White Oleander

31

ON THE ANVIL OF AUGUST, the city lay paralyzed, stunned into stupidity by the heat. The sidewalks shrank under the sun. It was a landscape of total surrender. The air was chlorinated, thick and hostile, like the atmosphere of a dead planet. But in the front yard, the big oleander bloomed like a wedding bouquet, a sky full of pinwheel stars. It made me think of my mother.

There was still no call from Susan. Many times, I’d wanted to call her and demand a meeting. But I knew better. This was a chess game. First the urgency, then the waiting. I would not run down the street after her, begging. I would develop my pieces and secure my defenses.

I woke up very early now, to catch a few breaths of cool air before the heat set in. I stood on the porch and gazed at the giant oleander. It was old, it had a trunk like a tree. You just had to roast a marshmallow on one twig and you were dead. She’d boiled pounds of it to make the brew of Barry’s death. I wondered why it had to be so poisonous. Oleanders could live through anything, they could stand heat, drought, neglect, and put out thousands of waxy blooms. So what did they need poison for? Couldn’t they just be bitter? They weren’t like rattlesnakes, they didn’t even eat what they killed. The way she boiled it down, distilled it, like her hatred. Maybe it was a poison in the soil, something about L.A., the hatred, the callousness, something we didn’t want to think about, that the plant concentrated in its tissues. Maybe it wasn’t a source of poison, but just another victim.

By eight it was already too hot to be outside. I went back inside to make Tasha’s lunch. She was the new girl in Yvonne’s bed, thirteen, going to King Junior High, D track, summer term. Grave, silent, she had a vertical scar on her upper lip just healing. She flinched if people moved too fast near her.

“You’ll do great,” I said, making her celery with peanut butter in the creases and a Granny Smith apple. “I’ll be watching.”

I drove her to school in Niki’s truck, let her off in front of Thomas Starr King Junior High, watched her go in scared and small, her backpack hanging with key chains. I felt helpless to prevent her life from taking its likely direction. Could a person save another person? She turned to wave at me. I waved back. I didn’t drive off until she was inside.

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.

My mother waited for the CO to unlock the gate. She still looked wonderful, thin and wiry, her pale hair twisted up in the back with a pencil stuck in it. A year and a half. I stood up. She walked over to us, warily, squinting in the sun, wisps of her hair blowing in the wind like smoke. Her tanned skin was more lined since I’d seen her last. She was getting that leathery look, like a white settler in Kenya. But she hadn’t changed as much as I had. She stopped when she got under the overhang, and I didn’t move, I wanted her to see who I was now. My acid green shirt with the industrial zipper, my eyes ringed in heavy black shadow and liner, my ears with their octave of earrings. My woman’s legs in a swap meet skirt, that Sergei loved to put over his shoulders, my hips, my full breasts. High wedgie shoes borrowed from Rena for the occasion. Not the pink girl with the prom shoes, not the rich orphan. I was Rena’s girl now. I could pass for any girl heading to just where my mother was. But not the soft girl, the check kiter. She would not take anything from me. Not anymore. For the first time when I visited, she didn’t smile. I could see shock on her face, and I was glad of it. Her lawyer’s assistant looked between the two of us, uninterested, then got up and went inside the cooler concrete of the visitors shelter, leaving us alone.

My mother reached out and took my hand. I let her. “When I get out, I’ll make it up to you,” she said. “Even in two or three years, you’ll still need a mother, won’t you?”

She was holding my hand, she was a foot away from me. I stared at her. It was as if some alien was speaking through her. What kind of a routine was this?

“Who said you’re getting out?” I said.

My mother dropped my hand, stepped back a pace. The look in her eyes faded the aquamarine to robin’s egg.

“I just said I’d talk to you. I didn’t say I’d do it. I’ve got a deal to make.”

Now robin’s egg turned to ash.

“What deal?” she asked, leaning against a post, her arms folded across the front of her denim dress, the very same dress she wore when I saw her last, now two shades lighter blue.

“A trade,” I said. “Do you want to sit here or under the trees?”

