Janet Fitch - White Oleander

“Fuck my sponsor, you call my fucking sponsor. I’m going in there and I’m going to cash her check.”

I heard more crashing, yelling, and then suddenly the door to my room flew open. Starr in her Victoria’s Secret rose negligee all twisted around, both huge tits exposed, was waving the .38. I would see that sight for years in my dreams. She fired without aiming, one arm extended. I rolled onto the floor and the room was full of the smell of gunfire and flying chipboard. I tried to wedge myself under the bed.

“You crazy.” Ray and Starr struggled. I moved out where I could see them. He twisted her arm behind her back and took the gun away. He was naked, and bent her backwards by her arm, so that his cock pressed into her buttocks, her tits pointing at the ceiling, shivering like small scared animals as he pushed her with his hips toward the door.

“Fuck you, Ray, fuck you!”

“Anytime,” he said as he shoved her out.

Maybe they would do it now and forget all about me. There was a hole in the closet wall. I started to get dressed. I wasn’t going to stick around anymore, not with that crazy drunk and a houseful of guns. I was going to call my caseworker tonight. I’d let Ray know where I was, but I couldn’t stay here.

Then I heard fighting in their room, and Starr was back, firing at me as I was struggling into my clothes. Pain bloomed in my shoulder, raced fire across my ribs. I staggered for the dresser, to climb up and out the window, but then she fired again, and my hip exploded. I fell onto the floor. I could see her coral painted toenails. “I told you to leave him alone.” The ceiling, no air, the metallic smell of static and gunpowder and my own blood.

LIGHT IN MY EYES. Hands moving me. Someone was screaming. God—uniforms, questions. Bearded man, woman, shirt buttoned wrong. Flashlight in my eyes. “Where’s Ray?” I asked, turning my head from the light.

“Astrid?” Davey, the light in his glasses. Holding me together. “She’s coming to.”

Another face. Blond, doll-like. False eyelashes. Black shirt. Schutzstaffel. “Astrid, who did this? Who shot you?” Just tell us, tell us who.

Davey shoved his glasses up his nose. Stared into my eyes. He shook his head, imperceptibly, but I saw.

In the doorway, the two little boys huddled. Jackets over their pajamas. Owen with his broken-necked giraffe, head sagging over his arm. Peter with the jar of lizards. The foster kids. They knew what came next.

“Astrid, what happened. Who did this to you?” I closed my eyes. Where could I begin to answer such a question anyway.

Beard Man swabbed my arm, stuck the needle in, IV.

“She going to be okay?” Davey asked.

“Great job, son. Without you she’d have already bled to death.”

Hands under me. Firestorms of pain as they lifted me onto the stretcher. Screaming. Fire. Fire. Beard Man held up the IV bag.

“That’s it,” he said. “Just relax.”

I stared into Davey’s eyes, knowing that who felt worse was a toss-up. He held my hand, and I held his, as hard as I could though the painkillers were knocking me out. “My stuff.”

“We’ll get it later.” Caseworker. Couldn’t even button her shirt right.

Davey started grabbing things, my mother’s books, my sketchbook, some paintings, the animal scat poster. But Ray . . . “Davey, my box.”

Davey’s face darkened. He’d read the tracks. My brain fading into blue-greens and yellows, a coruscating flicker of Tiffany glass. “Please,” I whispered.

“Let go now, sweetheart. You need to come with us.”

He grabbed the wooden jewelry box, his face twisted like when his shoulder was dislocated. He stayed with me as they wheeled me out to the ambulance, shrugging off the blackshirt doll woman as she tried to lead him away. Overhead, the cradle moon shone like a silver hoop. Beard Man talking to me as he loaded me in the back of the ambulance. “Relax, you’ve got to relax now. We’ve got your stuff.” Then the rear doors closed, Davey went away, the night swallowed him, swallowed them all.

HER FINGERS MOVED among barnacles and mussels, blue-black, sharp-edged. Neon red starfish were limp Dalis on the rocks, surrounded by bouquets of stinging anemones and purple bursts of spiny sea urchins. Her fingers touched an urchin’s stiff bristles and I watched inert plant spines move, animate, and reach for my mother, feeling for her shape and intent. She wanted me to touch it too, but I was afraid. It amazed me to see the white flesh and purple spines communicating across a gap no less enormous than deep space, a miracle in six inches of water. She touched me that way, my cheeks, my arms, and I too reached out to her.

El cielo es azul. We were on Isla Mujeres, the Island of Women. I was a little girl in a faded dress, sunburned, barefoot, hair white as dandelion floss. The streets were crushed shell where we stood in line at the tortilla shop every morning with the Mexican women. ¿Cuál es su nombre? Su hija es mas guapa, they said, Your daughter is too pretty, and touched my hair. My mother’s skin peeling like paint. Her eyes bluer than the sky, azul claw.

In a big hotel colored pink and orange, a man with a dark mustache smelled like crushed flowers. There were taxis and music, and my mother went out in embroidered dresses pulled low off the shoulders. But then he was gone, and we moved on to the Island of Women.

My mother was waiting for something there, I didn’t know what. We bought our tortillas every day, walked back to the little whitewashed bungalow with our string bag, past small houses with grated windows and the doors opened like frames. Inside were pictures on the walls, grandmothers with fans, sometimes there were books. We ate shrimp with garlic in outdoor restaurants on the beach. Camarones con ajo. Some fishermen caught a hammerhead shark and dragged it up onto the beach. It was twice the size of the little boats the fishermen used, and everyone came to the beach to look at it, to pose alongside its monstrous head, as wide as I was tall. Battalions of teeth showed in its humorless grin. I was afraid when my mother left me on the beach to swim out on the soft blue. What happened if the shark came, and the water turned red and the bones came through?

WHENEVER I WOKE, there was Demerol. Doctors in masks, nurses with soft hands. Flowers. Their smiles like nectar. There were IVs and other children, dressings and Tom and Jerry on the TV, balloons and strangers. Just tell us, just tell. Schutzstaffel. Plainclothes. How could I begin to describe Starr, with her nightgown all twisted around, unloading a .38 into my room. I preferred to think about Mexico. In Mexico the faces were weathered and soft as soap. These buzzing noises in my room were only the mosquitoes in our bungalow on the Island of Women.

ON A FULL MOON NIGHT, something moved her, and we left with only our passports and money in a belt under her dress. I threw up on the ferry. We slept on a new beach, far to the south.

The next day, she danced with a young man, Eduardo, on the rooftop, it was his hotel, all the windows were open and I could see the reef, the sea like a lens. The top floor wasn’t done yet, there were hammocks under a palm roof, and we could stay as long as we liked. We were happy in Playa del Carmen, driving with Eduardo around town in his black Volare, feeling very rich, ¡que rico!, though the town only had two paved roads and a Michoacan ice-cream stand. Painted pictures of snowcapped volcanoes. The tourist boat stopped at Playa del Carmen twice a week, bobbing five stories high like an offshore wedding cake. My mother read tarot cards in the cafe perfumed with the fat smoke of grilled polio and carnitas. I watched the man shave the stacks of meat onto tortillas with a machete. We ate well there.