Free Disconnection by Erin Samiloglu Page B

have the damn thing? She should have just given the phone to Uncle Harold, or thrown it out the window, or…something. Anything other than what she
had
done, which was stick it back in her purse after she had hung up on Chloe right there in front of her grieving uncle. “Wrong number,” she had told him.
    She reached for the phone and pressed the “on” button. She heard Chloe ask, “Sela? Are you there?”
    “Nutcase!” Sela banged the phone like a hammer against the table. She screamed, “Fuck off! You sick person! The girl’s dead, do you hear me, dead! And you’re trying to be her, what is your problem? What are you, some kind of mental case? Stop calling!”
    “Stop screaming.” Chloe’s voice sounded shaken, confused. “I don’t understand,” she said. “What happened? Why did you never come? I waited.”
    Sela stood up and paced back and forth along the kitchen floor. “Oh, I went to your house all right, Chloe. I even met your uncle with the bad tie. But I didn’t see you. No, I couldn’t see you. You want to know why? You want to
fucking
know why? Because you’re dead! Chloe Applegate is dead! So stop calling. I know you’re not her!”
    Sela threw the phone into the wall, and then leaned against the kitchen cabinets and slid down, holding her knees, resting her head on her shoulder and closing her eyes.
    Think of something
, she told herself.
Think of something else
—
anything but Chloe Applegate
.
    Sela inhaled deeply and willed herself to remember. When she was a young girl, she loved to watch her father shave. Sela would sit on the bathroom counter and observe as he slid the razor over of his skin with one delicate stroke after another. He often played Mozart’s
Le nazzo di Figaro
during this routine because he said it relaxed him, made the shave smoother without nicks.
    Shaving was just an example of how her father carried himself in life, even in the most mundane of chores. He was a classy guy. Sela often wondered what he would be like today, if he were still alive, if she were to stop by her parents’ house on an early Saturday morning, if she would still catch him at the mirror, a shaving cream brush in his hand, a face turned to look at her, half soaped, half clean, smiling as he welcomed her home.
    Sela thought about him now because she wondered what her father would do in this situation. How would he have reacted? Whoever was on the other line was definitely insane. It was obvious to Sela that they actually thought that they were Chloe Applegate, that it was more than just a joke to them. They truly
believed
their lie. Should she report the girl to the police? What would her father have done?
    She knew what her mother would say.
    You have nothing to fear
.
    Minutes passed before the phone rang again. Sela opened her eyes and stared at it from its position beside the wall. Finally she crawled over to the other end of the room like a groveling dog and, against her better judgment, picked up the phone and turned it on. She did not answer. She merely sat and waited.
    The voice spoke. “I am Chloe. I can prove to you I’m Chloe. I don’t know what’s happening. It’s so cold. And dark. I think I’m home, my heart tells me I’m home. But this isn’t like any home I ever remember. I can prove to you I’m Chloe.”
    Sela asked, “How?”
    An hour later Sela found herself once again outside the Applegate home. She knocked on the door.
    Chloe’s mother answered. Sela knew it was Chloe’s mother because she was exactly the way Chloe—or the Wannabe Chloe—had described her, a woman short in stature with closely cropped, silvery blonde hair and a double piercing in one ear.
    Lines around the eyes suggested that Mrs. Applegate was a woman used to laughing a lot, though she did not laugh now, and did not spare a smile as she studied Sela from head to toe. “You look like my daughter,” she concluded. “You look very much like my daughter.”
    What could she say to that? Sela