White Oleander

5

CASEWORKERS CHANGED but were always the same. They took me to McDonald’s, opened their files, asked their questions. McDonald’s scared me. There were too many children, screaming and crying and sliding into pits filled with colored balls. I had nothing to say. This one was a man, white, with a clipped beard like the jack of spades. His hands square as a shovel, he wore a signet on his pinkie finger.

He found me a permanent placement. When I left the group home on Crenshaw Boulevard, nobody said good-bye. But the girl with the scar tattoos stood on the front porch and watched me drive away. Clusters of lavender jacarandas emerged from the ranks of trees as we stitched along the gray-and-white streets.

It took four freeways to get to my new home. We exited onto a street that sloped upward like a ramp. Tujunga, the signs said. I watched the low ranch houses get larger, then smaller, the yards chaotic. The sidewalks disappeared. Furniture grew on the porches like toadstools. A washing machine, scrap lumber, a white hen, a goat. Finally we were no longer in town. We came over a rise and we could see the wash, half a mile across, kids on dirt bikes cutting trails in the open land, kicking up pale plumes of dust. In contrast, the air seemed listless, defeated. We stopped in the dirt yard of a house, part trailer, but so many parts added on, you had to call it a house. A plastic garden pinwheel stood motionless in a patch of geraniums. Spider plants hung from pots on the wide trailer porch. Three little boys sat, watching. One held a jar with some kind of animal. The biggest one pushed his glasses up on his nose, called back over his shoulder, through the screen door. The woman who came through it was busty and leggy, with a big smile, her teeth white and shallow, all in the front. Her nose was flat at the bridge, like a boxer’s.

Her name was Starr and it was dark inside her trailer. She gave us sugary Cokes we drank out of the can as the caseworker talked. When she spoke, Starr moved her whole body, throwing her head back to laugh. A small gold cross glittered between her breasts, and the caseworker couldn’t keep his eyes off that deep secret place. She and the caseworker didn’t even notice when I went outside.

There were no fringy jacarandas here, only oleanders and palms, pear cactus and a big weeping pepper. The dust that covered everything was the pinkish beige of sandstone, but the sky was broad as an untroubled forehead, the pure leaded blue of stained glass. It was the first time the ceiling wasn’t pressing on my head.

The biggest boy, the one with the glasses, stood up. “We’re catching lizards, you want to?”

They trapped the lizards with shoebox snares down in the wash. The patience of such small boys as they waited, silent, still, for a green lizard to enter the trap. They pulled the string and the box fell down. The biggest boy slid a sheet of cardboard under the box and turned it over, and the middle one grabbed the tiny living thing and put it in the glass jar.

“What do you do with them?” I asked.

The boy with the glasses looked at me in surprise. “We study them, of course.” The lizard in the jar did push-ups, then grew very still. Isolated, you could see how perfect it was, every small scale, its row of etched toenails. Made special by virtue of its imprisonment. Above us the mountain loomed, a solemn presence. I found if I looked at it a certain way, I could feel its huge-shouldered mass moving toward me, green polka dots of sage clinging to its flanks. A puff of breeze came up. A bird screamed. The chaparral gave off a hot fresh smell.

I walked down the wash, wandering between boulders warmed in the sun. I leaned my cheek against one, imagining becoming so still, so quiet as this, indifferent to where the river dumped me after the last storm. The biggest boy was suddenly beside me. “Careful of the rattlesnakes. They like those rocks.”

I moved away from the rock.

“The western diamondback is the largest of the American vipers,” he said. “But they rarely strike above the ankle. Just watch where you’re going, and don’t climb on the rocks, or if you do, watch where you put your hands. Do like this.” He took a small rock and knocked it on the nearest boulder, as if knocking on a door. “They’ll avoid you if they can. Also look out for scorpions. Shake your shoes before you put them on, especially outside.”

I looked at him closely, this skinny freckled boy, a bit younger than me, trying to decide if he wanted to scare me. But he seemed more interested in impressing me with how smart he was. I kept walking along, looking at the shapes the boulders made, the blue of their shadows. I had the sense that they were inhabited, like people in hiding. The boy followed me.

“Rabbit,” he said, pointing down at the dust.

