Chloe Doe (16 page)

She said the words softly, like they cost her nothing. But her face changed. She was an old woman with white in her red hair and a wrinkled face.

“It was over then,” I tell the doctor. “For all of us.

“Camille was dead and I felt that way too.”

Only I was still breathing. I tried to make myself stop, thought if I wished it hard enough, it’d happen.

And that’s how I was feeling. Like a
muñón.
A ghost. I was what was left over after the best part of me was taken away. And I kept thinking it couldn’t be true. Like the people who lose an arm, who still have feeling in their missing fingers. I could still feel Camille.

The police came back three days after Camille was killed because what they took out of her was semen. They came to the door and said,

“Mr. Atwater, could you step outside for a minute? There are some questions . . . a few things that need clearing up.”

“Why don’t you come in?”

“Outside would be better. There’s no need to upset the girl.”

I was standing at the door, next to Walt. Inside my head I was screaming his name, but I couldn’t find my voice. I was still in that faraway place I went when I first found Camille, where it felt like I wasn’t really living all the things that were happening.

Walt was waiting for the police. He had the .357 in his jeans, under his San Diego Zoo T-shirt. He pulled out the gun and said he would kill himself. He put it to his head and told them not to come near him. To stay away, or he’d do it. Sure as they were looking at him alive, they’d be looking at him dead.

My mother flew out of the house to be at Walt’s side. To try to get him to put the gun down.

“No, Walt. No! You don’t mean it.” Her face was swollen and pink, from days of crying. “You don’t mean it. Tell me you don’t mean it.”

She cradled his head in her hands. Looked into his eyes. Stuck her body up against his. Clung to him like she wouldn’t be parted.

“I want to die. You know I want to die.”

I wanted him to die, too. I wanted it more than I wanted to breathe.

The police swarmed around them. They took the gun and tore my mother out of Walt’s arms and held her back. They pushed Walt down on top of the car and pulled his arms back and Walt was crying, “I love you! I love you, Connie! You know I love you!”

Even after they shut the door, he pushed his face up against the glass so his nose and lips were smashed, and he said, “Connie! Connie!” Like a baby bawling. “Connie!”

And that was the last I saw of him. This man who killed my sister.

“And your mother? When did you last see her?”

I take a deep breath but it’s not enough.

“Your wife buy you anything else? Maybe some shoes?”

“When, Chloe?”

“Some
zapatos.
Loafers or Nikes. Do you run?”

“Your mother.”

“Your mother, Doc.”

He almost laughs.

“I’m not letting you off,” he says. “It’s my last question today. When you answer it you can go back to your room.”

“Or we’ll sit here till Tuesday?”

“For as long as it takes.”

But I’m done hiding.

“Six years ago September twenty-second,” I tell him. “Three days after Camille was killed.” I stand up and move toward the door. “It rained, for the first time since before summer. It was hard to breathe, with the steam coming up off the pavement.” I get to the door and turn the knob.

“I left that night, when my mother came back from the police station. It was dark. The street lights were on. She came into the house and sat down at the kitchen table, her purse in her lap, and I asked her, ‘What are we going to do?’

“She couldn’t look at me. She just sat there for a long time, and then she said, ‘He’s my husband.’

“I was on the street two months when the police picked me up. The first time. They put me in a foster home. That’s no place for a child.”

I step through the door but look back at him.

“I took one thing with me. You know what that was?”

He shakes his head.

“A picture of my father. The only one we had. I kept it with me two years. Then it was just one more thing to carry around.”

He nods, like he understands. And maybe he does. I know I’m not the only person who’s had to give up a dream.

I shut the door. I think he’s probably right about talking, that bad memories lose their hold on you once they hit air.

Monkey Ring

“
C
amille was wearing a yellow headband, a plastic monkey ring she got out of the gum-ball machine at Safeway, and a Band-Aid on the heel of her right foot, where her new school shoes dug into her.”

It took a whole week for her to break the shoes in. She limped like something was broken, and she thought she might need crutches if it kept up.

“You remember a lot about that day,” Dr. Dearborn says.

“I remember the things that were important to Camille.”

“Good. That’s how we keep loved ones close.” No matter the distance.

No matter how they were taken from you.

“Tell me about that day,” he says. “Your last day with your sister.”

The police asked Walt, “You were at work?”

He was wearing his work shirt that said
Miller Genuine Draft
above the pocket. The police asked Walt how long he was a driver for Miller.

“Eight years.”

“Are you fond of the daughters?”

Walt shoved his hands in his pockets. He rocked on the heels of his feet. “I love them,” he said. “Camille was a good girl.”

The police stopped writing and studied Walt.

“Yeah? So when I call Miller they’ll tell me you were on the job?”

“That’s what they’ll say.”

“And your last delivery was where?”

“Well, I don’t remember,” Walt said. “I guess I forgot now. I forgot.”

“Yeah, well, it’s written down, right?”

“I don’t write down all my drops. Some are called in at the last minute.”

“Then Miller will know about it? The guy who radioed you out?”

“He must know. Someone has to keep track of us.”

I found her in the backyard and covered her with rose petals and the oak leaves that turned gold in the Indian summer.

The police asked, “Did you find her like that already? Or did you use the petals and the leaves to cover her up?”