She turned and led me to her favorite place in the visitors yard, under the white-trunked ficus trees looking out at the road, her back to Reception, the farthest point from the first lookout tower. We sat on the dry, summer-battered grass, it scored my bare legs.

She sat gracefully, her legs to one side, like a girl in a meadow. I was larger than her now, but not as graceful, not beautiful, but present, solid as a hunk of marble before it’s been carved. I let her watch me in profile. I couldn’t look at her while I spoke. I was not hard enough, I knew I would be thrown by her bitter surprise.

“Here’s the deal,” I said. “There are certain things I want to know. You tell me, and I’ll do what you want me to do.”

My mother picked one of the dandelions out of the grass, blew the tufts from the head. “Or what.”

“Or I tell the truth and you can rot in here till you die,” I said.

I heard the grass rustle as she changed her position. When I looked, she was lying on her back, examining the stem from which the plumes had been blown. “Susan can discredit your testimony any number of ways.”

“You need me,” I said. “You know it. Whatever she says.”

“I hate this look, by the way,” she said. “You’re a Sunset Boulevard motel, a fifteen-dollar blow job in a parked car.”

“I can look however you want,” I said. “I’ll wear kneesocks if you like.” She was twirling the dandelion between her palms. “I’m the one who can tell them it was Barry’s paranoid fixation. That he hounded you. I can say he had threatened to commit suicide, fake it to look like you did it, to punish you for leaving him.” Her blurred features behind the chicken-wire glass. “I’m the one who knows how fucked up you were at Sybil Brand. When I came to see you that day, you didn’t even recognize me.” It still made me sick to think of it.

“If I submit to this examination.” She flicked the dandelion stem away.

“Yes.”

She kicked off her two-hole tennis shoes and ran her feet through the grass. She stretched her legs out in front of her and propped herself on her elbows, like she was at the beach. She gazed at her feet, tapping them together at the ball. “You used to have a certain delicacy about you. A transparency. You’ve become heavy, opaque.”

“Who was my father?” I asked.

“A man.” Watching her bare toes, clicking together.

“Klaus Anders, no middle name,” I said, picking at a scab on the web of my hand. “Painter. Age forty. Born, Copenhagen, Denmark. How did you meet?”

“In Venice Beach.” She was still watching her feet. “At one of those parties that last all summer long. He had the drugs.”

“You looked just like brother and sister,” I said.

“He was much older than I,” she said. She rolled over onto her belly. “He was forty, a painter of biomorphic abstractions. It was already passe by that time.” She parted the grass like short hair. “He was always passe. His ideas, his enthusiasms. Mediocre. I don’t know what I saw in him.”

“Don’t say you don’t know, that’s crap,” I said.

She sighed. I was making her tired. So what. “It was a long time ago, Astrid. Several lifetimes at least. I’m not the same person.”

“Liar,” I said. “You’re exactly the same.”

She was silent. I had never called her a name before.

“You’re still such a child, aren’t you,” she said. I could tell she was struggling for composure. Another person wouldn’t have been able to see it, but I could tell in the way the skin around her eyes seemed to grow thinner, her nose a millimeter more sharp. “You’ve taken my propaganda for truth.”

“So set me straight,” I said. “What was it you saw in him.”

“Comfort probably. He was easy. Very physical. He made friends easily. He called everybody ‘pal.’ ” She smiled slightly, still looking down at the grass she was parting, like going through a file. “Big and easy. He asked nothing of me.”

Yes, I believed that. A man who wanted something from her would never have been attractive. It had to be her desire, her fire. “Then what?”

She plucked a handful of grass, threw it away. “Do we have to do this? It’s such an old newsreel.”

“I want to see it,” I said.

“He painted, he got loaded more than he painted. He went to the beach. He was mediocre. There’s just not much to say. It’s not that he was going nowhere, it’s that he’d already arrived.”

“And then you got pregnant.”

She cut me a killing look. “I didn’t ‘get pregnant,’ I’ll leave that for your illiterate friends. I decided I would have you. ‘Decision’ being the operative word.” She let her hair down, shook the grass out of it. It was raw silk in the filtered light. “Whatever fantasy you might have spun for yourself, an accident you were not. A mistake, maybe, but not an accident.”

