Always Chloe and Other Stories

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  When I hear myself say it, I figure Ben is probably thinking I’m talking about something I’m doing on purpose. Something I could stop doing if I wanted to. And I can’t figure out how I would even start to explain that.

  “Well,” he says. “Do you want me to tell you what I would do?”

  “I think so.” Unless it’ll hurt, I want to say. But that part never gets added.

  “Well. If it were me. And I thought I was standing between somebody and their happiness…I think I would move out of the way.”

  See? I should have added the part about how he should only tell me if it wasn’t going to hurt.

  I think for a minute about Blue Boat. Bumping against the dock. Down below. Trying to get my attention. Not on purpose, I don’t. I don’t really mean to think about it. It’s just there all of a sudden. In my head.

  First I say nothing.

  Then I say, “Oh.”

  I look into the fishbowl at Arnold. He’s sort of bricky red with little darker polka dots all over his shell, and white claws. His two tiny beady black eyes are sitting there all by themselves in little dents in his shell. It looks like he’s staring at me.

  I’m thinking maybe I should have picked Arnold to talk to. Not Old Ben. But I can’t say that. It would hurt somebody’s feelings.

  So I go in a different direction completely.

  I say, “Ben? What do you call those great big birds with the long necks and the long legs and the long beaks?”

  “The white ones?”

  “No. The gray ones.”

  “Great blue herons.”

  Damn. Score one more for Kevin.

  “They’re not blue.”

  “I guess somebody must’ve thought they were blue enough.”

  “But they’re not.”

  “Well, anyway, that’s what they call them.”

  “That totally sucks.”

  I never say why I think it totally sucks.

  He never asks me.

  I wake up in the middle of the night. On the couch. Scared that I even let myself sleep long enough to have a dream.

  The dream was that I could hear somebody in the room with me, crying.

  I sit up, sit still. Breathe as quietly as I can.

  I can still hear it.

  I reach over to our little lamp and turn it on.

  Jordy blinks into the light.

  He’s sitting out in the living room with me. On the floor. Wearing nothing but red boxer shorts. Leaning his bare shoulder on one of our big weird windows. Which I know has got to be cold. And he’s crying.

  He turns his face away, like he doesn’t want me to see.

  “Turn off the light,” he says. “Okay?”

  So of course I do, right away.

  My stomach is all icy and numb. This has got to be big. In all the time since I knew Jordy, I only saw him almost cry once. It was when he was burying this really nice old dog we knew. And even then, I never actually saw a tear run down his face. And it wasn’t the kind of crying you could hear, either. It was more that sense that he almost could cry, if he let himself, and even that seemed like a big deal at the time.

  “Jordy. What’s wrong?”

  He mutters something, but it’s too quiet to hear.

  I wrap my blanket tight around me and go sit on the floor near where he is.

  I say, “What did you say?”

  He says, “I said, ‘Everything.’”

  “But you’re getting married. You should be happy.”

  “That’s just it,” he says. “I’m getting married. I should be happy. But how can I be happy when you’re so miserable? I have no idea what to do.”

  Neither do I.

  But I do the only thing I can think to do.

  I let the blanket fall off me, and I reach out and put my arms around him and hold him as tight as I can. Even though that makes him cry even harder. I don’t let him go, either. I just hang on, and he just cries and cries.

  And cries.

  I feel like I’m holding his heart. Like there’s hardly any more Jordy wrapped around his heart anymore. He’s mostly just bare heart. And it feels like something that’s very easy to break. Like one of those dainty little china cups you wouldn’t let a kid use.

  No. It’s even easier to break than that. It’s like one of those incredibly light, thin Christmas ornaments that just fall apart in your hand.

  My stomach does this big lurch, like I might throw up, and then I have to think real hard about settling it down again. Until it almost works.

  I remember now. That’s how I made my mother cry. I always remembered her crying, and that it was my fault. But I didn’t remember what I did.

