Chloe Doe (6 page)
Mary Christine picks up the photo and brings it close to her face.
“Where is he?” the Niña shrieks. “What did you do to him?”
“Who?” Mrs. Jacobs asks. She has forgotten her only son. Shut him out of her heart when she woke from the gunshot blast and found herself soaked in her husband’s blood. “What are you talking about?”
“My brother.”
“You don’t have a brother, Tammy,” Mrs. Jacobs says, her face as closed as a door. “It’s just me and you.”
“No. No. No.” Mary Christine holds the photograph against her face and cries.
Mrs. Jacobs picks up her purse. She slips her hands into her gloves. “I don’t know what I’ll bring next week,” she says. She’s slowly moving Mary Christine’s belongings out of their tidy home in the Hollywood Hills. “How about your yearbook? You don’t want to forget your friends.”
Later, the Niña tells me she feels like a dirty dish towel her mother twists, twists, wringing out the only part of her that matters.
She won’t tell me her brother’s real name. Mary Christine writes
Hey-Zeus
letters staff won’t mail. Instead, the Niña tucks them into her diary, where no one, not even staff, is allowed to go. She writes him a letter telling him they don’t want her to have the baby. The doctors are saying the baby will be retarded. He won’t be able to talk. He’ll spend his life in bed, crying or unconscious. He won’t know she is his mother.
“I think all babies know their mother,” she tells me. She looks at me over the letter in her hand. “Don’t you?”
“Depends,” I say. Having a baby at fourteen is plain
loco.
She’s in her third month and will have to decide. Before, the pregnancies ended on their own. One when Mary Christine fell out her bedroom window, which is on the second floor. The other naturally.
Her pants are tight. She doesn’t button them, but they’re difficult even to zip. The nurses bring her clothes from their homes that will make her more comfortable; her mother won’t accept that Mary Christine is having her grandchild.
Mrs. Jacobs tells Tammy on her next visit, when she comes in the middle of the day, with a long envelope and a bag of the Niña’s clothes, that she must choose to abort. She shows her pictures of babies born in-family. Some have their noses smashed into their faces, others are missing ears and toes. They never say mama. They never look into your eyes and say I love you. Some of them don’t even have eyes. Some of them are so messed up, an arm comes out of a leg socket. Does she want a baby like that, her mother asks. One that will suffer every day of his life?
Mary Christine doesn’t answer. She clutches the bag of clothing, pulling out pieces — a pair of jeans, underwear, a cheerleading skirt — until it’s all piled in her lap.
Her mother leaves the pictures spread out on the bottom of the Niña’s bed and walks out.
Mary Christine doesn’t choose to keep or do away with the baby. It’s by God’s intervention that her third baby is taken from her. This is what she says. She is in group one week after her mother came with the pictures. Her stomach is gone, flat as pavement. Her face is as angular and as starved as the face of the real Jesus.
“The baby is gone,” she says. She doesn’t cry. She’s holding a small crocheted beanie she made during rec time.
“Gone where?” the doctor asks.
The Niña shrugs. “Heaven, I suppose.”
I think about this. Do all babies go to heaven, even those who never take a breath?
S
peed, crank, meth, crystal, ice.
Swallowed, smoked, snorted, injected.
A cheap high. An epidemic.
In group they ask us to talk about any and all drugs we’ve used and why we think we’ll go back to it when we get out.
“I never used. Not the hard stuff.”
My blood hasn’t been tainted. I never feel the need crawling on my skin, digging into me like claws or fangs.
Really?
They don’t believe me.
I know a lot about drugs. Mostly what they do to a person, and I picked that up watching my
cuates.
A person uses them enough, they’re wasted on or off of them.
Hitler used speed. He was an
aficionado.
Passionately devoted to the stuff. They don’t tell you that in the history books. Stick with me, Chloe Doe. I’ll let you in on all the dope.
Your parents pop little white pills for a long-haul vacay. Drive through the night, and the next, and you asleep in the backseat, headlights passing overhead. Before you know it you’re at Grandma’s.
It’s not new. For a while coke was the drug of choice, but for the working class, it got expensive. Zap! Back into the limelight.
Twenty-five dollars of coke gets you an hour high. Twenty-five dollars of meth gets you three, sometimes five hours.
You can’t beat that. More for your money.
And it’s the same thing. Gives you the same rush. You feel like you can run a marathon and discover the cure for cancer.
I’ve seen labs set up in motel rooms. In garden sheds. In mobile homes way out in the middle of nowhere, that suddenly become the center of activity. First giveaway. That’s when you’re too doped up to be making it. There’s a general street rule: if you’re making it, you shouldn’t be taking it.
Last year a lab blew the roof off a house in East L.A. and set the whole block on fire. It exploded like it was the Fourth of July. I never saw anything like it. Houses went down like cardboard, and all the firemen scrambling like busy little bees, and dumbstruck. What can you do? It was a meth lab.
The little niña-woman, my roommate, confesses: She swallowed a bottle of baby aspirin. She was nine. Her parents rushed her to the hospital and they pumped out her stomach. She said she ate Mexican for dinner and it came up like acid. It burned her nose. Small chunks of tortilla chips got stuck in her throat. It made her cry.
Her parents stood next to the bed wondering if she was going to die. Her mother said, “Save my baby. Please, please, please.” And the father rubbed the mother’s arms and told her there was no chance Tammy was going to die. It was just a bottle of baby aspirin, for God’s sake. Just a bottle of baby aspirin.
This
inocente,
she said she thought at the time, listening to her father talk about the baby aspirin as if it was a moron’s choice of relief, that she should have taken the Tylenol. It was on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet and if she’d been more into it, if she’d thought it through rather than thinking anything would do, she’d have grabbed a bottle of something that would work.
