porch, that I would be the one to ruin his life the way Starr crushed his model in the living room. I stepped on it running to meet Ray.
MY MOTHER SENT me her poem 'For Astrid, Who Will Live After All.' There were a couple of lines I couldn't get out of my head:
It was worse than I told you so. I didn't want to believe it. I was still a girl, only fourteen. I could still be saved, couldn't I? Redeemed. I could live a different life, I would go and sin no more. I scowled when the physical therapist flirted with me, a lean young man, kind, handsome. It took half the day to walk up and down the corridor. They moved me from Demerol to oral Percodan.
IF I HAD had anywhere to go to, I could have been released after two weeks, but as it was, I recuperated on the county dollar until I could walk with a cane and the bandages came off. Then I was given a new placement, sent off with a thirty-day prescription for Percodan and my mother's letters and books, the wooden box, and a lost boy's poster of animal turds.
10
THE AIR IN VAN NUYS was thicker than in Sunland-Tujunga. It was a kingdom of strip malls and boulevards a quarter-mile across, neighborhoods of ground-hugging tracts dwarfed by full-growth peppers and sweet gums fifty feet high. It looked hopeful, until I saw a house down the street, and prayed, please Jesus, don't let it be the turquoise one with the yard paved in blacktop behind the chain-link fence.
The social worker parked in front of it. I stared. It was the color of a tropical lagoon on a postcard thirty years out of date, a Gauguin syphilitic nightmare. It was the gap in the chain of deciduous trees that cradled every other house on the block, defiantly ugly in its nakedness.
The bubble-glass door was also turquoise, and the foster mother was a wide, hard-faced blond woman who held a dumbfounded toddler on her hip. A little boy stuck his tongue out at me from behind his mother. She glanced at my metal hospital cane, narrowed her small eyes. 'You didn't say she was lame.'
The caseworker shrugged her narrow shoulders. I was glad I was high on Percodan, or I might have cried.
Marvel Turlock led us through her living room dominated by a television set the size of Arizona, where a talk show hostess admonished a huge bearded man with a tattoo, and down a long hall to my new room, a made-over laundry porch with navy-and-green-striped curtains and a ripcord spread on the narrow roll-away bed. The little boy tugged at her oversized shirt and whined, like music played on a saw.
Back in the TV room, the caseworker spread her papers on the coffee table, ready to bare the details of my life to this hard-faced woman, who told me to take Justin out to play in the backyard in a voice that was used to telling girls what to do.
The paved backyard was thick with heat and littered with enough toys for a preschool. I saw a cat bury something in the sandbox, run away. I didn't do anything about it. Justin roared around on his Big Wheel trike, smashing into the playhouse every round or two. I hoped he would decide to make a few mud pies. Mmm.
After a while, the toddler came out, a little blond girl with large, transparent blue eyes. She didn't know how much I feared the color turquoise, that I wanted to vomit thinking of her mother reading my file. If only I could have stayed in the hospital, with a steady Demerol drip. The baby headed for the sandbox. I wanted not to care, but found myself getting up, scooping out the catshit with a pail, throwing it over the fence.
ED AND MARVEL Turlock were my first real family. We ate chicken with our hands, sucking barbecue sauce off our fingers as if forks had not yet been invented. Ed was tall and red-faced, quiet, with sandy hair going bald. He worked in the paint department of Home Depot. It didn't surprise me to learn they got the turquoise paint at cost. We watched TV all through the meal and everybody talked and nobody listened, and I thought about Ray, and Starr, and the last time I saw Davey. Boulders and green paloverde, red-shouldered hawks. The beauty of stones, the river in flood, the stillness. My longing seesawed with hot prickling shame. Fourteen, and I'd already destroyed something I could never repair. I deserved this.
I finished out the ninth grade at Madison Junior High, limping from class to class on my cane. My fractured hip was mending, but it was the slowest thing to heal. My shoulder was already functional, and even the chest wound that cracked my rib had stopped burning every time I straightened or bent. But the hip was slow. I was always late to class. My days passed in a haze of Percodan. Bells and desks, shuffling to the next class. The teachers' mouths opened and butterflies burst out, too fast to capture. I liked the shifting colors of groups on the courtyard, but could not distinguish one student from the next. They were too young and undamaged, sure of themselves. To them, pain was a country they had heard of, maybe watched a show about on TV, but one whose stamp had not yet been made in their passports. Where could I find a place where my world connected to theirs?
IT WASN'T LONG before my role in the turquoise house was revealed to me: babysitter, pot scrubber, laundry maid, beautician. This last I dreaded the most. Marvel would sit in the bathroom like a toad under a rock, calling for me just the way Justin called for her, relentlessly. I tried to escape by thinking of gamelan orchestras, creatures in tide pools, even the shape of the curtains, navy and green, noticing how the stripes created the curtain by the way they flowed or broke. I thought there was a meaning there, but she kept calling.
'Astrid! Damn it, where is that girl?'
There was no point in pretending, she 'd keep calling until I came, exaggerating my limp like a servant in a horror movie.
Her face was red when I got there, hands on her wide hips. 'Where the hell have you been?'
I never answered, just turned on the water, tested the temperature.
'Not too hot,' she reminded me. 'I've got a sensitive scalp.'
I made sure it felt a little cold to me, because the Percodan I was doing around the clock made it hard to sense temperature. She knelt on the rug and stuck her head under the faucet and I washed her hair, stiff with dirt and hair spray. Her roots needed touching up. She went for a blond shade that on the package looked like soft butter gold, but on her more closely resembled the yellow shredded cellophane lining kids' Easter baskets.
I worked in a conditioner that smelled of rancid fat, rinsed, and sat her on the stool she 'd dragged in from
