Welcome, Caller, This Is Chloe (24 page)

“I’m so proud of you, Chloe, for all you’ve done for the radio station,” she said. “KDRS does so much good for the school and our community. I’d hate to see it taken off the air.”

What did a do-gooder like Ms. Lungren see? Did she see Frack, a boy who stutters, find his voice? Did she see Haley wrapped in a cocoon of people who accepted her and the child growing in her belly? Did she see this building as Duncan’s refuge? And mine?

“Funding-wise, we’re good through May,” I said. “But I’m not sure about next year. We’re going to need not just operating expenses but big bucks for new equipment. There’s only so much Duncan can do with duct tape.”

Ms. Lungren made a soft, purring noise. “Hmmm . . . a capital-improvement-campaign proposal.” Her kitty nose twitched, like a cat eyeing a new mouse squeak toy. “Might be a wonderful JISP project for someone next year. It wouldn’t have to be someone as outgoing as you, Chloe, but someone good at mobilizing people and money. Someone who excels at organization . . .”

I wanted to laugh. I was in the presence of a guidance counselor who still thought she could make a difference. A rare species. I slipped on my headphones for the next segment of my show.

During the next hour, we talked about superheroes, including those on Saturday morning cartoons and real-life heroes. No one seemed to notice that I talked less and took more calls than usual. Tonight the minions had run of the castle.

On Monday, the second official installment of
Heartbeats
, I figured I’d also be able to lie low because we’d have plenty of calls, given Valentine’s Day was coming up. Everyone wanted to talk about love.

Right before
Heartbeats
kicked off, Clementine gave me the thirty-second hand signal and said over the mic, “If Guinea Pig Girl calls, she’s not getting through.”

I wondered what was going on with Brie and if she’d call the station again with something more appalling than dead guinea pigs. Not knowing what was going on behind Brie’s beautiful face was worse than her rumors, because rumors, even those based on lies, were known. Like Grams had said, an active imagination made the unknown a frightening place.

I kicked off the first hour of
Heartbeats
talking about the most romantic movies of all times. Haley put together her top five:
Titanic, Casablanca
, Zefferelli’s
Romeo and Juliet
, Cocteau’s haunting black-and-white
Beauty and the Beast
, and another 1939 fave,
Gone with the Wind
.

“My vote goes to
Casablanca,”
I said. “Gotta love Ingrid Bergman’s shoes.”

The calls poured in.

“
Ghost
, that old eighties movie where the guy dies but can’t leave his love, is sooooo romantic.”

Another caller loved
West Side Story
. “I think what makes it so incredibly romantic is they can’t have each other, and so many times we want what we can’t have.”

I let the callers have free will, and we moved from movies about romantic love to movies about other kinds of love.

“Schindler’s List
. A man who loves humanity.”

“
Dr. Doolittle
. A man who loves animals.”

Animals. Guinea pigs. Would Brie call? Would the hammer come down tonight? By the end of the hour, still no Brie.

At the break for news, Duncan said, “You’re pretty quiet tonight.” He sat in the chair next to me folding a piece of paper. If he was trying to make a paper airplane, it was looking pretty bleak. Too round. Too lopsided. Maybe I wasn’t the only one having a bad night.

“Got a thing against quiet girls?” I picked at a hole in the chair armrest.

He chuckled. “No.” His fingers continued to fold and tear. “I was wondering if you had plans for Valentine’s Day. I have this idea . . .”

When he looked up, all thoughts of Brie fled. The silver of his eyes sparked with something that lit a fire in the center of my chest. He handed me the paper, which I now recognized as an origami heart.

“It’s nothing fancy, and you might not even want to do it.”
Duncan shucked his hand through his hair. “But if you’re free and you don’t have anyone else to hang out with on Valentine’s Day, then maybe you—”

“Duncan . . .” I grabbed him by the scarf and pulled him toward me.

“What?”

“Shut up.” Over the past month I’d changed. I left my old clan. I joined the radio staff. I was listening more. But some things about me would never change. I still loved spicy salsa bars, I still had orange-red curls, and I was still bold, still Chloe.

I raised my face to his. The spark as our lips met was a thousand snapping bonfires.

From the look on his face, Duncan felt it, too. He snagged in a few deep breaths. “I guess that means you’ll go out with me on Valentine’s Day?”

“I’ll be there. With bells on my toes.”

His gaze shot to my feet, where I wore a pair of sixties sequined platform wedges.

I swatted him on the arm. “It’s an expression, Dunc.”

With my mind on all things Duncan and Valentine’s Day, I took a greater interest in the second hour of my show, during which we talked about Valentine’s Day food. One caller explained how to make a chocolate fondue spread. Another caller said she put together a picnic one year with all red and white and pink foods. I looked at Duncan and thought of eggs and cheese on toast.

It was the bottom of the hour and Brie—Cheese Girl, Dead-Guinea-Pig Caller, whatever you wanted to call her—hadn’t dialed
in. There was something creepy about her silence. Like me, Brie needed to be noticed.

About five minutes before signing off, Clementine flashed the name of my next caller, and I smiled.

“Hey, callers, Brad’s back,” I said as Duncan patched the call through. “Remember him? He’s our silent, suffering poet with a major crush. Well, Brad, how’d it go with your ladylove?”

A nice, dramatic beat of silence filled the air before Brad said, “She hated it.”

“What?”

“My poem. I took my favorite poem, wrote it on fancy paper, and put it in her locker. She read it”—a choky sound waffled over the line—“and shoved it at me, like she was embarrassed or afraid of it. Of me.”

