Chloe Doe (14 page)

“What kind of dressing?”

“What kind would her royal highness like today?”

I look over the counter. I already know it’s Graciela because her English is too perfect and wrapped up in a thick Mexican accent, but her voice is so strong I don’t know if she’s smiling unless I see it.

“Congratulations,” she says. “You’re doing something right.”

I haven’t missed therapy once since my second month here, when I pretended to have the twenty-four-hour flu that lasted two weeks. I went down to zero in points and it took three weeks to get a bar of soap.

I’ve been here, at Madeline Parker, four months now. I have a brush, shampoo
and
conditioner, and library privileges.

“Thanks.” Graciela is motherly. Her smile falls on me like a blanket, wraps me up, and lasts long enough I’m feeling smothered. “Do you have Ranch today?”

“For you, of course.” She puts the chicken and salad on my tray, a big squirt of dressing into a plastic cup beside it, and then drops a slice of watermelon in the empty space. I stare at it for a long time, my hands sweating.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“I haven’t had watermelon . . .” since I sat at the kitchen table with Camille and we argued over whose lips looked more like a slice of watermelon, pink and happy.

We bought watermelon-flavored lip gloss at the drugstore that morning but had to share it. It was one of our mother’s good days; she bought eye shadow for herself and later took me and Camille to the outlet stores for one dress each. The school year started weeks before, but there was no money then for clothes.

Graciela uses her plastic-covered hand to slip a second wedge of melon onto my tray.

“Now go. You’re making me miss my
crios.
”

I sit down at a table by myself, even though the Niña is waving at me. Girls sit in groups of two or three, leaning into the tables, talking and laughing too loud. I’m not like them. I keep to myself, but know the right words to fit in, and I use them when I need to. I am a long way from the Chloe I was meant to be, and that’s what Dr. Dearborn wants me to think about. Where was I headed before my world fell apart? Before I landed somewhere in between.

There’s a bus stop on the street I worked, in front of a pizza shop and not too far from the mall. There’s a different kind of people on the street before dark. A lot of teenagers. They go to the mall after school and buy date dresses and eat pizza before heading home. Sometimes I think about what their homes look like.

Their yards are watered and green and the light is always on in the living room, so they know they’re wanted. They have parents who call the police if they stay out too late, worried they got in a car accident. Family photos hang on the wall above the TV and cover tabletops. The kitchen smells like spaghetti, garlic, and tomatoes. I bet every girl I watched, waiting for a bus to take them back to their
castleios,
swinging plastic bags stuffed with “Kiss me” T-shirts and too-tight jeans, has her own bedroom. Posters of rock stars and pictures of the boys they love are pinned to the walls. They have a boom box and a collection of CDs they play so they can sink into another place, another time, where all their dreams come true.

I used to think like that. Before, when I had Camille and a life ahead of me. I thought I’d have a boyfriend one day, who sat on my bed after school and looked through my music collection, who picked flowers for me and held my hand. The things my father did for my mother when it was still good between them.

It feels so long ago, she seems too far away to be me. I try to hold on to that picture of her, to see what else I hoped for, what more is missing, but it grows blurry and I realize I’m about to cry. I cried a lot my first year on the street, after my stomach was full and I had a place to live. When I knew for sure there was no going back and nothing for me there anyway. And now all kinds of thoughts are swirling through my mind. What was I like? Did I want to be a doctor, an artist, a librarian? I liked school and reading. I remember that. Did I want to move to another state? Another country? Learn to speak another language? I think I might have a talent for it; I picked up the Spanish so easily.

Would I have gotten married? Had a kid?

Would I have saved my love for someone special?

These are things I will never know.

I have not held the hand of a boy.

I have not held the hand of another human being since the day I came home from school and found Camille gone. And it was the hand of a lady police officer trying to keep me from drifting away, from looking for Camille.

