Always Chloe and Other Stories Read online

  “Duh,” I say. “I was here all last week. I know how different they’re going to be.”

  “No,” he says. “I don’t think you do. The reason we gave Kevin the bedroom and slept out here is because he was still with Mark. So he wasn’t going to sleep with me, because that would’ve been cheating. But when he gets back, Kevin and I will be sleeping in the bedroom.”

  “And where will I sleep?”

  “Out here in the living room. With Ethel.”

  I can feel my eyes getting really wide. Like they’re bigger than they ever were before.

  “By myself?” My voice sounds a little shrieky.

  Jordy’s eyes look hurt now. I mean, even more.

  “You won’t be by yourself. Ethel will be here with you.”

  “But Jordy—”

  “I know, Chloe. I know. I know this is hard. But you knew this would happen sooner or later.”

  “No I didn’t!” I didn’t mean to yell. But I did. Yell. I just didn’t mean to.

  “We’ve talked a bunch of times about how I would have a boyfriend at some point.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t think that meant I’d have to sleep by myself! You didn’t tell me that. Why didn’t you tell me that?” Screechy. It even hurts to listen to myself.

  Jordy sighs. “I think you sort of knew that, Chlo. I think it’s one of those things that everybody knows. That if someone is your boyfriend, you sleep with him. And not anybody else. I think maybe you didn’t really think it out, because maybe you didn’t want to go there.”

  “But Jordy! You have to be there at night to keep me safe. Otherwise, I could wake up with somebody on top of me.”

  “That won’t happen here, Chlo. The state home and the street weren’t safe places. Our apartment is a safe place. Kevin and I will be right in the next room. No one can get to you here.”

  “But Jordy! When I’m asleep, I won’t know all that!”

  I’m crying now, and the tears feel hot, and Ethel is licking at them. She came in from her spot on the bed because I was upset, and now she’s licking my tears.

  “Maybe you can practice tonight. And while Kevin is gone. That way, if you get scared, you can come in with me. But I need you to try, Chloe.”

  “I can’t sleep all alone, Jordy, I already know I can’t.”

  “You won’t be all alone. Ethel will be here. Ethel would bark if somebody was trying to get to you. Which nobody ever will. Not here. You won’t be alone. Ethel will keep you safe.”

  I’m just opening my mouth to tell him one last time, one time that he will just have to believe, that it’s impossible.

  But I never get to.

  “Chloe. I’m not just asking you to try something here. I’m telling you I need this. I need you to do this for me. I know this is really hard for you, and I’m sorry. I wish there was some other way. But I need to go back to having a life here. I’m not saying I won’t always be your friend and take care of you, because I will. I’ve worked really hard to make a space for you in my life and not bring anybody into it who would tell me I can’t always be your friend and take care of you. And don’t think it hasn’t been hard sometimes—”

  “But you said that was your litmus test.”

  He holds still. Not saying anything. He was on a roll, and I knocked him off it, and now he doesn’t know where he is.

  “I said what?”

  “You said that would be your litmus test. To Dr. Reynoso. Don’t you remember? You said a lot of guys wouldn’t want to get a Chloe in the deal, like some guys don’t like to be with people who already have their own kids, but you said that was okay. You said that’s how you’d know the right guy when you found him. You said I would be your litmus test. Whatever litmus is. But anyway, I knew what you meant. Don’t you remember?”

  He says, “Yeah. I do. I remember. And you know, Kevin’s been really nice about having you around. Even when you weren’t being all that nice to him.”

  I look down at the couch, because it makes me feel ashamed, when he says that. I don’t say anything.

  “This is my chance to be happy, Chloe. And I know you want me to be happy. So I need you to do this. Let’s start tonight. That way by the time Kevin gets home, you’ll have had some practice.”

  I sit very still, with my hands in Jordy’s hands and Ethel’s little paws up on my knee, and her tongue licking the tears off my cheeks as fast as I can cry them.

