Click Your Heels Three Times, part one
I.
2020
Chloe has caught glimpses of him since that awful day, a day that was filled with sunshine and loss. She stood in the middle on an empty apartment and clutched her stomach as he disappeared from her life. He just faded, there one moment and gone the next. Another loss in a week that she would come to think of as a week of losses. Davis and Jimmy and Lois and then, last of all, Clark.
Clark left but he wasn’t gone without a trace.
In the beginning, she thought it was only temporary, that he would realize his mistake in thinking that to be a hero meant he needed to just be an alien. He would come back to her, Chloe thought. Maybe he’d knock on her new door or maybe he would just zip in like he could, running faster than nearly anyone in the world can, with the exception of Bart. He would come and he would stand before her, contrite and remorseful. I’m sorry he’d say. I was an idiot he’d say. And she would open her arms and say It’s okay, come here, everything is all right now.
That is what she thought. She thought he would come back and she would welcome him back. She would instantly forgive, the pain at losing him set aside because he was in her life again. The pain wouldn’t be forgotten, not quite, but it wouldn’t be important anymore because he was back in her life.
Time would tell her that she was wrong. Time told her she was wrong about many, many times.
First she was wrong about him coming back into her life. At most he hovered at the edges, a person she glimpsed on occasion. A flash of red and blue: that was how he would be present in her life. In the dream she had at the beginning he would appear on her doorstep, knocking on her door loudly, impatiently. She would fling open the door and there he would be, an apologetic look on his face, and she would welcome him inside with wide, forgiving arms. The dream never came true.
One day she accepted this. The day it happened wasn’t a good day. She stayed inside and sought the bottom of the bottle. It offered only a temporary release. It was a bad day and she hasn’t forgotten it in the days and months and years since it happened. She doesn’t want to forget.
The dream changed after that night.
In it Clark walks into her apartment after she has invited him in. It’s not the apartment she was left with after Jimmy died, but the apartment she bought later. The one Jimmy gifted her had large windows and the rooms filled with a golden light when the sun was shining. On days when it was overcast the light was gray and dour, unhappy. There were no good memories associated with that apartment, only the unpleasant ones. Memories of loss. She got rid of that apartment less than a year later and so in her dream Clark comes to the apartment she bought from the sale of the one Jimmy gave her. It’s the apartment she lives in now. He walks in this apartment and says all the right things, all the words she has wanted and needed to hear since that awful day when he left her standing alone in her old apartment.
“Goodbye Chloe,” he’d said to her that sunny day all those years ago. A sunny beautiful day, only the beauty was marred by a funeral and then by Clark saying goodbye to her.
In the dream he’s unchanged, the years having had no effect on him. He’s exactly as he was at twenty-two. He’s dressed in his usual outfit-blue jeans and a blue t-shirt, the look completed by the bright red jacket. His face is smooth and unlined, not burdened at all. Not that he was unburdened the day he left her. In the dream his face is more similar to the way his face was during the summer he was human and with Lana. Chloe remembers how he looked then and that’s how he looks in her dreams, a man untouched by time, hurt and pain. This is how he is in her dream.
When he’s in her living room he speaks. He apologizes, his voice cracking as he says, “I’m sorry, Chloe. So sorry.”
In reply she says, “I missed you.”
“I missed you,” he answers. He moves forward slowly and it’s after he has taken two steps towards her that her feet begin to move. They meet each other and the hug just starts, their bodies crushed together.
“God, I missed you,” he says into her hair. His hands span her back.
She tilts her head back. “But now you’re back.”
“I’m back.”
When he says that in her dream, she smiles. Not the smile of her youth, though, but the smile she has today. In her dream she isn’t twenty-two, she’s whatever age she is at the moment she’s having the dream. Her skin isn’t as smooth as it was and there are the beginnings of crow’s lines in the corners of her eyes. She’s older and touched by time, by the pain of the numerous losses, by everything that has happened in her life, the good and the bad. She has smile lines and she has gained a bit of weight. Her hair is longer, just below her shoulders but straight like always.
“Don’t let go,” Clark says in her dream.
“I won’t.”
