Chloe Doe (11 page)

I give it up. Gordo never tried to hurt me.

“You’re right,” I tell him. “It was an accident.”

“Chloe, do you want to see your mother?”

“You think I should.” But I don’t see how it’s going to help me. “It wouldn’t be a happy reunion.”

“It’s an opportunity,” he says. Some girls need to face their mothers, to look them in the eye and tell them what a bad job they did. He says once I let go of those feelings, once they’re with their rightful owner, my wounds will close, my scars will fade. Like I have an infection in my blood and the only way I’ll heal is to let the poison ooze out of me.

What he doesn’t get, is that even if he finds her, even if she comes, it won’t be to hold my hand and tell me how sorry she is. And, anyway, it’s too late for that.

“I never wrote her,” I admit, “but I called her once. I had to tell her who I was.”

“She didn’t forget you.”

“She didn’t recognize my voice.” I’d only been gone a year. “And then there was silence.” So much of it, I thought she had dropped the phone, or maybe I had given her a heart attack and she was on the floor gasping for breath. Later, I hoped that it was true. That she was so sorry she missed her chance to tell me the things I needed to hear, that she died. I believe that regret and sorrow can do that to a person.

“What did you need to hear?”

He knows this answer. He has kids of his own.

“That she was sorry?”

“That too.”

I really wanted to know that she loved me, missed me, wanted me back.

“I did all the talking. ‘Hi, Mom.’ SILENCE. ‘It’s me, Chloe.’ SILENCE. SILENCE. SILENCE. ‘Chloe.’ I hoped, with Walt gone, she was thinking clearer. I told her, ‘I want to come home.’

“She never spoke.” I cried, I asked her to say something. Say my name. What’s my name, Mom? “She hung up.”

“And that was the end of it?”

“You know I feel like a bug with a pin through my heart?” The way he looks at me nonstop.

“Too intense?”

“I feel like I can’t move.”

He tells me I can get up, walk around.

Like a fly buzzing around inside a bottle. I can’t leave. The only out comes when he twists off the cap and turns me upside down. Until then I’ll feel the air grow thinner, become weightless in my lungs. Sometimes he keeps me until I almost pass out and the world is white.

“So?” he says. “You never talked to her again?”

“Yeah, sure I did. I called back a few weeks later and told her all the things you think I need to tell her. So, you see, it’s been done. I guess I know a little about doctoring.

“I have nothing to say to her.”

I shift. The chair is tight. Feels tighter. I pull at my hospital-issued V-neck cotton shirt. Three meals and snacks, too. I never ate this good.

“You can come up with a few words.”

When I think of my mother, my heart’s a flat line.

“You feel something,” he insists. “Don’t you ever just want to scream?”

I feel like my body’s been raging for years.

He likes my analogy, that prostituting my body has really been my way of exorcising my anger. It’s self-destructive but the only way I know to keep my engine running. And my mother had self-destructive behaviors, too.

Yeah? “Like what?”

He watches me a moment, taking off his glasses and folding them into the palm of his hand.

“She had a lot of men in her life,” he points out. “Like you.”

“Not really.” The men in my life are just passing through. None stay long enough it hurts.

I am not my mother. I’m not anything like her.

I look around the room. Chairs, a bookshelf, a table with names and body parts carved into the wood. Not even a window. There’ll be no escaping today. No leaping from the flames and sprinting into the crowd.

I wait him out. I won’t look at him, won’t break the silence. I hear him move; his crossed leg comes undone and his foot hits the floor. He inches forward in his chair.

“That bothers you. A lot.”

Good work, Sherlock.

“You’re a smart girl, Chloe,” he says. “You thought about this before.”

“I’m not like my mother.” I have thought about this, and there are some important differences. For starters, the only damage I do is to myself.

“There are some differences,” he agrees.

But not many. He won’t say it because he won’t argue. Some truths, he told me, need to be realized if they’re going to be worth anything.

“So you think we’re a pair.” I have to clear my throat and his eyes go soft. I don’t want him feeling sorry for me. I put the anger I’m feeling in my eyes and lay them on him. “Like mother, like daughter.”

“I think she made it too easy for you to take to the streets. To think of it as your only choice.”

Promiscuity starts at home.

He sees a pattern. My mother’s willingness to share her body with a number of men in return for what she thought was love is similar to me paying my bills and putting food in my stomach. I can see that. There was more money when my mother had a man around, more food in the cupboards.

And I thought she didn’t teach me a thing.

“What else?” I want to know the other ways he compared us and found a match.

“She put up a good fight,” he says, “trying to ignore that what she was doing to herself, to her girls, was fatal.”

I never held another person’s life in my hands and then shook them loose.

“What did it feel like,” he wants to know, “going to your mother, asking her for help, and she turned you away?”

She needed Walt more than she needed us. “The only thing I need from the
cachas
is money. My mother couldn’t live without love.”

“Is that what she had with your stepfather?”

“She thought so.” And she believed she’d never find it again.

“Your mother loved her husband more than she did you,” he spells it out.

“Even though he was a dirtbag,” I agree.

“Even though he hurt you,” he adds. “She loved him.”

That’s right. She didn’t want to believe he hurt us, even when the truth was the only thing left in the room.

“And you felt . . .”

I wait a beat and lift my shoulders.

“You going to make this multiple choice?”

He says they have to be my words. I have to take ownership of my feelings.

“You realized your mother wasn’t going to come through. You were on your own.”

How did I feel then?