Some people were mean. Time for a bit of Chloe cheer. “This girl, who obviously doesn’t have good taste in poetry or guys, made a whopper of a mistake, and that’s her problem, not yours. Now, what I want you to do is write a—”

“But that’s not all,” Brad went on, as if I said nothing, “her friends found me after school in the parking lot, three of them. They told me to stay away from her.”

“Ahhhhh, Brad—”

“They said not to come within three feet of her or I’d be sorry.” His voice cracked.

Brad was hurting. I didn’t want to use the Great Silencer on him, but I needed to end the call. Clementine gave me a wrist twirl, the signal to wrap up things. “So let’s talk about how—”

“I went home,” Brad barreled on. “At first I cried so hard I couldn’t breathe. It was as if my heart had been ripped from my chest, and not only that, someone had thrown it in the middle of the lunchroom, and everyone stomped all over it. Blood was everywhere.”

I fought a wave of wooziness. “Brad, we need—”

“Then I stopped crying. Maybe I ran out of tears or maybe there was no more blood to pour out of the huge hole in my chest.”

Duncan placed his hand on my arm. Duncan. Always at my side.

Brad must have arrived at a more peaceful place, because when he talked next, his words were steadier. “I took all the poems I’d written to her, more than twenty, and I burned them one after another, lots of hot flames and curling, snapping paper. Now I have a pile of ashes.”

Time to take control of the airwaves. “Okay, that’s not a bad thing, Brad. You crushed hard, she didn’t crush back, but you’re not hanging on to her. This is good.”

“No, Chloe, it’s not good.” Brad hung up.

The entire staff gave me a What now? look. No problem. I’d been bayoneted lately; I knew how to handle this. “Brad, I feel your pain, we all do. It’s hard to put yourself out there, to make yourself vulnerable, and, yeah, sometimes you get hurt. Maybe that’s what we need to talk about next week, how to pick up and move on, but for now, Brad, I send you healing thoughts over the airwaves. We all do. I also send good thoughts that love—the right love for you, one that loves your poems—will find you, because it
will all work out in the end. The person you think you can’t live without, who you think is your perfect match, might not be it.

“On that note, listeners, it’s time to sign off. This is 88.8 The Edge, and this has been
Heartbeats
with Chloe Camden, where love is on the air.”

Duncan cued my theme music, and the On Air sign went dark.

“Good job, Dr. Phil,” Clementine said. “That had VSP written all over it.”

“Not VSP, VHP.” I slipped off my headphones. “Very hurting person.” Because when you cared about people, you handed them a little piece of your heart, and with those hands, they had the power to cause pain.

“HEY, GRAMS!” I PUSHED OPEN THE FRONT DOOR OF THE TUNA
Can. “The radio staff stopped by Dos Hermanas after my
Heartbeats
show, and I brought you a green chili burro.”

The living room was bottom-of-the-ocean black, as was the kitchen behind it. I fumbled for the light switch, but when I flicked it, the room remained dark. I flicked three more times. No light.

“Grams? Are you home?”

Silence.

My arms outstretched, I walked into the living room. My shin slammed against something cold and hard in the middle of the floor. A box of some kind.

“Grams?” I called again. A sliver of panic tinged my words. “Where are you? What’s going on?” Something crunched and snapped beneath my feet. The sliver turned into a full wedge. “Graaaaams!”

“Can it, Poppy, or we’ll have nosy Noreen over here.”

My heart, which had reached breakneck speed, slowed. “Grams? What happened to the light?”

“I threw a shoe at it.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because I didn’t want to see them anymore.” A chill hung on each word.

“Grams, you’re starting to freak me out.” I set her green chili burro on the boxlike thing and fumbled through the dark to the kitchen, where I switched on the light over the dining table.

“What the . . .” Not one, but two boxes sat in the middle of the living room, and Grams sat between them, her lap piled high with hundreds of glossy bits of paper. Photos? It was hard to tell. Some were warped, others torn.

“What happened?”

Grams lifted the bits of paper over her head, and they tumbled to the ground. “Eighty years of living. Gone.” Her voice was cold, dead.

Rushing to the living room, I dropped to her side. “Grams, what’s going on?”

Grams’s hands slid through the heap of photos on her lap. “The company that oversaw the restoration work of the Tuna Can dropped off my photo albums this afternoon. They spent some extra time on them, trying to salvage what they could, because they knew what’s important to an old girl living in a Tuna Can.” Her hands and bottom lip shook. “A stupid old girl living on her own.”

I grabbed photos from a heap on the coffee table. Mickey Mouse and three of my brothers without heads. Half of the Grand Canyon and my father’s right ear. “Surely some of them weren’t damaged by the water.”

“A few survived.” Reaching into her pocket, she showed me pictures of Zach on the beach, Sam and Max playing basketball, Jeremy and Dad riding a tandem bike, and Luke on his graduation from med school. “But none . . .” Her hands slid over the mutilated photos in her lap. This close I could see orange hair the color and curl of poppy petals. “But none of you, Poppy. Not one of you survived.” The first tear fell. Then another.

I sat on my heels. I’d never seen Grams cry. Not at weddings or graduations. Not when the tow truck took away her ruined Jeep after she slammed into the ATM. Not even when Gramps died five years ago. My world was upside down, inside out, and wrong.

“I’m a stupid old woman.”

And Grams was wrong. “You’re not stupid. You’re brilliant when it comes to dealing with people. You know how to make people happy and tamales de dulce. And you—”