Camille has nine moths in her box. There are less of them this year because of the heat. Nothing is surviving.
Yesterday Camille and I walked to 7-Eleven for Cokes and counted thirteen dead birds along the way. The news says to watch cats and small dogs, especially. Small animals are victims of the weather. We wore socks with our tennis shoes but still felt the heat through the rubber soles.
It’s only the second week of June. School let out two days early because there were no air conditioners and the old fans just pushed hot air.
Camille says it’s so hot because hell is opening up to snatch the child-killer.
In the afternoons we lay on the floor in the living room, in front of the fan, and sing our names into the whirling blades:
C-h-l-l-o-o-e-e-e
C-a-a-m-i-l-l-l-e
The curtains are drawn and the room is shadowy. We don’t turn on the light. We’re not allowed to open the refrigerator; our mother will get us what we need, if she thinks we really need it. We have an old blue Westinghouse refrigerator and the ice cubes are melting in the tray, even with the temperature on COOLEST and us opening it only three or four times a day.
“They’re not going to make it.” Camille shakes her box and the moths open their wings. They’re slow and maybe ready to die.
Once, I killed one between my fingers; its body crumbled like ash and blew away. It was an accident.
“Let them go,” I tell her. “They’re no use to you dead.”
She puts the box on the street, between her feet, and hangs her head over them, watching their lives fade.
We’re sitting on the sidewalk, catching what little wind comes. Neighbors drive by and honk. Across the street, Mr. Shearer prunes his roses while Mrs. Shearer holds up a flashlight. Stars come out in the still-blue sky.
“Why don’t you let them go?”
“It’s natural selection,” Camille explains. “Only the strong survive.”
She wants to be a scientist.
The parents of the boys will watch, too. People from the news will record his last words, how he looks when the poison hits him, if he says he’s sorry.
Camille says her last words would be the name of the man she loves, and she’ll only kill if she has to. She’ll kill if her life is in danger, or if the man she loves is about to be murdered. But she’ll never kill someone’s baby.
He’ll struggle, Camille says. They’ll tie him down, but his body will have a mind of its own.
That’s why the parents come. Ten seconds of screaming pain will heal their broken hearts.
In the morning the moths are curled up on the bottom of the box, and Camille flushes them down the toilet. She says, “Thank you for the brief shining moments of your lives that touched mine,” as the water swirls and is swallowed up.
The night before, Camille and I stayed up past midnight. We watched the clock from our beds, where we were supposed to be sleeping. When it was twelve-oh-one Camille said, “One less devil to worry about.” But I thought the words in my mind, Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Match Game
I’m here three months when he pulls out the big artillery.
“Do you want your mother to come for a visit?”
Like he knows who she is and exactly where to find her.
“Is the old address still good?”
Sure. I’ve been writing her letters. One every week I’ve been gone.
“Have you ever written her?”
He looks harmless today, in shoes that are almost worn-through in the soles. I tell him I have better walks than that, me, a guest of the state.
“You want to borrow a few dollars?” I ask him. Get yourself some shoes that won’t let in the rain.
He’s planning on shopping over the weekend. And thanks, but he can manage on his small county paycheck. “What was your address?” he asks again.
“I don’t remember it,” I tell him, even though I know the street name and number better than I do my birthday.
Sometimes I think about Gordo, the only man who was nice to us, who lived two doors down and painted his house the color of avocados when they’re peeled open; that next-to-the-pit color of yellow-green, because it reminded him of a small town in Mexico where his brothers still lived.
I tell him about Gordo, because he’s the only memory from that place that doesn’t draw blood.
He says I remember Gordo so well because he’s the only healthy male influence of my young life. And he wore his heart on his sleeve: people appreciate someone willing to feel his own loneliness.
Really? Every day without Camille is like walking without my shadow. I turn, thinking she’ll be right there. Wanting it so bad a couple of times I was sure I caught a glimpse of her red hair, her white, white skin, before she faded back to memory. How do I wear that?
But I don’t tell him this. Instead, I say, “Gordo and my mother were together. I saw him naked.”
He looks at me through his glasses and I stare right back at him, giving nothing away.
“Sometimes that happens,” he says. “Even in the best families.” For example, “We walk into a bathroom without knocking.” He lets that hang between us, almost like a question: Was there something more sinister going on?
I give it up. Gordo never tried to hurt me.
“You’re right,” I tell him. “It was an accident.”
“Chloe, do you want to see your mother?”
“You think I should.” But I don’t see how it’s going to help me. “It wouldn’t be a happy reunion.”
“It’s an opportunity,” he says. Some girls need to face their mothers, to look them in the eye and tell them what a bad job they did. He says once I let go of those feelings, once they’re with their rightful owner, my wounds will close, my scars will fade. Like I have an infection in my blood and the only way I’ll heal is to let the poison ooze out of me.
What he doesn’t get, is that even if he finds her, even if she comes, it won’t be to hold my hand and tell me how sorry she is. And, anyway, it’s too late for that.
