chloe

Page Seventy-five

No picture of Chloe today, though there may be one or two in my storage unit. Many times I wonder, really wonder, if I will ever indeed SEE my own belongings again. See them, touch them, and live in all the memories that they will waken, both in my mind and in my heart.

Chloe was born on 7 August 1992, along with her five brothers and sisters. Like almost everyone in the litter, she was grey and white, built small and compact. She lived with us until the first week in January 1993, when she and her brother Brucie went off east to live with my parents. Like Mugsy and some other animals, Chloe would become a victim of my mother's extreme psychological changes in the year 2000, and there would be a sad ending to a life that began so happily.

Before that time, though, Chloe had a good life. She was adored and pampered by me and my daughter, and by her feline mother and grandmother. She was the most shy and reticent member of the Maman family, and always had to be treated with a bit more delicacy than the other cats. As for the outdoors, in those first five months of her life that she was here in the Turners miasma, she didn't care much for the outside. A little time outdoors was fine for her, and after that she liked her creature comforts. She was especially close to her sister Zoe, who also didn't need much of the outside world until she got older, so they chummed around together a lot in the apartment.

I loved Chloe and Brucie in the same way that I loved all of my other animals, and the only reason I could let them go at all was because they were still going to be part of my family, though at a distance. I would never have given them to anyone but a relative, and I knew they would have a great life with my parents. Whatever else my mother was before her terrible crash in 1997, she was almost always excellent to her animals, and I had no worries for my two kids on the day they drove off with her (though I still cried for days for missing them).

I had no crystal ball. I couldn't see the big black wall of shit that was to come. Many times since 1997 I've attacked myself, wondering, SHOULD I have known that such a thing might come? I'd surely seen certain traits in my mother all my life that hinted at danger. SHOULD I have figured out that such a day could come?

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