Janet Fitch - White Oleander

AFTERWARD, I lay gazing at the patterns cast on the stained walls, the effect of the light from the street shining through our windows, the etched designs like bird feet. Next to me, Paul slept with a pillow crammed tightly over his head, product of his years in foster care, not to hear more than he had to. I slipped out from under the covers, pulled on my icy stiff jeans and a sweater, put on the fire under the kettle for a Nescafe. What I would give for a cup of Olivia’s thick black coffee, so dark it didn’t even turn pale when you put the cream in. I rolled myself a cigarette from Paul’s Drum tobacco, and waited for the water to boil.

It was three in California. I would never tell Paul how much I wanted to be there, how much I wanted to drive in a top-down Mustang with my mother along the coast in sun-warmed, sage-scented February, and pick up some sea-washed stranger with a shell strand laced around his beautiful neck. If I told Paul how much I missed L.A., he would think I was crazy. But I missed it, that poisoned place, gulag of abandoned children, archipelago of regret. I craved it even now, the hot wind smelling of creosote and laurel sumac, the rustle of eucalyptus, the nights of mismatched stars. I thought of that ruined dovecote behind the house on St. Andrew’s Place that my mother once wrote a poem about. How it bothered her the doves would not leave, though the chicken wire had long since collapsed, the two-by-fours fallen. But I understood them. It was where they belonged, shade in summer, their sad wooden flute calls. Wherever they were, they would try to get back, it was like the last piece of a puzzle that had been lost.

The kettle whistled and I made my instant coffee, stirred in some evaporated milk from a can, and gazed out at the flats opposite ours across the courtyard—the old man watching TV and drinking peppermint schnapps, a man washing dishes, a woman painting—while on the other side of the globe, California shimmered, hoarding the ragged edge of the century in a bright afternoon scented with love and murder. In the flat downstairs, the neighbors’ newborn was crying, rhythmically, a high thin chant.

I pressed my hand to the frosted pane, let the heat from my body melt the ice, leaving a perfect outline against the darkness. But I was thinking about light coming in through white curtains, the smell of ocean and sage and fresh laundry. Voices and music, a scratchy recording of Dietrich singing “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss,” rose into the sound well of the courtyard, but inside my head, I could hear the repetitive cries of a red-shouldered hawk, the faint rustle of lizards in a dry wash, a click of palms and the almost imperceptible sigh of rose petals falling. In the dark palmprint, I could see my blurred image, but also my mother’s face shimmering on a rooftop over an unknowable city, talking to the three-quarter moon. I wanted to hear what she was saying. I wanted to smell that burnt midnight again, I wanted to feel that wind. It was a secret wanting, like a song I couldn’t stop humming, or loving someone I could never have. No matter where I went, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California.