He bent his head, touched her dark hair that I had brushed, ran his hand down her mauve angora sleeve. 'You can still stay,' he said. 'Don't worry about that.'
I thought it was what I'd wanted to hear. But now that he said it, I knew I'd feel better out on Sunset Boulevard with the other runaways, asleep on a piss quilt on the steps of the homeless church, eating out of the trash at Two Guys from Italy. I couldn't stay here without Claire. I could never say the lines he wanted, paint on my prettiest smile, listen for his car in the driveway. My face in the vanity mirror was sharp and jagged. He was reaching out to me, but my face was beyond reaching.
I turned away and looked out at the night and our reflection in the broken French doors: me in my silk pajamas, Ron on the bed, Claire on the pillow, bathed in the bed's lampside glow, for once utterly indifferent.
'Why couldn't you just have loved her more?' I said.
His hand dropped down. He shook his head. Nobody knew why. Nobody ever knew why.
IT TOOK LONGER to pack than when I left Amelia's. There were all the new clothes Claire gave me, the books, the little Durer rabbit. I took everything. I only had one suitcase, so I packed the rest in shopping bags. It took seven bags to pack it all. I went into the kitchen, reached into the jewelry bag, and took the aquamarine ring that was always too big for her, and her mother too. But it fit me fine.
It was almost midnight when a caseworker came in a minivan, a middle-aged white woman in jeans and pearl earrings. Joan Peeler had left DCS last year to work in development at Fox. Ron helped me carry my things out to the van. 'I'm sorry,' he said as I climbed in. He fumbled for his wallet, pressed some money on me. Two hundred-dollar bills. My mother would have thrown them in his face, but I took them.
I watched the house, the way it got smaller in the back window of the van as we drove off in the moonless night, the end of what might have been. A little Hollywood bungalow beyond the huge white trunks of the sycamores. I didn't give a damn what happened to me now.
22
MACLAREN CHILDREN'S CENTER was in a way a relief. The worst had happened. The waiting was over.
I lay in my narrow bed, low to the ground. Except for the two changes of clothes in the pressboard drawers beneath the mattress, all my things were in storage. My skin burned. I'd been de-loused and still stank of coal-tar soap. Everyone was asleep but the girls in the hall, girls who had to be watched, the suicide girls, the epileptics, the uncontrollables. It was finally quiet.
Now I found it easy to imagine my mother in her bunk at Frontera. We weren't so different after all. The same block walls, linoleum floors, the shadows of pines against the outside lights, and the sleeping shapes of my roommates under their thin thermal blankets. It was too hot in here, but I didn't open the window. Claire was dead. Who cared if it was too hot.
I stroked the furry ends of my short hair with one palm. I was glad I'd cut it off. A gang of girls jumped me twice, once in the Big Field, once coming back from the gym, because someone's boyfriend thought I was looking good. I didn't want to be pretty. I lay fingering the bruises blooming on my cheek, shading from purple to green, watching the shadows of the pines behind the curtain, dancing in the wind like Balinese shadow puppets behind a screen, moving to gamelan music.
I had gotten a call from Ron yesterday morning. He was taking her ashes back to Connecticut, and offered to pay for my ticket if I wanted to come with him. I didn't want to see Claire delivered back to her family, more people who didn't know her. I couldn't stand around like a stranger through the eulogy. She kissed me on the lips, I would have told them.
'You didn't know her at all,' I told Ron. She didn't want to be cremated, she wanted to be buried with her pearls in her mouth, a jewel over each eye. Ron never knew what she wanted, he always thought he knew best. You were supposed to watch her. He knew she was suicidal when he took me in. That's why I was hired. I was the suicide watch. Not the baby after all.
The pine shadows moved across my blanket, the wall behind me. People were just like that. We couldn't even see each other, just the shadows moving, pushed by unseen winds. What difference did it make if I was here or somewhere else. I couldn't keep her alive.
A girl out in the hall groaned. One of my roommates turned over, mumbled into her blanket. All the bad dreams. This was exactly where I belonged. For once I didn't feel out of place. Even with my mother, I was always holding my breath, waiting for something to happen, for her not to come home, for some disaster. Ron never should have trusted me with Claire. She should have gotten a little kid, someone to stay alive for. She should have realized I was a bad luck person, she should never have thought I was someone to count on. I was more like my mother than I'd ever believed. And even that thought didn't frighten me anymore.
THE NEXT DAY I met a boy in the art room, Paul Trout. He had lank hair and bad skin, and his hands moved without him. He was like me, he couldn't sit without drawing something. When I passed him on my way to the sink, I looked over his shoulder. His black pen and felt-tip drawings were like something you'd see in a comic book. Women in black leather with big breasts and high heels, brandishing guns the size of fire hoses. Men with bulging crotches and knives. Weird graffiti-like mandalas with yin-yangs and dragons, and finned cars from the fifties.
He stared at me all the time. I felt his eyes while I painted. But it didn't bother me, Paul Trout's intense, blinkless stare. It wasn't like the boys in the senior classroom, their stares like a raid, moist, groping, more than a little hostile. This was an artist's stare, attentive to detail, taking in the truth without preconceptions. It was a stare that didn't turn away when I stared back, but was startled to find itself returned.
When he came around behind me to use the wastebasket, he watched me paint. I didn't try to cover up. Let him look. It was Claire on the bed in her mauve sweater, the dark figure of Ron in the doorway. The whole thing bathed in red ambulance lights. Lots of diagonals. It was hard to paint well, the brushes were plastic, the poster paint dried fast and powdery. I mixed colors on the back of a pie pan.
'That's really good,' he said.
I didn't need him to tell me it was good. I'd been making art all my life, before I could talk, and after, when I could, but didn't choose to.
'Nobody here can paint,' he said. 'I hate jungles.'
He meant the hallways. All the hallways at Mac were painted with murals of jungles, elephants and palm trees, acres of foliage, African villages with conelike thatched huts. The rendering was naive, Rousseau with none of the menace or mystery, but it wasn't done by the kids. We weren't allowed to paint the halls. Instead, they'd