I could barely make out the blurred markings, two larger prints followed by a smaller one and then another. He smiled, his teeth slightly pushed back, vaguely rabbitlike himself. He was a boy who should have been in front of a TV or in a library, but he could read the pale dust the way another kid would read a comic book, the way my mother read cards. I wished he could read my fortune in the dust.

“You see a lot,” I said.

He smiled. He was a boy who wanted to be seen. He told me his name was Davey, he was Starr’s real son. There was a daughter too, Carolee. The other two, Owen and Peter, were foster like me. But even her natural children had been in foster care, when Starr was in rehab.

How many children had this happened to? How many children were like me, floating like plankton in the wide ocean? I thought how tenuous the links were between mother and children, between friends, family, things you think are eternal. Everything could be lost, more easily than anyone could imagine.

We walked on. Davey pulled at a bush with bright yellow flowers. “Deerweed. Pea family.” The breeze came up the canyon, making the trees flicker green and gray. “Paloverde’s got the green bark. The other’s ironwood.”

The quiet, the solidness of the mountain, the white butterflies. Green scent of laurel sumac, which Davey informed me the local Indians had used to sweeten the air in their wickiups. Clumps of giant ryegrass, still green, but already crackling like fire. Two hawks circled the seamless blue sky, screaming.

THAT NIGHT, motifs of cowboys on broncos, lariats, and spurs decorated my sleeping bag bed, where I lay zipper open to the coolness watching Carolee, sixteen years old and tall as her mother, a sullen girl with pouty lips, zipping her top. “Thinks she’s going to ground me,” Carolee said to her reflection. “That’s what she thinks.”

On the other side of our thin wall, the mother and her hippie boyfriend were making love, the headboard knocking against the partition. It was not the night magic, my mother and her young men, murmuring to strains of imperial koto in the scented dusk.

“Lord almighty!” Starr wailed.

Carolee’s mouth twisted into something not quite a smile, her boot on her bed, she was doing the laces. “Christians don’t say, ‘Fuck me baby.’ Actually they’re not supposed to do it at all, but she’s got the sin virus in her blood.” She posed in front of the mirror, lowered the zipper of her top an inch, so it showed the well between her breasts. She bared her teeth and wiped them with her finger.

A dirt bike whined, and she pushed the screen out, climbed onto the dresser, narrowly missing her basket of makeup. “See you in the morning. Don’t close the window.”

I got up and watched her on the dirt bike disappearing up the road. It was wide and white in the moonlight, the darkness of mountains darker than the sky, a perfect vanishing point of the road and the telephone poles. I imagined you could follow that road through the vanishing point, come out somewhere else entirely.

“WITHOUT JESUS, I’d be dead today,” Starr was saying as she cut in front of a semi, which punished us with its air horn. “That’s the God’s honest truth. They’d taken my kids, I was ready for roadkill.”

I sat in the passenger seat of Starr’s Ford Torino while Carolee slouched in the back, ankle bracelet glittering, a present from her boyfriend, Derrick. Starr drove too fast, bumping up the road, and chain-smoked Benson and Hedges loos from a gold pack, listening to Christian radio. She was talking about how she used to be an alcoholic and a cokehead and topless waitress at a club called the Trop.

She wasn’t beautiful like my mother, but you couldn’t help looking at her. I’d never seen anyone with a figure like that. Only in the back pages of the L.A. Weekly, chewing on a phone cord. But her energy was overwhelming. She never stopped talking, laughing, lecturing, smoking. I wondered what she was like on cocaine.

“I can’t wait for you to meet Reverend Thomas. Have you accepted Christ as your personal savior?”

I considered telling her that we hung our gods from trees, but thought better of it.

“Well, you will. Lord, once you hear that man, you’ll be saved on the spot.”

Carolee lit a Marlboro, lowered the back window. “That phony-ass con. How can you swallow such shit.”

“He who believeth in me, though he was dead, yet he will live, and don’t you forget it, missy,” Starr said. She never called us by our names, not even her own children, only “mister” or “missy.”

She was taking us to the Clothestime in the next town, Sunland, she wanted to get me a few things for my new life. I’d never been into a store like that. My mother and I got our clothes on the boardwalk in Venice. Inside the Clothestime, colors assaulted us from every side. Magenta! they screamed. Turquoise! Battery acid! under the nicker of fluorescent lighting. Starr filled my arms with clothes to try on, herded me into a dressing room with her, so we could continue our chat.

