I saw that I scared them. They thought my mother's daughter would be something else, something more like them. Something gentle, wide-open. That was a riot. My mother didn't scare them, but I did.
"Is that it?" I asked, holding out my hand for the magazine.
Hannah tried to straighten out the curl of the magazine on her flowered knee. My mother's face on the cover, behind chicken wire, on the phone in the seclusion room. She must have done something, usually you get to be at the picnic tables. She looked beautiful, smiling, her teeth still perfect, the only lifer at Frontera with perfect teeth, but her eyes looked weary. Contemporary Literature.
I sat down next to Julie on the splintered front steps. Hannah took a seat a step down, her dress flowing in a curve like an Isadora Duncan dance step. I opened the piece, flipped through it. My mother's gestures, flat of palm to forehead, elbow on the ledge. Head against the window, eyes downcast. We are larger than biography. "What do you talk about with her?" I asked.
"Poetry." Hannah shrugged. "What we're reading. Music, all kinds of things. She sometimes talks about something she saw on the news. Stuff you wouldn't even think twice about, but she gets some take on it that's just incredible."
The transformation of the world.
"She talks about you," Julie said.
That was a surprise. "What's she say about me?"
"That you're in a, you know. Home. She feels terrible about what's happened," Hannah said. "For you most of all."
I looked at these girls, college girls, with their fresh makeup-less faces, trusting, caring. And I felt the gap between us, all the things I wouldn't be because I was who I was. I was graduating in two months, but I wasn't going to Pitzer, that was for sure. I was the old child, the past that had to be burned away, so my mother, the phoenix, could emerge once again, a golden bird rising from ash. I tried to see my mother through their eyes. The beautiful imprisoned poetic soul, the suffering genius. Did my mother suffer? I forced myself to imagine it. She certainly suffered when Barry kicked her out of his house that day, after sleeping with her. But when she killed him, the suffering was somehow redeemed. Was she suffering now? I really couldn't say.
"So you thought you'd come out and what?" I asked. "Adopt me?"
I laughed but they didn't. I'd grown too hard, maybe I was more like my mother than I thought.
Julie gave Hannah a "told you so" look. I could see this had been the sandy girl's idea. "Yeah, well, sort of. If you wanted."
Their sincerity so unexpected, their sympathies so misplaced. "You don't think she killed him, do you," I said.
Hannah shook her head, quickly. "It's all been a terrible mistake. A nightmare. She talks all about it in the interview."
I was sure she had. She was always at her best with an audience. "Something you should know," I told her. "She did kill him."
Hannah stared at me. Julie's gaze fled to her friend. They were shocked. Julie stepped protectively toward her gauzy friend, and I felt suddenly cruel, like I'd told small children there was no tooth fairy, that it was just their mom sneaking into their room after they went to bed. But they weren't small children, they were women, they were admiring someone they didn't know the first thing about. Look at the hag Truth for once, college girl.
"That's not true," Hannah said. Shook her head, shook it again, as if she could clear my words out of it. "It isn't." She was asking me to tell her it wasn't.
"I was there," I told her. "I saw her mix up the medicine. She's not what she seems."
"She's still a great poet," Julie said.
"Yes," I say. "A killer and a poet."
Hannah played with a button on the front of her gray dress, and it popped off in her hand. She stared at it in her palm, her face stained red as beet borscht. "She must have had her reasons. Maybe he was beating her."
"He wasn't beating her," I said. I put my hands on my knees and pushed myself into a standing position. I felt suddenly very tired. Maybe there was still some stash in Niki's room.
Julie looked up at me, brown eyes serious and calm. I would have thought her more sensible than Hannah, less likely to have been taken in by my mother's spell. "Why'd she do it, then?"
"Why do people kill people who leave them?" I said. "Because they feel hurt and angry and they can't stand that feeling."
"I've felt that way," Hannah said. The lowering light of the sun was touching the curly escaped ends of her hair, making a frizzy halo around her fair head.
"But you didn't kill anyone," I said.
"I wanted to."
I looked at her, twisting the hem of her vintage dress with the small flowers, the front gapping open where the button fell off, her stomach was rosy. "Sure. Maybe you even fantasized about how you would do it. You didn't do it. There's a huge difference."
A mockingbird sang in the yucca tree next door, a spill of liquid sound.
"Maybe not so big a difference," Julie said. "Some people are just more impulsive than others."
