Chloe hands me the picture back. “I don’t think we’ve seen who you’re looking for. Do you have a number where we can reach you?”
I glance back at her. “That woman over there. Do you know her name?”
Eleanor and Chloe exchange these shy smiles when they see who I mean. Chloe’s voice gets stronger, bolder. “That’s not her.”
“You don’t know that,” I say. “It could be her.”
Eleanor moves her chair to give me a better view. “See for yourself. But I assure you, Miss Sunshine-Belle is nobody’s mother. And never will be, either.”
I take five small steps toward Miss Sunshine-Belle. She teeters toward me, eyes still closed, legs still spinning. I get closer, closer, closer to the woman they say can’t be my mom and I don’t get why because she definitely could be. Me and her, we’re not so different. Mom used her body to get things, take care of things, make things happen, because she didn’t know any other way to do it. I use my body, too. Maybe in a different way, dancing instead of turning tricks, but it’s still using what I’ve got to survive.
The woman stops twirling. Just stops and stares right at me, her lip curling up like she’s looking so deep inside of me and doesn’t exactly like what she sees. I wonder if she knows that both of us are users, that both of us are pulled so deeply by something we can’t control. And then I see something else on her. Not just recognition, but a five-o’clock shadow, creeping up her unwashed skin.
I bolt toward the exit and thrust my foot into the metal push-bar of the door. It hurts. I let the door clang shut behind me. It’s almost dusk and the streetlights on both sides of the road turn on in succession, like rows and rows of Christmas lights. They sear my head, hitting my tired eyes with the power of thousand-watt bulbs.
But it’s nothing compared to the sudden, painful flash inside my chest. We’re nothing alike, me and my mom. How could I have been so stupid? My mom never danced a day in my life.
NINETEEN
I rest my head in my hands and close my eyes, my breath heaving, struggling to catch time with my heart. It’s stopped raining and the air is still, but I don’t even care. I want so badly to call Rose, to tell her I made it, tell her we’re worth something, but I know I can’t. She didn’t even come with Mrs. M. She could have, but she didn’t.
I sit down on the last step. Behind me, I hear the metal door push open and then close. I’m expecting to see one of the people from the common room, Miss Sunshine-Belle even, dancing, making me think that dreams sometimes do become real.
But it’s Chloe, the younger of the two social workers. She stays on the top step and leans over the railing. She doesn’t look at me, just pulls a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and lights one.
“Rough day, I take it.” She blinks at me in the subtle darkness, leans across the railing, and blows three rings of smoke in front of her. “You didn’t plan on sleeping here at all, did you?”
I sit up straight and shake my head, my wet hair grazing my face. “I didn’t plan on any of this.”
“No one ever does.”
“I’m not supposed to be here. I’m on my way to Los Angeles. I made it on a show. It’s called Live to Dance.”
“I know that show. You’re going to be on it? That’s awesome.” She takes another long drag of her cigarette. “So what are you doing here?”
I open my mouth but nothing comes out. I don’t know what I’m doing here, how I got here to begin with.
Chloe stubs her cigarette on the sidewalk and then tilts her head back to the sky, darkening, filling with more stars I ever thought a city like Portland could hold. She pats her empty wrist, as though at one time it owned a watch. “I’m off for the night. Time to make my way home.” She jogs down the steps and walks away from the building.
I stand up. “So you’re just leaving?”
She turns. “Unless you give me some reason to stay.”
I open my mouth to tell her. Tell her that I lied and tell her that the picture I gave her wasn’t my mom’s friend. Tell her that I do know why I came here, why the second I saw that sign, I knew I had to see if she was here.
Chloe sighs long and deep. But then she strolls back to the steps and tugs at my arm. “Come on.”
