Chloe Doe (15 page)

She says, I’m not thinking about dying. I have a job to do. I have a future.

She once put her hand into an open flame on the gas stove in her kitchen. She kept it there for a count of ten.

What about causing yourself unnecessary pain? they ask.

Can they trust her not to burn her arms with cigarettes?

Will she promise to eat three meals a day?

Will she look before crossing the street? Think before opening a bottle of aspirin?

She once ate fire.

She made a funnel with construction paper, soaked it with gasoline, and lit a match to it. Then she took a breath, in and out, quick.

Will she be doing this again?

No, she tells them. I’m past that. My mind is on other things. I want to make the world a better place to live in.

No pain . . . no pain . . . no pain . . .

Don’t feel . . . don’t feel . . . don’t feel . . .

That’s how she did it, put her hand in the flame from the kitchen stove and counted to ten and survived with nothing to show for it. No scars. No souvenirs.

“I listen to the words. I believe that what I’m saying is true: I feel no pain.

“Then I do it. I do it while the words are everything.

“If you don’t fear it, you’re OK. Nothing happens. But think about it, and you’re lost.”

Her hand never burned, she says. It was sore for a while. She put some Bactine on it and it was OK. Like a sunburn. But there were no blisters. No scarring. And she’s telling the truth. She holds out her hands for me to see. There are no marks of old wounds or punishments.

No one would even know about it, except her mother caught her in the act. She came into the kitchen and saw the Niña with her hand in the open flame and she screamed to bring down the house. Then she called 911, not even thinking to get the Niña away from the stove.

“It wouldn’t have been sore,” she tells me, “except she interrupted my thoughts. I lost my focus.”

It’s all in the head, she says.

There are promises the Niña must make before they’ll let her go. She’ll sign a contract. We all will. There’s no leaving unless we agree to come back, once a week for as long as it takes. We’ll get a real job. Pee in a cup. And no calling people from the past, they’re more weight than we can bear.

We leave knowing we’ll be fighters the rest of our lives.
Guerreras.
Our problems can come back, if we let them. If we’re not careful. Vigilant. So we can leave Madeline Parker, but on a leash.

The Niña will sign her contract just to get out. She’ll sign it so she can get on with her life. She’s tired of living in limbo. Of feeling like a ropewalker without a net.

Just about everyone expects us to fall. And when we do, it’s up to us alone to scrape it all back together.

“My life is set,” she says.

They have her organized. A half day of school until she feels better. One hour a week with her private therapist and an hour in group here at Madeline Parker. She’ll have family therapy with her mother. She’ll have chores to do around the house. After-school activities will have to wait. Maybe a part-time job in the summer.

We say good-bye to the Niña the night before she goes. We have a little party, with cake and music and staff telling her why they think she’ll do OK out there, why they don’t expect to see her back here anytime soon.

“Your life has new meaning,” they say. “You understand your mother and she understands you.”

In the morning the Niña packs her bags. She packs everything except her diary.

“I want you to have it,” she says. “We’re a lot alike.”

I don’t think so and I tell her this.

“But we are.” She says we’re both where we’re at in life because of a brother or a sister. “And our mothers are just the same.” She knows this because things never should have gone so far.

I start wishing I never said anything about Camille or about our mother’s boyfriends. That I’d never showed them what growing up Chloe was like. And besides, she’s wrong. It’s not Camille who got me where I am today. Not the way the Niña’s brother did her.

And one more thing, she says. “We changed our names thinking it’d change who we are.” Thinking we could have a different life.

Her doctor told her that.

“We’re running away.” With nowhere to go.

Dr. Dearborn has been after me to come up with a new last name. One that says I’m somebody. He thinks I chose Doe to make a statement. One that didn’t require an explanation. A statement I no longer need because my life is changing. I have a future.

The Niña leaves the diary on her bed. She says we’re almost sisters. I think about that. Could we be sisters? Not the way Camille and I were, but because our lives are too much alike, the markings on our bodies too much the same, this could be our bond. She could be my little sister, and maybe having one wouldn’t be so bad.

I don’t tell her I’ll think about it, but I will.

Espanto

D
r. Dearborn says there’s a moment when someone like me knows they’ve come to the end of the line. When did I decide I couldn’t do it anymore? When did I decide to leave the only home I knew? Could I tell him about that moment?

I’ve been in Madeline Parker five months now; I’ve lost track of how many times I sat in this little room, just me and my
doctor,
how many sins I’ve confessed.

“I lived a long time wishing I could leave my mother’s house.” I shrug. “I had nowhere to go.”

“When did that stop mattering?” he asks.

When was nowhere better than where I was?

“I found Camille. In the backyard.”

We’d only been back to school a month and Walt had come to our bedroom door and told Camille, No, not today. He’d started doing that toward the end, kept Camille home from school. Every time he did, Camille cried, but not that morning.

The first thing I did when I got home was look for her. She hated our house and our bedroom and I always found her outside, sometimes crying, sometimes so still she was almost invisible, sitting in the yard with Simon or with a bunch of flowers she’d gathered and plucked, holding the soft petals in her hands like she was trying to capture water.

“She was laying down.” At first, from a distance, I thought she looked like a white, white sheet that had been blown from a clothesline. “When I got close I knew why.