“She was naked.”

“So you wanted to cover her up?”

I shrugged and it was enough for him.

“Did you do anything else?” the cop asked, leaning forward, leaning into my breath. “Did you maybe close her eyes?”

He used his sky blue handkerchief to wipe my face. “Do you think that might have happened?”

“I thought maybe she could be asleep. I wanted her to be asleep.”

But she wasn’t.

The police called my mother at work and told her to come home. I heard them tell her, “It’s about Camille. Why don’t you come home right away.” But when she got there, Camille was gone. The ambulance left with her on a stretcher; they put plastic bags over her hands and taped her mouth shut. I watched from the upstairs window.

“What is it? What is it?” my mother asked.

The police lady was trying to tell her. She was bending over my mother, who was sitting next to Walt on the plastic chairs we bought to sun ourselves. She talked softly, but I heard her through the glass. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. Camille was killed today. This afternoon . . . Camille was killed.”

And my mother kept saying “What is it? What is it?” like she couldn’t hear anything, not even her own voice, because it got louder and louder until it blended with the sirens, until it sounded like a whistle.

“What kind of relationship does Mr. Atwater have with your children?”

“He doesn’t like kids,” my mother explained. “He yelled at them from time to time. It’s just because he doesn’t like kids.”

“Were your children safe with Mr. Atwater?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did you ever leave them with Mr. Atwater, maybe when you went to the grocery store?”

“Yes. A lot of times. He just didn’t want them underfoot. They had to stay in their room or outside.”

“He ever hit them?”

“No. Never.”

“Chloe says he spanked them.”

“Well, yes. But not hit them. He never hit them. Sometimes he’d whop them on their behind if they were acting up. That’s all.”

“Aren’t they too old for spanking?”

“He didn’t spank them, really. He’d just whop them once or twice on the behind.”

“But you’d leave them for an hour or two and come back and everything was fine?”

“Yes.”

“Camille had burns on her hands. Do you know how that happened?”

“Her curling iron?” My mother had her hands in her shirt, twisting. “I don’t know. Was it her curling iron?”

“No, ma’am. They don’t look like burns from a curling iron. These burns look more like they came from a cigarette.” The policeman sat down in front of my mother, on the vinyl footrest. “Do you smoke, ma’am?”

My mother’s hands grew still. “Yes, I smoke. I smoke. Why? You don’t think I burned her? I didn’t burn her.”

“Who did, ma’am?’

My mother began to thread her hands through her hair. I watched the red strands sift through her fingers, then she pulled at the ends, pulled like she meant to tear her hair out. “I don’t know.”

“I think you do. You understand Camille isn’t coming back.”

“I know! I know that. I know.”

“Somebody did those burns.”

“I don’t know who. It wasn’t Walt. I know you’re thinking Walt. You’re thinking Walt, but he didn’t do it.”

“But Mr. Atwater smokes, doesn’t he, ma’am?”

“Did you ask him?”

“Does he smoke, ma’am?”

“Yes.”

She was bent over and holding her stomach with her hands. Her beautiful eyes, like none we’d ever seen, were sinking in her swollen face.

Train

T
he little Niña returns for group therapy once a week. She sits in a circle with us other contessas still waiting to get out and shares her life in the land of the free. Her brother, it turns out, is never coming home.

“He’s dead,” she tells us. “He’s gone.”

She doesn’t say whether she misses him. Whether she thinks now she’ll be able to live a normal life, not waiting for him to come back and pick up where he left off.

“We buried him at Green Hills Cemetery.” They have a family plot. “They killed him.” The other boys who couldn’t live with a saint among them. With a white boy walking around calling himself
Hey-Zeus.
“There are gangs in prison.”

The doctor asks, “Do you feel safe, Tammy?”

“I feel like he knows everything I’m doing. Just like God.”

Next group, the Niña doesn’t show. The banana-yellow Lexus doesn’t pull up the circular drive and drop her at the door, no little Niña walking without looking back, even when her mother calls,

“Tammy! Tammy, have a good session!”

She was determined to leave her mother behind.

This time the Niña was successful.

The newspaper said
Girl, 14, Throws Herself at Train.
But that wasn’t the way it happened. They think it must have been a split-second decision. That she couldn’t have waited. She couldn’t have thought it out and then waited patiently for the end of her life. It was unthinkable. It made a person cringe. It made them stop a beat or two. It’s easier for those who’ve never been there to think the Niña had a moment when the world piled itself on her shoulders all at once — we all have those moments — and she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. If she was anywhere else, the mall, for example, she’d be with us today.

But it’s not true.

Some of the girls here say, She was desperate for love. She was some kind of Juliet. It was missing that brother of hers and finding a way they could be together.

That’s not true either. Later, after the staff sat us down and told us about it, after we read about it in the newspaper, I took out her diary and read about it there.

She’d practiced. She’d rehearsed her death and then wrote about it in her diary. She thought it would happen so quickly, the speed of the train would fling her body into the sky, arms and legs wide, her mouth an open and screeching
No
and she would stay there, caught forever at the moment of impact and hanging over the world like a star. In the margins of her diary she drew a picture of herself exactly like that, with smaller stars blinking around her.