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!”
“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.