Chloe Doe (10 page)
We stop in front of the library and she knocks, all the gold bracelets on her arms sounding like wind chimes.
“There you go, now,” she says. She pushes the door open and nudges me through it.
“Chloe.” Dr. Dear is smiling like I’m a long-lost friend. “It’s good to see you.”
I sit down in my chair. Let my lip curl at the stink of his words.
“You want to talk about it?” he asks.
“It’s like you said,” I tell him. “Two steps forward, one back.”
“You’re slipping?” he guesses. “How?”
“Not slipping,” I say. “It feels more like being stuck in one place and not liking the scenery.”
“You want out?”
In a way. I want that place where time stops, where there’s zero gravity and I’m a floater. Except for bumping into a few things, no one’s there to bother me.
“It’s getting harder,” he says. His face is all soft with understanding, but this just makes me want to sharpen my nails on his pink-white skin, leave a mark of my own. “You’re thinking you can’t do it.”
“Something like that.”
“What does your gut tell you?”
“I haven’t been able to eat for days,” I tell him. Nothing goes down and stays. I’m a case of nerves, damned if I do and if I don’t.
“So let’s take it easy today,” he says. He won’t poke at anything real personal. We’ll leave family alone, and even the here and now, and work on the future. What do I see for myself?
Where am I going? And, please, be
realistic.
But that’s the one thing I can’t be. Reality hurts worse than possibility.
“You want me to say I’m headed nowhere.” I’m traveling a dead-end street. “Chances are, going the way I am, I’ll end up in jail.” Or dead.
He wants me to say it. He wants it bad enough he’s willing to steer me in the direction of the morgue.
“Chloe, most girls don’t last long on the street.” They don’t last.
He watches how I’m taking it. Pushes his glasses up his nose to make sure he doesn’t miss a thing.
Am I going to crack? Am I going to give him what he wants? A few tears.
None of this is new to me. He forgets I was the one out there. I saw the girls disappear like a magician’s hand trick. Only they didn’t come back. Girls like me are not pulled out of a hat or a sleeve. When we disappear we’re gone for good.
The doctor asks, “So what happens to them?”
He wants me to say they’re dead. But I won’t. He wants me to say, I know where they are. All those unmarked graves, they’re girls like me. But I can’t.
“They come here. The Hospitality Inn.”
Here is only a resting place. Here is where you collect yourself. You were one small step from falling over the edge, and then you came here. When you leave you’re ready for just about anything. Maybe you’re ready to believe.
“Where are you going, Chloe?”
“I have plans,” I tell him. “I have friends. My
cuates
are waiting for me.”
“Share your plans with me,” he says. “Where will you be a month after you’re out? Six months? A year from the day you leave Madeline Parker, where will you be?”
Have you thought about it? Have you planned ahead?
But I haven’t. Really, there’s no one waiting for me. On the street everything is temporary, even life.
I feel like I’m six feet under, that all the air has been squeezed from my lungs. My fingers curl into my palms until I feel the sting of my nails digging into my skin and I know I am alive. But that’s not what he wants. He led me here, hoping for a change in attitude. Hoping an up-close at my name on the list of the dead would bring a willingness to start new.
I don’t want to play his game today.
“I think I’ll get an apartment on the beach. Live like the rich and famous.”
“That’s expensive real estate,” he says.
He’s disappointed. Today I’m being irreverent. He uses the big word on me, thinking I don’t understand it. He skipped over the part in my file that says I’m a born genius. That in grades three through six I attended special classes. And when the state had ahold of me, I was on the honor roll.
“And flippant, too,” I agree.
Something snaps in his eyes and I see I’ve been caught. He knew all along, but he turns it into a game.
“Insolent.”
“Supercilious,” I say.
“Impudent.”
“You got a thing for I’s?”
“Exasperating.” And his eyes bug behind his glasses.
I like seeing him like this. Sometimes I get on my own nerves; I’ve never had a shrink tell me I was pressing on his.
“So, you think I’ll be dead?” I say, and I really consider this. If I haven’t thought about it, if I can’t do it myself, then someone else will.
“If you don’t start taking yourself seriously,” he says.
“And you, too, huh?”
“You take me seriously. And it scares you.”
I feel my eyes dry up with the pressure of looking at him. My hands twitch from wanting so much to move them.
“What do you have that can scare me?”
He holds out his hand, palm up, and taps it with a finger. “Your life. Do you want it?”
B
efore the sun is completely gone, the moths come out. Swarms of them. They settle on the porch lights and if they stay too long, we hear the snap-burn of their bodies. In the morning we scrape them off the glass. Last year Camille and I made a house for them out of a plastic jug and cut grass, then caught them. If you don’t let them go by morning, they die.
This year we forget about their reaction to captivity and do it all over again.
“Mr. Portsmith’s mowed his lawn,” Camille says. Mr. Portsmith’s mower doesn’t have a grass catcher. “We can go over now. He’s inside having iced tea.”
We walk over to where our yards border and scoop up handfuls of cut, brown grass. It’s been a dry year and June has hit us hard, with record temperatures and the air so sharp it chokes us going down. There’s been so little rain, the news warns us we may have to give up drinking water from our faucets. The government asks us to bathe in three inches of water and not to take showers. Our mother tells us to flush the toilet only when there’s something in there no one else would want to look at. I take that to mean every time I go. Camille says it’s only when we do number two, but she flushes every time. I hear her.
This year we take an old shoe box: Converse, black high-tops, size eleven. They belonged to one of our mother’s boyfriends. We don’t remember who. We make a bed of grass and Camille puts in red rose petals from our bushes. We use a piece of clear wrap for the lid, cut small slits in the plastic so the moths can breathe, then wander around under the streetlights.
