Chloe Doe

by Suzanne Phillips

  She has the windshield wipers on high — pretend, but I can imagine them sweeping over the glass.

  Camille is all scrunched up behind the wheel now. Her nose almost touches it as she leans forward and watches the pretend red taillights ahead of us. She’s very good at preventing accidents. More than once on our pretend trips she has driven off the road to avoid a bad driver. We’ve never flipped over or hit a tree, although we’ve come close.

  All our trips go wrong. We never end up where we plan. Even a calm trip to the supermarket turns into a race for our lives.

  “Whoever’s after us wants us dead,” Camille will say. She’ll press harder on the gas. She’ll grip the steering wheel until her knuckles are white. And she’ll shout orders at me, “Duck!” Or, if her attention is needed somewhere else, “Grab the wheel!” This, when she pretend-shoots at the car behind us.

  This trip is no different.

  “Will you look at that,” Camille says. “We’re being followed.”

  “Where?”

  “Don’t turn around! Idiot! We don’t want him to know we know,” she hisses.

  “It’s that green Chevy, with the Nevada license plates. He’s been with us the last ten miles. Every time I make a lane change, he changes, too.

  “Damn rain,” she mutters. She turns on the high beams. “We might have to get off.”

  Every time, there’s a reason to get off the freeway. Sometimes the sky’s a dark Satan. Sometimes there’s a moon. Today, Camille says, the thunderclouds will make it hard to see two feet in front of us.

  Sometimes the other car will turn off its lights and coast behind us while we drive down a dead-end street.

  We should keep going, I tell her. Stay on the road until we see a gas station.

  Sometimes Camille will bring up the possibility of a gas station. If we could only find a gas station, she’ll say, only to find it deserted when we pull into it. Not even the bell rings.

  “Who’s scared now?” Camille says.

  “I’m not scared.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “Not as scared as you. I won’t cry.”

  This morning Camille cried. She locked herself in our bedroom and told me to leave her alone. She played the radio, singing over Britney Spears. She had it up really loud and still I heard only her voice.

  Walt got her for eating the last bit of Cheerios for breakfast. That’s what set him off, but really it was because last night Camille bit him. She kicked his shins and yelled to wake the dead. When our mother stumbled into our bedroom, Walt told her Camille had a nightmare.

  This morning he chased her around the kitchen and out the front door. Mrs. Pitts was in her front yard clipping the wisteria bush.

  “I hate Mrs. Pitts,” Camille said. I hate her, too.

  All our high-speed chases, every shoot-out and game of chicken turn out the same. The man after us is wearing a ski mask or a Halloween costume. We can’t see his face, not until the end, after we’ve killed him and Camille takes off his mask to reveal his identity. He’s either slumped over the wheel in the driver’s seat and Camille has to use all her strength to push him back so she can peel off his ski cap and see who he is. Or he’s thrown clear of the car and lies mangled, arms and legs everywhere, according to Camille, and she rolls him over and takes off his mask and there he is: an old boyfriend of our mother’s.

  We get out of the car and walk over to where the body was thrown clear.

  “Look at that,” Camille says. “His arm is missing.” She scans the driveway. “You see it anywhere?”

  “No.”

  I let Simon out with us. I watch him walk through the grass toward the Portsmiths’ backyard.

  Camille crouches down beside the body and takes a long time straightening his head. “A clown’s mask,” she says, then peels it off.

  It’s Walt.

  “He’s a dirty SOB,” Camille says. “I don’t like him.”

  She rubs her palms like she’s trying to clean them under water.

  “Now we can get our skirts,” I say.

  I really want an orange wrap skirt and a string of different-color beads that tell the future. I want to keep pretending. To see how far Camille will go. Lately, our trips end after she lets her hate loose.

  “I don’t care about the skirts,” Camille says.

  “I do.”

  “Then drive yourself.”

  “I don’t know how to drive.”

