Clothes in the Oleander

The skirt Mom bought at Mervyn’s is sticking to the back of my thighs by the time I turn onto our street and see the first shirt. Button-down, pale blue, snagged on the oleander like someone hung it there. An ornament. A flag. Pants, one leg caught on the fence, the other hanging free in the warm dark. His good belt coiled in the ice plant, buckle glinting under the streetlight. His whole self, hung out and emptied, barely the shape of him.

I stop walking.

The upstairs light is on and I can hear the television over the neighbors’ sprinklers, which means she opened the window to throw his things out. She didn’t close it after, which means she’s not done, or she’s moved to a different kind of loud, the kind that doesn’t need windows.

I know better than to go inside when his clothes are outside. I learned it from being there, from having been a thing that was also thrown, or nearly, from seeing I was next. I learned it fast the way you learn a stove is hot, a strange dog will bite, a silence might not be a silence at all.

I look at his shirt in the oleander, pale against the dark leaves, the way it hangs almost gracefully, like laundry, like ordinary life. She planted that oleander the spring she married him, put it in herself with the gardening gloves she keeps hung on a hook in the garage. She told me its name means rose laurel in Greek, and it grows in places where nothing else will, and some things are both poisonous and beautiful.

He’s in the garage right now, on the floor, probably, too drunk to drag the camping cot down from the shelf. There’s an oil stain on the concrete out there, old and black, the shape of wings spread wide. He’ll have it on his back when he wakes up. He’ll carry it to work.

I turn around and walk the other way.

It’s past midnight, and the streets are that orange-dark, dark and bright at once. The trick is to move fast through the thirty feet of shadow between one pool of light and the next. Cars drive differently when they think no one’s watching.

The night smells of jasmine from someone’s yard and the road at this hour finally releasing salt and oil from the asphalt. I keep my eye on where the shadows are. They tell you to walk in the middle of the street, under the lights, but that’s wrong. That’s how you’re seen. I wear dark clothes for this exact reason, though if anyone asked, I’d say I just like the lack of color, and I do, but mostly I like being harder to see.

Boys. They’ll whip a Slurpee cup or beer bottle, or scream something filthy, which is best, actually; it means they’re just speeding by. I know to keep my head down, to keep moving. If they slow, if they decide to stop and assess, I hide. Time it right, the sound of tires slowing like warm breath on the back of my neck, and become invisible fast enough that the car won’t fully stop. Sometimes it does. They lean out, they call, they hoot and bang the sides of the car with open palms while I stand in wet grass behind the hedges, my breath shallow so the fog of my lungs won’t give me away like a white flag. I wait them out until they lose my scent. Until they drive away.

That’s how I don’t get caught, a girl-shaped thing alone after dark. There’s hardly a worse thing to be.

Six blocks to Renata’s, which I know the way I know the dark: by feel, by what comes next, by the gray house with the crooked porch step appearing the way it always does. The 405 is a hum behind everything.

I ring the bell. Then I text, because the bell doesn’t always work.

The door opens and it’s not Renata.

He’s older. Not old—not like a dad—but older than us, wearing a shirt for a band I don’t know and swim trunks faded from chlorine or sun, and I stand there. The rapid, automatic inventory of a teenage girl alone on a porch in the night; the way his weight is distributed, whether he’s holding anything, whether the door is positioned for opening wider or for closing.

“She’s not here,” he says.

“Oh,” I say. “Okay.”

I don’t move. I don’t know yet if I should.

“You a friend of hers?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s at her cousin’s.” He says something else, a word for what he is to her, a relationship I don’t catch, an explanation why he’s here in her house while she’s somewhere else.

Behind him, the house is warm and lit, full of the small sounds of a home at rest: a ballgame murmuring in another room, a dryer ticking over a zipper, the smell of cooking earlier that’s now just warmth. Our house has a smell, too. Burnt cinnamon and wet towels gone sour, the crackle of fights nobody won. I’ve known it my whole life. I’d know it in the dark, in a fire, at the end of the world.

He lifts the hem of his shirt to scratch his stomach, absentmindedly, not like he intends anything by it, just a man doing what men do when they’re at ease in a space and forget someone’s watching. His hand dips below his navel. Just a touch, a check. Just a relief. He’s thinking about other things.

The warmth of the house moves out over the threshold, finding the cold and trying to fill it. It reaches me where I stand.

I look past him at all that gold light. I think about Renata’s carpet, the clean dirt smell of it, the mercy of a place to sleep. I think about the shirt in the dark, so pale, how it hung like it was draped. Like a choice.

“She should be home soon,” he says, and steps back to let me in.