Claire took a deep breath. "This doesn't look so bad."
The crows cawed aggressively in the ficus trees. It was freezing cold. I pulled my sweater down over my hands. We passed through the guard tower. Claire brought a book for my mother, Tender Is the Night. Fitzgerald, Claire's favorite, but the guards wouldn't let her bring it in. My boots set off the metal detector. I had to take them off for the guards to search. The jangle of keys, the slam of the gate, walkie-talkies, these were the sounds of visiting my mother.
We sat at a picnic table under the blue overhang. I watched the gate where my mother would come in, but Claire was looking the wrong way, toward Reception, where the new prisoners milled around or pushed brooms — they volunteered to sweep, they were so bored. Most were young, one or two over twenty-five. Their dead-looking faces wished us nothing good.
Claire shivered. She was trying to be brave. "Why are they staring at us like that?"
I opened my hand, examined the lines in the palm, my fate. Life would be hard. "Don't look at them."
It was cold, but now I was sweating, waiting for my mother. Who knew, maybe they would become friends. Maybe my mother wasn't playing a game, or not too ugly a one. Claire could keep her in postage, and she would be a nice character witness someday.
I saw my mother, waiting while the CO opened the gate. Her hair was long again, forming a pale scarf across the front of her blue dress, down one breast. She hesitated, she was as nervous as I was. So beautiful. She always surprised me with her beauty.
Even when she had just been away for a night, I'd see her and catch my breath. She was thinner than the last time I'd seen her, all the excess flesh had been burned away. Her eyes had become even brighter, I could feel them from the gate. She was very upright, muscular, and tan. She looked less like a Lorelei now, more like an assassin from Blade Runner. She strode up, smiling, but I felt the uncertainty in her hands, stiff on my shoulders. We looked into each other's eyes, and I was astonished to find that we were the same height. Her eyes were searching within me, trying to find something to recognize. They made me suddenly shy, embarrassed of my fancy clothes, even of Claire. I was ashamed of the idea that I could escape her, even of wanting to. Now she knew me. She hugged me, and held her hand out to Claire. "Welcome to Valhalla," she said, shaking Claire's hand. I tried to imagine how my mother must be feeling right then, meeting the woman I'd been living with, a woman I liked so much I hadn't written anything about her. Now my mother could see how beautiful she was, how sensitive, the child's mouth, the heart-shaped face, the delicacy of her neck, her freshly cut hair. Claire smiled with relief that my mother had made the first move. She didn't understand the nature of poisons.
My mother sat down next to me, put her hand over mine, but it wasn't so large anymore. Our hands were growing into the same shape. She saw that too, held her palm to mine. She looked older than the last time I saw her, lines etching into her tanned face, around the eyes and thin mouth. Or maybe it was just in comparison to Claire. She was spare, dense, sharp, steel to Claire's wax. I prayed to a God I didn't believe in to please let this be over soon.
"It's not at all what I thought," Claire said. "It doesn't really exist," my mother said, waving her hand in an elegant gesture. "It's an illusion."
"You said that in your poem." A new poem, in Iowa Review.
About a woman turning into a bird, the pain of the new feathers coming in. "It was exquisite."
I winced at her old-fashioned, actressy diction. I could imagine my mother mocking her later to her cellblock sisters. But I couldn't protect Claire now. It was too late. I saw that the perennial hint of irony in the corners of my mother's lips had now been etched into a permanent line, the tattoo of a gesture.
My mother crossed her legs, tanned and muscular as carved oak, bare under her blue dress, white sneakers. "My daughter says you're an actress." She wore no sweater in the cold grayness of the morning. The fog suited her, I smelled the sea on her, although we were a hundred miles from any ocean.
Claire twisted her wedding ring, it was loose on her thin ringers. "To tell you the truth, my career's a disaster. I botched my last job so badly, I'll probably never work again."
Why did she always have to tell the truth? I should have told her, certain people should always be lied to.
My mother instinctively felt for the crack in Claire's personal history, like a rock climber in fog sensing fingerholds in a cliff face. "Nerves?" she said kindly.
Claire leaned closer to my mother, eager to share confidences. "It was a nightmare," she said, and began to describe the awful day. Overhead the clouds roiled and clotted, like dysentery, and I felt sick. Claire was afraid of so many things, she only went thigh-deep into the ocean because she was afraid of being swept under. So why couldn't she feel the undertow? My mother's smile, so kind-looking. There's a riptide here, Claire. Lifeguards have had to rescue stronger swimmers than you. "They treat actors so badly," my mother said. "I've had it." Claire slid her garnet heart pendant along its chain, tucked it under her lip. "No more. Dragging myself to auditions, just to have them look at me for two seconds and decide I'm too ethnic for orange juice, too classic for TV moms."
My mother's profile sharp against the chinchilla sky. You could have drawn a straight line using the edge of her nose. "What are you, all of thirty?"
"Thirty-five next month." The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. She would be the witness from hell. She couldn't resist the urge to lie down and bare her breast to the lance. "That's why Astrid and I get along. Scorpio and Pisces understand one another." She winked at me across the table.
My mother didn't like that we understood each other, Claire and 1.1 could tell by the way she was pulling my hair. The crows cawed and flapped their dull, glossy wings. But she smiled at Claire. "Astrid and I never understood each other. Aquarius and Scorpio. She's so secretive, haven't you found that? I never knew what she was thinking."
"I wasn't thinking anything," I said.
