Becoming Chloe Read online

  “I’ll find a new place.”

  I’ll get a job. And maybe some painkillers, or antibiotics, or both. I’ll be able to afford food every day. This is just a bad week in my life. I’m not going to have to live like this much longer.

  I stop at a phone booth and call information to find a free clinic. It’s not that far from the cellar where I’ve been sleeping.

  She stands and waits while I’m on the phone, then follows me again as I walk away.

  “Go away, Wanda,” I yell over my shoulder.

  “My name is Chloe,” she says.

  “Go away, Chloe.”

  But she follows me all the way to the free clinic. Where the woman at the counter tells me that to see an actual doctor I would have to come back at six-thirty p.m. Six-thirty to midnight.

  “What kind of clinic is open from six-thirty to midnight?” I ask.

  “The kind that treats overdoses and stab wounds,” she says.

  Meanwhile this Chloe/Wanda person is still following me. Still standing behind me.

  “I’ll go in with you,” she says. “You won’t even feel anything.”

  I’m lying on the mattress and Chloe is sitting by my side, stroking my hair.

  “Want me to go see what time it is?” she asks for the fiftieth time. Every hour or so she’s been jogging down to the corner drugstore to check the clock.

  “Not yet,” I say.

  “I used to have a bird that bit me all the time. But I still loved him.”

  “It was a dumb animal,” I say. “It didn’t know any better.”

  “I still loved him,” she says. “Didn’t you ever have a pet that bit you?”

  “I never even had a pet.”

  “Why not?”

  “My mother doesn’t like animals.”

  “That’s really sad. Want me to go see what time it is again?”

  “Yeah. Good idea.” Anything to get rid of her. “What happened to your bird?” I ask before she climbs out the window.

  “I don’t know. I had to go to the state home. He didn’t get to go.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Malcolm.”

  “Malcolm? Why did you name your bird Malcolm?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. And disappears.

  Only she doesn’t come back in a minute or two with the time. She doesn’t come back, period. Which I’m thinking is just as well.

  My arm hurts like hell and my head hurts a lot more than it did yesterday and I feel like I might have a fever. I try to sleep but I keep dreaming I’m in pain and it wakes me up. The last time I wake up it’s dark already. So it’s way past six-thirty.

  I walk down to the free clinic but there’s a line down the block. I stand in it for a minute or two, too dizzy to stand much longer. I’m thinking of sitting right down on the cold pavement. But then a guy in his forties comes down the line and says the doctor is really swamped and if you’re not bleeding to death could you please come back tomorrow.

  So I sigh, and I walk home. Stop at the all-night restaurant like I always do, to use the restroom. Wash up as best I can. My arm is swollen now, with black and purple around the bite marks. It helps not to try to move it at all.

  When I get in, I hear a slight rustling noise. It’s coming from behind the mattress alcove.

  “Chloe?” I say.

  “No,” she says, shyly, like she knows she isn’t wanted. “Did you get your doctor?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.” She comes out and sits on my mattress with me. She has something in the front pouch pocket of her hooded sweatshirt. “I have a present for you,” she says.

  She sounds so serious and intense—scared that I won’t like it—that I get scared, too.

  “What is it?” My voice comes out gentle. I wonder why I don’t get to be mad anymore.

  She slips it out from her big front pocket and sets it on the mattress with me. It’s a pigeon. A live pigeon. It just sits there, blinking. “How did you catch it?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “He just let me.”

  “I think it might have a broken wing.” I can see one of its wings hanging down too far.

  “Maybe. I got him for you because you never had a pet. Do you like him?”

  I reach out to the bird and he lets me stroke his back. I don’t know if he’s tame, or just in shock, or too sick or wounded to react, but he lets me touch him. “Yeah,” I say. “I like him.”

  “Would you like him if he bit you?”

  “I don’t know. Does he bite hard?”

  “He doesn’t bite at all,” she says. “I just wondered.”

