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 hired some kind of children's book illustrator, some wallpaper designer. They probably thought our art would be too ugly, too upsetting. They didn't know, most of the kids would have done exactly what the hall artist did. Peaceable kingdoms in which nothing bad ever happened. Soaring eagles and playful lions and African nymphs carrying water, flowers without sexual parts.
"This is the fourth time I've been here," Paul Trout said.
It was why I'd never seen him except in the art room. If you came back on purpose, ran away from your placement, you lost your privileges, your coed nights. But I understood why they came back. It wasn't that bad here at Mac. If it weren't for the violence, the other kids, I could understand how someone could see it almost as paradise. But you couldn't have this many damaged people in one place without it becoming like any other cell-block or psych ward. They could paint the halls all they wanted, the nightmare was still real. No matter how green the lawn or bright the hallway murals or how good the art was on the twelve-foot perimeter wall, no matter how kind the cottage teams and the caseworkers were, how many celebrity barbecues they had or swimming pools they put in, it was still the last resort for children damaged in so many ways, it was miraculous we could still sit down to dinner, laugh at TV, drop into sleep.
Paul Trout wasn't the only returnee. There were lots of them. It was safer in here, there were rules and regular meals, professional care. Mac was a floor you could not fall below. I supposed the ex-cons who kept going back to prison felt the same way.
"You cut off your hair," he said. "Why'd you do that? It was pretty."
"Attracted attention," I said.
"I thought girls liked that."
I smiled, felt the bitter aftertaste in my mouth. This boy might know a lot about cruelty and waste, but he didn't know a thing about beauty. How could he? He was used to that skin, people turning away, not seeing the fire in his lucid brown eyes. I could tell, he imagined beauty, attention, would feel like love.
"Sometimes it hurts more than it helps," I said.
"You're beautiful anyway," he said, going back to his drawing. "There's not much you can do about that."
I painted Claire's dark hair, layering blue and then brown, blending in the highlights, catching the red. "It doesn't mean anything. Only to other people."
"You say that like it's nothing."
"It is." What was beauty unless you intended to use it, like a hammer, or a key? It was just something for other people to use and admire, or envy, despise. To nail their dreams onto like a picture hanger on a blank wall. And so many girls saying, use me, dream me.
"You've never been ugly." The boy looked down at his hand filling the blank spaces in a science fiction scene. "Women treat you like you're a disease they might catch. And if in a weak moment they let you touch them, they make you pay." His mouth closed, then opened to say more, but closed without saying a word. He'd said too much. His mouth turned down. "Someone like you, you wouldn't let me touch you, would you."
Where did he get the idea he was ugly? Bad skin could happen to anyone. "I don't let anyone touch me," I finally said.
I painted in the pharmacy jar of butabarbitol sodium on the rag rug by her bed, the tiny pills spilling out. Bright pink against the dark rug.
"Why not?"