Operation Oleander (9780547534213) (7 page)

And so we hadn't.

Now I can hear a faint gurgle of water from the fountain.

That, and digging.

In the sunny part of the yard, Meriwether and I had helped Mrs. Scott plant day lilies in every color and variety. Bright yellow, scarlet with lemon stripes down their centers, salmon pink ones with petals dusted in diamonds. Single and double petals, straight-edged and fringed ones. Like she had, I loved them all—not for their scent, because these didn't have much. But for the way the flowers opened in the morning when the sun came out and then closed up at night. I told Mrs. Scott it was so they could dream. I'd turned red when I said that, when we stood out in the yard, hot and sweaty after planting a new grouping, because it had seemed silly when I said it out loud. But Mrs. Scott said she'd always think of day lilies that way. That they dream like we do.

This past year the day lilies have filled in. They've grown tall and thick. Flowered stalks reach for the sky.

In the middle of them, Meriwether kneels.

With a shovel in her hand.

“Meriwether?”

She jerks around. Her T-shirt's soaked through, and tendrils of her hair have escaped her ponytail clip. They curl against her damp neck and upper arms, like swirls of grass after a heavy rain.

“Go away,” she says.

The shovel is caked with dirt. Clumps of day lilies, wilting, lie on their sides on the lawn. Ripped like weeds from the earth.

“Stop!” She's tearing them up. Destroying her mother's garden. “What are you doing? Don't kill them.”

When I say the word “kill,” Meriwether drops the clump from her hands. She puts a dirty hand to her forehead as if she has a headache.

The word “kill” echoes back and forth between us.

I cover my mouth, not trusting the right words to come out.

“I'm not killing them. I'm transplanting them.” Meriwether says each word with force, as if I'm an idiot.

“Oh,” I say. “Sorry, it just looked . . .”

Meriwether sits back. She sprays some water from the hose onto the exposed roots.

“Where?” I ask.

“South Carolina. Maybe. Whenever we leave, I'm not abandoning these flowers. Mom loved them.”

“What's in South Carolina?” I should know, but I can't remember.

“My grandparents.” Meriwether's almost yelling at me. “They live in Charleston. Remember?”

That's right. Mrs. Scott had talked about the salt marshes and the herons of the low country, the red-winged blackbirds that nested in the marshes.

“I'm sorry, Meriwether.” I stand a few feet from her, and I don't know what to do. Best friends hug each other, don't they? Best friends know without saying anything what to do. “You're coming back, right?”

My question hangs there. Meriwether looks away. She digs out another clump of day lilies and lays them in the shade. She sprays them with water.

“I can help you,” I say.

“I don't want your help.”

She says it like she's mad at me.

“Are you moving?” I ask. “Is that why?”

“Yes, we're moving. Dad says he can't stay here.”

“When?”

“A few weeks. As soon as they can schedule the movers. But tomorrow night we're flying to Dover. We'll be back. For the funeral.” Meriwether stabs the shovel into the soft ground where the hose has dripped.

I reach for the hose. “I can help. Really. Please.” I need to help. I need to do something.
Please.

Meriwether pushes it away from me. “No, Jess. I don't want your help.”

“Why?”

Meriwether doesn't answer. Wiping her hands on the lawn, she stands and gathers plants into her arms, moving toward the garage.

I follow her.

“Why?”

Meriwether wraps the roots in burlap and stashes them in a bucket. She stomps into the house, leaving a track of muddy footprints. Mrs. Scott would make her take off her dirty shoes by the back door and use the hose to rinse them off.

“Meriwether.”

It's as if she's gone deaf.

She steps into the kitchen. The light comes in the window and makes the azure tiles glow like the gulf. “Not blue,” Mrs. Scott said. “Azure.” It's a word that conjures up Greek islands and tropical drinks. “Virgin drinks, of course,” she'd say, and laugh, as if it were a joke. A joke that she told when they had company. Whenever her mother would say “virgin,” Meriwether exhaled in a puff of embarrassment.