  I sleep for what feels like a long time, but when I wake up it’s still dark. And I feel sick. I feel like I have a bad fever. I need to pee. I touch my forehead and it hurts more than it should. It’s puffy. The stitches feel like they’re about to pull right out, they’re so tight.

  Chloe is sitting in a corner, in the one little bit of light from the avenue street lamp. She’s breaking pieces off a hot-dog bun and feeding them to the pigeon. “You slept a long time,” she says. “It’s later tonight than it was yesterday night when you went to sleep.”

  “Are you sure I slept a whole day?”

  “Positive. I tried to wake you up before the line at the clinic got real long again. But I couldn’t wake you up. And it’s long.”

  “Where did you get a hot dog?”

  “I don’t have a hot dog,” she says. She holds it out for me to see. Just an empty bun, with a smear of mustard. “The hot dog was already gone when I found it. Here, I brought you this cup,” she says. She moves over to hand me an empty Styrofoam coffee cup with a lid. The bird skitters out of her way into the darkness. “You can pee in this, and then I’ll take it outside and throw it away.”

  “That was smart.” That seems too smart for her. “That was smart to figure out that I’d need a way to pee.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” she says.

  * * *

  When I wake up again it’s light. Chloe is leaning over me. She has the bird tightly up against her belly, and when she sees my eyes come open, she puts him down on my chest, and I hold him and stroke his back. I notice that she has a nasty bruise inside her elbow where the blood was drawn, because we never got pressure on it like you’re supposed to.

  “You popped a couple of stitches,” she says. “It looks disgusting. Here. I brought you some soup.” She hands me an open paper cup. It’s chicken noodle. It’s still warm.

  “Where did you get soup?”

  “I told the guy down at the deli that my friend Jordy was really really sick and you needed something to eat. So you really like him, huh?” She points with her chin to the bird.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I really do. Thanks for the soup.”

  While I’m drinking it, I think how I have to get to the clinic tonight. Even if I have to crawl.

  “I would like you even if you hurt me,” she says.

  “But that’s just it. I would never hurt you.”

  She starts to cry. And then I feel like shit because I made her cry. She has these eyes that are blue and green and gray all at the same time, and they’re huge. When she cries they get even bigger, like those corny-sad paintings of kids or clowns.

  “Well, I wish you would. Because then I could forgive you, and then you’d see.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m really sorry I made you cry.”

  “That’s okay,” she says, brightening some. “I like you anyway.”

  I wake up and it’s dark again, and the fever is making me feel like I don’t exist. Somewhere in the back of my brain I’m thinking, Oh, shit, I’m still not getting to the clinic. But it’s a weird thought. Weird and far away. Chloe is gone, but I can see the bird walking around in the spill of light from the avenue street lamp. And I think I might die here. Because I can’t get anywhere now, like this, and I’m not going to get any better. I’m so sick that I almost don’t mind the thought of dying, but I really
mind doing it here.

  What seems like an hour later—but it could be a minute or a day—Chloe drops back in through the window. She has a Styrofoam cup in her hand and her pockets are stuffed.

  “Here,” she says. She holds out a capsule on the palm of her hand. “Take this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Antibiotic.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Will you just take it? Here, here’s some water.”

  “That’s not the cup I’ve been peeing in, is it?”

  “Of course not. It’s fresh. Here. Take two aspirin, too. To help get the fever down.”

  “How did you get them to give you all this?”

  “Just shut up and take them.”

  I swallow all three pills at once.

  Then Chloe takes a tube of ointment out of her sweatshirt pocket and squeezes some onto my forehead and some onto both sides of my arm. I jump when she touches each of those places. Last of all, she unwraps a butterfly bandage and uses it to reseal the split on my forehead. I shout out loud because it hurts.

  “How did you get them to give you all that, Chloe?”

