Chloe Doe (12 page)

I spread my wings. I arch my back. I remember why swans are graceful, why someone would name this for something beautiful.

I think I’m touching the clouds. For a long time they keep me from breaking the blue. I don’t hear the shattering surface. I belong behind this sky, all-silent and calm, and part of the world where butterflies live after they give up their feet and dream of flight. I can stay, if I pretend the fire in my chest doesn’t burn, if I pretend the world is upside down, if I pretend water is the air I breathe.

Supergirl

I
knock once and push the door open. He’s on the phone, his cell, and looks at his watch. I’m two minutes early. I didn’t wait to be called today and then eat up precious minutes as I used the bathroom and then shuffled down the hall. I’ve been waiting all week for this session. He waves me in and then pats the back of a chair as if to say, Go ’head, sit here.

I do.

He stands with one hand in the pocket of his Dockers. He says yes into the phone several times. He calls his wife honey.

“Sorry about that,” he says, and drops his cell into his coat pocket.

“Your girlfriend?”

She used to be. He married her fourteen years ago.

“Your social life is cutting into my time,” I tell him.

“You’re early.”

“Does that get me any points?”

It does with him. “What do you want to talk about today?” He sits down, shifts his long legs so he can use one as a table, and picks up my file.

“I did a lot of thinking,” I tell him. After the last time, when he told me I was a lot like my mother. I made a list of the ways we’re different: I don’t like makeup; I don’t read love stories and think it’ll happen to me; I’m not waiting for good things to come my way.

“I’m more realistic than that.”

“So long as you believe you can be happy,” he says.

We can all be happy. It’s just a matter of taking charge of our lives.

“So, you see,” I point out, “you weren’t right. Not a hundred percent.”

“No one ever is,” he agrees.

“And there’s something else. It’s big.”

I’m proud of myself, and happy that the things I do have in common with my mother only look that way on the outside. Dig a little deeper and I’m one of a kind.

He wants me to explain this.

“Our motivations.” I use the word he’s been preaching about from the beginning. I’m starting to believe that our lives are a series of decisions. “I know I got to where I am today because I decided to leave my mother’s house. I know I left my mother’s house because I couldn’t live with the decisions others made.”

It’s so easy and I knew it all along, I just never thought about it.

“And this,” he says, “leads us to the very real difference between you and your mother.”

I wait for him to fill me in, but he says, “Why don’t you tell me what it is.”

I can’t find the word he already knows.

It’s a feeling inside me, what gets me up in the morning, what pushes me through the day.

“And what is that? What makes you able to deal with your life?”

I live off the knowledge that what happened to us, to me and Camille, was a crime. I feel closer to her on days that are really bad.

“Courage,” he says.

I know the difference between right and wrong. What happened in that house was wrong, so I left.

For some people it’s not that easy. Some people can’t live what they believe in.

He says I’m one of a kind. I’m brave. Until now I was just doing what had to be done, but all along I’ve really been a hero. The way he said it, makes me feel above all the stuff that’s happened, like it can’t touch me. I’m caped and repel bullets. I’m Supergirl.

“And since we’re already on the subject, let’s dig a little deeper,” he adds.

He wants to know about my first time. The first time I took a john. What moved me to do it? What shifted inside me that made the decision one I could live with?

“You ruined a beautiful moment,” I tell him.

He says, “We can create another.” In fact, he’s looking forward to a lot of triumphs where I’m concerned.

“Small victories,” I say. He really likes his idea of life being either a win or a loss.

“That’s right.” He smiles. “So, your first time.”

“I don’t kiss and tell,” I say. I have more class than that.

He says I went into hiding, that first time, and never came out. He wants to meet the real Chloe. He thinks she’s worth our time and that I might even like her so much I’ll want her to stick around.

“What’s there to like about her?”

“She’s strong, and honest, and wasn’t afraid to love her sister or herself.” After all, she’s the one who decided to leave in the first place.

“You can’t love yourself if you’re selling to the highest bidder,” I remind him. The first time he said this to me I didn’t believe it. Now I know it’s true. I hated every time, every john, and got through it knowing I’d eat one more day, that I wouldn’t sleep outside that night. After a while, I started hating that it meant so much to me, living. I suppose that is hating yourself.

He says I’m still two girls living inside one skin. And that’s good for me. Once I give it up, once I let her go, I can’t be saved. My soft center is the Chloe I was born to be; the outer shell, as thick as armor, is the girl I was forced to become.

I tell him he should be a poet. But I like the picture he gave me. It feels right.

“The first night I left, I didn’t sleep,” I tell him. “The only thing I remember about it is walking.” I kept moving. I knew enough not to take the freeway; the cops would pick me up and dump me back on my mother’s doorstep. So I took back roads, until I heard the ocean. “Then I walked on the sand. Miles. The sun came up and I read a sign that said
SOLANA STATE BEACH.
” I didn’t get very far.

“I didn’t sleep the second night, or the third. It was pure daylight when my body broke down. I think I fell asleep walking.”

I woke up because water was dripping on my face. I thought it was blood. That Walt found me and carved me up with the knife that hung from the chain on his belt. But it was a guy in a wet suit and he kept asking me, “Are you OK?”

I grabbed my backpack and took off.

“It got easier after that,” I say. “After that, I started looking for a place to sleep. Usually the beach during the day. I blended in better.” But the cops showed up there, too. Wanted to know why I wasn’t in school. Skipping class to soak up some rays was a bad idea. They let me go, telling me if I kept it up the only job I’d get would be at McDonald’s.”