  Home. When Kevin comes home. This is his home now. My home. Jordy’s and my wonderful home. It’s Kevin’s now, too.

  Jordy sighs about three more times.

  Then he says, “I need to get downstairs now. Start the lunch setup. I’ll tell The Humanist you’re not feeling very good. But as soon as you can, if you can pull yourself together, I know he’d love to have you down there.”

  “Okay, Jordy,” I say. “I’ll be down in a while.”

  “Good, Chloe. That’s good.”

  He kisses me on the cheek.

  Ethel has to move her tongue to let him.

  I’m sleeping.

  All of a sudden, something lands on me. Something really heavy.

  Someone. Actually. I figure out pretty quick it’s a someone.

  He smells bad. Like sweat.

  He stuffs something in my mouth. Big and round. I think it’s a sock. A balled-up sock. But it’s not a clean sock. It smells and tastes like somebody’s old stinky gym locker. And it makes me gag. Partly because it smells bad, but partly because it’s too far back in my throat.

  And then the someone is hurting me, but that part is not even the bad part. It should be. It’s bad enough that it should be the worst thing I ever have to feel. But it turns out it isn’t even the worst thing I have to feel right now, tonight.

  The worst part is that I can’t breathe. It’s the sock but also the someone, because he’s so heavy he’s crushing my chest, and I can’t breathe in, and I can’t yell at him to get off me, and I can’t yell for help, because I have this sock in my mouth.

  So now I’m crying, because I’m scared I’m going to die for real, because I can’t breathe. And the more I cry, the more my nose gets stuffy and the more I really can’t breathe.

  There’s this feeling, this pain, building up in my lungs, and it’s getting worse, worse than any other way anybody is hurting me, or ever did. I could make it go away if I could just breathe in. If I could get him off me. I try. I struggle. But he’s really big and heavy, and I’m small and light, and all the struggling is doing is making me need to breathe a lot worse.

  So I just hold still. I hold still trying to need less air.

  And I just wait to die.

  Because, by now, that’s starting to feel like the easy way out. Well. The only way out.

  I feel the tears running down my cheeks, and then this little tongue licking them away again.

  I open my eyes.

  I’m on the air mattress on the living room floor. In our little apartment in Morro Bay. And Ethel is standing over me, very worried, licking the tears off my face.

  I lie there for a minute. Breathing. Just to feel how good it feels.

  Then I get up and go into bed with Jordy.

  He wakes up a little and rolls over.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I tried. But I had a really bad dream.”

  He throws his arm across me. Like the old days.

  “I’m sorry. What did you dream about?”

  “One of the times in the state home when I got raped in the middle of the night.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  I can feel his breath against my cheek. I can feel Ethel curl up on the covers behind my knees.

  Jordy says, “It helps to tell yourself it was just a dream.”

  “But it wasn’t just a dream, Jordy. You know that.”

  “Well. Tonight it was just a dream.”

  “If you dream some big eight-eyed monster is chasing you, that’s easier. Because when you wake up, you know there’s really no such thing as a big eight-
eyed monster. But this really happened. Just not tonight.”

  “And not ever again,” he says.

  We don’t say anything for a minute. I lie still and feel his breath. I like that last thing he said. I don’t want to do anything to chase it away.

  Later, when it pretty much goes away on its own anyway, I say, “How long did I make it, Jordy? How long was I sleeping all by myself?”

  He reaches over and takes his watch off the little crate by the bed. It glows. I feel bad because his breath on my face went away.

  “About forty-five minutes,” he says.

  Nobody says anything for a long time.

  Then Jordy says, “That’s okay, Chloe. We’ll try again tomorrow.”

  It’s about an hour or two later. I’m still not about to go back to sleep.

  I say, “Jordy? Are you awake?” Quiet. In case he’s not.

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh. Why are you awake? I know why I’m awake. But why are you?”

  He sighs. “Not sure.”

  “Jordy? Why did you finally call Kevin when you called him? I mean, after all that time. All that not calling. And then why did you call?”

