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Spoiler! :
Rated for heavy topics.
Reviews and likes are greatly appreciated.
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Dear Chloe,
My mother has always loved you.
Whenever we went shopping, my mother would always go to the girl's section first. Her face would light up as she carefully thumbed through the racks of clothing searching for the perfect dress or PowerPuff Girls shirt to buy for you. When she finally found a few dresses, a few shirts, a few skirts to pick from, she couldn't make the decision on which to get and bought them all.
After, we'd go over to the boy's section and my mother would randomly choose three or four shorts and shirts for me, dropping them into the shopping cart and moving on. Sometimes she'd buy something for Nina or Aiden but she never took as much joy from that as she did shopping for you.
As we got older and the majority of our class shuffled into middle school as awkward and zitty, you were clear-skinned and confident. My mother would talk about you like you were her kid, boasting on your politeness and beauty, talking about how much she saw herself in you. She would ask about you occasionally, usually after I'd come from your house.
She'd be at her desk, going through her paperwork, barely looking up at me as she asked about you. She'd pull her hair back and I'd see the tired lines and dark bags that made home under her eyes.
"So, how's Chloe? Her mother? Lucy?"
"They're fine."
I'd stand by the stairs, tapping my foot, my bag slung across my shoulders. I answered as vaguely as possible but my mother would continue.
"What'd you guys do today?"
"We made brownies. I left them in the kitchen."
She'd nod at this.
"How's Chloe doing in school? Are her grades alright?"
"She's Chloe, she's probably got a hundred average."
"Oh, that's good, that's good. She's got that math tournament coming up soon, right?"
"No, that's in five months."
"Oh well, I wouldn't worry about it anyway. She'll do great."
Then she'd look away, down at her papers or something and I'd know that I had been dismissed.
My mother and your mom were good friends and whenever whenever we were over each other's houses, my mother would spend half the time complimenting you or berating me.
I remember once, we were maybe eleven or twelve, playing video games in your room and I was going downstairs to get us more Oreos when I heard our mother's hushed voices. I bent down on the edge of the staircase and listened closely.
"Teresa, I can't even communicate with him, it's like we're on different planets. It's not that we argue much or that he's even a bad kid, he's just so quiet and independent. I feel like his landlord, not his mother."
"Have you ever thought that maybe it's not him? Maybe it's you?"
Your mom, her voice sympathetic and slow, was leaned close to my mother, who was tapping her foot and staring at a coffee cup on the glass table.
"No, I get it, I know, I wanted a girl. I always did. I had all of her clothing and dolls in the attic for years after I left New York. I gave them to you for Lucy and Chloe because it was like a slap in the face every time I opened the box." My mother's tapping increased and her voice got hoarse, like she was about to cry.
"I want- I just wish that...that Cassie was still here." Your mom's words were slow and careful and she was looking at my mother, sad and solemn.
My mother's face fell, her features pained and what came next was in a whisper so soft I had to strain myself to hear it.
"Am I a terrible person for not loving him nearly as much as I should? He looks so much like his father."
I blinked and swallowed hard, getting up from the stairs and going back to your room, ignoring your questions about the cookies and sitting on the floor by the window. You stopped mid-sentence about your craving for Oreos and cautiously sat next to me, silent.
I knew about Cassie then, remembered flashes of my life before here. I remembered a small, red-brick-against-grey-sky apartment somewhere in New York, remembered a man with crooked teeth and worker's hands, remembered a woman with a too thin body and determined eyes, remembered an older sister with no hair and a beautiful smile, remembered hospitals and a night where Cassie woke up with pale white skin and blood flowing out of her eyes and nose and mouth like a ghost, screaming and my mother frantic and a man, my father carrying her like she was a corpse, blood everywhere, tears coming out of his eyes. I remember the door slamming, the cold December air shut from the warm apartment, and I remember being a five years old, scared, crying, alone.
I remember being forgotten.
I didn't really notice my mother's indifference until after that night, sitting in your room. I became painfully aware of how quiet dinners were, how my mother never showed up to any of my Little League games but attended all of your tennis matches and had a front row seat to your math competition, which you won. She only had one bouquet the night of the school play, which she gave to you, Lady Macbeth. You gave me one of your roses, saying even the servants deserved praise.
Every year, when the wind blew secrets at my door and the cold air tasted like death, we left for New York. We would stay at a motel for exactly three days, spending Christmas at a cemetery, with the girl whose death broke my mother's heart. We'd never leave flowers, but bought dozens and dozens to send to cancer patients at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in the city. My mother wrote letters, dozens of them that she'd leave at Cassie's grave. I tried writing one once, but it felt strange, writing to a person I didn't know, someone who to me, barely existed at all. It's much easier to write to someone who I've known all my life, someone who I laughed with and loved and played tag with and kissed, someone I had known once upon a time.
When I was nine, eleven and fourteen, we saw my father, no longer the large, imposing figure he'd been in my memories, but a soft-spoken man who lost three people the night of Cassie's death. We never spoke at the actually grave site, but after, going out for coffee or to a diner or something, the conversation stilted and somber.
He'd give me an envelope filled with money those years, his hands still as strong and I knew he sent money to my mother the years he didn't come.
My mother cried a lot during those three days but they were over soon enough and we drove back home, the car ride silent other than the crooning of the oldies radio station we listened to.
We often took hitch-hikers wherever they needed to go, pulling over whenever she saw a thumbs-up. They were normally college aged kids, sometimes two or three, loud and grateful, or old men who sang along with the radio. I sometimes think she drove these people as far away as they needed to go only so she didn't have to think about herself, her two lives for a little longer.
I don't know how you found out about Cassie or if you did at all, but every year, you never asked where I was or what I did during Christmas, acknowledging my trips only with a long hug and the this soft, condoling look only a girl like you could pull off.
Tyler.
~*~
Spoiler! :
However, before I start off I just wanted to say that your title is very nice and I am at an extreme level of jealousy; my titles always turn out to be a big load of horse rubbish, but alas . . .
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