The reason I’m working a job is because Otis is going downhill fast.
For quite a while now his sister has paid us a little each month to look after him, and we also get the apartment for free. And we’ve gotten by just fine. But when Otis dies, she’ll sell the house, and we’ll be out on the street. She’s told us quite frankly that she’ll put it up for sale immediately. So I’ve been hustling very hard for tips and putting money aside.
We all hope that Otis will live forever, but it just doesn’t seem to be going that way.
Everybody dies. Even Chloe knows that.
I work at a fancy dinner restaurant downtown. I have to park Otis’s old truck two or three blocks away because it doesn’t have much muffler. It’s one of those restaurants that’s all about ambience. I have to be part of it. Or at least not detract.
Every now and then we get a family or a business dinner, but mostly it’s couples. They make me feel sad for reasons I can’t entirely pin down.
But tonight there’s a couple that breaks through that fog. By being more like me. A nice-looking guy in his late forties with a pretty young guy about my age who is obviously his date. They both order the lobster. I get one meal per shift but I can’t have filet mignon or lobster. I could if I had a financially stable boyfriend in his late forties, but I don’t. I have a noisy old pickup that’s not mine, a cranky old man who’s dying on me, a job waiting tables, and Chloe.
After I take their order I slip into the bathroom and lock myself in and look at my own face in the mirror. To see if I’m still pretty. Not enough, I guess. The scar on my forehead is ugly. It detracts from the overall picture. Breaks up the purity of the scene, making me seem like damaged goods. And my eyes look old to me, older than I really am. I look tired.
I guess I knew I was tired. I just didn’t know I looked it.
Later, after we close, I get to eat. My one really great meal of the day. I usually choose the salmon, because that’s Chloe’s favorite. I always bring half home in a doggie bag for her. I sit outside on the patio to eat, even though it’s a little cold out. I figure that way none of the other waiters will come sit with me. But tonight Marlon does, because he wants to smoke.
He has a half-finished bottle of wine that he rescued before it could get thrown out. He gestures in my direction, offering to fill my empty water glass. He’s pretty enough, and he has a look like nothing could tire him out. Whatever it is, he could get the best of it. At least, that’s what it says in his eyes. Sometimes I think people lie to the world with their eyes. If they still can.
I shake my head.
“Don’t drink?”
“No.”
“Don’t like it?”
“Oh, I like it fine,” I say. “I just don’t start because if I start I don’t stop.”
“So? Don’t stop. A bunch of us are going out partying, why don’t you come? You look like you could use a little R and R.”
“No. Sorry. My . . . wife is waiting up for me at home.” It’s easier to lie.
“So? Bring her.”
“Oh. No. I don’t think so. She’s been kind of . . . She’s not really much into partying. She’s been kind of depressed.”
“Oh,” Marlon says. “Sorry.”
I never really liked Marlon. Or any of the others, really. I’m sure they’re okay people, but my world and their worlds don’t intersect at any point. We really have nothing in common.
I pack up half my salmon to take home to Chloe.
Marlon says, “Just so you don’t end up down there with her.”
“I’m fine,” I say. And I am. I’m strong. I’m pretty enough. Nothing tires me out. Whatever it is, I can get the best of it. “I’m just going to go home.”
When I get home, I go into the main house first. Chloe is asleep on the end of Otis’s bed, curled up like a good dog. Otis is wide awake. Which is weird, because it’s after eleven. Otis is never awake when I get home. Sometimes he’s not even awake when I leave. On his dinner tray is a card-sized envelope with a little pre-made bow stuck on it. I have no idea what that’s about and it doesn’t seem right to ask. Maybe Chloe gave him a present. She’s like that.
Otis looks a little ruffled, so I sit on the edge of his bed and we chat.
“Something wrong, Otis?”
“Oh, the girl and I just had us a long talk. Hard to go to sleep after that.”
“Not for her, apparently.”
