Janet Fitch - White Oleander

Davey’s arm hung at a funny angle. “Does your arm hurt?” I asked softly.

He nodded, but he wouldn’t look at me. Did he know, could he guess?

Starr sat on a molded kitchen chair, slumped with exhaustion after the beating. Sullen, drinking her booze. She took a cigarette from the gold package and lit it.

“I think it’s dislocated,” Davey said.

“Whine, whine, whine. Why don’t you go somewhere and whine.”

I filled a bag with ice, put it against Davey’s shoulder. It looked bad. His mouth was all puckery. He never whined.

“He needs to go to the hospital,” I said, afraid, trying not to sound accusing.

“Well I can’t drive him. You drive him.” She fumbled in her purse for the keys and threw them at me. She had forgotten I was only fourteen.

“Call Uncle Ray.”

“No.”

“Mom?” Davey was sobbing now. “Help me.”

She looked at him, and now she saw the angle of his arm, the way he held it out by the elbow in front of him. “Oh Lord.” She ran over to Davey, knocking her shin into the coffee table, crouched by her son where he sat on the couch, holding his arm. “Oh, mister, I’m sorry. Mommy’s sorry, baby.” The more she thought about it, the more upset she got, running at the nose, trying to comb his hair back with her awkward hands, making jerky, meaningless gestures. He turned his head away.

She crossed her arms across her chest, but low, more toward the belly, and huddled next to the couch on the floor, rocking herself, hitting her forehead with her fist. “What do I do, Lord, what do I do?”

“I’m calling Uncle Ray,” I said.

Davey knew the number, recited it while I called him at the new houses. Half an hour later, he was home, his mouth set in a thin line.

“I didn’t mean it,” Starr said, her hands in front of her like an opera singer. “It was an accident. You’ve got to believe me.”

Nobody said anything. We left Starr crying in monotonous sobs, took Davey to the emergency hospital, where they popped his shoulder back in, taped it down. We concocted a story about how we were playing on the river. He jumped off a rock and fell. It sounded stupid even to me, but Davey made us promise not to say it was Starr. He still loved her, after everything.

EASTER. A pure crystalline morning where you could see every bush and boulder on the mountain. The air was so clean it hurt. Starr was in the kitchen fixing a ham, pushing little points of cloves into the squares she’d scored into the top. She’d been sober for two weeks, taking a meeting a day. We were all making an effort. Davey’s sling was a constant reminder of how bad it could get.

Starr put the ham in the oven, and we all went to church, even Uncle Ray, though he stayed behind in the car for a minute to get stoned before he came in, I could smell it as he passed by me to take the seat between Owen and Starr. Her eyes begged Reverend Thomas for a dose of the Blood. I tried to pray, to feel once again that there was something bigger than just me, someone who cared what I did, but it was gone, I could no longer detect the presence of God in that cinder-block church or in what was left of my soul. Starr yearned toward the sagging Jesus on the pearwood cross, while Uncle Ray cleaned his fingernails with his Swiss Army knife and I waited for the singing to start.

Afterward we stopped at a gas station and Uncle Ray bought her an Easter lily, the promise of a new life.

At home, the trailer smelled of ham. Starr served up lunch, creamed corn, canned pineapple rings, brown-and-serve rolls. Ray and I couldn’t look at each other, or it would all start again. We looked at the little kids, we played with our food, congratulated Starr on her cooking. Ray said Reverend Thomas wasn’t half bad. We had to put our eyes anywhere but on the other one’s face. I studied the little bowl of pink peppermint ice cream with jelly beans sprinkled over, and the Easter lily in the middle of the table in its foil-wrapped pot. We hadn’t been together since we took Davey to the emergency room. We hadn’t talked about it, how it had all gone too far.

All afternoon, we watched Easter shows on TV. Pink-skinned evangelists and choirs in matching sateen gowns. Congregations the size of rock’n’roll concerts. Hands waved in the air like sunflowers. He is risen, Christ the Lord. I wished I believed in Him again.

“We should be there,” Starr said. “Next year, we’ll do the Crystal Cathedral, Ray, let’s.”

“Sure,” Ray said. He had changed out of his church clothes, back into his regular T-shirt and jeans. We played Chinese checkers with the boys and avoided each other’s glances, but it was work, being in the same room without touching, especially with Starr sitting next to him, one hand up high on his soft-washed jeans. I couldn’t stand it. After Davey won, I went outside and walked around down in the wash. All I could think of was her hand on his jeans.

I was bad, I had done bad things, I had hurt people, and the worst of it was, I didn’t want to stop.

Blue shadows climbed the tawny round slopes of the mountain, like hands modeling the shape of a lover’s thighs. A lizard perched on a rock, thinking he was invisible. I threw a pebble at him, watched him dart away into the chaparral. I tore up a leaf of laurel sumac and held it to my nose, hoping it would clear my head.

I smelled him first, the smell of dope wafting on the twilight air. He was in the yard, sunlight striking his face and warming it like a stone. The sight of him caught in my throat. Now I knew I’d been waiting for him. I climbed onto a rise so he could see me, to the east, on the blind side of the trailer, then descended into a bowl of sand between the boulders.

A minute later, I heard him walking up the riverbed, dry already though it was only April. I knew Davey would read all this tomorrow in our tracks. But the moment I touched Ray, I knew we could never be apart, no matter how much we wanted to, no matter who we hurt. His lips on my neck, his hands under my shirt, pulling my pants open, peeling them down. My thighs craved the naked touch of his hips, we fit together like magnets as we sank into the sand. I didn’t care about scorpions or the western diamondback. I didn’t care about rocks or who might see us.

“Baby, what are you doing to me,” he whispered into my hair.

THE LAST TIME I had heard two adults fight was the night my mother stabbed Barry in the hand. Smashing, crashing. I covered my head with the pillow, but I could still hear every word through the thin walls, Starr’s drunken screeching, Ray’s murmuring rebuttals.

“You used to get it up fine, before you started fucking that little bitch. Admit it, you bastard, you’ve been fucking her!”

I crouched deeper into my sleeping bag, sweating, pretending it wasn’t me, it was some other girl, I was just a kid, I had nothing to do with this.

“Fuck my sponsor! God, I should have got rid of her when I had the chance!”

I imagined Ray sitting on the edge of the bed, his back slouched, hands dangling between his thighs, not interrupting her, just letting her blow it off, warding off her drunken slaps, wishing she would pass out. I could hear his voice, still calm, soothing, reasonable. “Starr, you’re shitfaced.”

“You perv. You like fucking kids? What’s next, dogs? You really like that skinny twat better than me? That no-tit baby?”

The shame, knowing that the boys were listening, now they knew everything.

“She got a tighter pussy than me? She suck you off like me? Does she take it up the ass? No, really, I want to know what kid fuckers do.”

How long did I think I was going to get away with it? I wished I’d never come here, I wished I’d never been born. Yet I had to admit there was a part of me that was proud, even excited, that Ray couldn’t get it up for Starr. He couldn’t fuck her, no matter how big her tits were, no matter if she let him put it up her ass. It was me he wanted.