In the cubicle, she wriggled into a tiny striped minidress and smoothed it over her ribs, turning to the side to see what it looked like in profile. The stripes widened and tapered over her breasts and bottom like op art. I tried not to stare, but how could you not be astounded. I wondered what Reverend Thomas would think of her in a dress like that.

She frowned, pulled the dress over her head, and hung it back up. It still was stretched to fit her figure. Her body in the small dressing room was almost too much to bear. I could only look at her in the mirror, her breasts falling out of the top of her under-wired brassiere, the cross hiding between them like a snake in a rock.

“Sin’s a virus, that’s what Reverend Thomas says. Infecting the whole country, like the clap,” she told me. “They’ve got clap now you can’t get rid of. Sin’s just exactly the same. We’ve got every excuse in the book. Like what difference does it make if I shovel coke up my nose or not? What’s wrong with wanting to feel good all the time? Who does it hurt?”

She opened her eyes wide, I could see the glue on her false eyelashes. “It hurts us and it hurts Jesus. Because it’s wrong.” She said it soft and sweet, like a nursery school teacher. I tried to imagine what it was like working in a gentleman’s club. Walking naked into a room full of men.

She tried on a pink stretchy dress, rolling it down over her hips. “It’s a virus that eats you up from the inside out, you infect everything around you. Oh, wait till you hear Reverend Thomas.” She frowned at the dress in the mirror, the way it looked in the back, it was so tight it rose up between her legs. “This would look better on you.”

She stripped it off and handed it to me. It smelled of her heavy perfume. Obsession. When I took off my clothes, she looked at my body closely, like she was trying to decide if she wanted to buy it or not. My underwear was torn. “You’d better start wearing a bra, missy. Thirteen years old, I should say. I had my first bra in the fourth grade. You don’t want ’em hanging to your knees when you’re thirty, do you?”

Thirteen? The shock of it made me drop a stack of clothes off the hook. I thought back through the past year. My mother’s trial, all the sessions and questions, medication and caseworkers, Sometime in there I’d turned thirteen. I had crossed a frontier in my sleep, and nobody had woken me to stamp my passport. Thirteen. The idea so stunned me I didn’t even argue when Starr insisted on buying me the pink dress to wear to church, and two bras so they wouldn’t hang down to my knees when I was thirty, and a package of panties, some other things.

We went next door to Payless for shoes. Starr took a sample red high heel down from the display and put it on without a sock, stood on it, smoothed her shorts over her hips, cocked her head to one side, made a face, and put it back on the stand. “I mean, I really thought like that. Who cares if I stick my tits in some stranger’s face? It’s nobody’s business but mine.”

Carolee whispered, “Mother, please shut up. People are staring.”

Starr handed me a pair of pink high heels that would match my dress. I tried them on. They made my feet look like Daisy Duck’s, but Starr loved them and pressed them on me.

“She could really use some goddamn sneakers or something,” Carolee said. “All she’s got are those thongs.”

I decided on a pair of hiking boots, hoping they weren’t too expensive. Starr looked pained when I showed them to her. “They’re not very . . . flattering.”

But snakes rarely struck above the ankle.

ON SUNDAY MORNING, Carolee was up early. I was surprised. On Saturday she’d slept until noon. But here she was, up at eight, dressed, her little backpack on her back. “Where are you going?”

She brushed her sandy hair. “Are you kidding? I’m not going to spend my day listening to Reverend Creephead talk about the Blood of the Lamb.” She put her brush down and rushed out of the room. “Sayonara.” I heard the screen door slam.

I took the hint from Carolee and pretended I was sick. Starr looked at me hard, and said, “Next week, missy.” She wore a short white skirt and a peach blouse and four-inch spike heels. I could smell a big waft of Obsession. “No excuses.”

