My mother reached out and took my hand. I let her. "When I get out, I'll make it up to you," she said. "Even in two or three years, you'll still need a mother, won't you?"
She was holding my hand, she was a foot away from me. I stared at her. It was as if some alien was speaking through her. What kind of a routine was this?
"Who said you're getting out?" I said.
My mother dropped my hand, stepped back a pace. The look in her eyes faded the aquamarine to robin's egg.
"I just said I'd talk to you. I didn't say I'd do it. I've got a deal to make."
Now robin's egg turned to ash.
"What deal?" she asked, leaning against a post, her arms folded across the front of her denim dress, the very same dress she wore when I saw her last, now two shades lighter blue.
"A trade," I said. "Do you want to sit here or under the trees?"
She turned and led me to her favorite place in the visitors yard, under the white-trunked ficus trees looking out at the road, her back to Reception, the farthest point from the first lookout tower. We sat on the dry, summer-battered grass, it scored my bare legs.
She sat gracefully, her legs to one side, like a girl in a meadow. I was larger than her now, but not as graceful, not beautiful, but present, solid as a hunk of marble before it's been carved. I let her watch me in profile. I couldn't look at her while I spoke. I was not hard enough, I knew I would be thrown by her bitter surprise.
"Here's the deal," I said. "There are certain things I want to know. You tell me, and I'll do what you want me to do."
My mother picked one of the dandelions out of the grass, blew the tufts from the head. "Or what."
"Or I tell the truth and you can rot in here till you die," I said.
I heard the grass rustle as she changed her position. When I looked, she was lying on her back, examining the stem from which the plumes had been blown. "Susan can discredit your testimony any number of ways."
"You need me," I said. "You know it. Whatever she says."
"I hate this look, by the way," she said. "You're a Sunset Boulevard motel, a fifteen-dollar blow job in a parked car."
"I can look however you want," I said. "I'll wear kneesocks if you like." She was twirling the dandelion between her palms. "I'm the one who can tell them it was Barry's paranoid fixation. That he hounded you. I can say he had threatened to commit suicide, fake it to look like you did it, to punish you for leaving him." Her blurred features behind the chicken-wire glass. "I'm the one who knows how fucked up you were at Sybil Brand. When I came to see you that day, you didn't even recognize me." It still made me sick to think of it.
"If I submit to this examination." She flicked the dandelion stem away.
"Yes."
She kicked off her two-hole tennis shoes and ran her feet through the grass. She stretched her legs out in front of her and propped herself on her elbows, like she was at the beach. She gazed at her feet, tapping them together at the ball. "You used to have a certain delicacy about you. A transparency. You've become heavy, opaque."
"Who was my father?" I asked.
"A man." Watching her bare toes, clicking together.
"Klaus Anders, no middle name," I said, picking at a scab on the web of my hand. "Painter. Age forty. Born, Copenhagen, Denmark. How did you meet?"
"In Venice Beach." She was still watching her feet. "At one of those parties that last all summer long. He had the drugs."
"You looked just like brother and sister," I said.
"He was much older than I," she said. She rolled over onto her belly. "He was forty, a painter of biomorphic abstractions. It was already passe by that time." She parted the grass like short hair. "He was always passe. His ideas, his enthusiasms. Mediocre. I don't know what I saw in him."
"Don't say you don't know, that's crap," I said.
She sighed. I was making her tired. So what. "It was a long time ago, Astrid. Several lifetimes at least. I'm not the same person."
"Liar," I said. "You're exactly the same."
She was silent. I had never called her a name before.
"You're still such a child, aren't you," she said. I could tell she was struggling for composure. Another person wouldn't have been able to see it, but I could tell in the way the skin around her eyes seemed to grow thinner, her nose a millimeter more sharp. "You've taken my propaganda for truth."
"So set me straight," I said. "What was it you saw in him."
"Comfort probably. He was easy. Very physical. He made friends easily. He called everybody 'pal.'" She smiled slightly, still looking down at the grass she was parting, like going through a file. "Big and easy. He asked nothing of me."
Yes, I believed that. A man who wanted something from her would never have been attractive. It had to be her desire, her fire. "Then what?"
She plucked a handful of grass, threw it away. "Do we have to do this? It's such an old newsreel."
"I want to see it," I said.
"He painted, he got loaded more than he painted. He went to the beach. He was mediocre. There's just not much to say. It's not that he was going nowhere, it's that he'd already arrived."
"And then you got pregnant."
She cut me a killing look. "I didn't 'get pregnant,' I'll leave that for your illiterate friends. I decided I would have you. 'Decision' being the operative word." She let her hair down, shook the grass out of it. It was raw silk in the filtered light. "Whatever fantasy you might have spun for yourself, an accident you were not. A mistake, maybe, but not an accident."
A woman's mistakes . . . "Why him? Why then?"
"I needed someone, didn't I? He was handsome, good-natured. He wasn't averse to the idea. Voila."
"Did you love him?"
"I don't want to talk about love, that semantic rat's nest." She unbent her long, slim legs and stood, brushing her skirt off. She leaned against the tree trunk, one foot up on the white flesh, crossed her arms to steady herself. "We had a rather heated sexual relationship. One overlooks many things." Over her head, a woman had scratched Mona '76 in the white wood.
I looked up at her, my mother, this woman I had known and never really knew, this woman always on the verge of disappearance. I would not let her get away from me now. "You worshipped him. I read it in your journal."