A woman’s mistakes . . . “Why him? Why then?”

“I needed someone, didn’t I? He was handsome, good-natured. He wasn’t averse to the idea. Voilà.”

“Did you love him?”

“I don’t want to talk about love, that semantic rat’s nest.” She unbent her long, slim legs and stood, brushing her skirt off. She leaned against the tree trunk, one foot up on the white flesh, crossed her arms to steady herself. “We had a rather heated sexual relationship. One overlooks many things.” Over her head, a woman had scratched Mona ’76 in the white wood.

I looked up at her, my mother, this woman I had known and never really knew, this woman always on the verge of disappearance. I would not let her get away from me now. “You worshipped him. I read it in your journal.”

“ ‘Worship’ is not quite the word we’re looking for here,” she said, watching the road. “Worship assumes a spiritual dimension. I’m looking for a term with an earthier connotation.”

“Then I was born.”

“Then you were born.”

I imagined him and her, the blonds, him with that wide laughing mouth, probably stoned out of his mind, her, comfortable, in the curve of his heavy arm. “Did he love me?”

She laughed, the commas of irony framing her mouth. “He was rather a child himself, I’m afraid. He loved you the way a boy loves a pet turtle, or a road race set. He could take you to the beach and play with you for hours, lifting you up and down in the surf. Or he could stick you in the playpen and leave the house to go out drinking with his friends, when he was supposed to be baby-sitting. One day I came home and there had been a fire. His turpentine-soaked rags and brushes had caught fire, the house went up in about five minutes. He was nowhere around. Evidently your crib sheet had already scorched. It was a miracle you weren’t burned alive. A neighbor heard you screaming.”

I tried to remember, the playpen, the fire. I could distinctly remember the smell of turpentine, a smell I’d always loved. But the smell of fire, that pervasive odor of danger, I’d always associated with my mother.

“That was the end of our idyll de Venice Beach. I was tired of his mediocrity, his excuses. I was making what little money we had, he was living off me, we had no home anymore. I told him it was over. He was ready, believe me, there were no tears on that score. And so ends the saga of Ingrid and Klaus.”

But all I could think of was the big man lifting me in and out of the surf. I could almost remember it. The feeling of the waves on my feet, bubbling like laughter. The smell of the sea, and the roar. “Did he ever try to see me, as I grew up?”

“Why do you want to know all this useless history?” she snapped, pushing away from the tree. She squatted so she could look me in the eye. Sweat beaded her forehead. “It’s just going to hurt you, Astrid. I wanted to protect you from all this. For twelve years, I stood between you and these senseless artifacts of someone else’s past.”

“My past,” I said.

“My God, you were a baby,” she said, standing up again, smoothing the line of her denim dress over her hips. “Don’t project.”

“Did he?”

“No. Does that make you feel any better?” She walked to the fence, to look out at the road, the dirt and trash blowing in the wind, trash stuck in the weeds on the other side of the road. “Maybe once or twice, he came by to see if you were all right. But I let him know in no uncertain terms that his presence was no longer appreciated. And that was that.”

I thought of him, his sheepish face, the long blond hair. He hadn’t meant to hurt me. She could have given him another chance. “You never thought maybe I’d like a father.”

“In ancient times there were no fathers. Women copulated with men in the fields, and their babies came nine months later. Fatherhood is a sentimental myth, like Valentine’s Day.” She turned back to me, her aquamarine eyes pale behind her tanned face, like a crime in a lit room behind curtains. “Have I answered enough, or is there more?”

“He never came back?” I asked quietly, praying it wasn’t true, that there was more, just a scrap more. “Never called you, later on, wanting to see me?”

She squatted down again, put her arm around me, propped her head against mine. We sat like that for a while.

“He called once when you were, I don’t know. Seven or eight?” She ran her fingers through my hair. “He was visiting from Denmark with his wife and his two small children. He wanted us to meet at a park, that I should sit on the park bench and play with you, so he could see you.”

“Did we go?” I just wanted her to hold me.

“It sounded like the plot of a bad movie,” she said. “I told him to go to hell.”