I follow her back into the building, through a second set of doors that I never went through the first time. We pass Eleanor and she sees us, but she doesn’t look surprised or anything. The room is just like the common room, but this one must be for staff or something, complete with a large pot of coffee set up and already brewed. She pours us both cups, leaving room for cream and sugar. Then she grabs a blanket from behind a chair and drapes it over my shoulders. “So why aren’t you staying in some fancy hotel?” She grins in this way that makes me realize she’s pretty young. Not my age, but close. Not much older than Rose. “Don’t those shows pay for stuff like that?”
I take a short sip of my coffee. “I don’t know. I don’t care about the show anymore.”
Chloe’s eyebrows shoot up. “You know, most people don’t ever get to live their dreams out in real life.” She adds a third packet of sugar to her coffee and stirs.
“I only tried out in the first place to change what they think of me. It was a stupid idea.”
“Change what who thinks of you?”
“The people where I’m from.” I hide my eyes behind my cup. “They blame me and my sister for something that happened there.”
“You can let people blame you for all kinds of things in life. But the question you really want to ask yourself here is, what do you think of you?” She leans in toward me. “Took me a long time to learn that lesson.”
I swallow, the truth of it creeping up, creeping out in a way I never meant it to. I close my eyes. I don’t want to cry, but the tears are there. They fall, silently. One by one, into my coffee and into my mouth.
TWENTY
I follow her out of the shelter.
There’re a couple of other workers there now—Eleanor included—smoking cigarettes on the back steps. Chloe nods goodnight to all of them. Each one smiles back at her and me but they don’t ask her where we’re going. It’s like their job of fixing people never ends the way other people’s do. Or maybe they don’t want it to.
Once we’re away from the building, though, I ask her where we’re going. She’s still a stranger. And even though the only other stranger I’ve ever trusted got me to Portland safe and sound, Chloe could be anyone. If Rose were here, she’d make sure I knew that.
“I want to show you something,” Chloe says.
We walk another few blocks and make some more turns and walk farther, down a hill that literally looks as if we’re descending into hell because it’s full of garbage and old liquor bottles and it stinks. The whole way down, I get this bad feeling in my gut. Still, I don’t stop. Not even when I see that what we’re approaching is the bottom of some broken old bridge with five or six homeless people sleeping there, nestled together on plastic bags and cardboard strips. Everything here is so awful, worse than any place I think I’ve ever seen.
Chloe pulls out her pack of cigarettes, watching me, watching. “What is this place?” I pull the blanket over my hands. Something about this place makes me colder than I thought I could be.
“Today’s my anniversary,” she says. “Clean for four whole years.”
I search her face. Does she know my mom? Is that why she brought me here? Is my mom here? I scan the sleeping bodies. None of them are her. All of them are too old, too dirty, too different from how I remember her.
“Five years ago, this is where I lived. Hard to believe.” She reaches into her jacket pocket and takes out a picture of a little girl, aged three or four. “This is my daughter. She’s my reason. The reason I needed to get healthy.” Chloe caresses the photo with her thumb. “She’s the reason I’m still alive today.”
“Who stays with her when you’re working? Her dad?”
“No. Her daddy left me before she was born.” She claps, hard, the n
oise booming through the silence around us. “The second he knew I was pregnant, wham! He was out of there. I thought we’d be okay at first, me and my baby girl, but things got so hard. I needed to live and buy diapers and formula and it was just so much.” She exhales. “Too much. Jobs are pretty scarce for high school dropouts.” She stares at her feet. “It was rough, but I was doing okay. Until I found out I was pregnant again.”
I blink. She seems too young to have kids. Too small and frail. I wonder what I look like to her. “You have another baby?”
She crosses her arms, holds herself tight. “No. Not like that, I don’t. I didn’t get to have my second little girl. Didn’t get to hold her hand and kiss her tears away and be her mom.” She sighs. “Not in the way it counts. I don’t know what I was thinking that day it all happened. No, that’s a lie. I do know what I was thinking. That I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t raise a second baby on what I had. There was barely enough food to eat for the two of us as it was. And those welfare checks?” She laughs and it sounds awful. “Well, those don’t feed a growing girl and a growing mom, either. After months of us not paying the rent in the crappy apartment we were living in, the landlord finally kicked us out. Or said he was going to, anyway.”
