“Are you still my wife, Connie?” Walt put a little whine in his voice, a little uncertainty. “Are we together?” His hand, holding the gun to his head, shook. “I don’t want to be here if we’re not together.”
“I’m your wife.”
She said the words softly, like they cost her nothing. But her face changed. She was an old woman with white in her red hair and a wrinkled face.
“It was over then,” I tell the doctor. “For all of us.
“Camille was dead and I felt that way too.”
Only I was still breathing. I tried to make myself stop, thought if I wished it hard enough, it’d happen.
And that’s how I was feeling. Like a muñón. A ghost. I was what was left over after the best part of me was taken away. And I kept thinking it couldn’t be true. Like the people who lose an arm, who still have feeling in their missing fingers. I could still feel Camille.
The police came back three days after Camille was killed because what they took out of her was semen. They came to the door and said,
“Mr. Atwater, could you step outside for a minute? There are some questions . . . a few things that need clearing up.”
“Why don’t you come in?”
“Outside would be better. There’s no need to upset the girl.”
I was standing at the door, next to Walt. Inside my head I was screaming his name, but I couldn’t find my voice. I was still in that faraway place I went when I first found Camille, where it felt like I wasn’t really living all the things that were happening.
Walt was waiting for the police. He had the .357 in his jeans, under his San Diego Zoo T-shirt. He pulled out the gun and said he would kill himself. He put it to his head and told them not to come near him. To stay away, or he’d do it. Sure as they were looking at him alive, they’d be looking at him dead.
My mother flew out of the house to be at Walt’s side. To try to get him to put the gun down.
“No, Walt. No! You don’t mean it.” Her face was swollen and pink, from days of crying. “You don’t mean it. Tell me you don’t mean it.”
She cradled his head in her hands. Looked into his eyes. Stuck her body up against his. Clung to him like she wouldn’t be parted.
“I want to die. You know I want to die.”
I wanted him to die, too. I wanted it more than I wanted to breathe.
The police swarmed around them. They took the gun and tore my mother out of Walt’s arms and held her back. They pushed Walt down on top of the car and pulled his arms back and Walt was crying, “I love you! I love you, Connie! You know I love you!”
Even after they shut the door, he pushed his face up against the glass so his nose and lips were smashed, and he said, “Connie! Connie!” Like a baby bawling. “Connie!”
And that was the last I saw of him. This man who killed my sister.
“And your mother? When did you last see her?”
I take a deep breath but it’s not enough.
“Your wife buy you anything else? Maybe some shoes?”
“When, Chloe?”
“Some zapatos. Loafers or Nikes. Do you run?”
“Your mother.”
“Your mother, Doc.”
He almost laughs.
“I’m not letting you off,” he says. “It’s my last question today. When you answer it you can go back to your room.”
“Or we’ll sit here till Tuesday?”
“For as long as it takes.”
But I’m done hiding.
“Six years ago September twenty-second,” I tell him. “Three days after Camille was killed.” I stand up and move toward the door. “It rained, for the first time since before summer. It was hard to breathe, with the steam coming up off the pavement.” I get to the door and turn the knob.
“I left that night, when my mother came back from the police station. It was dark. The street lights were on. She came into the house and sat down at the kitchen table, her purse in her lap, and I asked her, ‘What are we going to do?’
“She couldn’t look at me. She just sat there for a long time, and then she said, ‘He’s my husband.’
“I was on the street two months when the police picked me up. The first time. They put me in a foster home. That’s no place for a child.”
I step through the door but look back at him.
“I took one thing with me. You know what that was?”
He shakes his head.
“A picture of my father. The only one we had. I kept it with me two years. Then it was just one more thing to carry around.”
He nods, like he understands. And maybe he does. I know I’m not the only person who’s had to give up a dream.
I shut the door. I think he’s probably right about talking, that bad memories lose their hold on you once they hit air.
Monkey Ring
“Camille was wearing a yellow headband, a plastic monkey ring she got out of the gum-ball machine at Safeway, and a Band-Aid on the heel of her right foot, where her new school shoes dug into her.”
It took a whole week for her to break the shoes in. She limped like something was broken, and she thought she might need crutches if it kept up.
“You remember a lot about that day,” Dr. Dearborn says.
“I remember the things that were important to Camille.”
“Good. That’s how we keep loved ones close.” No matter the distance.
No matter how they were taken from you.
“Tell me about that day,” he says. “Your last day with your sister.”
The police asked Walt, “You were at work?”
He was wearing his work shirt that said Miller Genuine Draft above the pocket. The police asked Walt how long he was a driver for Miller.
“Eight years.”
“Are you fond of the daughters?”
Walt shoved his hands in his pockets. He rocked on the heels of his feet. “I love them,” he said. “Camille was a good girl.”
The police stopped writing and studied Walt.
“Yeah? So when I call Miller they’ll tell me you were on the job?”