Hospitals don’t take childhood suicide attempts for real. They asked her, Why did you swallow the baby aspirin? and she told them she did it because she liked the way they tasted — like vitamin C and a little bit like Tang. They’re also a pretty color, like orange SweeTarts.
Turns out the little Niña has a habit, all right, but it’s not drugs. She didn’t fall out her window — she jumped. She didn’t break a bone in her body. Didn’t come close to killing herself. It was a call for help, the doctors say. First the baby aspirin and then the window.
She asked for help the only way she knew.
“But there are better ways of getting a person’s attention,” they tell the Niña. “Better ways of asking for help.” Tammy doesn’t need to hurt herself to get it.
“Tammy didn’t turn to drugs to soften the edges of her reality,” the doctors say. She was stronger than that.
Before they turn on me they tell the Niña she’s to come up with two things she could say to the right people when she needs help. They don’t tell her who the right people are, only that she has until next group.
“Chloe? What do you have to share?”
I don’t have a story like the Niña’s to tell. I don’t even have a story about drugs. Not the hard stuff. Not the stuff that can really mess you up.
“Like I told you before, I’ve only smoked marijuana.” And I only used it as an aphrodisiac — to get my appetite up. Marijuana heightens the senses. The food tastes better and you want more of it.
It’s a love potion. The sex, you don’t mind it. It gets so you’re not really a part of it.
“How long were you a marijuana user?”
They want to know. Here, let me check my calendar. Looks like I started May 15, 2002, at two p.m. How about that? I’m some record keeper. Think that’s a marketable skill?
“How long, Chloe?”
It’s not a big deal. I tell them soon they’ll legalize it. It has medicinal purposes. And it looks like I had a head start. Looks like I’m a pioneer. I knew all about its potential even before the doctors. How about that?
“But how long?”
If I smoked cigarettes it’d be no big deal, right? I mean, cigarettes kill you. It’s a known fact. Check your
New England Journal of Medicine
for that. It’s in the newspaper. It’s on TV. It’s on posters at bus stops.
Marijuana’s a gift. It’s like eyesight to the blind.
Farmers are starting to grow it.
How long? How long? Their faces stretch and thin out like Silly Putty: How long, Chloe? Their voices, too. Deep and winnowed. How long?
“Chloe, here’s your pamphlet. Read it and be ready to talk next drug dependency group.”
And no points today. No shampoo or toothpaste.
The brochure says: Marijuana: a habit-forming drug obtained from the dried leaves and flowers of the Indian hemp, used as a hallucinogen.
I never saw things. I never smoked and a whole other world sprung up in front of my eyes. Furniture never moved. The
cucarachas
never danced.
I’ve never
had
to have it.
You crave it, sure. Because it’s an escape. But it’s not something that gets under your skin.
How much? Was it every day? Or just a Saturday night kind of thing?
“Four years, give or take,” I tell them. “And not always. There were long months when I went without it.
“Marijuana’s like aspirin. Except you can’t OD on it.
“You take it for the little aches and pains.
“Only when I needed to. When I wanted to get away from it all for a few hours. Like a Caribbean vacation, only low budget.”
C
amille thinks God can’t watch all of us at the same time.
“He only has two eyes,” she says. “He sends angels to do it.”
We’re sitting on the blankets from our beds, in our new swimsuits. Camille is already pink, even though she rubs on sunblock 30 every five minutes and it’s only May.
“That’s what it means to have a guardian angel,” she explains.
She thinks her angel is a man in a brown suit who smokes cigars and carries a notebook crammed full of her good deeds. She dreamed it more than once, and Camille believes dreams are as important as our waking moments.
“They’re a window into our future.”
I tell her, “I dreamed I could sing all the songs on
Breathe.
”
“You can do that now, Mom listens to it every day. I dreamed I went somewhere in an airplane. There was snow. Lots of it, on the ground and in the air. And the people spoke a different language, but I understood it. I think I’m going to live there. When I’m eighteen.”
“Well, maybe I’ll have the same dream,” I say.
“You won’t. It doesn’t happen, two people dreaming the same thing. But you can visit.”
“Maybe,” I say. I’m done telling her how I want us to be together all the time, even after we’re grown. Camille says families aren’t meant to be together forever. “We all grow up and go our own ways and meet up again at Christmas. Or,” she says, “we catch up on the phone.”
Our mother has only two aunts living, she thinks, somewhere in Georgia, and she doesn’t keep in touch with them because they’re too old to remember her. They don’t know that she was ever married or that she has two kids.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe I’ll move somewhere, too. A place where I can ride horses. You can come visit me.”
“Okay,” she says. She picks a dandelion off its stem and holds it under her chin. She wants the sun to do its magic, to turn her skin yellow without her even touching the weed to her throat. “You’re supposed to do it with buttercups,” she says, “but we don’t have any. Does it make my skin yellow?”
I look under her chin. “Yes.”
“Good. That means I’m a ray of sunshine.” She drops the weed on the ground.
“What about the things we shouldn’t have done?” I ask.
“What things?”
“Does your angel keep track of the things you shouldn’t have done?”
She looks at me for a long minute, quiet, the way our mother sometimes does, then says, “Angels can only see the good in people.”
But I think God knows everything we do.
Camille has things to hide, like letting Isaiah Riordan kiss her under the flaminca bush in our backyard, lighting matches and burning Simon’s ear, and her first period.
She was up in the middle of the night, moving in the darkness. I heard the dresser scrape against the carpet when she pulled it away from the wall, and the lamp fall over.
“What are you doing?”
“Shut up.”