Chloe Doe (17 page)
She wanted to get it right, so she’d tried it, right before they locked her up in Madeline Parker: She’d laid herself down on the railroad tracks near Busman Street and waited for the Georgia–Pacific. She’d felt the ties vibrate like it was an earthquake, long before she saw the train round the curve and bear down on her.
She’d had a full two minutes to think about what she was doing before the nose of the train was pointed in her direction. Its thunderous clacking on the rails beat over her. It’d made it so she could think of very little. It’d filled her head, so nothing else could. Hypnotized her so she almost lost the will to lift herself off the tracks and throw herself into the gravel and sage weed. And when it passed, it’d been like she was in the center of a hurricane. She’d been caught in a vacuum. She’d held to a large rock, feeling her fingers slip, the skin shaving off. She knew she wouldn’t feel a thing.
This time, she meant it for keeps, and she left a piece of paper behind, the curling end of a piece of paper towel, stuffed into the front pocket of her jeans. She’d written her name on it. Her real name. This I got from the newspaper, along with the fact that the Niña had died instantly.
She knew who she was and couldn’t live with it.
The doctors ask, “What other options did Tammy have?”
I think everything she tried to hold on to slipped through her fingers. Including her life.
I know now that the little Niña was right about one thing: She and I were a lot alike. Our mothers failed us. Our bodies were not our own. Our names were not the ones we were born to. And we gave up. Even though suicide wasn’t my way, living on the streets and using my body was like dying, a quiet death no one really noticed.
But there’s still time for me to change my mind. And I’m thinking that’s exactly what I want to do. Live.
I decide it’s time to come up with a new name. I can never go back to who I was before I lost Camille. Before Walt came into our lives. Before our mother drifted away from us. I’ll never be that girl again. But I can do better than Doe. Tammy was right to leave her diary with me. Reading it, I felt like I was looking at myself in places. I felt some of the same things she felt. And reading her death exactly like she planned it, knowing what she was feeling, set me free in a way. I swear I heard glass shattering. It was like breaking through the water and taking my first real breath. It burned my lungs going down. Made me realize I was still alive. That I want to go on feeling that way.
I tell the doctors, “Tammy did all she could for herself.” She was beyond the touch of our hands, the sound of our voices.
But I’m not. I’m right here.
T
he first thing he asks me this session:
“Have you decided on a last name?”
Ever since I told him I was thinking about it, he’s made it his mission to see it done. For three weeks I’ve been writing letters out on a piece of paper and trying to make them fit and mean something. I sit on my bed and look at the empty bed beside me, where the Niña once sat staring at old photographs. Where she’d left her diary, hoping I’d read it. I’m glad I did. I know now how easily it could have been me.
Today he tells me I’ll need a real name for my Social Security card. For my paycheck. A bank account. To rent a real apartment. For all the things I’ll need in the land of the living.
I tell him I have it.
He waits with his eyes wide open behind his glasses. He looks like an owl. I tell him so and he says he’s ready to start hooting.
“You always been a cheerleader?”
He says he first noticed his optimism in college. “I wasn’t big enough to play ball,” he admits. So the next best thing was to cheer them on.
“You feel that way about me, Doc? Your life wasn’t messed up enough to put you on the street so now you spend your time with girls like me?”
“Don’t think there isn’t someone out there waiting for your help,” he says.
“As bad as my life was, there’s always someone worse off?”
“No,” he says. “No matter how bad it gets, we always have something worth giving.”
“You went to church on Sunday.”
He doesn’t deny it.
“I used to see things that way. Life is a bowl of cherries.”
“No reason you can’t think that way again.” But he doesn’t push it. “Your name?”
I have a list, but what I really want is to take some part of Camille with me. I tell him this.
“How will you do that?”
I knew he’d ask. I realize now he didn’t solve my problems; he gave me what I needed to solve them myself.
“I used the letters of her name.”
He likes my strategy.
“I chose the one that showed I was going somewhere.”
This makes him even happier. He sits back in his chair, smiling.
“Aimes.”
“Chloe Aimes. I like that.”
So do I.
T
here are milestones. The first month, eighty percent of us return to the old life. If we make it six months, we have a fighting chance. One year and we’re as cured as we’re going to be. Twenty, thirty years later, gray and slow, there’s a chance we’ll return. Like alcoholics, we’ll live with it every day. That’s what they say, but on my year anniversary I don’t feel any pull. That life seems like someone else’s.
“Because you stayed in therapy,” the doctor says. I never gave up on him. Or myself.
Every Tuesday I leave my job at the Vets Administration, where I greet patients and schedule follow-up appointments, a little early. I hop on the 19 and return to the old homestead for ninety minutes in that tiny room with no air. Except they cut him a window.
“Are you happy with that?” I ask him.
“It’s getting better.” He smiles like he’s a winner. “By next year I’ll have an air conditioner.”
Perseverance. It’s his favorite word. We’ve spent more than one session defining it.
It’s a guarantee.
You’ll get what you want, eventually.
Athletes know it as endurance.
Politicians call it patience.
CEOs have ambition.
Actors have devotion.
I have courage.
The End.