I try not to think of that moment. Every time I do it wraps around my throat, takes a bite out of me. But he’s waiting, his eyebrows perched above the silver rims of his glasses and looking like he could stay exactly where he is another day or two.

The look on her face was like being pushed off a cliff. “It was a long fall and knowing the whole way I was dying.”

He smiles real big and toothy, like a pumpkin.

“That’s good,” he says. We made progress today.

“She should have loved you better.” Just in case I didn’t know it. If no one ever said it to me before.

She should have saved me. And Camille. Think about how different my life would be then.

“And Hitler never should have happened.” So long as we’re dreaming.

“She’s the reason you’re here,” he says. “Do you see that?”

I do, but I gave him enough. He’s happy and too old to be doing cartwheels. Besides, I need to keep a little something for myself.

High Dive

T
his summer our mother is working at the city pool for extra money. Camille and I get in for free. And we get free licorice whips, we both like black, and Coke, but only one cup each. We have to wait until we’re really thirsty. Sometimes we wait until our mouths are so dry it’s hard to talk. The water in the fountain tastes like rust, like it’s been sitting there all winter, and Camille says it can probably kill you if you already have a cold or stomach flu. She learned in school that stagnant water breeds disease.

I’m eleven years old and tall enough that I can use the high dive. You have to be twelve. Camille says she’ll tell on me, but she never does. Even at thirteen she doesn’t use the high dive, because she gets dizzy on the tenth step and has to push her way back down, through the bigger kids who call her chicken and peck at her, flapping their arms.

She says I’m fearless because I’m young. But in a few years I won’t like heights or small places; I’ll be like her friend, Mary Witcher, who’s afraid of dogs and thunder and of dying in a car crash.

I know I’ll always love to dive; it’s like flying. It’s where no one can touch me.

Sometimes I think I’m a bluebird, hanging in the air, putting off for as long as I can the time when I have to return.

Even birds can’t fly forever.

I have big dreams. I’ll be a world-class diver. I’ll go to the Olympics. I can do a swan with a half twist; the lifeguard says that’s a good start.

Our father was a swimmer. Camille says he taught both of us to swim when I was three years old, which is why I don’t really remember. I only know I’ve been able to swim forever. Now I know my father’s hands were under my stomach when I kicked to get to the side and hold the blue rail, thinking my life depended on getting there as fast as I could. I have fragments of memory: pieces of our father, but it could have been someone else. I have only Camille to tell me if I’m wrong. Most times she’s pretty good at it.

I don’t remember his face. Or his voice. I don’t know if he cheered us on, but I think he must have, or I wouldn’t love it like I do. I wouldn’t be a natural.

He’s what I think about when I’m up here, when I’m tumbling through the air, when everything’s perfect. And I still ask Camille about him.

“What did he look like?”

“He wore blue trunks,” Camille says. “And a white cap.”

I’ve never seen a man wear a cap, but Camille says he did it for his ears. “He got a lot of ear infections.”

“Did he like to dive, too?

Camille thinks there was only a small board then. She remembers he walked slowly to the very end of it, balanced on his toes, and closed his eyes like he was praying. When he did dive, there was nothing spectactular about it. Nothing like we see on the TV. Our father, Camille says, didn’t have a lot of flair. We think this is one of the things that bothered our mother.

Camille was five when he left us. She knows our mother was not easy to live with.

“She yelled every time he came home, sometimes late and the dinner was ruined, sometimes early and it wasn’t ready yet, and what does he expect of her if he can’t give her a schedule to work on?”

Camille is good at being our mother and reliving those last days. Otherwise, I wouldn’t know what was what.

“He just couldn’t get it right,” Camille says. “And that was it. He stopped trying. You can’t expect a man to stay around if there’s no winning.”

Sometimes I look at our father’s picture and try to remember him. In the picture he’s standing in front of our house on India Street, and the lawn is spread out in front of him. He’s holding a silver thermos under his arm and wearing work clothes with splotches of paint and a tear at the elbow. It’s a green shirt, and underneath, where his bony elbow sticks out, he’s wearing a white thermal. He has skinny legs. The belt at his waist makes his pants bunch. The soles of his boots are worn to almost nothing. He’s looking into the camera and I know his eyes are brown, because Camille told me.

Camille says I look more like him than she does. I have my father’s brown eyes. Camille says he always looked hungry, and I have the same kind of thinness; a down-to-bone look that people find alarming.

Camille resembles our father in temperament. Our mother says Camille could challenge a mule in stubbornness and win nine times out of ten, “just like your father.” Our mother says she knows only one other person than Camille to make up their mind so quick and permanent, our father.

I think I remember hearing him call us into dinner. I think he may be the shadow setting the table, drinking coffee, reading the newspaper to us, singing along to a Johnny Mathis Christmas album. But Camille says I want it so bad, I’m dreaming it, and this could be equally true.

On the back of his picture our father wrote:

Dad

India St.

1991

I move like I’m gravity, like it’s not a decision.

Standing on my toes, on the edge of the high dive, the water looks as clear and blue as the sky.

In my head there’s the possibility that this moment isn’t here yet, that maybe I’m not born. I could be an idea. Or I could be realized, and life is standing still. For this moment, the world has stopped.

I have perfect balance. The wind moves around me. My heart is as light and bright as the sun. I am as light as a sparrow bone, and for one moment I am everything that can’t be caught and held.

Then I’m passing through the air, turning, arms drawn in, toes pointed. My chin rests on my chest. I believe I have a chance at anything: one full revolution.