He had called, he had wanted to see me, and she said no. Without asking me, without mentioning it. It struck me across the throat like a blow with a pipe.

I got up and went to lean on the tree trunk, on the other side of the trunk. She could hardly see me from there. But I could hear her. “You wanted to know. Don’t turn over rocks if you don’t want to see the pale creatures who live under them.”

“Do you know where he is now?”

“Last I heard he bought a farm somewhere on one of the Danish islands. Aero, I think.” When I looked around the trunk, she was playing with her shoes, walking them on her hands. “Picturesque, but unless his wife knows something about farming, I’m sure they’ve lost it by now.” She looked up just in time to catch my glance, and smiled her knowing half-smile, not my father’s wide-open smile, but the one that said she had read your mind, knew what you were thinking. “Why, are you planning to descend upon your long-lost father and his family? Don’t be surprised if they don’t kill the fatted calf.”

“Better than you and your new children,” I said. The heat rippled off the blacktop, I could smell asphalt loosened by heat.

“Ah,” she said and lay back on the grass, her arms folded underneath her head, her legs crossed at the ankle. “I told them you wouldn’t necessarily greet them with open arms. But they’re a tender lot. Idealistic. They thought they’d give you a try. They were so proud of the article. Did you like it, by the way?”

“Threw it out.”

“Pity.”

The crows suddenly flew out of the tree in a series of shots, we listened to their rough calls doppler away. A truck went by on the frontage road, a club cab with dual back wheels, trailing ranchero music, absurdly cheerful. Like Guanajuato, I thought, and knew my mother was thinking the same.

My shirt didn’t absorb sweat; it pooled and was soaked into the waistband of my skirt. I felt I’d been wading. “Tell me about Annie.”

“Why do you have to hold on to the past?” She sat up, twisted her hair back, skewered it with the pencil. Her voice was sharp, irritated. “What’s the past, just a pile of moldy newspapers in some old man’s garage.”

“The past is still happening. It never stopped. Who was Annie?”

The wind shook the dense glossy foliage of the ficus, there was no other sound. She ran her ringers over her hair, pulling tight, like she was climbing out of a pool. “She was a neighbor. She took in kids, did people’s laundry.”

The smell of laundry. The laundry basket, sitting in the laundry basket with other children, playing we were in a boat. The little squares. It was yellow. We scooted it across the kitchen floor. “What did she look like?”

“Small. Talkative.” She shaded her eyes with one hand. “She wore those Dr. Scholl’s sandals.”

Wooden clopping on the linoleum. Yellow linoleum with a multicolored paint-splotch pattern. The floor was cool when you put your cheek against it. And her legs. Tanned. Bare legs in cutoffs. But I couldn’t see her face. “Dark or fair?”

“Dark. Straight hair with little bangs.”

I couldn’t get the hair. Just the legs. And the way she sang all day long to the radio.

“And where were you?”

My mother was silent. She pressed her hand down on her eyes. “How could you possibly have remembered this.”

Everything she knew about me, everything she walked around with in that thin skull case like a vault. I wanted to crack her open, eat her brain like a soft-boiled egg.

“Imagine my life, for a moment,” she said, quietly, cupping her long ringers like a boat, like she was holding her life in a shell. “Imagine how unprepared I was to be the mother of a small child. The demand for the enactment of the archetype. The selfless eternal feminine. It couldn’t have been more foreign. I was a woman accustomed to following a line of inquiry or inclination until it led to its logical conclusion. I was used to having time to think, freedom. I felt like a hostage. Can you understand how desperate I was?”

I didn’t want to understand, but I remembered Caitlin, tugging, always tugging, Assi, juice!Juice! Her imperiousness. On the other side of the fence, past my mother’s head, the young women in Reception watched one of them sweeping the concrete courtyard, sweeping, sweeping, like it was a penance. “That’s what babies are like. What were you thinking, that I would amuse you? That you and I could exchange thoughts on Joseph Brodsky?”

She sat up, crossed her legs, and rested her hands on her knees. “I thought Klaus and I were going to live happily ever after. Adam and Eve in a vine-covered shack. I was walking the archetypes. I was out of my fucking mind.”