  “I just told them what was wrong with you. I told them I’d never get you down there unless we could do something about the fever. Oh. Here.” She goes back into her pocket and takes out a scrap of paper. “This is the number of the doctor. Where he lives,” she says, with great awe. “If you call him when you’re okay enough to go down there, he’ll meet you on his lunch hour. He wants to make sure you’re okay.”

  I stare at the number for a minute, then drink the rest of the water. I’m so thirsty I could die right now, just from that. “That took a lot of brains, Chloe. To get all this done.”

  “No, it didn’t,” she says.

  The bird flies unsteadily into one of the windows and then flaps down to the floor again.

  It’s five or six days before I get in to see the doctor. But I’m feeling much better.

  I’m feeling clean because I took a sponge bath in a public restroom. Chloe let me use her towel. Who knew she had a towel? She has a lot of stuff in that alcove that I haven’t seen yet.

  The doctor has gray hair but looks too young to have it. He looks like a guy who really cares but now he’s worn out from it. He’s small and mostly refined-looking, except for a full beard. He’s attractive. I feel attracted to him the minute he walks into the room. Then I see a wedding ring on his finger and I feel ashamed. And I try to feel something else entirely.

  “The famous Jordan,” he says.

  It embarrasses me. “I’m not famous.”

  “You are around here.”

  He peels off the butterfly bandage and I try to not yell out. I don’t want to be a coward in front of him. I want to be brave.

  “Your girlfriend really loves you,” he says.

  “She’s not my girlfriend. Are you going to have to stitch that again?”

  “No, it’s starting to heal. I’m just going to take out the old ones. It’ll hurt. I’m sorry.” He’s right. It hurts like hell. But I don’t make any noise. “Your sister?” he asks.

  “No, she’s just a friend.”

  “Damn good one,” he says. “She waited in line all night, and when we tried to lock up she sat down cross-legged on the floor and wouldn’t leave. We had to give her antibiotics and aspirin just to get her out the door.”

  “Did she seem . . .” Then I don’t know how to finish that thought.

  “What?”

  “I’m not sure how to say it. Did she seem . . . smart?”

  He thinks a minute. Shrugs. “Smart enough, I guess. Why?”

  “I’m just having trouble figuring her out. Sometimes she’s . . . Well, like when I met her, she’d just been raped. And she wasn’t even upset about it. She just said it happened all the time. I asked her if she ever said no, and she said it doesn’t matter what she says. It’s like she doesn’t even understand what a bad thing is. She doesn’t even know that what’s happening to her isn’t okay. Then when she needs to get something done, she seems a lot smarter.”

  He has his hand on my shoulder now, but I wish he wouldn’t. Because it makes me think things that I feel ashamed about. And because I think he’ll see that I’m attracted to him. Like he’ll all of a sudden know me way too well.

  “Maybe she doesn’t want to understand things that she doesn’t think she can change anyway. Maybe sometimes you just have a couple of rotten choices. Like you can fail to comprehend the world you’ve got, or you can see it as this ugly, evil, dangerous place and not be able to do a damn thing about it.”

  “So you think it’s an emotional thing?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know enough about her. I just know the kinds of things I’ve seen over the years.” I look at his face and I see what he means. About the things he’s seen over the years. He’s seen too much. “I wouldn’t rule out severe trauma. Of course, it’s just a theory. But don’t rule it out. And don’t undersestimate it.”

  “So if that’s it, could she get better? I mean, if somebody made her feel safe and took care of her? Could she get better?”

  “I don’t know how to answer that question. I can’t predict the future. I think a better question would be, Does she have anybody in her life who cares enough to do all that for her?”

  He still has his hand on my shoulder, but now it doesn’t matter because I’m thinking about Chloe. “I’m not sure,” I say. “I guess I’d have to think about that.”

  “Do you know the person who did this to your head, Jordan?”

  I look down at the clinic floor, which is linoleum. Very old linoleum. I wonder what he’ll do if I don’t answer.