On Friday nights—date night—too-blond girls pushed through the doors of the pizza shop, their boys following behind them. They chewed gum, wore shirts that showed their bellies, and said nasty things that made them laugh, and they held hands.

The girls smiled like the sun was shining.

They were happy, knowing their boys wanted them.

I don’t know how to smile like that. What it would cost me to learn.

And I suppose that’s who I’d be, if things were different. A girl with a boyfriend and a smile I felt on the inside.

Mexican Border

I
n our mother’s old Nova, Camille and I take a pretend trip to the Mexican border. We want to buy bead necklaces and orange wrap skirts — cheap. We don’t have much money, only what we managed to save from our allowance. Just across the border we can buy for half price.

We’ve been once, for real, when our mother and one of her boyfriends took us on a day trip. They bought statues: a wood-carved standing Jesus in prayer, and a brown mustang rearing on his hind legs. They bought the statues from the lines of vendors by the side of the freeway and wouldn’t let us get out of the car.

This time we’re going to mingle with the natives, Camille says. We’re going to haggle for the best price.

“They’re hungry for the American dollar,” Camille says. “We’ll talk them down to a good deal for us.”

Camille is sitting on the pillows from her bed so she can see over the steering wheel. She brought her black purse that was our mother’s until last year. Inside, she has her Maybelline Wine and Roses lipstick, an empty compact with a mirror she pulls out at traffic lights to check her pretend eye makeup, and a man’s white handkerchief she says belonged to our father. She has no proof. But she won’t use it. She keeps it pressed and folded and either in her purse or in the top drawer of her dresser, where no one, not even our mother, is allowed to go.

She also brought her favorite sweater, a green fuzzy pullover with a pearl button in the back. She brought her first bra; she has only one. And her radio.

I brought two apples from the fruit bowl on our way out of the house.

This trip is sudden. Camille found me in the backyard, in our mother’s lounge chair, where I sometimes read. I have my rabbit’s foot in my pocket because I don’t go anywhere without it, and a dollar for the ice-cream man.

I found Simon sitting in a sun spot by the car and put him on the seat between us. He’s walking on the back dash now. His claws get stuck in the stereo speakers and he has to shake them free. He makes sharp, yowling cries when this happens.

“Can’t you shut that cat up?” Camille asks. “I’m trying to drive.”

“His paws are stuck.”

“Then unstick them,” she says, and heaves a breath that messes her bangs.

By the time I reach into the backseat, Simon has taken care of it himself.

Camille drives smoothly, turning the wheel with her fingertips. She learned from watching our mother.

I’m sitting in the passenger seat. Reading the map is my responsibility, although Camille says it won’t take much brain to do it.

“It’s a straight shot all the way. You just look out for police,” she says.

We don’t want to spend all our money on a speeding ticket.

Before we get to the border it starts to rain. A squall off the ocean, Camille says. She expected it. She heard the tide warnings on the radio. “If it gets much worse, we might have to pull over.”

She has the windshield wipers on high — pretend, but I can imagine them sweeping over the glass.

Camille is all scrunched up behind the wheel now. Her nose almost touches it as she leans forward and watches the pretend red taillights ahead of us. She’s very good at preventing accidents. More than once on our pretend trips she has driven off the road to avoid a bad driver. We’ve never flipped over or hit a tree, although we’ve come close.

All our trips go wrong. We never end up where we plan. Even a calm trip to the supermarket turns into a race for our lives.

“Whoever’s after us wants us dead,” Camille will say. She’ll press harder on the gas. She’ll grip the steering wheel until her knuckles are white. And she’ll shout orders at me, “Duck!” Or, if her attention is needed somewhere else, “Grab the wheel!” This, when she pretend-shoots at the car behind us.

This trip is no different.

“Will you look at that,” Camille says. “We’re being followed.”

“Where?”

“Don’t turn around! Idiot! We don’t want him to know we know,” she hisses.

