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The Dogs and the Sea Chloe blinked her eyes into the white light of the morning. Instead of waking as she was accustomed to, when the pale square of window light had framed her body from the knees to the toes, she woke violently the second it hit her face. Instantly she found herself sitting upright, her back straight in a silhouette against the blinding sun in the window. She trembled with energy. Even her organs knocked inside of her, rattling for room in her small chest. Despite the fact that her little sister was still limp and lazy in the sheets, her colorless hair slipping out of the wrapped fabric like a tongue on something dead, Chloe wanted to scream. She wanted to jump up onto her bed, leap across to Gracie's, crow and screech and push her little sister aside until she could run alone all through the house and out onto the yellow-grass yard and into the arms of Ben and Julie. Because today her uncle and aunt were coming to visit from a place called Queen's Park. It was a place that sounded majestic, part of a palace maybe, but was really infinitely more wonderful. It was a neighborhood in London where there were silent streets and dignified people. Today they were coming and when they left again maybe they would take Chloe with them. Whether scrunched in the sour leather of their luggage or beside them in daylight, it didn't matter. Just as long as she could control her behavior tonight, keep out of trouble for a few short hours, they would have to fall in love with her. Somehow, it had to happen. At least that was what her hectic heart was counting on. Her feet slammed into the dirty pink rag rug and her eyes bounced over the cluttered space. She should have left the room quietly, but she couldn't help herself. As soon as she started walking her feet kicked into a pile of clattering plastic unicorns, tangling themselves in the golden floss of their manes and tails. Gracie moaned in her bed, but Chloe couldn't quiet down. Her breath caught and sputtered and made noises in her head. She raced out of the room and down the long hall into the kitchen, where her mother was already preparing for the arrival.
“When are Ben and Julie coming?” The energy stiffened inside of her until she felt her skin calcify and turn to bone. All of her breath left in a growl and her head dropped. “Mother, I want to know. I'm counting down. I have to know.” “You are not allowed to have a meltdown today, understand? Just calm down and help me with these dishes. Throw out those old peaches and wash the bowls.” Chloe made a monstrous sound, the worst she was capable of. It would have sent Gracie or her brother into hysterics. But her mother laughed. “You sound like a sick animal, kid. Get going.” All the next hour Chloe worked, flying on the ticking excitement of her heart, the ticking that rushed faster through her with every passing second that brought her closer to Ben and Julie. She moved from the sink to the basement to the backyard, working for less than a few moments at each location, spending much of the hour rushing in transit, dashing through the hallways and rooms in circuitous routes, kicking or even wrestling the clothes and furniture that from time to time would block her way. Evan and Gracie woke and the light of the day got louder, sounding more and more like a raging dissonance pounding on the red transparent curls of her ears. Then, in a certain moment before a full fifty minutes had passed, Chloe jarringly remembered that she had to finish her novel. It was meant to be for Ben and Julie, and she was so far behind. She couldn't believe she had not remembered earlier. The realization seized her shoulders and shook her away from the litter box and back into the kitchen where her mother was washing. “Mom,” she said. “Can you ask Gracie to leave our room so I can work on some business?” Her voice was already shrill and pleading. Chloe's mother finished scrubbing down a cereal bowl, dried it and put it back in its nest of other bowls before she answered. “Gracie is cleaning up in there right now. And you know perfectly well it's her room as much as yours. You can do your work just as well with her there. I'm sorry, Chloe, but this is not a day for demands.” Even though she knew she should obey, the idea sickened her. She, Chloe Murphy, was a serious ten-year old girl who needed silence and space to write. She, unlike her sister, was not playing foolish children's games. No, she was not. She was writing a novel on imperative themes. Her annoyance was uncontrollable. Automatically her face scrunched up into the round hole between her lips and she snarled. “But Mom, I'm TELLING you. I don't want to play with Gracie. I don't want her in the way. It's a bad place for me to be right now.” “I don't want you to play either. I want you to pick up those ponies and all your papers and I want you to organize them so Uncle Ben doesn't think you're a slob.” “I am not a slob.” “Then go.” She planted her feet harder into the floor until she could feel them binding to the wood. Her mother put down a dish rag and stared her in the eye. “Family means togetherness.” This was the line her mother had said in quiet moments, moments after Gracie and Evan had long been asleep and Chloe had stayed up to read. The way her mother had said it those nights, with only the green shades of the double-headed reading lamp burning light, one with its glowing eye staring into her lap and one into Chloe's, it had been impossible not to agree. In those moments it had felt like family was togetherness, that family was