  No answer for a long time. I’m just about thinking he isn’t going to answer me at all. Or that he finally fell back asleep.

  “I think I just finally got brave enough. All that time thinking he wouldn’t want to talk to me. That he was already with somebody else. I started to call him maybe a dozen times. But then I always lost my nerve.”

  “So how did you get brave enough?”

  “You helped.”

  “Me? I’m not brave.”

  “Yeah, you are. About some things, you are. Maybe not about sleeping alone and stuff like that, but about things like saying what you mean to say. And not really caring what people will think of you. I guess I finally thought, ‘Well, what would Chloe do?’ And I knew you would call him and find out. I knew you’d take the risk.”

  Ethel is snoring a little, so Jordy nudges her with his foot, and she stretches out more. She only snores when her chin is tucked in too much. I don’t mind her snoring, but it bothers Jordy some.

  “You mean I actually helped you?”

  “You’ve helped me with a lot of things, Chlo. Think where I was when I first met you. And the direction I was going. You’ve helped me a lot. I thought you knew that.”

  “You never told me.”

  “Well, then I should be ashamed of myself. I should have told you. I guess I thought you knew. I’m sorry.”

  Ethel tucks her chin and starts to snore again. Jordy lets it slide.

  “So how much more time do I have to practice this sleeping thing?”

  “Maybe almost a week.”

  “Oh.”

  Snore. Snore. Snore.

  “Well. Goodnight, Jordy.”

  “Goodnight, Chloe.”

  I still don’t go back to sleep. I don’t think he does, either.

  GOD, THE DEVIL, AND RABBITS

  This is my paddling story for today.

  Ethel and I are all the way down the edge of the sand spit, almost to where the Montana de Oro State Park starts. In a minute, we’ll run out of bay. Estuary. But right now we just keep paddling. The water is really shallow. If I got out and stood up, it wouldn’t even come up to my knees.

  I look down and see something in the sand at the bottom of the water, but I’m not sure what it is. I reach down carefully, so Blue Boat doesn’t tip over. Even though it couldn’t tip very far in about six inches of water. But I’m used to being careful.

  I pick the something up.

  Ethel sniffs at it. I don’t think she knows what it is, either.

  It looks like a seashell. But it’s different, too. Because when you find a seashell, you turn it over, and then you’re looking at the inside of it. I turn this over, but it’s like two seashells stuck together at the edges. It has wavy ridges.

  I decide to put it in a puddle of water on the floor of Blue Boat and paddle all the way home and ask Jordy what it is.

  It’s a long paddle. The wind is up, and we’re paddling into it, and these little wind waves break over the nose of Blue Boat and splash on Ethel and me. By the time I get back, my shoulders are tired, and I’m a little out of breath.

  I yell up to Jordy, and then I sit there in Blue Boat until he comes down. Ethel jumps off onto the dock, but when she sees I’m staying in Blue, she jumps back in again.

  When Jordy gets down, he stands at the edge of the dock in just a pair of jeans. No shirt or shoes. He looks really cold. It gets cold in Morro Bay in the winter and stays that way in March. Not like where we came from, but still cold.

  “What do you think this is?” I ask him.

  He takes it from me. Squats on the dock, turning it over in his hands. “It’s an oyster,” he says.

  “They have oysters in this bay?”

  “Estuary. Apparently so. I think there’s an oyster farm down there, somewhere near Baywood Park. I hope you didn’t take it from there. Those oysters belong to somebody.”

  I say, “No. This guy was all alone. All by himself near the sand spit. I think maybe he ran away from the farm.”

  Jordy says, “I don’t think oysters can run.”

  I say, “That’s what I used to think about birds. If I open it, do you think I’ll find a pearl?”

  Jordy frowns. Like he has to think for a minute. “Probably not,” he says. “I guess it’s not impossible. But it’s rare. Most of the time when you open an oyster, you don’t find a pearl. And then you’ve killed the oyster for nothing. Unless you want to eat it. But I’m not much of an oyster fan myself.”