“It’s that green Chevy, with the Nevada license plates. He’s been with us the last ten miles. Every time I make a lane change, he changes, too.

“Damn rain,” she mutters. She turns on the high beams. “We might have to get off.”

Every time, there’s a reason to get off the freeway. Sometimes the sky’s a dark Satan. Sometimes there’s a moon. Today, Camille says, the thunderclouds will make it hard to see two feet in front of us.

Sometimes the other car will turn off its lights and coast behind us while we drive down a dead-end street.

We should keep going, I tell her. Stay on the road until we see a gas station.

Sometimes Camille will bring up the possibility of a gas station. If we could only find a gas station, she’ll say, only to find it deserted when we pull into it. Not even the bell rings.

“Who’s scared now?” Camille says.

“I’m not scared.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Not as scared as you. I won’t cry.”

This morning Camille cried. She locked herself in our bedroom and told me to leave her alone. She played the radio, singing over Britney Spears. She had it up really loud and still I heard only her voice.

Walt got her for eating the last bit of Cheerios for breakfast. That’s what set him off, but really it was because last night Camille bit him. She kicked his shins and yelled to wake the dead. When our mother stumbled into our bedroom, Walt told her Camille had a nightmare.

This morning he chased her around the kitchen and out the front door. Mrs. Pitts was in her front yard clipping the wisteria bush.

“I hate Mrs. Pitts,” Camille said. I hate her, too.

All our high-speed chases, every shoot-out and game of chicken turn out the same. The man after us is wearing a ski mask or a Halloween costume. We can’t see his face, not until the end, after we’ve killed him and Camille takes off his mask to reveal his identity. He’s either slumped over the wheel in the driver’s seat and Camille has to use all her strength to push him back so she can peel off his ski cap and see who he is. Or he’s thrown clear of the car and lies mangled, arms and legs everywhere, according to Camille, and she rolls him over and takes off his mask and there he is: an old boyfriend of our mother’s.

We get out of the car and walk over to where the body was thrown clear.

“Look at that,” Camille says. “His arm is missing.” She scans the driveway. “You see it anywhere?”

“No.”

I let Simon out with us. I watch him walk through the grass toward the Portsmiths’ backyard.

Camille crouches down beside the body and takes a long time straightening his head. “A clown’s mask,” she says, then peels it off.

It’s Walt.

“He’s a dirty SOB,” Camille says. “I don’t like him.”

She rubs her palms like she’s trying to clean them under water.

“Now we can get our skirts,” I say.

I really want an orange wrap skirt and a string of different-color beads that tell the future. I want to keep pretending. To see how far Camille will go. Lately, our trips end after she lets her hate loose.

“I don’t care about the skirts,” Camille says.

“I do.”

“Then drive yourself.”

“I don’t know how to drive.”

She walks away and I see the backs of her legs just below the hem of her yellow sundress. Purple and blue hand marks where Walt got her.

“You need to learn. I’ll show you.”

Camille gets Simon from where he’s sitting on the edge of the Portsmiths’ yard, then gets in on the passenger side. She puts Simon on her lap and keeps him there by holding onto his scruff. He stretches his back and purrs as she pets him.

“Put the key in the ignition.” She pretends to put the car in neutral. “Now, start and we’re off.”

I make sure to steer clear of the place where we left Walt. Camille likes to run her victims over. She does this whooping like a warrior Indian.

Now she’s crying. I tell her she’s going to ruin her makeup. She’s always careful about that. She doesn’t want to look like our mother looks when she cries, like she has two black eyes.

She pulls our father’s handkerchief from her purse and wipes her face.

“It doesn’t smell like him anymore,” she says.

Fire-eater

T
he little Niña is going home. She’s no longer a harm to herself.

In group the doctors ask her about the time she jumped out her bedroom window and she says, That was a mistake. I’ll never do that again.

When they ask her, Can we trust you with an open medicine cabinet? With knives in plain view?