I coughed the dry hacking cough I'd had all spring, from smoking pot and the perennial mold at Rena's. I dashed down the slope to the water, squatted and touched the current with my fingertips. Cold, real. Water from mountains. I put it between my eyes, the third eye spot. Help me, River.

And what if she did get out? If she came walking up to the house on Ripple Street, if she said, "I'm back. Pack up, Astrid, we're leaving." Could I resist her? I pictured her, in the white shirt and jeans they let her change into when they arrested her. "Let's go," she said. I saw us standing on the porch at Rena's, staring at each other, but nothing beyond that.

Was she still in my bones, in my every thought?

I squatted by the water as it flowed over the tumbled rocks, thought how far must they have come to have settled in this concrete channel, the stream clear and melodious, the smell of fresh water. I didn't want to think about my mother anymore. It made me tired. I'd rather think about the way the willows and the cottonwoods and palms broke their way through the concrete, growing right out of the flood control channel, how the river struggled to reestablish itself. A little silt was carried down, settled. A seed dropped into it, sprouted. Little roots shot downward. The next thing you had trees, shrubs, birds.

My mother once wrote a poem about rivers. They were women, she wrote. Starting out .small girls, tiny streams decorated with wildflowers. Then they were torrents, gouging paths through sheer granite, flinging themselves off cliffs, fearless and irresistible. Later, they grew fat and serviceable, broad slow curves carrying commerce and sewage, but in their unconscious depths catfish gorged, grew the size of barges, and in the hundred-year storms, they rose up, forgetting the promises they made, the wedding vows, and drowned everything for miles around. Finally, they gave out, birth-emptied, malarial, into a fan of swamp that met the sea.

But this river was none of these things. It flowed serene and ignored past fences spray-painted 18th Street, Roscos, Frogtown, alive despite everything, guarding the secrets of survival. This river was a girl like me.

A makeshift tent sat on a small island in the middle of the miniature forest, its blue plastic tarp startling amid the grays and greens. The here-and-now Hiltons, Barry used to call them. I knew whose it was. A tall, thin Vietnam vet in khakis and camouflage, I'd seen him around early in the mornings, the thin thread of smoke from his small coffee-can stove. I'd seen him in front of the Spanish market on Glendale Boulevard, the boarded-up side, playing poker with his friends in the long shadows of afternoon.

Wild mustard flowered on the cracked banks, and I picked a bouquet for Yvonne. What was a weed, anyway. A plant nobody planted? A seed escaped from a traveler's coat, something that didn't belong? Was it something that grew better than what should have been there? Wasn't it just a word, weed, trailing its judgments. Useless, without value. Unwanted.

Well, anyone could buy a green Jaguar, find beauty in a Japanese screen two thousand years old. I would rather be a connoisseur of neglected rivers and flowering mustard and the flush of iridescent pink on an intersection pigeon's charcoal neck. I thought of the vet, warming dinner over a can, and the old woman feeding her pigeons in the intersection behind the Kentucky Fried Chicken. And what about the ladybug man, the blue of his eyes over gray threaded black? There were me and Yvonne, Niki and Paul Trout, maybe even Sergei or Susan D. Valeris, why not? What were any of us but a handful of weeds. Who was to say what our value was? What was the value of four Vietnam vets playing poker every afternoon in front of the Spanish market on Glendale Boulevard, making their moves with a greasy deck missing a queen and a five? Maybe the world depended on them, maybe they were the Fates, or the Graces. Cezanne would have drawn them in charcoal. Van Gogh would have painted himself among them.

BUT THAT NIGHT I dreamed the old dream again, of gray Paris streets and the maze of stone, the bricked blind windows. This time there were doors of glass with curved art nouveau handles, they were all locked. I knew I had to find my mother. It was getting dark, dark figures lurked in the cellar entrances. I rang all the buzzers to the apartments. Women came to the door, looking like her, smiling, some even called my name. But none of them was her.

I knew she was in there, I banged on the door, screamed for her to let me in. The door buzzed to admit me, but just as I pushed it in, I saw her leaving from the courtyard gate, a passenger in a small red car, wearing her curly Afghan coat and big sunglasses over her blind eyes, she was leaning back in the seat and laughing. I ran after her, crying, begging.

Yvonne shook me awake. She took my head in her lap, and her long brown hair draped over us like a shawl. Her belly was warm and firm as a bolster. Through the strands of her hair wove the colored strands of light I still saw, cast by a kid's carousel bedside lamp I'd scavenged on trash day. "We get all the bad dreams, ese," she said, stroking my wet cheek with the palm of her hand. "We got to leave some for somebody else."

30

THE MATERNITY WARD of Waite Memorial Hospital reminded me of all the schools I'd ever gone to. Sand-textured walls painted the color of old teeth, lockers in the hall, linoleum floors dark and light brown, acoustic tiles packed with string. Only the screaming up and down the halls was different. It scared me. I didn't belong here, I thought, as I followed Yvonne down the corridor. I should be going to third period, learning something distant and cerebral, safely tucked between book covers. In life, anything could happen.

I brought all the things we'd learned to use in baby class, the tennis balls, the rolled-up towels, the watch, but Yvonne didn't want to do it, puff and count, lie on the tennis balls. All she wanted was to suck on the white terry cloth and let me wipe her face with ice, sing to her in my tuneless voice. I sang songs from musicals I used to watch with Michael — Camelot, My Fair Lady. I sang to her, "Oh Shenandoah, I long to hear you," that Claire had once sung on the banks of the McKenzie. While all around us, through the curtains, women screamed in their narrow labor beds, cursing, groaning, and calling for their mothers in ten languages. It sounded like the laboratories of the Inquisition.

Rena didn't stay long. She drove us there, dropped us off, signed the papers. Whenever I started liking her, something like this happened.

"Mama," Yvonne whimpered, tears rolling down her face. She squeezed my arm as another contraction came. We'd been here for nine hours, through two shifts of nurses. My arm was bruised from hand to shoulder. "Don't leave me," she said.

"I won't." I fed her some of the ice chips they let her have. They wouldn't let her drink anything, in case she had to have anesthesia. They didn't want her puking into the mask. She puked anyway. I held the small plastic kidney-shaped pan up under her chin. The fluorescent light accused us.

The nurse looked up at the monitor, stuck her ringers up Yvonne to check her dilation. She was still eight centimeters. Ten was full dilation, and they told us over and over again there wasn't much they could do until then. Now was what they called transition, the worst time. Yvonne wore a white T-shirt and green kneesocks, face yellow and slick with sweat, her hair dirty and tangled. I wiped the stringy vomit from her lips.