“A pregnant girl with a baby? He should have gone to jail for that.”
“See, that’s what I thought at first, too. I was angry. I was mad at the whole world for making my life so ugly.”
At the far side of the bridge, a man—now awake—is peeling the garbage bags from his shoulders. Next to him, a woman shouts at him for making too much noise.
“I didn’t want that kind of life for my babies. I wanted them to grow up all skipping and happy and not knowing a damn thing about how bad our life was. I was just a baby myself. I wanted to finish school. I wanted to do something meaningful for myself. It all got so confusing. On the night that slumlord evicted us, I snapped.”
I look Chloe straight in the eyes. I think of the way my mom snapped when she left us. The way Rose snapped when I told her I was leaving Summerland. The way I snapped when George stood on that stage and told them who I was. I don’t think Chloe’s talking about this kind of snapping.
“I never meant to hurt her. But when life gets so desperate like that, a person can get so damn selfish.”
“You’re a mother,” I say. “Your only job in the whole world was to love your girls.”
Chloe smiles, but her eyes are still small and sad. “I know that now. But at the time, all I could think of was that they deserved better than what I could give them. I ran a bath for her. A higher one than normal. It was just the way she liked it. Warm water with lots of shampoo bubbles. Her little green squirt frog floating around, following after her pudgy legs.”
My throat tightens. My chest thuds. No. Please. Just don’t say it.
“And after she played in the water for a couple of minutes, I turned her over, onto her stomach. I kissed the back of her head. Rubbed my face in those little brown curls, all wet and matted to her neck.”
I put one hand over my mouth to stop the noises inside of me from escaping, to stop her words from getting in.
“And then I held her whole little self under the water.”
Chloe’s breath gets slow and heavy, like it’s too much to lift. “She kicked around under the weight of my hands for a second or two. But then she didn’t kick anymore.”
I ball my hands into fists. I want to hit something. Hit her.
“My eyes were blazing and all my mind could think of at that moment was that I couldn’t do it anymore. I just couldn’t do it anymore.”
My voice cracks. “All she wanted was for you to love her. All she wanted was a shot.”
“I know that now. And something inside of me said the same thing. So I grabbed her little body out of that water. Fast.”
My heart speeds. She tried to undo it. She tried.
“I pulled her out. And I pushed on her stomach so hard she threw up. I wrapped her in the bath mat and shouted downstairs for someone to call nine-one-one. When they came, exactly three minutes later, I told them every truth of what I did to her.”
I stand in silence, motionless, the grayness inside me seeping out.
“Longest three minutes of my life, that was.” She pauses a moment, then takes a deep breath. “But she was okay. Her body had gone into shock from what I’d done, but she was going to be okay. Another three minutes under that water and I wouldn’t be here now to tell you this story.” She runs her hands through her scraggly hair. “After she recovered, DCF took her away from me. Said if I didn’t get some help, they’d take my new baby away once it was born, too. I pleaded with them not to but when that landlord kicked me out, it seemed like I had no way around it. I spent six whole weeks kind of wandering around, sleeping here and under other bridges, nearly freezing to death and eating out of garbage cans while I figured out what to do with myself.” She shrugs. “I guess my body finally gave up on me, because I wasn’t getting the proper care and nutrition a pregnant woman needs.”
Chloe points to a heap of trash, a mess of rotting sleeping bags and fast-food containers around it. “I had a miscarriage. Right over there. This is where my baby lived. For one brief second, she opened her tiny little eyes and looked up at me.” Chloe inhales and then lets the air out in these short spurts that sound like they hurt. “I’ve never been a religious person, but I’d swear on a Bible that that baby took one look at me and said, ‘No. This isn’t how I want my life to be.’ Because right then and there, she closed her eyes and never opened them again.” Chloe closes her eyes, her body swaying back and forth. “I like to think she went to another place with warm beds and warm food and love.”