I slapped the magazine against the leg of my jeans. They were going to justify her some way. Protect the Goddess Beauty no matter what. They are willing to forgive me anything. "Look, thanks for coming, but I have to go in."
"I wrote my number on the back of the magazine," Hannah said, rising. "Call if you, you know. Want to."
Her new children. I stood on the porch and watched them go back to their car. Julie was driving. It was a green Olds station wagon, vintage, so big it had skylights. It made a ringing sound as she drove away. I took the magazine and threw it in the trash. Trying to pass her lies off, like some elderly Salome hiding behind her veils. I could have told her children a thing or two about my mother. I could have told them they would never find the woman inside that shimmering cloth, smelling of mold and violets. There were always more veils underneath. They would have to tear them away like cobwebs, fiercely, and more would come as fast as they stripped them away. Eventually, she would spin them into her silk like flies, to digest at her leisure, and shroud her face again, a moon in a cloud.
28
NIKI TORE OFF a square of the acid and put it on my tongue, then one for her. It came on small sheets of paper printed with pink flamingos on motorcycles. We sat on the porch, looking at the wreck of the neighbor's old Riviera parked up on blocks. The weather was heating up, hazing over, tepid as bathwater, moist as a wet sock. I felt nothing at all. "Maybe we should take another one." If I was going to do it, I wanted to make sure I'd get off. Yvonne thought we were crazy to mess with our heads this way, but I was just crazy enough now. Susan D. Valeris had called me three times already. I stopped answering the phone, told Rena to hang up on anyone asking for me.
"It takes a while," Niki said. "You'll know when it happens. Believe me, you won't sleep through it."
Nothing happened for almost an hour, I was sure the stuff was no good, but then it came on, all at once, like an elevator. Niki laughed and waved her hand in front of my face, the fingers leaving trails behind them. "High enough now?"
My skin felt hot and prickly, like I'd broken out in a rash, but my skin looked the same. It was the sky that had suddenly changed. It had gone blank. Blank as a cataract, an enormous white eye. I felt anxious under that terrible empty sky. It was as if God had gone senile and blind. Maybe he did not want to see anymore. That made sense. All around us, everything was the way it usually was, only unbearably so. I tried never to think about how ugly it was here. I tried to find the one beautiful thing.
But on this drug, I found I couldn't shut it out, focus down. It was terrifying. I was overwhelmed by the sordid and abandoned, growing like a hellish garden, the splintered step, the four dead cars in the neighbor's weedy lot, rusting back to earth, the iron fence of the prop outlet topped with razor wire, the broken glass in the street. It occurred to me that we lived exactly at the bottom of L.A., the place where people dumped stolen cars and set them on fire. The place where everything drifting came to rest. I felt sick, my skin burned. There was a metal taste in my mouth as if I'd chewed foil. In the street, I noticed a dead bird, smashed flat, surrounded by its soft feathers.
I was afraid to tell Niki I was scared, it occurred to me if I named it, I might start screaming. I might never stop.
The whole world had been reduced to this, lifeless debris. And we were just more of the city's detritus, like the bird, the abandoned shopping carts, the wrecked Riviera. I could feel the hum of the high power lines, the insidious radiation mutating our cells. Nobody cared about the people down here. We were at the end of civilization, where it had given up out of senility and exhaustion. And we were what was left, Niki and I, like cockroaches after the end of the world, scuttling through the ruins, fighting over scraps of the dead corpse. Like my dream of my mother's melted face. I was afraid to ask if my face was melting. I didn't want to call attention to it.
"You okay?" Niki had hold of a handful of my hair at the nape of my neck, pulled gently.
I shook my head, infinitesimally, I couldn't even be sure whether I had done it or just thought I had. I was afraid to do more.
"Don't worry," she said. "You're just coming on."
She was turning into a jack-in-the-box, a Raggedy Ann. I had to hold on to the fact that I knew her, it was only a trick of my mind. This was Niki, I kept telling myself. I knew her. Abandoned at six by her mother at a Thrifty drugstore in Alhambra, Niki always counted the house, assessed the odds, worked out percentages. I liked to watch her when she was getting ready for work, with her starched Bavarian waitress costume on, looking like Heidi in a Warhol film. Even if I did not recognize her, I knew her. I had to hang on to that.
I was sweating, cracking up like the decades-old paving job in the smeared linoleum sun.
"Can we get out of here?" I whispered, trembling, nauseated. "I hate this. I mean, really."
"Just tell me where," she said. Her eyes looked strange, black and buttony, like a doll's.