"She opens up," Claire said cheerfully. "We talk all the time. I had her chart done. It's very well balanced. Her name is lucky too." The ease with which Claire knelt at the block, stretched her neck out, still chattering away.
"She hasn't been very lucky so far," my mother said, almost purring. "But maybe her luck is changing." Couldn't Claire smell the oleanders cooking down, the slight bitter edge of the toxin?
"We just adore her," Claire said, and for a moment I saw her as my mother saw her. Actressy, naive, ridiculous. No, I wanted to say, stop, don't judge her based on this. She doesn't audition well. You don't know her at all. Claire just kept talking, unaware of what was going on. "She's doing wonderfully well, she's on the honor roll this year. We 're trying to keep that old grade point average up." She made a half-circle gesture with her fist, a Girl Scout gesture, hearty and optimistic. The old grade point average. I was mortified and I didn't want to be. When would my mother have worked with me, hour after hour, to raise the old grade point average? I wanted to wrap Claire in a blanket the way you do with someone who's on fire, and roll her in the grass to save her.
My mother leaned toward Claire, her blue eyes snapping like blue fire. "Put a pyramid over her desk. They say it improves memory," she said with a straight face.
"My memory's fine," I said.
But Claire was intrigued. Already my mother had found a weak spot, and I was sure would soon find more. And Claire didn't realize for a moment that my mother was jerking her chain. Such innocence. "A pyramid. I hadn't thought of that. I practice feng shui, though. You know, where you put the furniture and all." Claire beamed, thinking my mother was a kindred soul, rearranging the furniture for good energy, talking to house-plants.
I wanted to change the conversation before she started talking about Mrs. Kromach and the mirrors on the roof. I wished she'd glued a mirror right to her forehead. "We live right near the big photo labs on La Brea," I interjected. "Off Willoughby."
My mother continued as if I hadn't spoken. "And your husband is even in the business. The paranormal, I mean." Those ironic commas in the corners of her mouth. "You've got the inside scoop." She stretched her arms over her head, I could imagine the little pops up and down her spine. "You should tell him, his show is very popular in here."
She rested her arm on my shoulder. I discreetly shrugged it off. I might have to be her audience, but I wasn't her coconspirator.
Claire didn't even notice. She giggled, zipping her garnet heart on its thin chain. She reminded me of the tarot card where the boy is looking up at the sun as he is about to walk off a cliff. "Actually, he thinks it's just a big joke. He doesn't believe in the supernatural."
"You'd think that would be dangerous in his line of work." My mother tapped on the orange plastic of the picnic table. I could see her mind winding out, leaping ahead. I wanted to throw something in there, stop the machine.
"I told him just that," Claire said, leaning forward, dark eyes shining. "They had a ghost that almost killed someone this fall." Then she stopped, unsure, thinking she'd made a gaffe, talking about murder in front of my mother. I could read her skin like a newspaper.
"You don't worry about him?"
Claire was grateful my mother had let her little faux pas gently slide by. She didn't see, my mother had hold of what she really wanted. "Oh, Ingrid, if you only knew. I don't think people should fool around with things they don't believe in. Ghosts are real, even if you don't believe in them."
Oh, we knew about ghosts, my mother and I. They take their revenge. But rather than admit that, my mother quoted Shakespeare. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Claire clapped her hands in delight, that someone else had quoted the Bard for a change. Ron's friends always missed her references.
My mother flicked her long hair back, draped her arm around me again. "It's like not believing in electricity just because you can't see it." Her bright blue assassin's eyes smiled at Claire. I knew what she was thinking. Can't you see what an idiot this woman is, Astrid? How could you prefer her to me?
"Absolutely," Claire said.
"I don't believe in electricity, either," I said. "Or Hamlet. He's just a construct. A figment of some writer's imagination."
My mother ignored me. "Does he have to travel a good deal, your husband? What's his name again? Ron?" She wrapped a strand of my hair around her little finger, keeping me in check.
"He's always gone," Claire admitted. "He wasn't even home for Christmas." She was playing with that garnet heart again, sliding it up and down the chain.
"It must be lonely for you," my mother said. Sadly. So sympathetic. I wished I could get up and run away, but I would never leave Claire here alone with her.
"It used to be," Claire said. "But now I have Astrid."
"Such a wonderful girl." My mother stroked the side of my face with her work-roughened finger, deliberately scraping my skin. I was a traitor. I had betrayed my master. She knew why I'd kept Claire in the background. Because I loved her, and she loved me. Because I had the family I should have had all this time, the family my mother never thought was important, could never give me. "Astrid, do you mind letting us talk for a moment alone? Some grown-up things."
I looked from her to my foster mother. Claire smiled. "Go ahead. Just for a minute." Like I was a kid who had to be encouraged to get into the sandbox. She didn't know how long a minute could be, what might happen in a minute.
I got up reluctantly and went over to the fence closest to the road, ran my fingertips over the bark of a tree. Overhead, a crow stared down at me with its soulless gaze, squawked in a voice that was almost human, as if it was trying to tell me something. "Piss off," I said. I was getting as bad as Claire, listening to birds.
I watched them, leaning toward each other over the table. My mother tanned and towheaded, in blue, Claire pale and dark, in brown. It was surreal, Claire here with my mother, at an orange picnic table at Frontera. Like a dream where I was naked and standing in line at the student store. I just forgot to get dressed. I was dreaming this, I told myself, and I could wake up.