  But now I remember.

  I was standing in front of the Christmas tree, holding this ornament. Waiting for her to take it and hang it on the tree. I swear I didn’t feel like I even squeezed it or anything. But then all of a sudden, it just popped apart, and then it was in pieces in my hand, and my hand was bleeding, and my mother hit me in the face and said that was the very best one, the one her grandmother gave her, and that everything I touched, I ruined.

  And then she cried.

  That icy feeling in my gut is gone now. Everything is. Everything that was anything like a feeling is gone. No more feelings. We’re past that now.

  The only thing I can feel is his body shaking in these great big heaves. That are all my fault.

  I broke Jordy. Everything I touch, I ruin.

  It’s really true. I touched Jordy, and now look.

  He was the very best one, too.

  There’s a line I cross sometimes where I don’t get to feel anymore. It’s like things aren’t safe enough to feel. They’ve gone too far. And then after that, I’m here, but I’m not here. Like it used to be, before Jordy met me.

  I broke Jordy and made him cry.

  Old Ben was right.

  It’s time to move.

  PART THREE:

  This Is Back to My Right Now.

  LIGHT

  The sun is coming out.

  The traitor.

  First it’s like an extra-bright circle in the fog, and everything is a little bit lighter. But then the fog actually burns away in patches, and I see some bright blue sky. I look up for a few minutes, hearing the motor buzzing around close and watching little cottony drifts of fog blowing across the blue, blue patches of sky.

  I feel warm for the first time in as long as I can remember.

  I remember something Jordy said. About God and light being sort of the same thing. At least, I think that’s what he said. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

  Anyway. It makes me wonder what or who just busted me.

  The same second I think that, I see the boat. This little metal boat with a noisy motor in back, kicking up a wake. Unfortunately, it’s headed right for me. And there’s no place to hide.

  When it gets closer, I see who’s driving.

  Old Ben.

  I’m not surprised. Not at all. Part of me knew that. Not with my head. But with a place in my stomach, I always knew. I knew when I passed him on the fuel dock. I knew he’d come looking for me.

  For a second, I wonder why he couldn’t have been inside this morning, where he wouldn’t see me go by. But I guess that’s just another way of getting busted.

  He cuts the engine and drifts to a stop a bunch of feet away from me, making Blue Boat rock like crazy.

  I look at his face, but then quick look away again. It’s a look I never saw on his face before. And I’m not so thrilled about having to start now.

  He throws me a rope. But I don’t even notice. I’m looking the other way at first. I hear it splash on the water, so then I look. And there’s this whole long snake of thick rope lying on the water, except then it starts to sink. So then Ben has to reel it in again. I watch him reeling, and I watch little drops of water flying off the wet rope the whole time he’s wrapping it. He’s wrapping it around this rope rack he makes by using his hand on one end and his elbow on
the other.

  He sets the rope down on the bottom of the boat and then cups his hands around his mouth and yells to me.

  “This time catch it.”

  I don’t want to make him any madder, so I do.

  It’s wet and cold in my hands, and where it trails down onto my legs.

  And then Old Ben is reeling me in. Hand over hand, he pulls the rope until Blue Boat bumps right up against the metal side of his motor boat with a big clunk.

  I risk looking at his face one more time. But it looks more like he feels sorry for me, now that it’s up closer like this. Maybe more sorry than mad.

  Maybe that’s worse. I don’t know. I’m not sure how to tell things like that anymore. Or maybe I never knew.

  Nobody says anything for a minute. But I know he will. I have nothing, really, to say. But he will. If I give him time.

  When he’s had enough time, he says, “Do you have any idea how far out to sea you are?”

  “Not really,” I say.

  “What made you think you could paddle back before dark?”

  “I didn’t. I never thought that.”

  “You were just going to stay out all night?”

  “Yeah. Pretty much.”

  “What made you think you could even paddle back in the morning? Don’t you know the current would have taken you farther and farther out to sea?”