“I never wrote her,” I admit, “but I called her once. I had to tell her who I was.”
“She didn’t forget you.”
“She didn’t recognize my voice.” I’d only been gone a year. “And then there was silence.” So much of it, I thought she had dropped the phone, or maybe I had given her a heart attack and she was on the floor gasping for breath. Later, I hoped that it was true. That she was so sorry she missed her chance to tell me the things I needed to hear, that she died. I believe that regret and sorrow can do that to a person.
“What did you need to hear?”
He knows this answer. He has kids of his own.
“That she was sorry?”
“That too.”
I really wanted to know that she loved me, missed me, wanted me back.
“I did all the talking. ‘Hi, Mom.’ SILENCE. ‘It’s me, Chloe.’ SILENCE. SILENCE. SILENCE. ‘Chloe.’ I hoped, with Walt gone, she was thinking clearer. I told her, ‘I want to come home.’
“She never spoke.” I cried, I asked her to say something. Say my name. What’s my name, Mom? “She hung up.”
“And that was the end of it?”
“You know I feel like a bug with a pin through my heart?” The way he looks at me nonstop.
“Too intense?”
“I feel like I can’t move.”
He tells me I can get up, walk around.
Like a fly buzzing around inside a bottle. I can’t leave. The only out comes when he twists off the cap and turns me upside down. Until then I’ll feel the air grow thinner, become weightless in my lungs. Sometimes he keeps me until I almost pass out and the world is white.
“So?” he says. “You never talked to her again?”
“Yeah, sure I did. I called back a few weeks later and told her all the things you think I need to tell her. So, you see, it’s been done. I guess I know a little about doctoring.
“I have nothing to say to h
er.”
I shift. The chair is tight. Feels tighter. I pull at my hospital-issued V-neck cotton shirt. Three meals and snacks, too. I never ate this good.
“You can come up with a few words.”
When I think of my mother, my heart’s a flat line.
“You feel something,” he insists. “Don’t you ever just want to scream?”
I feel like my body’s been raging for years.
He likes my analogy, that prostituting my body has really been my way of exorcising my anger. It’s self-destructive but the only way I know to keep my engine running. And my mother had self-destructive behaviors, too.
Yeah? “Like what?”
He watches me a moment, taking off his glasses and folding them into the palm of his hand.
“She had a lot of men in her life,” he points out. “Like you.”
“Not really.” The men in my life are just passing through. None stay long enough it hurts.
I am not my mother. I’m not anything like her.
I look around the room. Chairs, a bookshelf, a table with names and body parts carved into the wood. Not even a window. There’ll be no escaping today. No leaping from the flames and sprinting into the crowd.
I wait him out. I won’t look at him, won’t break the silence. I hear him move; his crossed leg comes undone and his foot hits the floor. He inches forward in his chair.
“That bothers you. A lot.”
Good work, Sherlock.
“You’re a smart girl, Chloe,” he says. “You thought about this before.”
“I’m not like my mother.” I have thought about this, and there are some important differences. For starters, the only damage I do is to myself.
“There are some differences,” he agrees.
But not many. He won’t say it because he won’t argue. Some truths, he told me, need to be realized if they’re going to be worth anything.
“So you think we’re a pair.” I have to clear my throat and his eyes go soft. I don’t want him feeling sorry for me. I put the anger I’m feeling in my eyes and lay them on him. “Like mother, like daughter.”
“I think she made it too easy for you to take to the streets. To think of it as your only choice.”
Promiscuity starts at home.
He sees a pattern. My mother’s willingness to share her body with a number of men in return for what she thought was love is similar to me paying my bills and putting food in my stomach. I can see that. There was more money when my mother had a man around, more food in the cupboards.
And I thought she didn’t teach me a thing.
“What else?” I want to know the other ways he compared us and found a match.
“She put up a good fight,” he says, “trying to ignore that what she was doing to herself, to her girls, was fatal.”
I never held another person’s life in my hands and then shook them loose.
“What did it feel like,” he wants to know, “going to your mother, asking her for help, and she turned you away?”
She needed Walt more than she needed us. “The only thing I need from the cachas is money. My mother couldn’t live without love.”
“Is that what she had with your stepfather?”
“She thought so.” And she believed she’d never find it again.
“Your mother loved her husband more than she did you,” he spells it out.
“Even though he was a dirtbag,” I agree.
“Even though he hurt you,” he adds. “She loved him.”
That’s right. She didn’t want to believe he hurt us, even when the truth was the only thing left in the room.
“And you felt . . .”
I wait a beat and lift my shoulders.
“You going to make this multiple choice?”
He says they have to be my words. I have to take ownership of my feelings.
“You realized your mother wasn’t going to come through. You were on your own.”
How did I feel then?
I try not to think of that moment. Every time I do it wraps around my throat, takes a bite out of me. But he’s waiting, his eyebrows perched above the silver rims of his glasses and looking like he could stay exactly where he is another day or two.
The look on her face was like being pushed off a cliff. “It was a long fall and knowing the whole way I was dying.”
