not to know how much I needed her, I wanted her to promise never to go away again.
'I'm so sorry.'
'You aren't really,' I said. 'Don't pretend.'
'Astrid! What did I do, go out of town?' Her pink palms were cupped, what was she expecting, for me to fill them? With what? Water? Blood? She smoothed her satin skirt. 'It's not a crime. I'm sorry I wasn't here, okay? But it's not like I did something wrong.'
I sat down on the couch, put my feet on the coffee table among the antiques. I felt like a spoiled child, and I liked it. She shifted toward me on the couch, I could smell her perfume, green and familiar. 'Astrid, look at me. I am sorry. Why can't you believe me?'
'I don't buy magic. I'm not one of your tricks. Look, you got something to drink? I want to get really drunk,' I said.
'I was going to have a coffee and cognac, and I'll let you have a small one.'
She left me there listening to Billie Holiday sing while she made clicks and clatters in the kitchen. I didn't offer to help. In a minute, she was back with glasses, a bottle of brandy, and coffee on a tray. So perfect in every way, even the way she put the tray on the table, keeping her back straight, bending her knees.
'Look,' she said, sitting down next to me. 'Next time I'll send you a postcard, how's that. Wish you were here, love .. . Brandy.' She poured cognac into the snifters.
I drank mine down in a swallow, not even trying to savor it. It was probably five hundred years old, brought over on the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. She looked down into her glass, swirled it, smelled it, sipped.
'I'm not the world's most considerate person,' Olivia said. 'I'm not the type who sends birthday cards. But I'll try, Astrid. It's the best I can do.' She reached her hand to touch my face but couldn't bring herself to do it. The hand fell on my shoulder instead. I ignored it there.
'Oh for Christ's sake,' Olivia said, removing it, sitting back against the pillows. 'Don't sulk. You're acting just like a man.'
I looked away and caught our reflection in the mirror over the fireplace, the beauty of the room, of Olivia in her silver nightgown like mercury in moonlight. Then there was this wretched blond girl who looked like she had wandered in from another movie, her face scored with welts, her 99-cent sweatshirt, her unbrushed hair.
'I brought you something from England,' Olivia said. 'You want to see it?'
I wouldn't look at her. What, did she think presents would make it all better? But I couldn't help watching that beautiful slow walk as she went into the back of the house, silver satin trailing her like a pet dog. I poured myself some more brandy, swirled and watched the liquid separate into trails and meet in the amber pool at the bottom. The smell was fire and fruit, and it burned as it went down. I felt just the way Billie Holiday sounded, like I'd cried all I could and it wasn't enough.
She came back out with a small white box and dropped it into my lap.
'I don't want things,' I said. 'I just want to feel like someone gives a shit.'
'So you don't want it?' she teased, moving to take it away.
I opened the box marked Penhaligon, and nested in tissue was an antique perfume bottle, silver and glass with a lace-covered bulb, filled with a perfume tinged a slight pink. I set it on the table. 'Thanks.'
'No, don't be like that. Here, smell it.' She picked it up and squirted me with it, a fine mist propelled by the lace-covered bulb.
I was surprised at the scent, not at all like Ma Griffe, it smelled like small flowers that grew in leafy English woods, like a girl who would wear pinafores and pantaloons and make chains of wild daisies, a fairy-tale girl from the Victorian age.
When Olivia grinned, the charm of her overbite got to me in a way her perfection never could. 'Now, isn't that you?' I took it away from her and sprayed it over my head so the mist fell like light rain. Wash my sins away. Make me a girl who'd never seen the firestorms of September, who'd never been shot, who'd never gone down on a boy behind a bathroom in a park. A nursery-rhyme girl in a blue dress holding a pet lamb in a cottage garden. It was me, after all. I didn't know quite whether to laugh or to cry, so I poured some more brandy in my glass.
'That's enough,' she said, taking the bottle away.
The threads of my scars throbbed with alcohol. I knew it wasn't up to Olivia to love me. She did the best she could, bought me a bit of childhood in a bottle, by appointment to the Queen. 'Thanks, Olivia, really,' I said.
'That's better,' she said.
I WOKE UP the next morning painfully curled on Olivia's couch. Someone had taken my shoes off, the bottle of pink perfume still clutched in my hands. Either it was hot, or I had a fever, and a headache that beat the sides of my skull like an African drum. I slid my feet into my shoes, not tying the laces, and went looking for Olivia.
She lay on top of her bedspread in her crewel paisley canopy bed, completely passed out, still in her robe, bent legs at right angles like she was running in her dream. The clock past her pillow read eleven. I ran down the hall and hit the door.
I was halfway across Olivia's garden when Marvel came out of the turquoise house, Caitlin's Barbie car in her arms. She glanced up. Her mouth opened wide. The only color left on her face was the Autumn Flame of her hair.
If I hadn't been so hungover, something might have sprung to mind. But we stared at each other and I knew I was caught, knee-deep in rosemary and alyssum, frozen as a deer. Then it was all screaming and confusion. She ran out the gate as I took a few feeble steps back toward Olivia's. She seized me by my hair and yanked me back. Her head jerked as she smelled my breath.
'Drinking with the whore? Did you sleep with her too?' She smacked me in the face, not caring about my scars, her voice reverberating in my tenderized skull like a shot in a cave. She smacked me as she dragged me back over to the turquoise house, head, arms, anywhere she could get me. 'What were you doing over there? Is that where you spent the night? Is it? Is it?' She hit me square on the ear and the Penhaligon perfume leaped from