cozy and dim. Here in the day, though, with Evan naked and covered in marker and Gracie spreading a rainbow of gummy bears across her manuscript, family seemed to mean something else. It seemed wrong to say it out loud, too delicate to stand against the sharp daylight of the house. So hearing the line, she had to obey, but she didn't have to obey pleasantly. Chloe marched as loudly as she could, stomping her feet on the hardwood floors so they deafened the house. She imagined she was a Yeti storming the Himalayas. Her feet crashed through the deep Tibetan snow to impact the rock below with force. It was good. It was effective. She was making her point. When she reached the room she shared with Gracie she flung the door open. “Get out.” Gracie was playing on the floor with a winged horse. She looked up from under an unending mane of hair and then went back to cantering across the carpet. “Gracie, get out.” “No. We're in the desert. We need water.” “I don't care. Your stupid horse can go to hell .” Chloe paused. Then she said, “Do you even know what hell is?” “Yes, but I can't tell you.” “That means you don't. Get out. Mom wants you in the kitchen.” Gracie's pale eyes narrowed but she got up anyway, slinking across the room with her awkward, already self-conscious walk. Chloe slammed the door and shoved a shabby dollhouse against it. She was alone, and she was ready to write. But the sad fact was, as soon as she got to her manuscript, the commotion began. She barely even got a chance to read, before she heard the taxi door slam and hysterical shrieks from the living room. Her heart tightened and screamed with her siblings. By then it was far too late to start. As she ran to the front door, she could just see over the heads of Gracie and Evan and through the masking brilliance of her delight, the two laughing faces of her uncle and aunt. Evan was dangling from Ben's arms, but he dropped him when he saw her and yelled her name. The ecstasy on her uncle's face almost matched her own, and confirmed everything she loved about him. She also knew, instinctively, that soon she would be with them in London. The dinner was like a banquet and Ben and Julie were its presiding king and queen. The anxiety of the day turned throughout the meal to a pure form of joy, and it was all Chloe could do to remember, once or twice, to turn down the corners of her mouth for the sake of dignity. After dinner she rushed to her room, her cheeks still red with the compliments of the evening, to finish the manuscript. Julie was brushing Gracie's hair in the living room and Evan was watching television, so the house was quiet. She sat on her bed and took out a pen. Chloe only had about twelve pages written of what she hoped to be a full length, in depth novel. She should have had more by now, but it never seemed like she had enough time. Furthermore, she had reached a point a few days ago from which she couldn't seem to proceed. Hopefully tonight she would be able to push past it and give it to Ben as proof of her intelligence. The novel was about a girl who was lost at sea on her bed. The ocean was still and wide around her, and no matter how far she drifted into the horizon she could never see land. Her only companions were five yellow dogs that guarded the bed, four at the corners and one by her side. The dogs were cartoon dogs so they didn't smell terrible or urinate on board, but they did not sing or talk like regular cartoon dogs. They only watched in silence, their sharp golden noses pointing each to a different cube of ocean where the hope of land might lie. At first the girl was distressed over the overwhelming vastness of her solitude and the sea. Eventually, though, she learned to endure it; even to prefer it to anything else. In the end she would be swept up the river Thames and land on the streets of London, where Ben and Julie, her foreign, beaming family, would take her in not as a niece but as a fellow artist and a friend. But Chloe only had twelve pages done and the girl had already learned to overcome her weakness and live with peace on the purple sea. She wanted to build a long epic about the girl's survival, but she couldn't think of anything else to write. She looked over her last passage,
The more Chloe looked at it, the more it felt like an ending, and she couldn't think of what should fill the hundred or so more pages she needed before the story arrived in London and could really take off. Originally, she had wanted to include Heather-Marie, her best friend last year, as a visitor in a lifeboat who would join the girl on her travels. But lately Heather-Marie had not been so nice to her, telling Chloe she was too loud and too wild. Lately Chloe had eaten lunch without her, sometimes all alone, and it seemed like for now she should stick with just the dogs and the sea. Since Ben and Julie's arrival that evening, Chloe had been looking forward more and more to the moment when they would drag her sodden character out of that filthy, far off river. They had swept into the house in dark, vintage clothing and the laughter had only just now ceased. They had told about all their travels: in Alexandria, Tripoli, Carthage, other cites that Chloe couldn't even pronounce well enough to remember. They had told about their album, a techno compilation called Scream Out Annie, which they were almost ready to record. They had also described the capers of their musician friends, long haired geniuses who squatted in warehouses and never dated the same girl twice. But when they had tired of talking Chloe had become the star. They had laughed at her jokes and