But then something always happens and she does let go. Her arms break away from his body and the distance between them grows. The physical distance, that is. Miles and miles pile up and soon there are fields and fields separating them. She can barely see him; he’s so far away. She reaches out her hand, stretching her arm, but it’s not enough. The distance has increased so much and she can’t see him anymore and he’s lost once again. She wants to find him, but a fog appears, surrounding her, and she can’t see anything. All edges disappear and everything is hazy and undefined and a whitish-gray color.
“Clark?” she calls. She calls it again and again, but there is only silence from him and a dull humming sound. The sound grows and grows until her voice is drowned out.
It’s then that she wakes. The dream starts out well, starts out fulfilling her most basic wish and desire before it takes a turn down Nightmare Avenue. He returns only to be lost again.
Something inside her has changed. Instead of seeing his return as a glorious event she views it as only a temporary stay. It’s better for him to stay away because she doesn’t want to go through losing him again. She tells herself this and believes it. She tells it to herself this when she glimpses him as he keeps the city safe. When she catches sight of him it’s just for a moment, just a flash of red and blue. A blur. As soon as she blinks he’s gone and she tells herself it’s for the best.
She tells herself that it’s better he stays away after he saves her life that one time. He saves her on a dark night when she is certain of her death.
But Chloe doesn’t die that night.
The dream stops plaguing after he saves her life, rescuing her. After that night she doesn’t have that dream again. He saves her and doesn’t stick around and then she really does know how it is. At least she knows how she thinks it is. Perception isn’t always reality.
And after that night it doesn’t hurt as much when she catches a glimpse of him saving the world one day at a time. Before she would feel a pain as if her heart was being stung by something sharp and precise. Chloe still feels a pain but it is duller, flatter. Her reaction isn’t surprising given that individuals have a tendency to adapt and become accustomed to what the present is even if the past was different.
Her present is a life in Metropolis.
Her father has tried to convince her to move. He lives in Gotham now, has lived there for some ten years or so. Chloe has visited him in Gotham. It’s a city that isn’t land-locked like Metropolis. When she visits, Gabe takes her down to the boardwalk that extends the length of the beach. The wind whips through her hair and the air will smell like salt. The air often has a grittiness to it, the result of the constant wind and the salt in the water. The wind is cold, bracing in the winter and cooling in the summer. Gravel crunches beneath their feet as they walk.
“I do think you’d like it here,” Gabe says.
“I’m happy in Metropolis. It’s my home.”
“This could be your home.”
“Dad,” Chloe says. It’ll be soft and just slightly reproaching.
“I miss my daughter. Can’t blame an old man for that, can you?”
She laughs lightly, careful not to be cruel. It’s an affectionate laugh. “You’re not old.”
“I feel old. I would just like to see you more. And if you ever got married and had children, I’d want to see them too, especially the children.”
When he says those words mentioning children she always pauses for a moment before speaking. Then she says, “I don’t think I’m the marrying sort.”
Her father heaves a small sigh at this.
Then she’ll change the subject although her father will do his best to bring it back to the topic of her moving to Gotham. He wants her closer to him, he’ll say. He thinks it will result in her finding someone to marry. Since that week of losses she has dated. Most of her relationships have been causal, but one did last a year. They broke up over something stupid, Chloe remembers. Or maybe it was something that seemed critical at that moment, but in hindsight was really rather stupid. She’s not sure. What she is sure of is that her father wants her to marry, wants her to settle down and have a family and be content for once in her life.
She wants to tell him: I’m content. This is my life and I’m okay with it.
He’s her father, though, and he wants everything for her. Wants the world for her and doesn’t think she can get the world in Metropolis. Too many deaths, he thinks, although he never says this. Metropolis is where Jimmy, Davis and Lois died. It’s where she lost her mother.
She lost Clark too in Metropolis but her father doesn’t know that. There are dozens of secrets between her and Gabe. There’s so much that she can never tell him. Some of the reasons are because of the loyalty she has to others. Some of the reasons are because she simply doesn’t want to hurt him.
So Chloe says, “Metropolis is my home.”
This is what ends the conversation when it occurs. Her tone will be firm and her father will say he understands. For all his supposed understanding he never stops trying to get her to move. He means well of course.
But Chloe doesn’t move, not to Gotham and not to any other city, and so what happens is the result of this decision not to leave.
Part Two