Bleeding Violet (3 page)

Rosalee smacked my hand away as though it were a fly, the key attached to her bracelet jingling angrily. “Even if you were Hannibal Lecter himself,” she said, rising to her feet with careless grace, “around here you’re nothing special.
You’re
the one who should be afraid.” She began to pace. “You know your aunt’s packing up your stuff as we speak? Says she’s either gone ship it all here or to the state hospital.”

“Tell her to ship it here.”

“Only thing’s getting shipped is
you
.” Her footsteps echoed in the empty room, exaggerating the distance between us. “You think I aim to be responsible for what would happen to you if you stay in this town?”

“You haven’t been responsible for me for sixteen years,” I said. “Why should it bother you now? It doesn’t bother me.”

“I’ll drive you to Dallas myself if I have to,” she muttered to herself, ignoring me.

“And then what? You come back here and live your life of solitary splendor? To hell with that. I don’t care if you don’t
want me—I need a mother more than you need solitude.”

Rosalee stopped pacing and looked down at me, tight-lipped. “What I
need
is to not have to chase after a bipolar-disordered kid.”

If she thought that name-calling would put me in my place, she was sadly mistaken. “I prefer manic-depressive,” I told her, “if it’s all the same to you. It’s much more explicit, don’t you think? More honest? But really, you can call me whatever you like as long as I get to stay.”

“I don’t know anything about
normal
kids, let alone …” Rosalee waved her hand at me and all my disordered glory.

“There’s nothing to know,” I told her. “All I have to do is take some pills and everything is jolly.”

“Your definition of ‘jolly’ includes assault and battery?
You put your aunt in the hospital!
”

“I haven’t taken my pills in a while,” I conceded.

Rosalee stomped to the shelf and snatched up a random handful of pill bottles. “So take ’em now.”

She took up her Easter Island stance, so I got up and got the right bottles from the shelf—lithium and Seroquel.

“What’re all these other ones for?” Rosalee asked, examining the bottles she’d picked up.

“Different things: depression, insomnia, anxiety, hyperactivity, blah, blah, blah.” I held up the lithium. “This one evens me out. And this one”—I held up the Seroquel—“makes the hallucinations go away.”

“You
hallucinate
?”

Having her undivided attention was making me giddy. “That’s why my latest shrink decided I was manic-depressive. He said it was either that or schizophrenia, and I’m way too charming and rational to be a schizophrene. His words, not mine.”

I washed down the pills with water, which I drank straight from the tap in the bathroom. When I came out, I said, “Is that better? Are you happy? Can I stay now?”

“No!”

So much for giddiness. “No it’s not better, no you’re not happy, or no I can’t stay?”

“All of the above.”

I picked up Swan from the shelf and cuddled her. She was cold and heavy and made of wood, but a girl like me had to take comfort wherever she could get it.

“Why do you want me to leave?” I said. “I’ll be eighteen in two years. All the hard work of raising me has been done.
I’m old enough to see to my own needs. You don’t have to
do
anything. What’s the big deal?”

Rosalee had hidden her arms behind her back so I wouldn’t get the idea that I could cuddle with her, too. “You wouldn’t fit in here.” She sounded desperate. “I keep telling you. A girl like you could never learn to adapt. And why would you want to? You think you’re crazy now? There’s things in this town that’d drive anybody—What the hell’s so funny?”

I could barely hear her, I was laughing so hard. “Let me get this straight: You want me to leave because you don’t think I can
adapt
?”

“I
know
you can’t.”

Was she serious?

I was biracial and bicultural—a walking billboard for adaptation. And what did she expect me to adapt to? Fishing in the crick? Baking pies from scratch? Small-town life was sure to be slow and boring, but maybe that was what I needed—Dallas sure hadn’t done me any good.

“I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “Let me stay for one month. If I can fit in, make friends, all that, then I get to stay. But if I fail, then I’ll leave, and you’ll never have to see me again.”

Rosalee was quiet a long time. “One week.”

“
Two
weeks.”

More quiet. “And you’ll go back to your aunt?”

I stroked Swan’s long, straight neck. “I didn’t say that.”

“Then say it now or no deal.”

