White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

Someone had cut out these policemen and stuck them on our apartment. They kept looking at her, a dirty magazine. Her body like moonlight.

skin. I stuck my nose between the bindings and smelled all the readings she had given, the smell of unfiltered cigarettes and the espresso machine, beaches and incense and whispered words in the night. I could hear her voice rising from the pages. The cover curled outward like sails.

But she was in here, and I was out there. I had a friend. She wasn’t going to take him away from me.

“What are you thinking?” I asked him. “That they won’t be happy,” he said quietly. “Who?” “People who buy these houses. I’m building houses for people who won’t be happy in them.” His good face looked so sad.

They could paint the halls all they wanted, the nightmare was still real. No matter how green the lawn or bright the hallway murals or how good the art was on the twelve-foot perimeter wall, no matter how kind the cottage teams and the caseworkers were, how many celebrity barbecues they had or swimming pools they put in, it was still the last resort for children damaged in so many ways, it was miraculous we could still sit down to dinner, laugh at TV, drop into sleep.

I’d begun to think of my life as a series of Kandinsky pencil sketches, meaningless by themselves, but arranged together they would begin to form an elegant composition. I even thought I had seen the shape of the future in them. But now I had lost too many pieces. They had returned to a handful of pine needles on a forest floor, unreadable.