  “I don’t want to kill him,” I say. “I’m going to go put him back.”

  And then, even though I’m tired, I paddle all the way back down to near where the bay ends at the Montana de Oro Park. I mean, where the estuary ends.

  And I put him back.

  And then I paddle all the way home.

  When I go past the gasoline dock, that old guy is out there working again.

  There’s this seal somewhere under the dock. I can’t see him, but I can hear him. He’s making this big sound, and it echoes under there. It sounds like he’s saying, “Ork, ork, ork.”

  Ethel thinks it’s very interesting.

  The old man waves to me. Really big. Like I was a mile away and probably wouldn’t see him. But I’m right in the water under the end of his dock. I don’t say that I think that’s weird or anything. That would be rude. I just wave back.

  The tide is low, and I can see about six starfish on the pilings. Some are reddish and some more orange.

  He says, “Well. If it isn’t my young friend.”

  I stop the boat right in front of his dock. I can do that. It’s easy if you paddle a lot, and you really know what to do. You just sort of paddle backwards. And if you do it on only one side, you can even stop and turn at the same time. But I just stop.

  “I’m your friend?”

  “Well, I would say so,” he says. “Unless you don’t want to be.”

  “Oh, no. I do. But how can I be your friend if I don’t even know your name?”

  He walks over to the edge of the dock and squats down on his heels. There are no railings on the docks, and I want him to be careful. “Ben Sutherland. And you are…?”

  “Chloe. And this is Ethel.”

  “Chloe what?”

  “Chloe nothing. I never got a second name. Jordy gave me that name, and he wanted to give me another one, but I said I didn’t need it.”

  He has that look again on his face. Like he’s noticing how I’m different, but he’s too polite to say. Maybe I get what Jordy means about the whole polite thing. Maybe it really is a good thing, like he says.

  “Well, then, Chloe Nothing, it’s official. We’re all friends.”

  I sit there, still in the water for a minute, but the wind blows me backwards, so then I have to paddle just to stay in place. Ethel is still busy listening to the big noisy
“Ork, ork, ork.”

  “I don’t think I ever had a friend before. Except Jordy.”

  “And Jordy would be….”

  “My friend. You know. My friend that I live with.”

  “Oh. Your boyfriend.”

  “No. Jordy’s not my boyfriend. He has a whole other boyfriend of his own. He’s just my friend.”

  He nods, like he’s thinking hard about things. “And what about this fine lady? Isn’t she your friend?”

  I look down at Ethel. I made a terrible mistake. Right with her here listening, too. Right in front of her, I made it sound like she wasn’t my friend. I hope she was busy listening to the seal and not paying much attention.

  “Oh. Ethel. Of course. Ethel. I meant human friends.”

  “Well, two’s a start,” he says. “And if it were me, I’d count the dog. Well, back to the old grind.”

  I paddle away thinking how cool it is that right up until that last sentence, I’m pretty sure I understood everything he said.

  When Ethel and I get back upstairs, Jordy says, “Where were you all that time?”

  “Putting the oyster back.”

  “Why didn’t you just drop it right off the dock?”

  “I didn’t want him to wake up and be confused about where he was.”

  Jordy shakes his head and sighs. He does that a lot.

  It’s right after the lunch rush. Which is the time I get busiest with dishes, but when the waiter guys get to breathe for a minute.

  Jordy comes back into the kitchen and leans on the big chrome double-door refrigerator, his hands deep in his jeans pockets. He seems different somehow. Lighter or something.

  I have my hands in all this hot, soapy water, and I keep washing dishes by feel, because all the time I’m doing it, I’m looking over my shoulder at Jordy.

  He looks at me. Kind of curious, I think. Then he smiles, and I look away again. Go back to washing dishes with my hands and eyes both.

  A minute later, I look around again and see The Humanist standing about six inches in front of Jordy, like they’re talking, just the two of them. Then The Humanist reaches his arms out to Jordy, and they give each other a hug.

  Which seems weird.