  She walks away and I see the backs of her legs just below the hem of her yellow sundress. Purple and blue hand marks where Walt got her.

  “You need to learn. I’ll show you.”

  Camille gets Simon from where he’s sitting on the edge of the Portsmiths’ yard, then gets in on the passenger side. She puts Simon on her lap and keeps him there by holding onto his scruff. He stretches his back and purrs as she pets him.

  “Put the key in the ignition.” She pretends to put the car in neutral. “Now, start and we’re off.”

  I make sure to steer clear of the place where we left Walt. Camille likes to run her victims over. She does this whooping like a warrior Indian.

  Now she’s crying. I tell her she’s going to ruin her makeup. She’s always careful about that. She doesn’t want to look like our mother looks when she cries, like she has two black eyes.

  She pulls our father’s handkerchief from her purse and wipes her face.

  “It doesn’t smell like him anymore,” she says.

  Fire-eater

  The little Niña is going home. She’s no longer a harm to herself.

  In group the doctors ask her about the time she jumped out her bedroom window and she says, That was a mistake. I’ll never do that again.

  When they ask her, Can we trust you with an open medicine cabinet? With knives in plain view?

  She says, I’m not thinking about dying. I have a job to do. I have a future.

  She once put her hand into an open flame on the gas stove in her kitchen. She kept it there for a count of ten.

  What about causing yourself unnecessary pain? they ask.

  Can they trust her not to burn her arms with cigarettes?

  Will she promise to eat three meals a day?

  Will she look before crossing the street? Think before opening a bottle of aspirin?

  She once ate fire.

  She made a funnel with construction paper, soaked it with gasoline, and lit a match to it. Then she took a breath, in and out, quick.

  Will she be doing this again?

  No, she tells them. I’m past that. My mind is on other things. I want to make the world a better place to live in.

  No pain . . . no pain . . . no pain . . .

  Don’t feel . . . don’t feel . . . don’t feel . . .

  That’s how she did it, put her hand in the flame from the kitchen stove and counted to ten and survived with nothing to show for it. No scars. No souvenirs.

  “I listen to the words. I believe that what I’m saying is true: I feel no pain.

  “Then I do it. I do it while the words are everything.

  “If you don’t fear it, you’re OK. Nothing happens. But think about it, and you’re lost.”

  Her hand never burned, she says. It was sore for a while. She put some Bactine on it and it was OK. Like a sunburn. But there were no blisters. No scarring. And she’s telling the truth. She holds out her hands for me to see. There are no marks of old wounds or punishments.

  No one would even know about it, except her mother caught her in the act. She came into the kitchen and saw the Niña with her hand in the open flame and she screamed to bring down the house. Then she called 911, not even thinking to get the Niña away from the stove.

  “It wouldn’t have been sore,” she tells me, “except she interrupted my thoughts. I lost my focus.”

  It’s all in the head, she says.

  There are promises the Niña must make before they’ll let her go. She’ll sign a contract. We all will. There’s no leaving unless we agree to c
ome back, once a week for as long as it takes. We’ll get a real job. Pee in a cup. And no calling people from the past, they’re more weight than we can bear.

  We leave knowing we’ll be fighters the rest of our lives. Guerreras. Our problems can come back, if we let them. If we’re not careful. Vigilant. So we can leave Madeline Parker, but on a leash.

  The Niña will sign her contract just to get out. She’ll sign it so she can get on with her life. She’s tired of living in limbo. Of feeling like a ropewalker without a net.

  Just about everyone expects us to fall. And when we do, it’s up to us alone to scrape it all back together.

  “My life is set,” she says.

  They have her organized. A half day of school until she feels better. One hour a week with her private therapist and an hour in group here at Madeline Parker. She’ll have family therapy with her mother. She’ll have chores to do around the house. After-school activities will have to wait. Maybe a part-time job in the summer.