Meriwether washes her hands in the sink. Trickles of dirty water drip along the counter. I ache to wipe them away like the rings from yesterday's coffee cups at home.

Everything in the house reminds me of Mrs. Scott, and I don't know how Meriwether stands it. I'd be half-crazy.

Maybe that's what's wrong.

Meriwether's shut everything out. Become like a zombie because it's too hard otherwise. She brushes past me, moving her shoulder in an exaggerated way, as if to show she won't touch me. Her room is down the hall.

“Meriwether—” I reach for her.

“Don't.” Meriwether jerks back. She retreats into her room. On the bed, her back against the wall, she barricades herself with pillows. I stand at the door. That's another thing I always loved about Meriwether's house—enough throw pillows to stack to the ceiling. In all colors. Some striped, some polka dotted. A riot of color, as if Mrs. Scott's day lily garden had been transplanted indoors.

“I called as soon as—I mean, I called. Last night. I wanted to tell you in person. I'm so sorry,” I say. “What can I do to help?”

“Do?” Meriwether's red-rimmed eyes squint. “You can't do anything.”

“Why don't we go outside? Walk to the beach?” I can't stand it in the house anymore. Everything reminds me of Mrs. Scott, and I can't breathe. Because I love her too.

On the beach, I can breathe, and I can cry and taste the salt on my cheeks as though it's just ocean spray.

“The beach?” Meriwether's voice accuses me, as if I've suggested we put on bikinis and go to a party.

“I'm really sorry.”

“You should be.” Meriwether grabs another pillow, pressing it against her stomach as if to hold herself together.

I touch the door to steady myself. The floor moves underneath me like the deck of a boat.

“If it weren't for you, my mom wouldn't have been at that stupid orphanage in the first place. I didn't even want to help you. Remember?” Meriwether flings words at me like acid spray.

I nod the way a marionette does when a puppeteer yanks a string. The
orphanage.
The way she says it stabs me. Meriwether's face is blotchy.

“Every day since school's been out, I've gotten up to sit at that stupid booth with you and ask people for money for school supplies. I don't even like mornings. My mom couldn't believe I was getting up. She told me she thought it was
great.
That maybe I was finally an army brat after all.”

My brain feels thick as felt.

“And you know what else?”

Now I am the one unable to talk. Unsure of what comes next. I am sinking, pulled down by undertow in the gulf, and there's no lifeguard on duty to save me. I see myself sucked farther down and away from shore. I can't fight it.

“I never said this before because I didn't want to hurt your feelings. But oleander, Jess? That's the stupidest name I ever heard of. Oleander is poisonous. Don't you know that?”

I nodded. Every summer the local news carries stories about people who poison themselves accidentally by inhaling oleander fumes from a beach bonfire. Or people who use oleander twigs to roast hot dogs. But what had drawn me was the photo of the oleander growing next to the orphanage, all the way in Afghanistan. It bonded us all together—Warda, Dad, and me. Poisonous, yes, but in its own way, oleander is beautiful, and it grows in places that more delicate plants can't.

“You knew and you wanted to use the name anyway?”

“Yes, I—”

“Just go. Get out.”

Her words pummel my body.

“Okay,” I say. “I'll go. If you really want me to.” I wait, hoping Meriwether will say something else.

She just sits there, protected by her pillows.

“I didn't know this would happen. I love your mom too.” I don't tell her my dad's condition, how he might still die.

I slip out and close the door behind me. I feel my heart stabbed through like an insect pinned to a board.

Outside, my eyes blurry, I walk past the flower beds. Where Meriwether removed the day lilies, a bare spot of earth lies exposed, a gaping wound.

T
HIS TIME
of the day, heat builds over land. Later, an afternoon thunderstorm will crackle, and rain will pour down out of the sky as if a dam holding it back has given way. But right now it's just hot and sticky, and the sunlight hurts my eyes. I walk to the beach anyway.

Away from Meriwether's house. Away from the pond with its two frightened goldfish and the flower bed that looks like a war zone. And my best friend who says her mother wouldn't have been at the orphanage that morning except for me.