Turns out I couldn’t even get a job there. Not that I asked for one. You need a phone for that kind of job. Even I knew that. You need a place to take a shower. To do your hair. You have to be presentable.

“You were right about my mother making it easier for me,” I say. “I thought about all the times we were close to hunger, and then my mother came home with some
hombre
with a thick wallet and it was cheeseburgers for dinner.”

It was always cheeseburgers the first night. And she put something green on our plates, too. Peas or green beans. Like she did a good job making sure we had vegetables. After a while that stopped, but the burgers always showed up. I couldn’t get them out of my mind. I hung out in front of McDonald’s, Carl’s Jr., Jack in the Box the first weeks I was on my own.

“I wasn’t a trash-picker. Not right away.”

The first time I asked, they gave me a burger free. After that it was,
NO VAGRANTS.
They called the police. A girl my age, one guy said, shouldn’t be on her own.

“You eat fast food, Doc? You ever eat everything that comes in your bag?”

He says he doesn’t. He orders at the Drive-Thru and then parks and munches on his lunch. When he tosses his scraps into the trash, there are french fries at the bottom of his bag that he never touched. Usually some burger left, too.

I tell him, Thank you. There’s someone out there who appreciates that.

“So, you were on the street how long before you sold yourself?”

I didn’t at first. “I held out as long as I could.”

“How long was that?”

“Longer than you think.” The city got in the way. “I was on the street two months when the cops picked me up. They put me in a foster home with a mom and a dad and seven other kids like me. I didn’t fit in.”

“Why?”

I shrug. “The whole thing was wrong. I wanted it to be me and Camille and it was never going to be that again. I wasn’t ready to let her go. I saw a guy like you, and he kept telling me not to ruin this good thing I’ve got going. But a home without Camille isn’t a home for me. And that’s why none of them worked out. Why they kept trying me out in new places. A year and a half of that and I was done.”

My second time out on the street I was thirteen; I’d been there before. I knew what to expect. I slept in doorways or behind trash bags. There are rats in the city. Real ones. They crawled across my feet. Even had one sniffing my hair.

“I couldn’t do it anymore,” I tell him. “It’s not how humans are supposed to live.” I mean, no one would choose it.

“My first john was so old his hands shook. I had to help him unzip his pants.”

He was parked in his car, a white Caddie, with the window rolled down. Waiting. I was on the street long enough then; I knew how it worked. I watched and listened and used the words I heard other
chicas
like me use. Hey, mister,
abuelo,
you want some of this? He looked at me a long time. He said I was sweet, so sweet, but he took me anyway.

We drove in his car until he found a street with houses and parked away from the lights.

I cried. Not because I didn’t want to give him head, which is what he asked for, but because I knew the minute I left him I’d eat a real meal. The number two at Mickey D’s. Quarter Pounder, fries, and a soda.”

That’s what it came down to for me. I wanted a meal. A hot meal that was mine, from start to finish. I wanted that more than I wanted to wake up the next morning.

So that was it, my first time.

I can see my sad story got to him. Maybe he’s thinking about his wife, or his own girl. But no, he’s thinking of me. No one should have to choose between that kind of life and death.

He wonders if it was easier, because Walt already took what I wanted to keep for myself. What I thought I would hold on to until I met the man of my dreams. Something secret, wrapped in white satin, like a wedding dress.

“I gave it up,” I said. “And that’s always better than having it stolen.”

He understands this. “The power of choice, even when it’s the lesser of two evils.”

That’s right.

Graceland

O
ur mother met Walt Atwater when she took a package trip to Las Vegas. They sat next to each other at the slot machines. Neither of them won any money, but they had a lot of fun trying. Our mother brought thirty dollars in rolled quarters. Walt had his payroll check: “They cash it for you right there. Hand you over a roll of bills or casino chips. Any way you like it.”

It took them three hours to run out of money. After that, they sat talking and drinking coffee until our mother’s bus was ready to leave. Walt followed her all the way home from Las Vegas because he fell in love with her over the cherry-cheese danish and her stories of heartbreak.

Our mother says she told him so much about herself because she thought she’d never see him again.

He already knows our names and exactly what we look like. He guesses who we are, even though I’m as tall as Camille. He comes right up to us and says, “You’re Camille. Yep. The red hair. So you must be Chloe. Your name means flower-in-bloom in Greek.”

“What does my name mean?”

“Camille . . . Camille . . . ,” he says, but the best he can come up with is, “It’s a flower, of course.” And we already knew that.

“Do you girls like flowers?”

Camille tells him about the rosebushes in the backyard. They were already here when we rented the place, and we water them when we remember. There’s also an azalea bush that isn’t doing too well.

“I have a green thumb,” he says. “We’ll see what’s ailing it. See if we can’t make it happy.”

Our mother knows Walt two weeks when they go back to Las Vegas and get married in the Graceland Chapel. On the marriage certificate there’s a picture of Elvis, the date — July 1st — and the names of two witnesses my mother met two minutes before the ceremony.

“He’s a good man,” our mother says. “He came looking for me. That’s a six-hour drive.” She tells us Walt had to go out of his way to get her. “It wasn’t a trip to the corner market.

“A man doesn’t go to that much trouble on a whim.” He’s serious about us. And, she wants us to know, he came for her and her girls. He knew about us from the start.

“I told him first thing, ‘I have two daughters. They’re as different as night and day. Chloe, she’s my conscience. My oldest, well, she reminds me of me.’