  We say good-bye to the Niña the night before she goes. We have a little party, with cake and music and staff telling her why they think she’ll do OK out there, why they don’t expect to see her back here anytime soon.

  “Your life has new meaning,” they say. “You understand your mother and she understands you.”

  In the morning the Niña packs her bags. She packs everything except her diary.

  “I want you to have it,” she says. “We’re a lot alike.”

  I don’t think so and I tell her this.

  “But we are.” She says we’re both where we’re at in life because of a brother or a sister. “And our mothers are just the same.” She knows this because things never should have gone so far.

  I start wishing I never said anything about Camille or about our mother’s boyfriends. That I’d never showed them what growing up Chloe was like. And besides, she’s wrong. It’s not Camille who got me where I am today. Not the way the Niña’s brother did her.

  And one more thing, she says. “We changed our names thinking it’d change who we are.” Thinking we could have a different life.

  Her doctor told her that.

  “We’re running away.” With nowhere to go.

  Dr. Dearborn has been after me to come up with a new last name. One that says I’m somebody. He thinks I chose Doe to make a statement. One that didn’t require an explanation. A statement I no longer need because my life is changing. I have a future.

  The Niña leaves the diary on her bed. She says we’re almost sisters. I think about that. Could we be sisters? Not the way Camille and I were, but because our lives are too much alike, the markings on our bodies too much the same, this could be our bond. She could be my little sister, and maybe having one wouldn’t be so bad.

  I don’t tell her I’ll think about it, but I will.

  Espanto

  Dr. Dearborn says there’s a moment when someone like me knows they’ve come to the end of the line. When did I decide I couldn’t do it anymore? When did I decide to leave the only home I knew? Could I tell him about that moment?

  I’ve been in Madeline Parker five months now; I’ve lost track of how many times I sat in this little room, just me and my doctor, how many sins I’ve confessed.

  “I lived a long time wishing I could leave my mother’s house.” I shrug. “I had nowhere to go.”

  “When did that stop mattering?” he asks.

  When was nowhere better than where I was?

  “I found Camille. In the backyard.”

  We’d only been back to school a month and Walt had come to our bedroom door and told Camille, No, not today. He’d started doing that toward the end, kept Camille home from school. Every time he did, Camille cried, but not that morning.

  The first thing I did when I got home was look for her. She hated our house and our bedroom and I always found her outside, sometimes crying, sometimes so still she was almost invisible, sitting in the yard with Simon or with a bunch of flowers she’d gathered and plucked, holding the soft petals in her hands like she was trying to capture water.

  “She was laying down.” At first, from a distance, I thought she looked like a white, white sheet that had been blown from a clothesline. “When I got close I knew why.

  “I screamed. And kept screaming.”

  “What was wrong with Camille?”

  I ignore his question. I don’t want to say it. I’m not ready to say it. And, anyway, he already knows.

  “Mrs. Pitts called the police.”

  They came with an ambulance.

  A fire truck. Two.

  They came in pairs.

  In cars with lights swirling and sirens splitting the air.

  The policía, with their guns and badges and vests like they were walking into a war zone, came too late.

  They said, Why don’t you come over here? Come with me. Come into the house.

  “They made me sit on the couch. I was still holding Camille’s shoes and they took them from me.”

  The police asked, Do you know where your mother is?

  My mother was working.

  “Do you have her phone number? At work? Do you know your mother’s telephone number?”

  I stop. My chest feels tight. I don’t think I can go on.

  “I can’t talk now,” I tell him.

  I’m a dam about to burst.

  “You’re doing fine,” he says. He leans forward, rests his elbows on his knees. It’s his all-star pose, if he was ever a player.

  “You like bringing me to tears?”

  “It’s my job,” the doctor says. “I want you to go farther today. I want you to give me a little more.”

  He says, “Tell me what you were feeling.” On that day. “On September nineteenth.”