  When he gets tired of waiting he says, “Okay, let me put it another way. Is this someone you still have to see on a regular basis?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Good. That’s mostly what I needed to know.”

  On the way home I stop at Chloe’s old grade school. Okay, I’m lying. It’s not on the way home. It’s eleven blocks out of my way. But I go there all the same. Because I just have to know about all this. I go into the office and a woman asks if she can help me. She’s about fifty, with a round face. She seems nice, which makes me uneasy. Then I realize the doctor was nice, too.

  This is my problem. I’m not used to people being nice to me. Not lately, anyway. I’m not sure how to deal with that.

  “Did Wanda Johnston used to go to school here?”

  The woman looks her up on the computer. “You realize I can’t give out any of this information unless you’re family. I can’t show you her records.”

  “I just want to know what she can do,” I say. “I want to know how bad it is.”

  “How bad what is?”

  “I mean, was she in, like, a special ed class? I’m only asking because I want to help her. Somebody has to. Help her.”

  She sighs.

  I say, “Look. If anybody else was trying to help her . . . If anybody else had ever tried to help her . . .” Then I give her a look that I hope is like the one Chloe gives me when she wants me to forgive her. All kind of big-eyed and sad. Because I know that’s a hard one to resist. “Maybe you could just tell me what it can’t do any harm to tell me?”

  She sighs again and pulls up Chloe’s files from the computer. “No special ed. Just the regular class, with everybody else. Look. What I’m supposed to tell you is exactly nothing. I’m not allowed to tell you that she was here for first and second grade and part of third. And that her grades were normal. And then she was turned over to Child Protective Services. So you don’t know that. Because I didn’t tell you.”

  “Can you also not tell me why?”

  “That I don’t know. We’re talking about a big loop of secrecy now. And I’m not in it.”

  She’s turned the monitor screen just a little bit toward me, which is how I happen to find out that Chloe was eighteen on the twelfth of May.

  I don’t see Chloe once all day. I have no idea wher
e she goes. All I see is the bird, fluttering around the cellar, apparently feeling like himself again. All dressed up with nowhere to go. I wonder how hard it will be to convince Chloe that we need to turn him loose.

  Then I think maybe she’s gone, out of my life for good, and it doesn’t even matter. I can’t decide if that’s what I want or not.

  I come back from the all-night restroom around midnight, and she’s back. I don’t ask from where.

  “Careful,” she says as I come in through the window. “Don’t let the bird out.”

  We sit and watch him fly in endless circles around the room. It occurs to me that I never bothered to name him, but it seems like bad timing to do it now.

  “Wow, he’s feeling good, huh?” I say.

  “Yeah, but he doesn’t like for me to touch him now.”

  “Well, he’s probably feeling more like a bird these days.”

  “Want to go get something to eat? I have money.”

  “Where did you get money?”

  “Some old guy in the park said he felt sorry for me because I’m too skinny, and he gave me five dollars.”

  “Great,” I say. “Because I’m starving.”

  * * *

  We eat hot dogs and fries, and while we’re eating I feel so much better that I almost feel happy. Happy. This weird thing I’ve forgotten how to feel.

  “That doctor was really nice,” I say.

  “Yeah. I liked him okay. Did he say you were going to be okay?”

  “Yeah. He thinks probably I’ll be okay.” And just for a minute I guess I do, too. The doctor and the food, and being clean, and having met people who were pretty nice to me, all in one day.

  “Wow,” she says. “You’re really feeling better.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I guess I am.”

  When we get home we lie down and try to sleep, but the bird is making such a racket. He’s flapping around in the dark, bouncing off the mattresses and banging into the windows. I feel bad for him. I feel bad for me because I figure this will go on all night and I’m tired.

  Chloe says, “Jordy. Are you asleep?”

  “How can I sleep with all that racket going on?”

  “I have to talk to you about something. I know this is going to be hard for you to hear. Because he’s your first pet and all. But I really think we’re going to have to let the bird go now.”