We both look down at her for a moment, watching her sleep.
Then Otis says, “Get her some help, son. Professional help. And do it soon.”
I feel a cold pit in my belly because he knows something I don’t. “What happened, Otis?”
“Nothing. We just talked. But I’m telling you, she needs help. The stuff she’s seen and the stuff has happened to her, there’s no way she could hold that up all by herself.”
“She told you about the time before I met her?”
“From the time she was born till the day she hooked up with you. Everything.”
“She never told me any of that.”
“She’s got her reasons, boy. She knows once you lay some stuff like that on a person they just don’t set it down again. The more that person loves her, the harder it sits.”
“Tell me, Otis.”
“Nope. I swore I wouldn’t. I’m just telling you this. Get her some help to deal with this stuff. She can’t do it alone, and you’re not enough, either, no matter what you might want to think. You can get some help on the money. You can call the county, tell ’em you’re low income. There’s help out there.”
“Okay, Otis. If you think that’s the best thing.”
“Promise me, Jordan.”
He never called me by my name before. As far as I can remember. This is a first.
“Okay. I promise. I’ll get her some professional help.”
Otis sighs, and the sigh seems to shrink him two or more sizes. “Okay, good. Now, here, this is for you. But you can’t open it till you get back in your own place.” He hands me the envelope with the bow. Chloe must’ve helped him decorate.
“Okay, Otis, thanks.”
I put it in my shirt pocket, squashing the bow slightly. But I can’t bring myself to take the bow off. If it wasn’t important, they wouldn’t have conspired to put it there. I pick up Chloe in a fireman’s carry and head out of Otis’s room.
“Jordan,” he says. “You’re okay. I’m sorry what I said, not being sure about you at first. You’re a good boy.”
“Well, that’s okay, Otis. I wasn’t sure about you at first, either. But I like you fine now.”
He nods and closes his eyes.
Chloe wakes up when I try to undress her and get her into bed.
“Jordy,” she says, “did you open your present?”
“Not yet. I will in a minute. How come you told Otis all that stuff you’d never tell me?”
“He told you all that stuff? He promised he wouldn’t tell you!”
“He didn’t tell me what the stuff was, just that you told him stuff from before I met you.”
“Oh. Good.”
“How come you told him when you wouldn’t tell me?”
“Because he’s going to die pretty soon. So then there still won’t be anybody in the world besides me who knows all those secrets. Open your present, Jordy.”
I open the envelope. Inside is the title to the old Chevy pickup. Otis has signed off on its ownership in a careful, fussy old man’s hand. I stare at it for a long time, turn it over in my hands. Just tonight I was feeling sorry for myself because all I had was somebody else’s pickup truck. The whole time, the truck was actually mine. I just didn’t know it yet.
I look up to say something to Chloe, but she’s fallen back asleep.
In the morning I go up to Otis’s room, open all the curtains.
“Wake up, Otis,” I say. “I have to tell you something. Do me a favor and don’t even look at me while I tell you this, because it’s hard. I’m not good at saying tha
nk you to people. Maybe because I’m not good at feeling like I owe anybody. I’ve always gotten by on my own. No help from anyone. But I appreciate what you did. I never had my own transportation before. It makes me feel freer, like there’s more I could do. Less helpless, you know?” I allow a pause, in case Otis wants to interject. He doesn’t. He’s probably no better at being thanked than I am at thanking. “Anyway, thanks. It means a lot. Really.” Another long pause. I look over at Otis, who still has his eyes closed. “Otis?”
I go over to his bed, lean over, touch his forehead.
Cold.
“Tell me again why we have to do this, Jordy?”
“Because I promised Otis before he died.”
“Oh.”
Now I’m glad I did, because that’s a tough one for Chloe to fight.
She doesn’t want to go see the psychiatrist, and I don’t really blame her. How will she tell all that stuff to a total stranger? She can’t even tell me. Maybe if I could convince her that the psychiatrist was about to die.