  Like a knife was stuck in my ribs and everytime I drew a breath my lungs burned. Like I was dying from the inside out.

  “Do you know the word espanto?”

  No. He doesn’t know any Spanish.

  “And you’re living in the City of Angels?”

  He’s not a native. He moved here from Wisconsin to go to UCLA. He looks OK today.

  “Did your wife dress you?”

  “Yes,” he says. “She went shopping over the weekend. Do you like it?” He pulls on the collar of his new blue cotton shirt with the gray pearl buttons.

  “You look like you’re playing dress-up cowboy.” But it’s good. “It’s better.

  “Can you order a taco in Spanish? Ask for directions? Call for help?”

  He says maybe he can order off a menu in Spanish.

  “Well, in case you ever need it, it’s ayuda! If you’re ever away from home. If you venture into the barrios.” But the slums are no place for an innocent.

  He takes off his glasses and his eyes look smaller today, deeper.

  “You were afraid,” he says. On that day.

  He wants me to say it, to own my feelings, and we’ve come too far for me to deny him. For me to hide.

  “Espanto, it means terror.” My voice breaks just a little and a smile fills the lines in his face. It hits me like a sucker punch.

  “Good,” he says.

  “You want me scared?”

  “Anything else would be a lie.”

  I know he’s right, but I don’t like it. I sit real still for a minute, and think about how it feels. To be afraid. It turns the edges of my world white. Makes my heart beat too fast. My lungs burn. My eyes, too.

  “Don’t stop now,” he says. We’re close. My breakthrough, he can see it just around the corner. So can I. I have to work harder to breathe, like I’m standing at the top of Everest, and I’m light-headed.

  “Isn’t that enough?” I can’t make my voice more than a whisper.

  But he shakes his head. There’ll be no rest for me. Not until I give it all I’ve got.

  I take a minute. Until my hands stop shaking and I can look him in the eye.

  “The police didn’t take him. Not right away.”

  Walt walked around
the house with a gun. For three days. He balanced it on his leg when he watched TV and set it beside his plate when he ate. That morning, the morning they arrested Walt, he held it to his head, above his ear, and asked us,

  “How does that look? You want this to be the last picture you have of me?” We didn’t answer. “Chloe, get the camera.”

  I took the picture, with him looking straight at me, with the gun against his head and his finger curled around the trigger.

  He asked my mother, “Well, how does it look? You want me to do it, don’t you?”

  My mother said, “Why don’t you do it? Instead of talking about it?” She got up from the table, where only Walt was eating, where I was sitting with a glass of orange juice, and she stabbed the air with her cigarette. I wished it was his heart she was slicing into. I wished the gun would go off on its own.

  “Because I knew he wouldn’t do it, Doc. He was a coward.”

  Walt said, “You don’t love me anymore? You don’t love me, Connie?”

  My mother looked at him. Her eyes seemed deeper than the ocean. She took a drag off the cigarette, but her hand was shaking.

  “You know it was an accident. I didn’t mean it to happen. You know how she got me going all the time.” His hand tightened on the gun. He pushed it against his head. “Is this what you want, then? Answer me, Connie. You better answer me. Because if you don’t love me anymore, I want to be dead.”

  I finally tell Dr. Dearborn what he’s been waiting for: “He killed my sister. And my mother knew it.”

  The room started spinning. I held on to the edge of the table, felt my fingertips slipping.

  I remember thinking, Don’t answer him. Don’t answer him. I tried to think it hard enough that I could make her stay quiet. If she could do it, if she could let him think she didn’t love him anymore, even if she did, there would be a chance for us. I wouldn’t have to leave like I was already thinking I’d do. We could move again, like we did when Henrik left, when my father left, and start over. I wasn’t ready to give up on my mother yet.

  But the meanness drained out of Walt. He was like a puppy pushing at her hand, looking for love.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, God, help me.” She was crying again; her face folded up and her cigarette fell from her fingers. “Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God!”