early now. She loved this time of day, loved feeling beautifully melancholy and sitting under the elm, looking up into its branches, dark against the sky.

In the end, I didn’t take the pills. It seemed too grandiose, a big gesture, fraudulent. I didn’t deserve to forget that I had turned my back on her. Oblivion wiped the books clean. It was too easy. I was the keeper of the butterflies now. Instead, I dialed Ron’s pager, added the 999 that meant emergency. I sat back down and waited.

RON SAT NEXT TO ME on the bed, his shoulders sagging like an old horse’s back and his face pressed into his hands, as if he could not look at one more thing. “You were supposed to watch her,” he said.

“You were the one who left.”

He gasped, and broke into long, shuddering sobs. I never thought I would feel sorry for Ron, but I did. I put my hand on his shoulder, and he pressed his hand over mine. It occurred to me I could make him feel better. I could stroke his hair, and say, It’s not your fault. She had problems we couldn’t have helped, no matter what we did. That’s what Claire would have done. I could have made him love me. Maybe he would keep me.

He held my hand and stared down at her silk slippers beside the bed. “I’ve been afraid of this for years.”

He pressed my hand to his cheek. I could feel his tears spill over the back, seeping between my fingers. Claire would have felt sorry for him if she weren’t dead. “I loved her so much,” he said. “I wasn’t a saint, but I loved her. You don’t know.”

He looked up at me with his red-rimmed eyes, waiting for me to deliver my lines. I know you did, Ron. Claire would say it. I could feel Olivia too, pressing me. He could take care of me. A man’s world!

But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Claire was dead. What did it matter if he loved her or not?

I pulled my hand away and got up, started picking up some of the things I’d thrown on the floor. There was his Cross pen. I tossed it in his lap. “She had it all the time,” I said. “You didn’t know her at all.”

He bent his head, touched her dark hair that I had brushed, ran his hand down her mauve angora sleeve. “You can still stay,” he said. “Don’t worry about that.”

I thought it was what I’d wanted to hear. But now that he said it, I knew I’d feel better out on Sunset Boulevard with the other runaways, asleep on a piss quilt on the steps of the homeless church, eating out of the trash at Two Guys from Italy. I couldn’t stay here without Claire. I could never say the lines he wanted, paint on my prettiest smile, listen for his car in the driveway. My face in the vanity mirror was sharp and jagged. He was reaching out to me, but my face was beyond reaching.

I turned away and looked out at the night and our reflection in the broken French doors: me in my silk pajamas, Ron on the bed, Claire on the pillow, bathed in the bed’s lampside glow, for once utterly indifferent.

“Why couldn’t you just have loved her more?” I said.

His hand dropped down. He shook his head. Nobody knew why. Nobody ever knew why.

IT TOOK LONGER to pack than when I left Amelia’s. There were all the new clothes Claire gave me, the books, the little Dürer rabbit. I took everything. I only had one suitcase, so I packed the rest in shopping bags. It took seven bags to pack it all. I went into the kitchen, reached into the jewelry bag, and took the aquamarine ring that was always too big for her, and her mother too. But it fit me fine.

It was almost midnight when a caseworker came in a minivan, a middle-aged white woman in jeans and pearl earrings. Joan Peeler had left DCS last year to work in development at Fox. Ron helped me carry my things out to the van. “I’m sorry,” he said as I climbed in. He fumbled for his wallet, pressed some money on me. Two hundred-dollar bills. My mother would have thrown them in his face, but I took them.

I watched the house, the way it got smaller in the back window of the van as we drove off in the moonless night, the end of what might have been. A little Hollywood bungalow beyond the huge white trunks of the sycamores. I didn’t give a damn what happened to me now.