Paullina Simons - Lone Star

Chloe didn’t know what to say. Questioningly she opened her hands.

“After Latvia, I’d like the four of you to travel by train and visit Treblinka. Bring my love some red roses. There must be a mass grave around there. After that, you can do what you like. You might want to visit Warsaw, or Auschwitz in southern Poland, but that’s your business. You have three items on the to-do list. Liepaja for your mother and father, Riga for my family, and flowers in Treblinka for me. You do those things, and I will help pay for your trip.”

“I have my own money, Moody,” Chloe mumbled in response, as if that was the only thing she’d heard.

“Oh, sure you do,” Moody said. “But you know who doesn’t have their own money? Hannah. You know who else? Blake and Mason. I hear their mother plans to tap into her life savings to buy them the plane tickets. You can’t travel through Europe on the kindness of strangers, Chloe.”

“You’re going to pay for all of us to go?”

“Well, let’s just say you’re not going to be staying at the Ritz-Carlton. You’ll bring your own money for food, for incidentals. But your travel expenses and your lodging expenses, yes, I will take care of.”

Chloe shook her head. “Moody, I don’t want to go to Riga.” Or to an orphanage! She scowled at her stoic mother, at her father sitting like a sad sack next to her. “My friends will never go for it.” Chloe was thinking of Blake especially. “They’d rather not go at all than go to Poland.”

“Child, I think you’re mistaking what this is,” Moody said. “Is this how your mother allows you to speak to her? This isn’t a negotiation. It’s a proposal. Take it. Or leave it. You want Barcelona? Fine. You’ll have to get to it through my home country. And through Poland. Barcelona through Treblinka.”

“But …”

“Or you don’t go.”

Chloe frowned, perplexed, maddened, upset. “Why would you pay for my friends to go with me?”

“It’s my graduation present to you,” Moody said. “You’ve been largely absent from my life these last few years”—she glared at Jimmy who glared right back—“and I would like to fix that. I’m not as young as I used to be. I don’t want your father’s irrational anger at me to stop you from taking this historic trip. And without your friends you can’t go.”

“Not irrational, Mom,” said Jimmy.

“Oh, yes,” Moody said. “Chloe is your daughter, like Kenny was my son, like you’re my son. Why can’t you understand that?”

“Chloe is a very good daughter,” said Jimmy.

“You’re not such a good son,” Moody said. “What son can stay angry at his mother? Kenny wasn’t a good man, but he was a good son. Better than you. He didn’t stay angry for seven years. That’s a sin, you know. It’s bad luck.”

“We’ve had about all we can handle of that, thanks to him,” Jimmy said as if spitting. “Us, Burt, Janice, their boys. Bad luck well and truly covered, Mom.”

“Listen, if I spoiled him, all right, but I spoiled all you kids. He wasn’t special. You wanted me to love him less than you? He was still my son! I had it rough growing up. I wanted it to be easier for my own children. Why is that so hard to understand?” She raised her hand. “Stop arguing with me, Jimmy. I’m done with it. We’ve yelled all we can yell. Help your child, spoil your child, or take me home. That’s your choice.”

Chloe could see her mother making intense beseeching eyes at her father from across the table. Head bent, Jimmy wasn’t looking at anybody.

Moody turned her attention back to Chloe. “I advised your parents not to keep you from going. Even though you are only eighteen or already eighteen or whatever it is you say, I told them that you should at least try to look for the answer to the fundamental question before you.”

Chloe hated questions before her. “What question is that?” she asked in an exhausted voice.

“What meaning does your finite existence have in this infinite world?”

Chloe didn’t think her Uncle Kenny asked himself this question once, and he probably was never harangued like this. Maybe he should’ve been. Maybe that had always been her dad’s point when he railed at his mother.

“You keep telling your mother and father you want to see things with your own eyes,” the old woman said. “So go see them. Do you only want to see the water and the waves?”

Yes?

“Do you only want to hear the cathedral bells?”

Um, yes?

“What about examining for five minutes your place in the world, what it means to be alive? What it means to be dead?”

“Enough, Mom,” Jimmy said in a voice more exasperated and tired than Chloe’s. “Unlike some others we won’t mention, Chloe gets it.” Jimmy turned to his daughter. “It’s not ideal, Chloe-bear,” he said, putting his arm around her. “It’s called life. You endure a lot of stuff you don’t care about, but then, if you’re lucky, you get what you want.” Jimmy’s eyes caught Lang’s for a glimpse.

Chloe took a few minutes to compose herself before she spoke. “Moody, Mom, Dad, do you guys have any idea how far Riga is from Barcelona?”

Moody smiled with a full set of dentures. “Yes,” she said. “A train ride away across Europe, just like they did it in the war days.”

THAT NIGHT UP IN THE ATTIC LANG SAT ON CHLOE’S BED. “Your father doesn’t want you to be upset. He thinks we were too hard on you. Some police chief! He’s gone soft in the head, I tell you. The fight has gone out of him.”

“I wonder why,” Chloe muttered. Lang said nothing.

“We don’t want you to be disappointed,” she said when she spoke again. “Dad and I don’t fully understand why you want to go, but then we’re not meant to, are we? I almost wonder if you yourself know. And that’s all right too. If you think you need to go to Barcelona to discover what you want and who you are, then who are your father and I to stand in your way? Your acceptance of Moody’s generous terms is wise. I know you’re worried about your friends not wanting to go to Latvia, but I think they’re going to surprise you. Besides, what choice do you have, really?”

“Not go?”

Lang nodded. “That will make your father happy,” she said. “In any case, everyone agrees the boys should go with you. Burt, Janice, Moody. They’ll keep you safe. Your father and I won’t argue this anymore. If you must go, then better with them. Soon you’ll be far away, and they’ll still be here saving up for that junk-hauling truck they won’t be able to afford because they’ve spent the summer frittering away their money in Barcelona with you.”

“You mean in Poland with me. In Latvia with me. Trudging through graveyards and death museums. And orphanages. What fun.”

Lang remained unfazed. “Europe is your parting gift to your friends. Now you can say goodbye to them the way you’re meant to. Abroad. And I hope when you come back, you’ll see one or two obvious things in a different way. Though I told Moody and your father, I wouldn’t count on self-discovery. I barely count on you coming back in one piece.”

“Nice, Mom.”

Lang patted the pink quilt above Chloe’s leg. “This is our gift to you, letting you go. Your dad and I are proud of you. You’ve been a good girl. We wanted to reward you for not disappointing us the way other parents have been disappointed.”

“Like Terri?”

“Not Terri. I think she’s rather fond of her daughter. And Terri works the hardest in that family. That’s why she doesn’t give a damn about the raccoons and dinner and Hannah’s homework. When you have to care desperately about bringing home the bacon, you’re hardly going to be bothered about who cooks it or what species eat it.”