She seemed to be blanking on the fact that Aunt Ulla didn’t want me anymore—never had, actually—but if Rosalee wanted to listen to me lie, I didn’t mind indulging her. “If I can’t fit in, I’ll go back to Aunt Ulla.”

Rosalee sighed, a step-off-the-cliff, no-hope-for-it-now kind of sigh. “Please yourself, then. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

I couldn’t believe it. Even knowing what she knew about me, she’d agreed to let me stay. “Yippee!” I waltzed Swan around the room.

Rosalee watched me dance—again as though she’d never seen anything like me—and went to the door, shaking her head.

“Good night, Momma.” The name immediately felt weird in my mouth, in my ears.

It must have sounded weird to Rosalee as well. “Don’t call me that,” she said. “I don’t even know you.”

I hadn’t thought black eyes could look icy, but Rosalee’s did. I stopped dancing and squeezed Swan against my chest. “If that’s the way you want it.”

“It is.” She left, and everything felt empty: the room, me.

She hates you
. Poppa said.
I told you she would. I told you she was unfeeling
.

I set Swan on the shelf and curtsied to her, thanking her for the dance. “She can feel plenty. She just doesn’t want to. I’ll make her feel. I’ll make her want to keep me.”

In a week?

“
Two
weeks.” I switched off the overhead light. “That’s plenty of time. I’m a likable person, aren’t I? And she
is
my mother. Her instincts will kick in.”

After sixteen years? I think her instincts died a long time ago
.

“Don’t be so gloomy, Poppa.” I scooched the pallet closer to the shelves so that Swan could better watch over me. I ditched the towel and lay naked on the pallet, pulling the chilly top blanket to my chin. “I can win her over. I know it.”

What if you can’t?

I yawned. “If I can’t, then I’ll paint the walls of her house with my blood.” A roll of thunder crashed outside and echoed beneath me along the floorboards.

“No matter what happens, one way or another, I’m here to stay.”

Thunder awakened me.

The heavy rain drilling against the window made dark wriggling shadows against the oblique ceiling. The rain echoed in the shadowy attic space and made me feel small and fragile, like a lace glove left behind on moving day—mateless and abandoned.

I shivered on the pile of blankets, waiting for Poppa to whisper to me so I’d know I wasn’t alone, but I’d silenced him when I’d taken my pills. Insanity or sanity. Poppa or loneliness. Wretched decisions I had to make every day.

Fucking manic depression.

I shuffled into the bathroom, and by the time I’d showered
the hitchhiking grit from yesterday down the drain, I’d made my choice for the day.

Sanity.

I took my pills and pulled on the lavender eyelet dress I’d made right before Poppa had died, well before I’d gone into my all-purple phase. Like every dress I made, it had princess seams that highlighted my curves, a high bodice, and a knee-length skirt. And because frustrating boys was one of my great passions, this particular dress had a row of tiny, jeweled buttons down the front that had stymied many ham-handed Romeos.

I stood at my window, watching the rain try to drown the world. Rosalee and I could still get to know each other, but we would have to spend the day inside. Surely I could convince her not to go to work today; why would she even want to? She could tell her boss to give her retroactive maternity leave or something.

Surely she wouldn’t leave me alone and spend the whole day wondering whether I was destroying her house.

I went downstairs to the kitchen, my rumbling stomach as loud as an engine in the silent house … and saw Rosalee. She was hunched over the dining table, scribbling onto a yellow sheet of paper. She raised her head when I came in.

Even in the dull rainlight, even in her tattered red sleep shirt, she was still too beautiful to look at, and so close I could smell the lingering scent of Dove on her skin. Weird knowing such an intimate thing as what soap she used after years of cluelessness.

A glass bowl of mixed fruit, mostly apples and bananas, sat on the counter separating the cooking and dining areas. A whiff of cleanser, something lemony, hung in the air.

As I grabbed a banana, she said, “Go get your pack.”

“Why?”

She went back to her scribbling. “Just do it.”

I got my empty pack, reluctantly, and went back to the kitchen.

The key on Rosalee’s bracelet jingled as she held out the sheet of notebook paper to me. “Take this.”

I took it.

