White Oleander

"Breathe," I said in her ear. "Please, Yvo

She tried to breathe, a couple of shallow inhalations, but it hurt too much. She flopped back down on the narrow bed, too tired to go on. All she could do was grip my hand and cry. And I thought of the way the baby was linked to her, as she was linked to her mother, and her mother, all the way back, inside and inside, knit into a chain of disaster that brought her to this bed, this day. And not only her. I wondered what my own inheritance was going to be.

"I wish I was dead," Yvo

THE BABY CAME four hours later. A girl, born 5:32 P.M. A Gemini. We went home the next day. Rena picked us up at the hospital's front loop. She refused to come in. We stopped at the observation window in Neonatal, but the baby was already gone. Rena wouldn't let Yvo

"Better just walk away," Rena had said. "You get attach, a loser game."

She was right, I thought, as I pushed Yvo

In the hospital driveway, Niki got out of the van, gave Yvo

I sat with her in the back on the ripped-out carseat. Yvo

I held her hand, pressed my other hand against her forehead the way she liked, and sang softly in my tuneless voice as we bounced and clattered along, heading for home. "Michelle, ma belle." The song seemed to soothe her. She rested her head against my shoulder and quietly sucked her thumb.

WEEKS WENT BY, and there was no call from Susan to let me know when I would see my mother. Now that she'd won my complicity, I heard no more about it. Not in May, not in June. I sat by the river's edge, watching the white egrets and brown wading birds fish in the current. It was my graduation day over at Marshall High School, but I saw no reason to attend. Even if she were out, my mother would never have come. Ceremonies not of her own invention didn't interest her. I would rather just let it pass quietly, like a middle-aged woman's birthday.

4The truth was, I was scared, so scared I was afraid to even mention it, like the morning I did the acid. It was a fear that could open its mouth and swallow me whole, like a hammerhead shark in five feet of water. I didn't know what happened now. I wasn't headed to Yale or art school, I was going nowhere. I was painting license plate frames, I was sleeping with a thief, he said I could move in with him anytime. Maybe I'd learn to pick locks, hijack a truck. Why should my mother have a monopoly on crime?

I sat by the water, watching it flow, and the egrets preen, their button eyes, thinking about what Mr. Delgado had said in our last class. He said the reason we studied history was to find out why things were the way they were, how we got here. He said you could do anything you wanted to people who didn't know their history. That was the way a totalitarian system worked.

Who was I, really? I was the sole occupant of my mother's totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces. I was starting to find some of them, working my way up-river, collecting a secret cache of broken memories in a shoebox. There was a swan in it, a white wooden swan with long black nares, like the swan on Claire's frosted shower doors. I sat on the swan and made tinkle for A

But who was A

And Klaus, the silhouette that was my father. We are larger than biography. Where did that leave me? I wanted to know how they met, fell in love, why they split up. Their time together was a battleground full of white stones, grass grown over the trenches, a war I lost everything in and had no way to know what happened. I wanted to know about our traveling years, why we could never go home.

I lay back on the sloped embankment and looked up. It was the best place to look at the sky. The concrete banks blocked out its fuzzy flat edges, where you saw the smog and the haze, and you just got the good part, the center, a perfect bowl of infinite blue. I let myself fall upward into that ultramarine. Not a pale, arctic morning like my mother's eyes, this blue was tender, warm, merciful, without white, pure chroma, a Raphael sky. When you didn't see the horizon, you could almost believe it was a bowl. The roundness of it hypnotized me.

I heard someone's steps coming toward me. It was Yvo

"Lie down, look at this great sky."

She lay down next to me, her hands folded across her stomach the way she did when she was pregnant, though the baby was gone. She was quiet, smaller than usual, like a leaf shrinking. A flight of pigeons raced across the rich curved surface of the sky, their wings beating white and gray in unison, like a semaphore. I wondered if they knew where they were going when they flew like that.

I squeezed her hand. It was like holding my own hand. Her lips were pouty, chapped. It was like we were floating here in the sky, cut off from future and past. Why couldn't that be enough.

A flight of pigeons should be enough. Something without a story. Maybe I should set aside my broken string of beads, my shoeboxes of memories. No matter how much I dug, it was only a story, and not enough. Why couldn't it just be a heron. No story, just a bird with long thin legs.

If I could just stop time. The river and the sky.

"You ever think of killing yourself?" Yvo

"Some people say that when you come back, you pick up just where you left off." I took Yvo

"I thought it was your graduation today, ese" she said.