“You were in love with him.”

“Yes, I was in love with him, all right?” she yelled at me. “I was in love with him and baby makes three and all that jazz, and then we had you and I woke up one morning married to a weak, selfish man, and I couldn’t stand him. And you, you just wanted, wanted, wanted. Mommy Mommy Mommy until I thought I would throw you against the wall.”

I felt sick. I had no trouble believing it, seeing it. I saw it all too clearly. And I understood why she never told me about this, had simply, kindly, refrained. “So you left me there.”

“I hadn’t really intended to. I dropped you at her house just for the afternoon, to go to the beach with some friends, and one thing led to another, they had some friends down in Ensenada, and I went, and it felt wonderful, Astrid. To be free! You can’t imagine. To go to the bathroom by myself. To take a nap in the afternoon. To make love all day long if I wanted, and walk on the beach, and not to have to think, where’s Astrid? What’s Astrid doing? What’s she going to get into? And not having you on me all the time, Mommy Mommy Mommy, clinging to me, like a spider . . .”

She shuddered. She still remembered my touch with revulsion. It made me dizzy with hatred. This was my mother. The woman who raised me. What chance could I ever have had.

“How long were you gone?” My voice sounded flat and dead in my own ears.

“A year,” she said quietly. “Give or take a few months.”

And I believed it. Everything in my body told me that was right. All those nights, waiting for her to come home, listening for her key in the lock. No wonder. No wonder they had to tear me away from her when I started school. No wonder I always worried she was going to leave me one night. She already had.

“But you’re asking the wrong question,” she said. “Don’t ask me why I left. Ask me why I came back.”

A truck with a four-horse trailer rattled up the road toward the highway. We could smell the horses, see their sleek rumps over the rear gate, and I thought about that day at the races, Medea’s Pride.

“You should have been sterilized.”

Suddenly she was up, pinning me by my shoulders to the tree trunk. Her eyes were a sea in fog. “I could have left you there, but I didn’t. Don’t you understand? For once, I did the right thing. For you.”

I was supposed to forgive her now, but it was too late. I would not say my line. “Bully. For. You,” I replied dryly.

She wanted to slap me, but she couldn’t. They’d end the visit right now. I lifted my head, knowing the white scars were gleaming.

She dropped her grip on my arms. “You were never like this before,” she said. “You’re so hard. Susan told me, but I thought it was just a pose. You’ve lost yourself, your dreaminess, that tender quality.”

I stared at her, not letting her look away. We were the same height, eye to eye, but I was bigger-boned, I probably could have beaten her in a fair fight. “I would have thought you’d approve. Wasn’t that the thing you hated about Claire? Her tenderness? Be strong, you said. I despise weakness.”

“I wanted you to be strong, but intact,” she said. “Not this devastation. You’re like a bomb site. You frighten me.”

I smiled. I liked the idea that I frightened her. The tables were truly turned. “You, the great Ingrid Magnussen, goddess of September fires, Saint Santa Ana, ruler over life and death?”

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.

And suddenly I felt panic. I’d made a mistake, like when I’d played chess with Ray and knew a second too late I’d made the wrong move. I had asked a question I couldn’t afford to know the answer to. It was the thing I didn’t want to know. The rock that never should be turned over. I knew what was under there. I didn’t need to see it, the hideous eyeless albino creature that lived underneath. “Listen, forget it. A deal’s a deal. Let’s leave it at that.”

The wind crackled its dangerous whip in the air, I imagined I could see the shower of sparks, smell the ashes. I was afraid she hadn’t heard me. She was still as a daguerreotype, arms crossed across her denim dress. “I’ll tell Susan,” she said quietly. “To leave you alone.”

I knew I had heard her but I didn’t believe it. I waited for something, to make me believe it was true.

My mother came back to me then, put her arms around me, rested her cheek against my hair. Although I knew it was impossible, I could smell her violets. “If you could go back, even partway, I would give anything,” she said into my ear.

Her large hands gently stroked my hair. It was all I ever really wanted, that revelation. The possibility of fixed stars.