I walk toward the heap of trash where the bridge looks the worst, covered in graffiti and reeking of booze and sadness.
“I can’t believe she died here.”
“I know it seems like the worst place on earth, this bridge. But this is where I changed. This is where I knew that I’d never have my baby back, but I could do something about my first little girl. Not because people told me I was awful and ugly because of what I did, but because I knew I wasn’t.” She tucks the photo back in her bag. “And the second I got clean and got her back, I knew I wanted to do something else. Something for us. Make myself into the kind of mother she deserved.”
“But you did it for them, too, right? To show them you weren’t who they thought you were.”
“It wasn’t as easy as that. You can’t erase the things you’ve done. Once they’re done, they’re done.”
“But you did. You got her back. You changed what they thought of you, so you got her back.”
“No,” Chloe says. “You’ve got it all wrong. Before I could get her back, I had to make myself into someone I could love.” She bangs her fist with her chest. “Me. You can’t make other people do a damn thing in this world. Lots of people still blamed me for what almost happened that day in the bathtub. It didn’t matter that I’d changed because they saw what they wanted to see, no matter what. That’s how life is. You can’t be who others think you should be. All you can do is show them that you’re human. Show them that you’re strong. Show them that while you may stumble, you won’t fall. And if they still don’t like who you are when you’ve shown them all that, best to just let them go. Leave them right here, under this damn bridge.”
I step though the sliding doors of the airport. It’s already close to nine but the place is still bright and bustling with nicely dressed people buying paninis and lattes from the Starbucks and hurrying, suitcases obediently rolling behind them. It reminds me of Summerland. Not the sandwiches or luggage, but the hustle right before night sets in each day. The mentality that, with the break of morning, things that used to feel so wrong can suddenly feel so right.
I’m stiff from my long day and even longer bus ride here, but I make my way to the American Airlines check-in counter because that’s what you’re supposed to do. Or at least, that’s what George did once
, two summers ago, when Rose and I brought him to this airport to say good-bye because he was leaving, going to stay with his cousins in Colorado, for half the summer. I remember thinking how I hadn’t expected the airport to be that big or that clean or that new or that modern because nothing—nothing—in Summerland was.
I remember George grumbling something about there being no meal on the plane and something about hating the middle seat but always getting the middle seat. I remember not really listening to him because I was so busy thinking about how weird it was that at that exact moment, people in this airport from all over the world were in transit. And I remember thinking that transit, moving from one place to the next, is a lot like being in limbo and not moving at all. Both of them mean not being in the place where you came from. Both of them mean not having arrived at the place you’re meant to go.
Most of all, I remember thinking about how much I was going to miss George. But now, those kinds of thoughts sit on the outside of my mind while the pictures of Dolores and Chloe stay in. It feels like it’s been days since I was in Summerland. It feels like a dream and maybe I didn’t meet any of them at all. And somehow, it feels like they’ve always been there inside of me.
I glance up at the clock on the wall. Twelve hours. I’ve got twelve hours to kill before my flight, but I don’t even care.
I’m going to be on that show. Not just to kick George’s butt and win the whole damn competition so that they’ll like us again, but so that we can like us again. So that we can get there. Not stay in limbo. Not be in transit. But be in the place that Rose and I and maybe even my mom were always meant to be. Summerland. But a whole different Summerland from the one we’ve known for a long, long time.
TWENTY-ONE
I wake up sprawled across two chairs, separated by the most uncomfortable bar jabbing into my hip. It takes a few seconds to remember where I am, why I’m here, who’s here (or not here) with me. I sit up straight and stretch and peer out the windows, exposing the clear runways and rising sun. It’s morning. I’ve spent the whole night here.
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