  “Yes, sir. I do know that.”

  Usually I would never call Ben “sir.” After all, he is my friend and all that. But he’s a grown-up man, and he’s mad. Sometimes when a grown-up man is mad, it helps to call him sir.

  “Then how did you expect to get back in?”

  “I didn’t. I didn’t ever expect to go back in.”

  I sneak a look at his face while he’s thinking about that. Or anyway, while he’s not talking. I guess it’s not up to me to say what Old Ben is thinking about. He looks like he’s only partway surprised. Like he knew, but he didn’t know. And like it’s definitely harder to for-sure know. But definitely not like it’s a complete surprise.

  He also looks really sad now.

  I just learned something new about myself. I learned that even though I really, really, really hate to make people mad, I like it a whole bunch better than making them sad.

  I never knew that before. I just thought they both sucked.

  I guess I just learned a little bit about what I’m running from. Which seems like weird timing, because it looks now like I’m not going to die. Well, I guess I am someday. So, I guess, whenever I die, if it’s fifty years or whatever, I still learned it before I died. Which is all the quote says. It doesn’t say whether you should learn it a long time before you die or right at the last minute.

  I guess Thurber left that last part up to me.

  I look down to see the otter poking his head up out of the water. Maybe twenty feet from me. I mean, from us. Old Ben is here now, too. It looks like the same otter, but I’m not sure how much otters look like each other. I think that would be insulting to otters, to say they all look alike. Like they’re not even each their own selves or something. Like there’s only one great big mass of otter with no individual anything. So I decide I’ll just figure it’s the same one, and that’s why he looks so familiar.

  He doesn’t have the clam with him, at least not that I can see, but maybe he ate it already. I wonder if he came to check on me. To see if I’d found my way.

  “Chloe,” Old Ben says.

  So I look up at him again. I guess I sort of went off in my own head for a minute there.

  “I know you’ve been depressed,” he says. “But why this?”

  “So Jordy can be happy.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense, Chloe. Not one bit of sense. How is this going to make Jordy happy?”

  “Well. I was standing between him and happiness. So it was time to move. You said so yourself. If you’re standing between someone and their happiness, you have to move.”

  “Oh, dear,” he says. And puts his head in his hands for a minute. When he comes up again, he says, “I’m sorry. I thought you would know what I meant by that. But maybe I should have been more specific. I meant move just a little bit.”

  “How would I do that?”

  I’m not really famous for doing anything just a little bit.

  “Well. That depends. What do you think it is about you that makes Jordy unhappy?”

  “I guess that I can’t really take care of myself. Like, if I could take care of myself, then he could get married to Kevin and move to a bigger apartment and be happy. And I could stay in the nice little apartment. But I can’t do that. Because I can’t be alone like that. I could never live alone without Jordy.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, yeah. Positive.”

  “Because that sounds like something that really would make him happy. But this…. Chloe. Jordy loves you. He would never get over losing you like this.”

  “He wouldn’t?”

  “Of course not. How would you feel if Jordy killed himself, and you felt responsible?”

  “I don’t even want to think about stuff like that, Ben.”

  “But you need to see what you almost did. There’s nothing you could do to Jordy that would be worse than this. Nothing.”

  We sit there for a while. Rocking on the swells. The sun is over on a long slant now. It’s going to go down in an hour or so. Part of me is glad I won’t be out here shivering by myself when it does.

  In case it doesn’t go without saying, I’m not feeling much.

  Finally I say, “Well, I’m out of ideas, then. I just have no idea what to do.”

  “First, come home. Let me take you home. And then I think you need to give some serious thought to whether you could take care of yourself more. Even a little bit more. If you really tried. I mean, if you really love Jordy the way I think you do…then I would think it would be worth a serious try.”

  I don’t answer. I don’t say anything. Because I can’t make my brain think anything right now. It’s all a big blank.