Rosalee had written directions to a school called Portero High; she’d even drawn a map. I looked at her in disbelief. “You want me to go to
school
?”

“You only got two weeks to fit in. School’s the easiest place to start. Gimme that pack.”

I gave it to her as a mild case of first-day-of-school jitters struck me, an absurd sensation this late in September. The rain
had seemed so cozy a moment before, but now that I had to go out in it …

I eyed the map dubiously, then watched the perilous sweep of water—framed so beautifully in the picture window—rush along the street, and I couldn’t help but imagine myself being swept along with it … into a drainage ditch.

“You don’t expect me to walk, do you? In this storm? I could catch pneumonia.”

“I don’t mean for you to walk. There’s a bike in the garage.”

“A bike?”

I went to the back door and peered through the glass panel. Torrents of white water streamed down the driveway from the garage to the street. Waiting to capsize me and Rosalee’s alleged bike.

This had to be a test. God tested his followers, didn’t he? Cruel tests of faith and devotion? Rosalee wanted to see how far she could push me, see if she could make me snap before I won the bet.

“Here.”

Rosalee stood behind me, holding out a shiny black raincoat and a pair of galoshes.

“I don’t wear black.”

“You’re the one don’t wanna catch pneumonia.” She shoved the rain gear at me. “
Take
’em.”

I took ’em.

“You need lunch money too.” She tucked a five-dollar bill into my dress strap—like I was a stripper!—and shoved notebooks, pencils, and pens into my pack. When she was done, she zipped up the pack and turned to me. “Put on the raincoat!”

I did, feeling drunk on the attention.

“Galoshes too.”

Even when a mother’s child bashed someone on the head, that mother still wanted her child to be protected against the rain. This was what I’d been missing all my life, this motherly concern.

She gave me the pack, then shooed me out the back door. I stepped out into an almost cool breeze. Thunderclouds had hijacked the whole of the sky; heavy rain obscured the morning air like fog.

“Do you want me to be home by a certain time?” I asked as Rosalee peeked her head out the door to watch the sky.

“I don’t care if you ever come back,” she said, her voice almost lost beneath the thunderous rain. “I hope to God you don’t.”

Rosalee slammed the door and locked me out in the storm.

I’d arrived at the school so early, I hadn’t expected to see any kids, but they swarmed the pale blue corridors—every single one dressed in black, as though a goth had written the dress code.

Country goths? Whoever heard of such a thing?

The kids at Portero High weren’t as diverse as they’d been at my old school but were more diverse than I’d expected. A peppering of brown, black, and even yellow spiced up the sea of white faces. But no matter the color, the expression on each face was the same: watchful.

They silenced as I went squeaking by in Rosalee’s horrid galoshes—and didn’t I feel ridiculous, like a clown squeezing a
stupid, oversize horn at a funeral—so I made a point to smile and wave at everyone I passed.

No one smiled or waved back.

But I refused to let it shake me. I had plenty of time to make friends.

I found the administration office almost right away, but when I stepped inside, I had to resist the urge to step right back out. The feeling that I’d walked into someone’s funeral intensified.

Behind the huge counter bisecting the office, a huddle of black-clad people stood weeping around a life-size glass statue. The man’s arms were outstretched, his see-through palms flat against a long stretch of window that wasn’t nearly as crystal clear as he was. Numerous bloodlike, gelatinous stains pinwheeled hypnotically at either end of the long window, like two giants outside the school had blown their brains out against the glass. But even as I watched, the stains vanished from the window, as though the rain were washing them away.

I decided to ignore the stains—probably all in my head anyway, no thanks to my stupid, useless medication—and concentrate on the statue, which made me feel somewhat at home.
During ski holidays in Finland, Poppa and I had often stayed at a hotel made wholly of snow and full of whimsical ice sculptures similar to the glass statue—a charming absurdity no one here seemed to appreciate.

“How could he have forgotten his earplugs?” said one of the weepers, a short, round woman with mascara trails on her cheeks. “It’s such a transy move.”

The trio of office workers petted the statue as they sobbed, stroking it as if to console it. The uselessness of the gesture reminded me of how I’d held on to Poppa’s hand all night after he’d died, as though my touch had made him less afraid to be dead.