“That’s what they’ll say.”
“And your last delivery was where?”
“Well, I don’t remember,” Walt said. “I guess I forgot now. I forgot.”
“Yeah, well, it’s written down, right?”
“I don’t write down all my drops. Some are called in at the last minute.”
“Then Miller will know about it? The guy who radioed you out?”
“He must know. Someone has to keep track of us.”
I found her in the backyard and covered her with rose petals and the oak leaves that turned gold in the Indian summer.
The police asked, “Did you find her like that already? Or did you use the petals and the leaves to cover her up?”
“She was naked.”
“So you wanted to cover her up?”
I shrugged and it was enough for him.
“Did you do anything else?” the cop asked, leaning forward, leaning into my breath. “Did you maybe close her eyes?”
He used his sky blue handkerchief to wipe my face. “Do you think that might have happened?”
“I thought maybe she could be asleep. I wanted her to be asleep.”
But she wasn’t.
The police called my mother at work and told her to come home. I heard them tell her, “It’s about Camille. Why don’t you come home right away.” But when she got there, Camille was gone. The ambulance left with her on a stretcher; they put plastic bags over her hands and taped her mouth shut. I watched from the upstairs window.
“What is it? What is it?” my mother asked.
The police lady was trying to tell her. She was bending over my mother, who was sitting next to Walt on the plastic chairs we bought to sun ourselves. She talked softly, but I heard her through the glass. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. Camille was killed today. This afternoon . . . Camille was killed.”
And my mother kept saying �
�What is it? What is it?” like she couldn’t hear anything, not even her own voice, because it got louder and louder until it blended with the sirens, until it sounded like a whistle.
“What kind of relationship does Mr. Atwater have with your children?”
“He doesn’t like kids,” my mother explained. “He yelled at them from time to time. It’s just because he doesn’t like kids.”
“Were your children safe with Mr. Atwater?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you ever leave them with Mr. Atwater, maybe when you went to the grocery store?”
“Yes. A lot of times. He just didn’t want them underfoot. They had to stay in their room or outside.”
“He ever hit them?”
“No. Never.”
“Chloe says he spanked them.”
“Well, yes. But not hit them. He never hit them. Sometimes he’d whop them on their behind if they were acting up. That’s all.”
“Aren’t they too old for spanking?”
“He didn’t spank them, really. He’d just whop them once or twice on the behind.”
“But you’d leave them for an hour or two and come back and everything was fine?”
“Yes.”
“Camille had burns on her hands. Do you know how that happened?”
“Her curling iron?” My mother had her hands in her shirt, twisting. “I don’t know. Was it her curling iron?”
“No, ma’am. They don’t look like burns from a curling iron. These burns look more like they came from a cigarette.” The policeman sat down in front of my mother, on the vinyl footrest. “Do you smoke, ma’am?”
My mother’s hands grew still. “Yes, I smoke. I smoke. Why? You don’t think I burned her? I didn’t burn her.”
“Who did, ma’am?’
My mother began to thread her hands through her hair. I watched the red strands sift through her fingers, then she pulled at the ends, pulled like she meant to tear her hair out. “I don’t know.”
“I think you do. You understand Camille isn’t coming back.”
“I know! I know that. I know.”
“Somebody did those burns.”
“I don’t know who. It wasn’t Walt. I know you’re thinking Walt. You’re thinking Walt, but he didn’t do it.”
“But Mr. Atwater smokes, doesn’t he, ma’am?”
“Did you ask him?”
“Does he smoke, ma’am?”
“Yes.”
She was bent over and holding her stomach with her hands. Her beautiful eyes, like none we’d ever seen, were sinking in her swollen face.
Train
The little Niña returns for group therapy once a week. She sits in a circle with us other contessas still waiting to get out and shares her life in the land of the free. Her brother, it turns out, is never coming home.
“He’s dead,” she tells us. “He’s gone.”
She doesn’t say whether she misses him. Whether she thinks now she’ll be able to live a normal life, not waiting for him to come back and pick up where he left off.
“We buried him at Green Hills Cemetery.” They have a family plot. “They killed him.” The other boys who couldn’t live with a saint among them. With a white boy walking around calling himself Hey-Zeus. “There are gangs in prison.”
The doctor asks, “Do you feel safe, Tammy?”
“I feel like he knows everything I’m doing. Just like God.”
Next group, the Niña doesn’t show. The banana-yellow Lexus doesn’t pull up the circular drive and drop her at the door, no little Niña walking without looking back, even when her mother calls,
“Tammy! Tammy, have a good session!”
She was determined to leave her mother behind.
This time the Niña was successful.
The newspaper said Girl, 14, Throws Herself at Train. But that wasn’t the way it happened. They think it must have been a split-second decision. That she couldn’t have waited. She couldn’t have thought it out and then waited patiently for the end of her life. It was unthinkable. It made a person cringe. It made them stop a beat or two. It’s easier for those who’ve never been there to think the Niña had a moment when the world piled itself on her shoulders all at once — we all have those moments — and she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. If she was anywhere else, the mall, for example, she’d be with us today.