called her precocious and barely paid attention to her yellow-headed siblings. After dinner Ben and Julie had brought her downstairs, alone, into the guest room. There they had showed her fabrics and trinkets from Africa and how their new luggage worked: how the wheels spun to form a secret combination. They had even told her the number, which was the password to all the belongings they owned in America. No one else knew it but the three of them, and Chloe had sworn she would never confess it. At that moment she had been so sure they would take her with them. She jotted down a few words, a description of Julie's silver rings that she could use later, and then a shriek outside distracted her. She opened the door to find Evan crunched in the corner, smirking as he defecated into his pants. “Mom!” she screamed. “Evan's taking a crap outside my room!” She slammed the door again and paced in circles. She could perfectly picture the final scene: Julie and Ben would do fine appearing just as they had that night: Ben with his smirk and curly ponytail; his new wife all in linen. They would smile and tell her she looked older, more renowned. No longer just precocious, but now wise. “I am,” she'd say. “I've been through a difficult journey.” “We can see that,” they'd say. “Why don't you come live with us in London and together we'll make art and be happy?” Someone knocked on Chloe's door, sharply, three times. She ignored it. “You are a brilliant writer,” she wrote in red magic marker. “Chloe?” her mother said, and opened the door. “I need to talk to you.” The evening's laughter was gone from her face. “I didn't tell him to poop there! I didn't. He just went ahead and did it and it's not my fault and at least YOU don't have to live with the smell.” “That's not what we have to talk about.” Chloe tightened her lips until they were nothing but a thin black line. She looked at the doorway. The frame was white but the more she looked the darker it became. “I have to ask you if you did something, and if you did, it's very important that you don't lie.” Chloe looked down when she saw Gracie's silhouette lurking in the hall. Her mother sat on the bed and Chloe closed her eyes so hard her lids wrinkled. “Did you change the combination of Uncle Ben's suitcase?” For a minute, she couldn't say anything. For a minute, she let the red and orange blurs behind her eyelids engulf her. She wasn't even sure her mother was talking at all. “Chloe, tell the truth.” Her cheeks brightened and she screamed. “Mother, I didn't do it! I didn't!” Her breath came out fast, escaping in wheezes and gulps. She could hardly think. “Relax, okay? Remember, this is important. If you can remember what number you changed it to, you won't get in trouble. They're exhausted and they need to go to bed.” The anger burned her intestines. She shuffled through a million ideas in her mind. Why would Ben and Julie think she had betrayed them? Why would they accuse her, of all people? She tried to relax, tried to think of what her counselor had said in the resource room: breathe in and out. Count to three. Think about floating in the ocean. She did not want to make an angry scene in front of her uncle and aunt like she had the last time they visited. She wanted so badly for them to know that she was different now, but when she spoke she screamed anyway. “What are you talking about?” Then she could hear Uncle Ben in the hallway. “Chloe, I'm not kidding. Tell me right now what you changed the lock to. I'm not screwing around like your mother does.” Chloe's mother met him outside. “She said she didn't do it.” “Who do you suggest for a suspect, then? She's the only one who knows the number. You think Julie did it?” He lowered his voice, but Chloe could still hear. “Personally I don't know any other troubled children in this house.” “Ben.” “Well, if you're not going to do anything about it we'll just sit down there and try every fucking combination until we figure it out.” He peered into Chloe's room, his ponytail half loosened and sticking with sweat to his face. “Think hard.” He slammed down the stairs, louder than any Yeti Chloe had ever evoked, and she was alone. All she heard was the voice of her mother from somewhere in the house. “You're to stay in your room, in silence, until you can remember that combination, understand? We're going to have dessert without you now.” Chloe lay on her bed for a long time, floating in the silent black. Days passed, weeks, and she heard them eating. She heard her sister growing up without her and becoming the star, with her timid humor and her ghostly singing voice. She heard someone tickle Evan until he threw up, and the crisp sound of some type of flammable dessert. All this she heard from far out on the Pacific. Here she was safe, with her silent yellow dogs. Out here she did not have to yell and scream, to fight Gracie and Evan. Out here there was no need to be wild or blamed or troubled. Then came a long silence again and finally a painfully loud knock on the door and Chloe once again sat upright. “You're still in here?” It was her mother. “I'm sorry, honey, I sent in Gracie to tell you. It was Ben's fault. He got the numbers wrong. It was three nines but he had the suitcase upside down. He thought it was three sixes. Isn't that ridiculous? Everyone's been laughing at him all night.” When she left Chloe disembarked. Her eyes stung so much she could barely open them. Tomorrow she would have to figure out a new ending for Lost at Sea. Tomorrow she would take out Ben and Julie and the river Thames.
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