It was only when I heard Starr’s Torino heave itself onto the road that I dared dress and come out, make myself some breakfast. It was nice being alone, the boys hiding somewhere down in the wash, the distant whine of dirt bikes. I was just eating when Starr’s hippie boyfriend came out of the bedroom, barefoot in jeans, pulled a T-shirt over his head. His chest was lean and hairy, sandy threaded with gray, his shaggy hair out of its usual ponytail. He staggered down the hall. I could hear the sound of his piss, the water coming on. Splashing, flushing. He came into the main room and found a cigarette in a pack on the table, lit it. The hand that held the cigarette was missing one ringer and the fingertip of the next.

He smiled when he saw me looking at it. “You ever see a carpenter get a table in a restaurant? Table for three, please.” He held up his damaged hand.

At least he wasn’t sensitive about it. I kind of liked him, though it embarrassed me that he was the one causing the “Christ almighties” through the wall. He was a plain man, lean-faced, sad-eyed, long graying hair. We were supposed to call him Uncle Ray. He opened the refrigerator, pulled out a beer. Shhhhht, it sighed when he popped the top.

“You’re missing the Jesus show.” He didn’t drink his beer so much as pour it down his throat.

“So are you,” I said.

“I’d rather be shot,” he said. “Here’s my theory. If there’s a God, he’s so fucked up he doesn’t deserve to be prayed to.” He belched loudly and smiled.

I’d never thought much about God. We had the Twilight of the Gods, we had the world tree. We had Olympus and its scandals, Ariadne and Bacchus, the rape of Danae. I knew about Shiva and Parvati and Kali, and Pele the volcano goddess, but my mother had banned the least mention of Christ. She wouldn’t even come to the Christmas pageant at school. She made me beg a ride off some other kid.

The nearest I’d come to feeling anything like God was the plain blue cloudless sky and a certain silence, but how do you pray to that?

Uncle Ray leaned up against the doorjamb, smoking, looking out at the big pepper tree and his pickup truck in the yard. He sipped his beer, which he held in the same hand as the cigarette, dexterous for a person missing two fingers. He crinkled his eyes against the smoke as he exhaled out the screen. “He just wants to ball her. Pretty soon he’s gonna tell her to get rid of me, that’s when I get my thirty-eight, teach him a fucking thing or two. Then you’ll see a little Blood of the Lamb.”

I picked the marshmallows out of my cereal, arranged them on the rim of the bowl, purple moons, green clovers. “It’s not a sin if you’re married,” I said. I didn’t think he’d hear me but he did.

“I’m already married,” he said, looking out the screen toward the pepper tree, its boughs blowing like a woman’s long hair. He shot a grin back over his shoulder. “I got the virus big time.”

I alternated the moons and clovers, eating the ones that fell in the bowl. “Where’s your wife?”

“I don’t know. Haven’t seen her in two, three years.”

He seemed so calm about it, that someone was walking around with his name and his history and he didn’t even know where she was. It made me feel dizzy, like I wanted to grab hold of something heavy and hang on. This was the life I was going to be living, everybody separated from everybody else; hanging on for a moment, only to be washed away. I could grow up and drift away too. My mother might never know where I was, and in a few years, if someone asked her about me, she might shrug like this and say, “Haven’t seen her in two, three years.”

It hit me, like a punch in the stomach. I could go for years and never see her again. Just like this. People losing each other, their hands slipping loose in a crowd. I might never see her again. Those dull eyes behind the dry aquarium, the shape of her back. My God, how could I have avoided knowing this all these months? I wanted my mother, I wanted something to hold on to me, not let me slip away.

“Hey, what’s all this?” Uncle Ray came over and sat next to me at the table. He stuck his cigarette in his beer can and took my hands in his. “Don’t cry, kid. What’s wrong? You can tell Uncle Ray.”

All I could do was shake my head, raw sobs like razors.

“You miss your mom?”

I nodded. My throat felt like there were two hands wrapped around it, squeezing, forcing water out of my eyes. Snot ran from my nose. Ray scooted his chair so he could put his arm around me, handed me a napkin off the table. I buried my face in his chest, and let my tears and snot wet the front of his T-shirt. It felt good to be held. I breathed in his smell, cigarettes and stale body and beer and fresh-cut wood, something green.

He held me, he was solid, he wouldn’t let me drift away. Talking to me, telling me nobody was going to hurt me, I was a great kid, nothing was going to happen. After a while he wiped my cheeks with the back of his hand, lifting my chin so he could look at me, pushing my hair out of my eyes. “You really miss her, huh. Tell me, is she as pretty as you?”