“I screamed. And kept screaming.”

“What was wrong with Camille?”

I ignore his question. I don’t want to say it. I’m not ready to say it. And, anyway, he already knows.

“Mrs. Pitts called the police.”

They came with an ambulance.

A fire truck. Two.

They came in pairs.

In cars with lights swirling and sirens splitting the air.

The
policía,
with their guns and badges and vests like they were walking into a war zone, came too late.

They said, Why don’t you come over here? Come with me. Come into the house.

“They made me sit on the couch. I was still holding Camille’s shoes and they took them from me.”

The police asked, Do you know where your mother is?

My mother was working.

“Do you have her phone number? At work? Do you know your mother’s telephone number?”

I stop. My chest feels tight. I don’t think I can go on.

“I can’t talk now,” I tell him.

I’m a dam about to burst.

“You’re doing fine,” he says. He leans forward, rests his elbows on his knees. It’s his all-star pose, if he was ever a player.

“You like bringing me to tears?”

“It’s my job,” the doctor says. “I want you to go farther today. I want you to give me a little more.”

He says, “Tell me what you were feeling.” On that day. “On September nineteenth.”

Like a knife was stuck in my ribs and everytime I drew a breath my lungs burned. Like I was dying from the inside out.

“Do you know the word
espanto
?”

No. He doesn’t know any Spanish.

“And you’re living in the City of Angels?”

He’s not a native. He moved here from Wisconsin to go to UCLA. He looks OK today.

“Did your wife dress you?”

“Yes,” he says. “She went shopping over the weekend. Do you like it?” He pulls on the collar of his new blue cotton shirt with the gray pearl buttons.

“You look like you’re playing dress-up cowboy.” But it’s good. “It’s better.

“Can you order a taco in Spanish? Ask for directions? Call for help?”

He says maybe he can order off a menu in Spanish.

“Well, in case you ever need it, it’s
ayuda!
If you’re ever away from home. If you venture into the
barrios.
” But the slums are no place for an innocent.

He takes off his glasses and his eyes look smaller today, deeper.

“You were afraid,” he says. On that day.

He wants me to say it, to own my feelings, and we’ve come too far for me to deny him. For me to hide.

“
Espanto,
it means terror.” My voice breaks just a little and a smile fills the lines in his face. It hits me like a sucker punch.

“Good,” he says.

“You want me scared?”

“Anything else would be a lie.”

I know he’s right, but I don’t like it. I sit real still for a minute, and think about how it feels. To be afraid. It turns the edges of my world white. Makes my heart beat too fast. My lungs burn. My eyes, too.

“Don’t stop now,” he says. We’re close. My breakthrough, he can see it just around the corner. So can I. I have to work harder to breathe, like I’m standing at the top of Everest, and I’m light-headed.

“Isn’t that enough?” I can’t make my voice more than a whisper.

But he shakes his head. There’ll be no rest for me. Not until I give it all I’ve got.

I take a minute. Until my hands stop shaking and I can look him in the eye.

“The police didn’t take him. Not right away.”

Walt walked around the house with a gun. For three days. He balanced it on his leg when he watched TV and set it beside his plate when he ate. That morning, the morning they arrested Walt, he held it to his head, above his ear, and asked us,

“How does that look? You want this to be the last picture you have of me?” We didn’t answer. “Chloe, get the camera.”

I took the picture, with him looking straight at me, with the gun against his head and his finger curled around the trigger.

He asked my mother, “Well, how does it look? You want me to do it, don’t you?”

My mother said, “Why don’t you do it? Instead of talking about it?” She got up from the table, where only Walt was eating, where I was sitting with a glass of orange juice, and she stabbed the air with her cigarette. I wished it was his heart she was slicing into. I wished the gun would go off on its own.

“Because I knew he wouldn’t do it, Doc. He was a coward.”

Walt said, “You don’t love me anymore? You don’t love me, Connie?”

My mother looked at him. Her eyes seemed deeper than the ocean. She took a drag off the cigarette, but her hand was shaking.

“You know it was an accident. I didn’t mean it to happen. You know how she got me going all the time.” His hand tightened on the gun. He pushed it against his head. “Is this what you want, then? Answer me, Connie. You better answer me. Because if you don’t love me anymore, I want to be dead.”

I finally tell Dr. Dearborn what he’s been waiting for: “He killed my sister. And my mother knew it.”

The room started spinning. I held on to the edge of the table, felt my fingertips slipping.

I remember thinking, Don’t answer him. Don’t answer him. I tried to think it hard enough that I could make her stay quiet. If she could do it, if she could let him think she didn’t love him anymore, even if she did, there would be a chance for us. I wouldn’t have to leave like I was already thinking I’d do. We could move again, like we did when Henrik left, when my father left, and start over. I wasn’t ready to give up on my mother yet.

But the meanness drained out of Walt. He was like a puppy pushing at her hand, looking for love.

“Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, God, help me.” She was crying again; her face folded up and her cigarette fell from her fingers. “Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God!”

“Are you still my wife, Connie?” Walt put a little whine in his voice, a little uncertainty. “Are we together?” His hand, holding the gun to his head, shook. “I don’t want to be here if we’re not together.”

“I’m your wife.”