Chloe Doe

by Suzanne Phillips

  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.”

  The All-knowing

  Camille 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.”

  “You broke the lamp.”

  “The lamp isn’t broken. Now shut up.”

  It’s a Best of Disney lamp, with Mickey Mouse and all his friends falling out of a tree house, left in the house by the people who rented it before us. I found it first and it’s mine. Besides, Camille’s talking like she has a secret, low and choked, like she does when she’s in trouble and worried about it.

  I turn on the lamp.

  “Mind your own business, Baby-Know-It-All.”

  Camille climbs back into bed and curls up on her side. Her small hands clutch the sheet.

  “What are you hiding?” I stand up and look behind the dresser. “What is it?”

  “Your bloody underpants.”

  I stare at her.

  “Idiots stare,” Camille says. “Bennie Munger.”

  Bennie Munger is the retarded boy who lives down the street.

  Soon my mouth will hang open, and I’ll spit when I talk. “You will,” Camille says. “Just like Bennie Munger.

  “I’m doing you a favor,” she says, but she’s crying. Not the whole-body sobs I cry, but the pretty, quiet tears. “We wouldn’t want Mom to know, would we?” she says. “We wouldn’t want her to find them.”

  “They’re not mine.”

  “Yes, they are. You’re a woman now, Chloe. You’re all grown up.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are. You can’t hide from it. There’s no escaping it. It finds you no matter what.”

  “Liar!”

  “It’s true. Our Chloe is a woman. Welcome to the club.” Camille s
niffs and wipes under her nose with the edge of the sheet.

  “You’re a liar,” I say.

  “We’ll see.”

  “I’m telling Mom. Then we’ll see. We’ll see who’s all grown up.”

  “Mom will yell.”

  “At you. They’re your underpants.”

  She jumps onto my bed and pins me to the mattress with her arm on my throat.

  “Never tell, never tell, never tell.” She chants our voodoo. I feel a tear drop on my face and run into my ear.

  “They’re your underpants,” I say, but my voice is weak and I can feel the fight drain out of me. I want to know. I’m ready to admit to anything so long as Camille’ll tell me about her body’s change. Our mother warned us about this event just weeks ago:

  “You two are growing up,” she said, turning away from the sink, where she was washing the dinner dishes. “No doubt about that.” She shook her head, then looked down at me and Camille, still sitting at the table. “You know that, I bet. Jesus, Camille’s got boobs.” Our mother laughed a little and Camille frowned and started saying how she didn’t like the word boobs, and could we please call them something else, when our mother said, “Yes, OK, breasts. Camille, you’re growing real fast. I think I was fourteen before I had anything to show for it.

  “And you’re almost eleven now, Chloe-girl. You want to show us what you got? See if maybe it’s time for a bra?” I shook my head and felt my cheeks heat up. Our mother reached down and stretched the T-shirt I was wearing tight across my chest. “Almost,” she said. “A couple more months.” She let go of my shirt and reached for her cigarettes. She lit one and blew the smoke out in a long cloud over our heads. “Hmm,” she said, eyeing me and Camille through the smoke. “You got your period yet, Cammy?”

  Camille hates her nickname, but our mother insists on it half the time. She also hates talking about her boobs, unless it’s to flaunt them at me.

  Camille sank lower in her chair. I heard her feet tap on the linoleum floor, once, twice, three times. “No, I’m not that grown yet.”

  Our mother thought about this, tilting her head to one side and considering Camille from that angle. She took another drag off her cigarette and flicked the ash into the sink. “You’d tell me though, wouldn’t you, girl?” She blew smoke rings at Camille. “Wouldn’t you, hon?”

  Camille didn’t say anything. She kept looking at the tabletop, turning her fork in circles.

  “Of course, you’d have to. I mean, you’ll need some things.” She put her cigarette down on the edge of the sink and walked over to us. “It’s just that I started mine by this time. I’m just wondering is all, Cammy.”

  “I won’t tell you if you keep calling me that. If you wanted my name to be Cammy, why didn’t you just put it like that on the birth certificate?”

  “It’s just a nickname, girl.” Our mother leaned toward us, putting her skinny hands palms down on the table. “You’re a little sensitive lately, Camille. I think that change is coming on pretty soon.”

  Now, Camille looks at me for a long time, like she’s considering her next move. Then she shrugs her shoulders and takes her arm off my throat.

  “So what?” she says. “It’ll be you soon, too.”

  She rolls over and lies next to me.

  “Why are you crying?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it’s something you do at a time like this.”

  “Are you sad?”

  “No, not really. It’s more like a feeling of aloneness. Like no one else knows what’s going on inside me. It’s a little scary, too. And a relief it’s finally come. It’s a whole bunch of things. But it’s not bad. Not as bad as they tell you in school.”

  “Are you going to be sick?”

  “No. Crampy, maybe. I don’t know yet. So far I feel OK. There’s a girl in my P.E. class who says she gets cramps every time.”

  I hope this doesn’t happen to Camille.

  “I won’t tell. Not Mom or anyone.”

  “Ever?”

  “Not ever.”