I smiled a little, his eyes were so sad and kind. “I have a picture.” I ran down to my room, brought back a copy of my mother’s last book, Dust. I gently stroked my hand over her picture on the back cover, on the beach at Big Sur. Huge rocks in the water, driftwood. She wore a fisherman sweater, her hair swept back by the wind. She looked like a Lorelei, cause of shipwreck. Odysseus would have had to lash himself to the mast. “You’re going to be prettier,” he said.

I wiped my nose on the short sleeve of my T-shirt, smiled. My mother was a woman people stopped in the market to wonder at. Not like Starr, but just at the sheer beauty. They seemed startled she had to shop and eat like anyone else. I couldn’t imagine owning beauty like my mother’s. I wouldn’t dare. It would be too scary. “No way.”

“Hey, way. You’re just a different type. You’re the sweetheart type. Your mother looks like she could take a bite out of ya—not that I’d mind, I can take it rough too, but you know what I mean. For you, they’ll just fall down like flies.” He peered into my lowered face with his kind eyes, speaking so gently. “You hear me? You’re going to have to push the bodies out of the way if you want to go down the street.”

Nobody had ever said anything like that to me before. Even if he was just lying to make me feel better, who bothered to do that now?

He flipped through some of the pages, reading. “Look, this one’s about you.”

I snatched it away, my face flaming. I knew the poem.

She used to recite it at poetry readings. I would sit drawing at my table as if I didn’t hear her, as if it weren’t me she was talking about, my body, my childish girl parts. I hated that poem. What did she think, I didn’t know what she was talking about? I didn’t care who she read it to? No, she thought because I was her daughter that I belonged to her, that she could do anything she wanted with me. Make me into poetry, expose my chicken bones and my cowrie shell, my unopened woman.

“What happened to her?” he asked.

“She killed her boyfriend,” I said, looking down at her photo, her profile a spear under my ribs, piercing my liver, my right lung. A tear ran off my eyelash and fell on her picture. I wiped it off. “She’s in prison.”

He shrugged. As if that was something people did. Not good, but not shocking.

I FINISHED OUT the eighth grade at Mount Gleason Junior High, my third school this year. I didn’t know anyone, didn’t want to. I ate lunch with Davey. We quizzed each other using flash cards he’d made for himself. What’s a baby ferret called? A kitten. How many kittens in a litter? Six to nine. Constellation Andromeda. Major feature? The Great Andromeda Nebula. Favorite object for observation? The double star Gamma Andromedae. Distance to earth? Two million light-years. Anomaly? Unlike the other spiral nebulae, which are receding from us at high velocities, Andromeda is approaching us at a rate of three hundred kilometers per second.

My caseworker visited our trailer often, sat with Starr, trying to look handsome on the porch under the spider plants. One day he said my mother was settled at the women’s prison in Chino now, and could have visitors starting Thursday. There was a group that brought children to see their parents in prison, and I was going to have a visit.

After the last visit, I was afraid. I didn’t know if I could do that again. What if she was still like that, a zombie? I couldn’t stand that. And I was afraid of the prison, the bars and hands snaking between them. Clanging their cups. How could my mother live there, my mother who arranged white flowers in a crackle-glass vase, who could argue for hours about whether Frost was an important poet?

But I knew how. Drugged, sitting in a corner, vaguely reciting her poems, plucking pills of fuzz off the blanket, that’s how. Or beaten senseless by guards, or other prisoners. She didn’t know when to lie low, avoid the radar.

And what if she didn’t want to see me? What if she blamed me for not being able to help her? It had been eight months since that day at the jail, when she didn’t even recognize me. At one point in the night, I even thought of not going. But at five I got up, showered, dressed.

“Remember, no jeans, nothing blue,” Starr reminded me the night before. “You want to walk back out of there, don’t you?” I didn’t need reminding. I wore my new pink dress, my bra and my Daisy Duck shoes. I wanted to show her I was growing up, I could take care of myself.

THE VAN CAME at seven. Starr got up and signed the papers while the driver eyed her figure in her bathrobe. There was one other kid in the van. I took the seat in front of him, also by the window. We picked up three more on the way out.