But it’s not true.
Some of the girls here say, She was desperate for love. She was some kind of Juliet. It was missing that brother of hers and finding a way they could be together.
That’s not true either. Later, after the staff sat us down and told us about it, after we read about it in the newspaper, I took out her diary and read about it there.
She’d practiced. She’d rehearsed her death and then wrote about it in her diary. She thought it would happen so quickly, the speed of the train would fling her body into the sky, arms and legs wide, her mouth an open and screeching No and she would stay there, caught forever at the moment of impact and hanging over the world like a star. In the margins of her diary she drew a picture of herself exactly like that, with smaller stars blinking around her.
She wanted to get it right, so she’d tried it, right before they locked her up in Madeline Parker: She’d laid herself down on the railroad tracks near Busman Street and waited for the Georgia–Pacific. She’d felt the ties vibrate like it was an earthquake, long before she saw the train round the curve and bear down on her.
She’d had a full two minutes to think about what she was doing before the nose of the train was pointed in her direction. Its thunderous clacking on the rails beat over her. It’d made it so she could think of very little. It’d filled her head, so nothing else could. Hypnotized her so she almost lost the will to lift herself off the tracks and throw herself into the gravel and sage weed. And when it passed, it’d been like she was in the center of a hurricane. She’d been caught in a vacuum. She’d held to a large rock, feeling her fingers slip, the skin shaving off. She knew she wouldn’t feel a thing.
This time, she meant it for keeps, and she left a piece of paper behind, the curling end of a piece of paper towel, stuffed into the front pocket of her jeans. She’d written her name on it. Her real name. This I got from the newspaper, along with the fact that the Niña had died instantly.
She knew who she was and couldn’t live with it.
The doctors ask, “What other options did Tammy have?”
I think everything she tried to hold on to slipped through her fingers. Including her life.
I know now that the little Niña was right about one thing: She and I were a lot alike. Our mothers failed us. Our bodies were not our own. Our names were not the ones we were born to. And we gave up. Even though suicide wasn’t my way, living on the streets and using my body was like dying, a quiet death no one really noticed.
But there’s still time for me to change my mind. And I’m thinking that’s exactly what I want to do. Live.
I decide it’s time to come up with a new name. I can never go back to who I was before I lost Camille. Before Walt came into our lives. Before our mother drifted away from us. I’ll never be that girl again. But I can do better than Doe. Tammy was right to leave her diary with me. Reading it, I felt like I was looking at myself in places. I felt some of the same things she felt. And reading her death exactly like she planned it, knowing what she was feeling, set me free in a way. I swear I heard glass shattering. It was like breaking through the water and taking my first real breath. It burned my lungs going down. Made me realize I was still alive. That I want to go on feeling that way.
I tell the doctors, “Tammy did all she could for herself.” She was beyond the touch of our hands, the sound of our voices.
But I’m not. I’m right here.
Hoot Owl
The first thing he asks me this session:
“Have you decided on a last name?”
Ever since I told him I was thinking about it, he’s made it his
mission to see it done. For three weeks I’ve been writing letters out on a piece of paper and trying to make them fit and mean something. I sit on my bed and look at the empty bed beside me, where the Niña once sat staring at old photographs. Where she’d left her diary, hoping I’d read it. I’m glad I did. I know now how easily it could have been me.
Today he tells me I’ll need a real name for my Social Security card. For my paycheck. A bank account. To rent a real apartment. For all the things I’ll need in the land of the living.
I tell him I have it.
He waits with his eyes wide open behind his glasses. He looks like an owl. I tell him so and he says he’s ready to start hooting.
“You always been a cheerleader?”
He says he first noticed his optimism in college. “I wasn’t big enough to play ball,” he admits. So the next best thing was to cheer them on.
“You feel that way about me, Doc? Your life wasn’t messed up enough to put you on the street so now you spend your time with girls like me?”
“Don’t think there isn’t someone out there waiting for your help,” he says.
“As bad as my life was, there’s always someone worse off?”
“No,” he says. “No matter how bad it gets, we always have something worth giving.”
“You went to church on Sunday.”
He doesn’t deny it.
“I used to see things that way. Life is a bowl of cherries.”
“No reason you can’t think that way again.” But he doesn’t push it. “Your name?”
I have a list, but what I really want is to take some part of Camille with me. I tell him this.
“How will you do that?”
I knew he’d ask. I realize now he didn’t solve my problems; he gave me what I needed to solve them myself.
“I used the letters of her name.”
He likes my strategy.
“I chose the one that showed I was going somewhere.”
This makes him even happier. He sits back in his chair, smiling.
“Aimes.”
“Chloe Aimes. I like that.”
So do I.
Courage
Chloe Doe Page 12