Camille looks like a drunk, swaying and grabbing at the air.
Last year we filled the jug. We had thirty of them. They don’t light up like fireflies, or rub their legs together, singing, like grasshoppers do. They don’t beat their wings, frantic for escape. They lay quietly, one on top of another, and fall into a deep sleep.
Camille says they smothered each other. There were too many of them. Or they died from the heat of too many bodies. We went to sleep with the jug on the nightstand between our beds and the light on, and when we woke up in the morning, they were shriveled up on the bottom.
Today they’re killing the man who hurt little boys. Who dragged them off to empty fields and touched their private parts. Then he killed them.
“How?”
“He smashed their heads,” Camille says. “He strangled them with a leather belt.” Probably the one he was wearing.
“He wrapped their heads in plastic so they couldn’t breathe. He’s a real sick bastard.”
On the evening news they show groups of people holding candles in the dark. They sing hymns and stand outside the prison gates with signs that quote the Bible:
Thou Shalt Not Kill.
And signs that say
Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right.
Camille says they’re morons. “They don’t have children. Or don’t like them.”
They’ll kill him tonight at one minute after twelve. His mother will watch from behind a glass wall.
Camille has nine moths in her box. There are less of them this year because of the heat. Nothing is surviving.
Yesterday Camille and I walked to 7-Eleven for Cokes and counted thirteen dead birds along the way. The news says to watch cats and small dogs, especially. Small animals are victims of the weather. We wore socks with our tennis shoes but still felt the heat through the rubber soles.
It’s only the second week of June. School let out two days early because there were no air conditioners and the old fans just pushed hot air.
Camille says it’s so hot because hell is opening up to snatch the child-killer.
In the afternoons we lay on the floor in the living room, in front of the fan, and sing our names into the whirling blades:
C-h-l-l-o-o-e-e-e
C-a-a-m-i-l-l-l-e
The curtains are drawn and the room is shadowy. We don’t turn on the light. We’re not allowed to open the refrigerator; our mother will get us what we need, if she thinks we really need it. We have an old blue Westinghouse refrigerator and the ice cubes are melting in the tray, even with the temperature on COOLEST and us opening it only three or four times a day.
“They’re not going to make it.” Camille shakes her box and the moths open their wings. They’re slow and maybe ready to die.
Once, I killed one between my fingers; its body crumbled like ash and blew away. It was an accident.
“Let them go,” I tell her. “They’re no use to you dead.”
She puts the box on the street, between her feet, and hangs her head over them, watching their lives fade.
We’re sitting on the sidewalk, catching what little wind comes. Neighbors drive by and honk. Across the street, Mr. Shearer prunes his roses while Mrs. Shearer holds up a flashlight. Stars come out in the still-blue sky.
“Why don’t you let them go?”
“It’s natural selection,” Camille explains. “Only the strong survive.”
She wants to be a scientist.
The parents of the boys will watch, too. People from the news will record his last words, how he looks when the poison hits him, if he says he’s sorry.
Camille says her last words would be the name of the man she loves, and she’ll only kill if she has to. She’ll kill if her life is in danger, or if the man she loves is about to be murdered. But she’ll never kill someone’s baby.
He’ll struggle, Camille says. They’ll tie him down, but his body will have a mind of its own.
That’s why the parents come. Ten seconds of screaming pain will heal their broken hearts.
In the morning the moths are curled up on the bottom of the box, and Camille flushes them down the toilet. She says, “Thank you for the brief shining moments of your lives that touched mine,” as the water swirls and is swallowed up.
The night before, Camille and I stayed up past midnight. We watched the clock from our beds, where we were supposed to be sleeping. When it was twelve-oh-one Camille said, “One less devil to worry about.” But I thought the words in my mind,
Two wrongs don’t make a right.
I
’m here three months when he pulls out the big artillery.
“Do you want your mother to come for a visit?”
Like he knows who she is and exactly where to find her.
“Is the old address still good?”
Sure. I’ve been writing her letters. One every week I’ve been gone.
“Have you ever written her?”
He looks harmless today, in shoes that are almost worn-through in the soles. I tell him I have better walks than that, me, a guest of the state.
“You want to borrow a few dollars?” I ask him. Get yourself some shoes that won’t let in the rain.
He’s planning on shopping over the weekend. And thanks, but he can manage on his small county paycheck. “What was your address?” he asks again.
“I don’t remember it,” I tell him, even though I know the street name and number better than I do my birthday.
Sometimes I think about Gordo, the only man who was nice to us, who lived two doors down and painted his house the color of avocados when they’re peeled open; that next-to-the-pit color of yellow-green, because it reminded him of a small town in Mexico where his brothers still lived.
I tell him about Gordo, because he’s the only memory from that place that doesn’t draw blood.
He says I remember Gordo so well because he’s the only healthy male influence of my young life. And he wore his heart on his sleeve: people appreciate someone willing to feel his own loneliness.
Really? Every day without Camille is like walking without my shadow. I turn, thinking she’ll be right there. Wanting it so bad a couple of times I was sure I caught a glimpse of her red hair, her white, white skin, before she faded back to memory. How do I wear that?
But I don’t tell him this. Instead, I say, “Gordo and my mother were together. I saw him naked.”
He looks at me through his glasses and I stare right back at him, giving nothing away.
“Sometimes that happens,” he says. “Even in the best families.” For example, “We walk into a bathroom without knocking.” He lets that hang between us, almost like a question: Was there something more sinister going on?