The day was overcast, June gloom, the moisture in the air beading on the windshield. You couldn’t see down the freeway as far as the next overpass. It came out of the mist and then it vanished, the world creating and erasing itself. It made me carsick. I cracked the window. We drove a long way, through suburbs and more suburbs. If only I knew what she would be like when I got there. I couldn’t imagine my mother in prison. She didn’t smoke or chew on toothpicks. She didn’t say “bitch” or “fuck.” She spoke four languages, quoted T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas, drank Lapsang souchong out of a porcelain cup. She had never even been inside a McDonald’s. She had lived in Paris and Amsterdam. Freiburg and Martinique. How could she be in prison?

At Chino, we turned off the freeway and drove south. I tried to memorize this, so I could find it again in my dreams. We drove past nice suburbs, then not-so-nice ones, then brand-new subdivisions alternating with lumberyards and farm equipment rentals. Finally we came to real country, and drove along roads with no signals, just dairies and fields, the smell of manure.

There was a big complex of buildings on the right. “Is that it?” I asked the girl next to me. “CYA,” she said. I shook my head. “Youth Authority.”

All the kids eyed it grimly as we passed. We could be there, behind that razor wire. We were silent as death when we went by the California Institution for Men, set way back from the road in the middle of a field. Finally, we turned onto a fresh blacktopped road, past a little market, case of Bud $5.99. I wanted to remember it all. The kids got their bags, their backpacks. Now I could see the prison—a steam stack, a water tower, the guard tower. It was aluminum-sided, like Starr’s trailer. Frontera wasn’t at all as I had imagined. I’d been picturing Birdman of Alcatraz, or I Want to Live! with my mother as Susan Hayward. Its low brick buildings were widely spaced and landscaped with trees and roses and acres of green lawn. It was more like a suburban high school than a prison. Except for the guard towers, the razor wire.

Crows squawked raucously in the trees. It sounded like they were tearing something apart, something they didn’t even want, just for the fun of destroying it. We filed through the guard tower, signed in. They searched our backpacks and passed us through the metal detector. They took a package away from one girl. No gifts. You had to mail them, a package from family was allowed four times a year. The slam of the gate behind us made us jump. We were locked in.

They told me to wait at an orange picnic table under a tree. I was nervous and sick from the ride. I didn’t even know if I’d recognize her. I shivered, wishing I’d brought a sweater. And what would she think of me, in my bra and high heels?

Women milled around behind the covered area of the visiting yard. Prisoners, their faces like masks. They jeered at us. One woman whistled at me and licked between her fingers, and the others laughed. They kept laughing, they wouldn’t stop. They sounded like the crows.

The mothers started coming in from the prison through a different gate. They wore jeans and T-shirts, gray sweaters, sweatsuits. I saw my mother waiting for the woman guard to bring her through. She wore a plain denim dress, button front, but on her the blue was a color, like a song. Her white blond hair had been hacked off at the neck by someone who had no feeling for the work, but her blue eyes were as clear as a high note on a violin. She had never looked more beautiful. I stood up and then I couldn’t move, I waited trembling as she came over and hugged me to her.

Just to feel her touch, to hold her, after all those months! I put my head on her chest and she kissed me, smelled my hair, she didn’t smell of violets anymore, only the smell of detergent on denim. She lifted my face in her hands and kissed me all over, wiped my tears with her strong thumbs. She pulled me to sit down next to her.

I was thirsty for the way she felt, the way she looked, the sound of her voice, the way her front teeth were square but her second teeth turned slightly, her one dimple, left side, her half-smile, her wonderfully blue eyes flecked with white, like new galaxies, the firm intact planes of her face. She didn’t even look like she should be in prison, she looked like she could have just walked off the Venice boardwalk with a book under her arm, ready to settle in at an oceanside cafe.

She pulled me down to sit next to her at the picnic table, whispered to me, “Don’t cry. We’re not like that. We’re the Vikings, remember?”

I nodded, but my tears dripped on the orange vinyl table. Lois, someone had scratched into it. 18th Street. Cunt.

One of the women in the concrete courtyard behind the visitors covered area whistled and shouted out, something about my mother or me. My mother looked up and the woman caught her gaze full in the face like a punch. It stopped her cold. She turned away quickly, like it wasn’t she who’d said it.

