Janet Fitch - White Oleander

I screamed for help. It seemed to excite them, the husky knocked me to the ground, biting the arms I’d held up to protect my face. I screamed, knowing there was no one. It was a dream I’d had before, but now there was no awakening, and I prayed to Jesus the hopeless way people pray who know there is no God.

Then—shouts in Spanish. Shoes pounded the ground. Metal clanged on bone. Teeth letting off, sharp painful barks. Snarling, whimpering, toenails scrambling on asphalt, ringing blows of a shovel. A man’s face peered into mine, pockmarked, dark with alarm. I didn’t know what he was saying, but he helped me up, put his arm around my waist, led me to his house. They had a row of china ducks on the windowsill. They were watching boxing in Spanish. His wife’s frantic hands, clean towel running red. Her husband dialed the phone.

ED DROVE ME to the emergency room, a washcloth across my face and a towel on my lap to soak up the blood from my arms. He gave me a nip of the glove compartment Jim Beam. I knew it was bad if Ed was sharing his booze. He wouldn’t come with me past the reception area of Emergency. There were limits. I wasn’t his child, after all. He took a seat on the waiting room bench and looked up at the TV bolted into the wall, Leno shaking hands with the next guest. He hadn’t missed much at all.

I was shaking as the woman filled out a chart. Then the redheaded nurse led me back. I told her it was my birthday, that I was fifteen, that Ed wasn’t my father. She squeezed my hand and had me lie down on a crisp narrow bed, then gave me a shot, something good to relax me, or maybe because it was my birthday. I didn’t tell her just how nice it felt. If you had to get mauled, at least there were drugs. She stripped off my clothes, and the shreds of cashmere made me cry.

“Don’t throw it away,” I begged. “Give it to me.”

I held the bits of my luxurious life against the good side of my face as she cleaned out the wounds, injecting a beautiful numbness. She said if it hurt, just tell her. The redheaded angel. I loved nurses and hospitals. If only I could just lie inside a wrapping of gauze and have this gentle woman care for me. Katherine Drew, her tag said.

“You’re lucky, we’ve got Dr. Singh on tonight,” Katherine Drew said. “His father was a tailor. He does custom work. He’s the best.” Her mouth smiled, but her eyes pitied me.

The doctor came in, speaking with a lilt that sounded like joking, a movie I once saw starring Peter Sellers. But Dr. Singh’s brown eyes carried the weight of all the emergencies he had ever seen, the blood, the torn flesh, the fever and gunshots, it was a wonder he could open them at all. He began to sew, starting with my face. I wondered if he was from Bombay, if he knew it was noon there right now. The needle was curved, the thread black. Nurse Drew held my hand. I almost passed out and she brought me apple juice sweet as cough syrup. She told me if they didn’t find the dogs I’d have to come back.

Whenever I came close to feeling anything, I asked for another shot. No point in trying to be brave. No Vikings here. On the ceiling of the emergency room was a poster of fish. I wanted to go down under the sea, drift in the coral and kelp, hair like seaweed, ride on a manta ray in silent flight. Come with me, Mother. She loved to swim, her hair like a fan, musical staff for a mermaid’s song. They sang on the rocks, combing their hair. Mother. . . . My tears flowed from nowhere, like a spring from a rock. All I wanted was her cool hand on my forehead. What else was there ever? Where you were, there was my home.

Thirty-two stitches later, Ed made his appearance, gray-faced, baseball cap in hand. “Can she go now? I gotta work in the morning.”

The redheaded Nurse Drew held my hand while she gave Ed Turlock instructions about cleaning my sutures with hydrogen peroxide and ordered him to bring me back in two days to check healing, then back in a week to have the stitches removed. He nodded but he wasn’t listening, explaining as he signed the papers that I was only his foster kid, it was a county health plan.

We didn’t talk on the ride back. I watched the passing signs. Pic N Save, Psychic Adviser, AA. Hair Odyssey. Fish World. If I were his daughter he would have come with me. But I didn’t want to be his daughter. I was thankful I didn’t possess a single drop of his blood. I cradled the bloody cashmere in my hands.

When we got home, Marvel was waiting in the kitchen in her dirty blue robe, hair Autumn Flame. “What the hell were you thinking?” She waved her plump hands in the air. If it hadn’t been for the bandages, she would have smacked me. “Walking around all hours of the night. What did you expect?”

I walked past her and took the first of the Vicodins, scooping water from the faucet. I went down to my room without saying a word, closed the door, and lay on my bed. In a perverse way, I was glad for the stitches, glad it would show, that there would be scars. What was the point in just being hurt on the inside? I thought of the girl with the scar tattoos at the Crenshaw group home. She was right, it should bloody well show.

SEAMS TRACED my jaw and cheek, arms and legs. Everyone at Birmingham High still stared at me, but differently, not because I was a baby hooker, but because I was a freak. I liked it better this way. Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness. Marvel wanted me to cover the weals with pancake, but I wouldn’t do it. I was torn and stitched, I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.

Olivia was still gone, her Corvette covered and silent, sprinklers coming on at eight in the morning for seven minutes exactly, lamps lighting at six P.M. by remote control. Magazines piled up on her doorstep. I left them there. I hoped it would rain on them, her sixteen-dollar Vogue .

How easy I was. Like a limpet I attached to anything, anyone who showed me the least attention. I promised myself that when she returned, I would stay away, I would learn to be alone, it was better than the disappointment when you found it out anyway. Loneliness was the human condition, I had to get used to it.

I thought about her as I sat under the bleachers with Conrad and his friends, getting stoned. Boys were easy, she was right about that. I knew what they wanted, could give it to them or not. What did she need me for, nothing. She could buy herself a Georg Jensen bangle, a Roblin vase.

AT CHRISTMASTIME, it was hot again, and smog lay thick over the Valley, like a vast headache over a defeated terrain, obscuring the mountains. Olivia was back, but I hadn’t seen her, only her discernible patterns, deliveries and men. At Marvel’s we went all out for the holidays. We dragged the green metal tree in from the garage, wound ropes of colored tinsel like bottle scrubbers around every door and window, put the plastic Frosty the Snowman on the blacktop, wired up the rooftop Santa-and-reindeer display.

Relatives came by and I wasn’t introduced, I passed around the Chex mix, the nutty cheese ball. They took pictures in groups nobody asked me to be in. I drank eggnog from the grown-ups’ punch bowl, fiery with bourbon, and went outside when I couldn’t take it anymore.

I sat out in the playhouse in the dark, smoking a Tiparillo I’d found in a pack someone had left out. I could hear the Christmas tapes Marvel played round the clock, Joey Bishop Christmas, Neil Diamond at Bethlehem. At least Starr believed in Christ. We had gone to church, visited the fluffed straw in the manger, the baby Jesus, newborn King.

Of all the red-letter events of the American sentimental calendar, my mother hated Christmas the most. I remembered the year I came home with a paper angel I made in school, with golden sparkles on tissue paper wings, and she threw it straight into the trash. Didn’t even wait until I went to bed. On Christmas Eve, she always read Yeats’s “The Second Coming”: What rough beast . . . slouches towards Bethlehem . . . We’d drink mulled wine and cast runestones. She wouldn’t come to hear me sing “O Come All Ye Faithful,” “God Rest Ye Merry,” with my class at Cheremoya Elementary. She wouldn’t drive me.