When the news of the bombing broke, I only thought about Dad. It hadn't come to my mind that Meriwether's mother might be hurt, or that others I knew would be killed.

No, it was Dad and the orphanage I thought about first. And Warda. And, if she's alive, whether her eyes now hold more pain in them than I'd already seen in the photos. The newscasters don't report on the orphanage. Maybe they think there's no story in that here.

I follow the beach road until it curves like the scar created by the water. Then I slip off my flip-flops and run onto the sand, toward the gulf. The whiteness of the sun reflecting off the beach burns my eyes.

Because of Operation Oleander.

Everything is whiteness. Hot whiteness.

I dash toward the surf, but I don't dive in.
Don't swim alone,
my dad's voice reminds me. Instead I run through the surf, kicking up water and sand. Water courses down my legs. One wave surges toward me, and water splashes up to my thighs. The edges of my shorts turn damp. Later they'll dry stiff from all the salt water.

This morning there's no one here except for one old man. He wears a faded green army cap and fishes in the surf. I've seen him before. I think he's retired. He's so dark and wrinkled that it's as if he's turned to seaweed that washes up on the sand at high tide.

The sun's overhead. I keep running. My feet push off. Digging into the wet sand, trying to release myself, tugging against the wet sand pulling me down, holding me back.

I fight. Push harder. Run faster.

And then I am finally flying, tripping, and soaring until I dive into the water.

When you're in it, water has a sound of its own. I am underneath, and it washes over me. Close my eyes because it stings. But I hear the gush of it, the gurgle all around me, almost as if the gulf is breathing. I listen to it gather and swell toward land.

I hold my breath until my chest aches.

Then I bellow out of the water like a breaching whale, gasping for air.

Beyond the point, the old man who's fishing raises his hat to wave at me. He's checking on me. He must think I'm crazy or drowning.

I am both.

In the water, no one can see my tears.

In the water, I am not even sure I am crying.

I wave back once and trudge out of the surf so he doesn't think I need rescuing. Water streams down my face and my neck, into the folds of my T-shirt, my shorts. I squeeze out my hair and find my flip-flops in the white, hot sand.

 

By the time I get home, I am half-dry and my skin itches with salt.

In the time I've been gone, someone has tied red, white, and blue ribbons to the front porch of our house. A couple of smaller ribbons trim the branches of the gardenia like ornaments.

For the first time, our house appears different from others on the block. It looks marked. Like Meriwether's house.

“There you are,” Mrs. Johnson says when I squish into the kitchen. She's holding the lid of a casserole dish, and steam billows out into the air like a cloud from a genie's lamp. Steam fogs the window and her glasses. She sets the lid down. “You didn't drown—that's obvious. What did you do?”

At least she didn't ream me out the way Dad would have.

“I went to Meriwether's house.”

Her eyebrows wrinkle. “She doesn't have a pool.”

“I went to the beach. After.” I take a deep breath. “I had to take a walk.” I hold in my stomach as if she might scold me. Or drill me like a master sergeant for details about what happened with Meriwether.

She just nods.

“Look. Some women from the auxiliary dropped by with food for dinner. People are starting to hear about your dad, and your mom over in Germany. This is beef stroganoff. Enough sour cream to clog my arteries, but it sure smells good.”

I breathe in, but the baked noodles don't smell like anything. My nose still holds the sea and the scent of gardenias.

“Isn't that nice of them?” Mrs. Johnson asks.

“I'm not hungry.” I don't understand why people bring food when bad things happen. I don't want to eat.

Mrs. Johnson cocks her head to one side.

“It's nice of people to reach out in ways they can. And I'm not going to let you starve. What do you think your mom would do if she comes home and you're thin as a rail? You're practically that now.”

Meriwether told me I was cheerleader thin. She meant it as a compliment. Back before deployment, I'd gone shopping for bathing suits with her and her mom. Mrs. Scott wanted to do everything to get Meriwether ready for the months she wouldn't be here. I found two suits—I only had money for one, and I had to turn over every single wrinkled dollar bill I had—but Meriwether hadn't found one that flattered her body.