I wait in the lobby on a hard wooden bench for fifty minutes.
Chloe comes out with a little slip of paper in her hand. We walk out into the street.
“Can I see that, Chloe?”
“Sure. We have to go to the drugstore on the way home. Can we afford this?”
She hands me the paper, and I see it’s a prescription for Zoloft.
“Well, sure, if this is what the doctor says you need.”
“She said I have to have it because I might want to hurt myself.”
“Why does she think you would want to hurt yourself?”
“Because I told her sometimes I want to hurt myself.”
“Oh. We can afford them. We just will.”
“I told her I can’t swallow pills but she wouldn’t listen.”
“We’ll practice,” I say. “I’ll help you learn how.”
We start with something cheap and easy. An aspirin. Because it becomes clear early on that she’s going to saturate and gag up and generally ruin at least several dozen, and her Zoloft isn’t cheap. I try to teach her to take big swallows of water, then drop the pill in, throw her head back. I tell her it will slide down almost without her feeling it.
But apparently that’s something like telling her she won’t even see the needle.
Taking the pills makes her nervous, and her gag reflex gets so acute that she can—and does—gag on plain water. She begs me to stop making her try. I tell her no, now that I know that she might want to hurt herself, I can’t let her stop trying. She has to swallow the pills.
She cries, and we put the lesson off for an hour or two.
The second time, she throws up before the pill hits her lips. I try to be calm as I clean up.
The third time, she slides the aspirin into her mouth, swallows, and smiles.
“There,” I say. “Was that really so hard?”
She smiles, and I see the aspirin clenched tightly between her front teeth.
* * *
Ever since the pills, Chloe has changed. Nothing pleases her anymore. She sleeps too much. She enjoys too little. I can’t remember the last time we laughed about anything. She watches I Love Lucy and never so much as cracks a smile. She hates everything. Everything I ask of her is asking too much. And I’m not suggesting that the pills themselves have had a negative effect on her mood, because we haven’t managed to get one down her yet.
“I only want you to take one,” I say. “I just want you to try. Just to prove to yourself that you can. And until you do, you have to promise you won’t hurt yourself.”
“I promise I won’t hurt myself. But I can’t do pills. I can’t.”
“I’ll crush it up and put it in some cherry-vanilla yogurt.” Cherry-vanilla is Chloe’s favorite.
Chloe says, “Then it won’t taste like cherry-vanilla yogurt, it’ll taste like pill. The reason I like cherry-vanilla yogurt is because it doesn’t taste like pill.”
Chloe has picked up one Zoloft and is holding it in her palm, looking at it. And looking at it. And looking at it. Like she expects it to evolve somehow. I bring her a glass of water. She puts the pill on her tongue. Takes a gulp of water. Swallows.
“Fabulous,” I say.
Chloe shakes her head. Shows me her tongue. It’s still on her tongue. At the last minute she must’ve chickened out. She takes five more gulps of water, chickening out every time.
Then there’s only one gulp of water left in the glass. I hold her hand in case that will help her be brave. She takes the rest of the water, gulps, gags, and vomits the contents of her mouth and part of the contents of her stomach onto the table. Onto the other pills.
I have to throw them away and start all over again.
I’m sitting in a soft chair with arms, talking to Chloe’s new psychiatrist. Dr. Reynoso. I can’t believe I get a soft chair with arms. I feel lucky that this doctor works on a sliding scale, and that the fee slides down as low as it does. All the way down to meet us.
Still, the money is going out, only out. Nothing is coming in. No plan for how I can work without leaving Chloe alone. Everything is great except that we’re headed for a wall.
Dr. Reynoso is in her sixties, wearing a burgundy pantsuit. It looks expensive. Other people must pay her a lot more.
“Chloe really likes you,” I say.
“She says that?”
“Yeah. All the time.”
“I’m surprised. She doesn’t act like she does when she’s here.”