He smiles real big and toothy, like a pumpkin.
“That’s good,” he says. We made progress today.
“She should have loved you better.” Just in case I didn’t know it. If no one ever said it to me before.
She should have saved me. And Camille. Think about how different my life would be then.
“And Hitler never should have happened.” So long as we’re dreaming.
“She’s the reason you’re here,” he says. “Do you see that?”
I do, but I gave him enough. He’s happy and too old to be doing cartwheels. Besides, I need to keep a little something for myself.
High Dive
This summer our mother is working at the city pool for extra money. Camille and I get in for free. And we get free licorice whips, we both like black, and Coke, but only one cup each. We have to wait until we’re really thirsty. Sometimes we wait until our mouths are so dry it’s hard to talk. The water in the fountain tastes like rust, like it’s been sitting there all winter, and Camille says it can probably kill you if you already have a cold or stomach flu. She learned in school that stagnant water breeds disease.
I’m eleven years old and tall enough that I can use the high dive. You have to be twelve. Camille says she’ll tell on me, but she never does. Even at thirteen she doesn’t use the high dive, because she gets dizzy on the tenth step and has to push her way back down, through the bigger kids who call her chicken and peck at her, flapping their arms.
She says I’m fearless because I’m young. But in a few years I won’t like heights or small places; I’ll be like her friend, Mary Witcher, who’s afraid of dogs and thunder and of dying in a car crash.
I know I’ll always love to dive; it’s like flying. It’s where no one can touch me.
Sometimes I think I’m a bluebird, hanging in the air, putting off for as long as I can the time when I have to return.
Even birds can’t fly forever.
I have big dreams. I’ll be a world-class diver. I’ll go to the Olympics. I can do a swan with a half twist; the lifeguard says that’s a good start.
Our father was a swimmer. Camille says he taught both of us to swim when I was three years old, which is why I don’t really remember. I only know I’ve been able to swim forever. Now I know my father’s hands were under my stomach when I kicked to get to the side and hold the blue rail, thinking my life depended on getting there as fast as I could. I have fragments of memory: pieces of our father, but it could have been someone else. I have only Camille to tell me if I’m wrong. Most times she’s pretty good at it.
I don’t remember his face. Or his voice. I don’t know if he cheered us on, but I think he must have, or I wouldn’t love it like I do. I wouldn’t be a natural.
He’s what I think about when I’m up here, when I’m tumbling through the air, when everything’s perfect. And I still ask Camille about him.
“What did he look like?”
“He wore blue trunks,” Camille says. “And a white cap.”
I’ve never seen a man wear a cap, but Camille says he did it for his ears. “He got a lot of ear infections.”
“Did he like to dive, too?
Camille thinks there was only a small board then. She remembers he walked slowly to the very end of it, balanced on his toes, and closed his eyes like he was praying. When he did dive, there was nothing spectactular about it. Nothing like we see on the TV. Our father, Camille says, didn’t have a lot of flair. We think this is one of the things that bothered our mother.
Camille was five when he left us. She knows our mother was not easy to live with.
“She yelled every time
he came home, sometimes late and the dinner was ruined, sometimes early and it wasn’t ready yet, and what does he expect of her if he can’t give her a schedule to work on?”
Camille is good at being our mother and reliving those last days. Otherwise, I wouldn’t know what was what.
“He just couldn’t get it right,” Camille says. “And that was it. He stopped trying. You can’t expect a man to stay around if there’s no winning.”
Sometimes I look at our father’s picture and try to remember him. In the picture he’s standing in front of our house on India Street, and the lawn is spread out in front of him. He’s holding a silver thermos under his arm and wearing work clothes with splotches of paint and a tear at the elbow. It’s a green shirt, and underneath, where his bony elbow sticks out, he’s wearing a white thermal. He has skinny legs. The belt at his waist makes his pants bunch. The soles of his boots are worn to almost nothing. He’s looking into the camera and I know his eyes are brown, because Camille told me.
Camille says I look more like him than she does. I have my father’s brown eyes. Camille says he always looked hungry, and I have the same kind of thinness; a down-to-bone look that people find alarming.
Camille resembles our father in temperament. Our mother says Camille could challenge a mule in stubbornness and win nine times out of ten, “just like your father.” Our mother says she knows only one other person than Camille to make up their mind so quick and permanent, our father.
I think I remember hearing him call us into dinner. I think he may be the shadow setting the table, drinking coffee, reading the newspaper to us, singing along to a Johnny Mathis Christmas album. But Camille says I want it so bad, I’m dreaming it, and this could be equally true.
On the back of his picture our father wrote:
Dad
India St.
1991
I move like I’m gravity, like it’s not a decision.
Standing on my toes, on the edge of the high dive, the water looks as clear and blue as the sky.
In my head there’s the possibility that this moment isn’t here yet, that maybe I’m not born. I could be an idea. Or I could be realized, and life is standing still. For this moment, the world has stopped.
Chloe Doe Page 8