  I look around for the otter, but I don’t see him anywhere. He must’ve figured I was all set now.

  “Hand me back the end of that rope,” Ben says.

  And I do.

  He leans over and takes hold of the handle on the front of Blue Boat. The rope and whatever-you-call-it plastic pipe handle that Kevin made for me. And he ties the end of the rope around it. With a very complicated knot that I would never know how to make.

  He never looks at me, not once the whole time. Maybe it would make him feel too bad. Or maybe that kind of knot needs all your attention.

  I go back to looking for the otter.

  “Where’s your paddle?” I hear Ben ask.

  “All the way over there.”

  I point.

  I’ve been keeping a very good eye on it the whole time. Even though I wasn’t entirely sure why.

  Old Ben sighs. Then he takes up his oars and rows over to get it. The rope keeps getting longer and longer as more and more of it pulls off the coil in Ben’s boat. I see him reach out and grab the paddle. And I feel better inside. Part of me never wanted to see it go. Even though I didn’t think I would need it. It’s still my paddle, after all. And I wanted it back the minute it flew out of my hand.

  Then I hear Ben start up his motor again, and we’re moving.

  Blue Boat is behind the back of Old Ben’s motor boat, but on a pretty long piece of the rope. But still right where you would think the wake would get us in trouble. But it doesn’t. The wake comes out of the motor in a big V shape. Part of it goes to the left of Blue Boat, and the other part goes to the right. And the water in between is sort of flat, but definitely not too wakey. And we just motor right along.

  I look at the place where the rope is tied to the handle. The handle Kevin made. It seems like the world’s biggest example of Kevin being right and me being wrong. I said I didn’t need a handle, and Kevin said I did, and now the handle will always be what brought me bac
k to Morro Bay alive.

  Not that I think Ben couldn’t have towed me back some other way. I’m sure he would have figured something out. But he’s not using any other way. He’s using the handle Kevin made. And I feel like maybe that means something.

  After a while, I can see Morro Bay, looking tiny, way off in the distance. Even The Rock looks pretty small.

  It’s really nice to see it again. Nicer than I thought it would be. Well, that’s not right, because I never thought it would be. I guess I mean, nicer than I thought it ever could be. Even though I never thought about seeing it again, because I never thought I would. But now that I do, I’m surprised.

  I’m getting all tangled up here.

  What I mean is, I really missed it.

  Pretty soon, I can barely make out the windows of our tiny little apartment. And I know that if I can just live there with Ethel and let Jordy and Kevin go live somewhere else, everything will be okay. But of course, I can’t. If I could, I never would have tried this. I know I can’t live alone.

  But I have to. I have to do it anyway. There’s no other way. It’s impossible, but I have to do it. It’s the only way to make Jordy happy.

  Then all of a sudden, I have one very happy thought. Just one, coming into my head out of nowhere, like the sun breaking through the fog.

  I get to tell Jordy about the whale.

  Ben unties the fancy knot near the dock. My dock. Right under our tiny little apartment. Right in front of the restaurant where maybe I might even still work.

  I look up and see Ethel watching me from one of the big weird windows. Standing up, with her front paws on the glass. Looking wiggly.

  The motor is turned off, so I can hear Old Ben when he talks to me.

  He says, “If I just leave you off here, can I trust that everything will be okay?”

  I feel my eyes get a lot wider.

  “I can’t promise how things are going to turn out, Ben. I never even know that myself.”

  “That’s not exactly what I meant. I mean, can I trust you? If I don’t go upstairs and tell Jordy, can I trust you to stay put?”

  “Don’t tell Jordy, Ben. Please. It would kill him.”

  Then those words kind of lie there for a minute, drooping down onto the water from being so heavy. I think we’re both thinking it’s weird that I would know that. That now I can see that even trying to do what I tried to do would kill Jordy. When I didn’t see yesterday or this morning that really doing it wouldn’t make him happy.