“You’re so beautiful,” I said, touching her hair, her collar, her cheek. Not pliable at all.

“Prison agrees with me,” she said. “There’s no hypocrisy here. Kill or be killed, and everybody knows it.”

“I missed you so much,” I whispered.

She put her arm around me, her head right next to mine. She pressed my forehead with her hand, her lips against my temple. “I won’t be here forever. It’ll take more than this to keep me behind bars. I promise you. I will get out, one way or another. One day you’ll look out your window and I’ll be there.”

I looked into her determined face, cheekbones like razors, her eyes making me believe. “I was afraid you’d be mad at me.”

She stretched me out at arm’s length to look at me, her hands gripping my shoulders. “Why would you think that?”

Because I couldn’t lie well enough. But I couldn’t say it. She hugged me again. Those arms around me made me want to stay there forever. I’d rob a bank and get convicted so we could always be together. I wanted to curl up in her lap, I wanted to disappear into her body, I wanted to be one of her eyelashes, or a blood vessel in her thigh, a mole on her neck. “Is it terrible here? Do they hurt you?”

“Not as much as I hurt them,” she said, and I knew she was smiling, though all I could see was the denim of her sleeve and her arm, still lightly tanned. I had to pull away a little to see her. Yes, she was smiling, her half-smile, the little comma-shaped curve at the corner of her mouth. I touched her mouth. She kissed my fingers.

“They assigned me to office work. I told them I’d rather clean toilets than type their bureaucratic vomit. Oh, they don’t much care for me. I’m on grounds crew. I sweep, pull weeds, though of course only inside the wire. I’m considered a poor security risk. Imagine. I won’t tutor their illiterates, teach writing classes, or otherwise feed the machine. I will not serve.” She stuck her nose in my hair, she was smelling me. “Your hair smells of bread. Clover and nutmeg. I want to remember you just like this, in that sadly hopeful pink dress, and those bridesmaid, promise-of-prom-night pumps. Your foster mother’s, no doubt. Pink being the ultimate cliché.”

I told her about Starr and Uncle Ray, the other kids, dirt bikes and paloverde and ironwood, the colors of the boulders in the wash, the mountain and the hawks. I told her about the sin virus. I loved the sound of her laughter.

“You must send me drawings,” she said. “You always drew better than you wrote. I can’t think of any other reason you haven’t written.”

I could write? “You never did.”

“You haven’t been getting my letters?” she said. And her smile was gone, her face deflated, masklike, like the women behind the fence. “Give me your address. I’ll write you directly. And you write to me, don’t go through your social worker. My mistake. Oh, we’ll learn.” And the vigor returned to her eyes. “We’re smarter than they are, ma petite.”

I didn’t know my address, but she told me hers, had me repeat it over and over so I would remember. My mind rebelled against my mother’s address. Ingrid Magnussen, Inmate W99235, California Institution for Women, Corona-Frontera.

“Wherever you go, write to me. Write at least once a week. Or send drawings, God knows the visual stimulation in this place leaves something to be desired. I especially want to see the ex-topless dancer and Uncle Ernie, the clumsy carpenter.”

It hurt my feelings. Uncle Ray had been there when I needed him. She didn’t even know him. “It’s Ray, and he’s nice.”

“Oh,” she said. “You stay away from Uncle Ray, especially if he’s oh so nice.”

But she was in here, and I was out there. I had a friend. She wasn’t going to take him away from me.

“I think of you all the time,” she said. “Especially at night. I imagine where you are. When the prison’s still and everyone’s asleep, I imagine I can see you. I try to contact you. Have you ever heard me calling, felt my presence in your room?” She stroked a strand of my hair between her fingers, stretched it to see how long it was against my arm. It came to my elbow.

I had felt her, I had. I’d heard her call. Astrid? Are you awake? “Late at night. You never could sleep.”

She kissed the top of my head, right in the part. “Neither could you. Now, tell me more about yourself. I want to know everything about you.”

It was a strange idea. She never wanted to know about me before. But the long days of sameness had led her back to me, to remembering she had a daughter tied up somewhere. The sun was starting to come out and the ground fog glowed like a paper lantern.