Chloe Doe Read Online Free PDF Page A

attitude.”
    I stole his line and I like my cleverness so much that I smile at him and take my seat.
    “OK,” he says, “now we have some real work to do. You don’t list a living relative.”
    “I don’t have one.”
    “Your mother’s not alive?”
    I tell him I doubt it. “Some people die when they lose a loved one.” I believe this with my whole body.
    “When was the last time you saw her?”
    I’ve lost track of days and mark time now by the hour.
    “Guess,” he says.
    But I don’t need to. I remember the exact moment. I could give him month, day, and year. I could tell him the sky was the darkest I’d ever seen it. Even the lights in the homes of the people I knew seemed farther away than the stars.
    “When was the last time you saw your mother, Doc?”
    “Christmas. She stayed for two weeks.”
    “A little hard on the wife and kids?”
    “Harder on the son. When?”
    “You think working out how I feel about my mother will cure me, Doc? You think she’s the key to my happiness?”
    “You know how you feel about her. You’re mad. And that’s good. It means you know you deserve better than you got.”
    I have one of those moments when you know someone’s standing on your shadow. He’s so fast, I didn’t see him coming. I look him in the eye, see he knows it himself. He’s got that look athletes get when they win the gold. He’s pleased with himself and the whole world.
    “I’m not mad,” I tell him.
    “Yes, you are.”
    He’s so sure of it, my body gets hot and tight. I’m on my way to thinking I want to rip his head off and use it for an ashtray before I realize the psychology he’s using on me.
    “You’re pretty good,” I tell him. “But I’m not mad.”
    Before he lets me go, he tells me what life looks like. “There’s the walk into battle. The battle itself. And the walk away.” It’s a cycle we repeat. Every day. Sometimes it’s over small stuff. Sometimes it’s life and death.
    “Our goal is the peace that follows victory. I want you to spend the next week thinking about what that peace would look like to you.”
    I want to tell him I don’t remember winning anything in my life, but my throat is dry and swallowing doesn’t help.
    “I want you to think about what you have to give up to get it.”

The Secret to Creating You
    I n each room there are two beds, one long dresser, half to each, and a beveled mirror, the shatterproof kind, so we won’t kill ourselves or our neighbor.
    They say, No fighting. No taking your
prójimo,
your roommate, your friend and putting her head through the wall, or the door or the window. We will behave like
cuates,
best buddies.
    We have our own bathroom, with a toilet and a shower cubicle, a sink and a plastic tree for hanging our toothbrushes. Towels are distributed each morning and checked off a balance sheet when we hand them back: There will be no hanging, no strangulation, no desperate escape attempts out a second-story window.
    The bathroom is small. You can’t stand inside it and take a deep breath. It’s like my old apartment on the Amtrak: a coffin.
    The doors to our rooms remain open. There’s no exception to this rule. We dress at seven a.m., when we can expect a certain amount of privacy; male staff workers don’t check the halls, don’t stick their heads through an arch for a Hurry-up, until 7:20.
    We eat breakfast at 7:30 and then have an hour of free time, to read the newspaper, watch
Good Morning America,
or talk to staff.
    We can make special requests: for a TV show that evening, for some time in the hospital’s library, for a hairbrush, for apple juice instead of milk at lunch. They count your points.
    Yes, you can watch
Charmed
tonight. Or
    No, you’ve earned only enough for a diary or a turn with the hot rollers. You want that instead?
    You want neither. You want your TV show.
    Lo siento,
they say. Come back when you decide.
    Your points are only good for a week, and then you start over. There’s no saving