“She’s not very trusting when I’m not around.”
“Maybe you should be around during the sessions.”
“No. That wouldn’t help. She won’t talk about her past around me because it would hurt me to have to carry all that. Also because I’m going to continue to be in her life. You have to be dying. How does she seem when she’s here as far as . . . intelligence?”
The doctor shrugs. “Average, I guess. Maybe a little above.”
“Oh.” I sit quietly for a minute, rolling a little bit of jeans fabric between my fingers. Listening to the silence, knowing I’m seeing what Chloe sees and hearing what she hears during her sessions. “When I first met her she was really simple. I mean, actually like she was simpleminded. Sometimes she still is. You’d almost think she was retarded. It’s like she just didn’t understand anything but good things. Anything bad, she just didn’t see it. She lived her whole life on a very childlike level. Still does sometimes. I mean, still does, mostly. Except, like . . . Well, like once when I was really sick. She did a lot of pretty complicated stuff to help me. And when Bruno died, her mood got really dark. And she never used to get dark, no matter what kind of crap was going on. Now it kind of comes and goes.”
“And you really miss the simple side when it’s away, right?”
I meet her eyes and then look down at my jeans again. “I didn’t say that.”
“Okay.”
“I think I might’ve killed a guy once. I’m not sure. If I did, it wasn’t on purpose. I’m not somebody who could do a thing like that on purpose, but sometimes things happen even when we didn’t mean for them to.” I had no idea that was about to get said.
“You want to tell me about it?”
“No, this shouldn’t be about me. We’re here to talk about Chloe.”
“You must need to talk to somebody sometimes, though. It must be a lot of pressure for you. Always thinking about Chloe. Taking care of Chloe. What about your own needs?”
“Well, I’d have died if it wasn’t for her, anyway.”
“It’s still got to be hard. Why don’t you tell me about the time you might’ve killed somebody?”
“No. I don’t want to talk about that. I have no idea why I brought that up.”
“Because it weighs on your conscience. Obviously. Have you thought about turning yourself in?”
“I’ve thought about it, yeah. But I can’t. Who would take care of Chloe? Let’s get back to Chloe. Is she making any progress with you at all?”
“I wish I could say she was, Jordan. But she barely talks to me. There’s a lot of dark stuff down there, and she won’t even let me scratch the surface. I’d like to talk a little more with you, though.”
There’s a very obvious question here, but it takes me a while to get to it. So we suffer in this long silence. Well, I suffer, anyway. Do therapists suffer? I don’t know, but probably not over stupid little things like silence. “To talk about Chloe? Or about me?”
“I was thinking we could talk about you sometime. How would you feel about that?”
Pretty much the way I’d feel about dying a slow, painful death. I’d rather drive my truck off a cliff. If I had a cliff. I’d rather spend the day with my father. “Fine,” I say.
I’m feeling jumpy and I know Dr. Reynoso must see it. She keeps smiling at me like she sees it. I keep giving these one-word answers, and I have to stop that.
I’m thinking I’ll just plunge in. Say what I need to say and get it off my chest. I’m not entirely sure I want to trust her. But I’m feeling desperate, like I have to trust somebody. And she seems like a better somebody than most.
“I’m worried that you’re going to turn me in for what I did.” There. I said it.
“No.”
“Because I really don’t see the point of me going to jail. It’s not like society needs to be protected from me, because I would never hurt anybody. I mean, normally. And it’s not even really like I need to be punished, because I’ve punished myself worse than what anybody else would do to me. And Chloe’s the one who would really suffer. And she’s the only one who didn’t do anything wrong.” Then I feel all those words sag and hover somewhere near the carpet, and they seem kind of pathetic. Especially since she said no.
“Okay. That’s actually not what I was hoping we could talk about. I know it’s a big issue to you, and you can talk about it if you want, but I was more interested in talking about you having a life of your own.”
Becoming Chloe Page 7