  Camille doesn’t want our mother to know because she’ll drag Camille to the store for the “necessary supplies,” and Camille says she can see it already, standing in line at the Safeway and our mother saying to the checker, “My daughter just started. Isn’t that amazing? I swear she was in diapers just two months ago.” I think I’d keep it to myself, too.

  For now, Camille says her P.E. teacher gave each girl a package of necessaries and it will get her through.

  “Can I see it?” I ask.

  “No.”

  Camille goes back to her bed but keeps the light on.

  “I’m going to sleep with it on. If that bothers you, too bad.”

  But it doesn’t bother me. I know I won’t sleep now anyway.

  Our first week in our house on Myrtle Street, Camille ran away for an afternoon. She packed her suitcase and left the house like she was going to school, then sat down at the train station and watched the trains and the people until it got dark.

  Camille says the train station is full of possibilities.

  “There’s one train that goes to San Francisco and another one that goes to Santa Fe. You can go to Seattle or Denver or Chicago. One day I’m just going to hop on one of those trains and see where I end up.”

  “You can try that,” our mother says. “But I wouldn’t recommend it.” She looks up from her nails. She’s painting them Scarlet Fever in preparation for her date tonight. She’s going out with a man whose truck got hit from behind at a red light. Our mother filed the claim for him and took a picture of the damage. “I tried it once,” she said. “Remember?”

  That’s how she met our father.

  “Think about that, Camille, when you’re thinking about where that train might take you. My life hasn’t been the same since.”

  I look at Camille. She’s got her lips pulled in like she does when she thinks hard about something. I wonder if sometimes our mother thinks about leaving us like our father did. I used to ask her, but she always said, “Don’t go borrowing worry, Chloe,” or “You worry something too much and it’s likely to happen,” so I stopped asking.

  “I think it might be worth the trip,” Camille says.

  The next day Camille wrote the school a letter saying she was at the dentist and would they please excuse her absence. She signed our mother’s name to it.

  I haven’t told on Camille, not on any of these things. She didn’t need to use her voodoo on me.

  I keep my mouth shut because telling means I’m no longer useful. Sometimes Camille says to me, Get lost. I don’t need you. When I know something, when the secret’s still safe, she likes me better than she likes her best friend.

  Camille says she and I will never truly be friends because she’ll always be older, and because of that, smarter.

  “We’ll never be equals,” she says.

  At thirteen she’s got a mind of her own. I heard our mother say that about her.

  Camille says, “You’ll always be running to catch up to me.”

  When I mention God knowing everything we do to my mother, she says, “That’s some imagination, Chloe-girl. That’s really something. What a thing to turn on your mother.”

  Then she thinks about it and says, “You know, I think you’re right. Something that off the wall’s got to be true. I guess I better think twice before I eat those grapes in the supermarket. Money first, then nibble. Huh, Chloe? You think I should think twice?”

  Her laugh gets caught in her throat. “You think God knows where your father is? I’d love back pay.”

  She wears her black dress with the silver bows at the waist and leaves us with a bowl of popcorn and Pepsi and the TV until the houses and the street are quiet, then she comes home, falling on the steps and laughing and saying, “Shh . . . my girls . . .” And there’s a man’s voice, crashing like thunder, laughing with her.

  They make kissing-smacking sounds while Camille and I scrunch down under our covers. And in the morning his
car is still in the driveway.

  This, I think, is one of the things God knows about that our mother wishes He didn’t. In the morning, our mother shows the man to the door then comes into the kitchen bundled in her bathrobe and white in the face, even with her makeup still on. She sits down at the table and says, “Get me a cup of coffee, will you, Camille?” Then she looks at me, in that quiet way of hers. Her eyes get small and the lines under them deepen. “How about that, Chloe?” she says. “You think your mother might have a screw loose?” She tries to light a cigarette but her hands shake and she drops the match. “I think I might. Yeah. That would explain some of the things I do.

  “I hope God’s given the two of you a little more sense than He gave me.”

  She looks at Camille, sipping her orange juice. “I worry about you, girlie-girl. A train won’t take you where you want to go.”

  Faith

  Our second one-to-one, he’s waiting for me. The chairs are arranged so that two face each other, with enough room between them an elephant could pass through and fart and we wouldn’t hear it. I sit down, in my hospital greens, and really look at him. It’s possible he could change my life. I haven’t forgotten the way he jumped under my skin, pushed at my soft spots so that I left feeling like a car wreck. No one’s ever done that before, gone after me fast and furious and got a hit.

  Part of me wants to run, but even I know I wouldn’t get far.

  He tells me I’m looking better.

  My cheeks have filled out some and I’ve graduated from tissue paper to cotton the color of puke.

  “You brushed your hair,” I say. I liked it better when it flew away from his head like a scream.

  In the week since I’ve seen him I forgot a lot of details, including the fact that he wears glasses and has a nose a bird could build a nest on. But the hair, I remembered.

  “So did you.”

  “Yeah. They let me have a brush today. A loaner.” They don’t know about lice here. How easy it is to give each other bugs and infections.

  By next week, he says, I could have enough points to buy my own.

  “Maybe.”