Becoming Chloe (18 page)

The other says, “Hey. Take a picture of me and my brother?”

“If you’ll return the favor,” I say.

“You bet, man. No problem.”

“Where did you guys come from? We didn’t see you on the trail.”

“Oh, we took the other trail. The one that comes up from Williams Lake. It’s steep, man. Two thousand feet nearly straight up. Scree slopes all the way. It was great. We haven’t seen anybody else all morning, till we saw you guys. You see anybody?”

“No,” I say.

“Yes,” Chloe says. When I look at her questioningly she says, “We saw those marmots.”

“Oh. I wasn’t counting the marmots.”

“How can you not count the marmots?” Chloe says.

The following morning we’re back in our base camp. I lie awake a long time thinking Chloe will wake up. But she doesn’t, and I need to pee.

I unzip my bag and struggle into my boots and out of the tent, realizing with each step of the way how much pain I’m in.

How stiff I am. My hips ache and feel tight, and there’s a saddle of muscles between them that feels like it’s contracted and then locked into place. I try to stretch a little, but it’s no real use. It’s just going to be a tough day. There are a few other tents within sight, so I have to walk a good ways to find a private spot to pee.

When I get back, Chloe is still sleeping. I lie down behind her and bump her gently with my whole body at once. “Hey, sleepyhead. All ready to bike back to Angel Fire?”

“No,” she says. “Not today. Please? I want to stay here another day.”

“Are you okay? Are you tired?”

“I’m fine. I just want to be not done climbing a mountain. I don’t want it to be over.”

“I’m not sure we have enough food and water for that. Unless I bike out and get more.”

“Could you do that, Jordy? I sure would appreciate it. And could you go out and find some firewood, too? A fire would be nice, so we could warm up a little.”

When I come back to camp with food in the backpack and an armload of firewood, it’s nearly noon. The sun is straight up over our heads. Chloe has been joined by two large horned animals.

Something in the deer family. Based on my reading, I’d have to say they’re either antelope, mule deer, or elk, but I’ll be damned if I know which.

Chloe is holding out a handful of trail mix and they’re trying to decide if they’re willing to take it from her hand. Then their heads come up and they see me and bound away.

“I’m sorry I chased off your friends,” I say.

“Wasn’t your fault,” she says. “It was their choice to make.”

I build a small fire, and we sit on both pads and both sleeping bags and warm ourselves by it. Every hour or so I go off and find a few more sticks of deadfall to feed into the flames.

Around dusk it begins to snow, but gently. Small, light flakes.

I expect them to hit the fire and sizzle, but instead the heat makes them curl away or rise again, and they evaporate in the air, as far as I can tell. Chloe tells me she’s sorry she’s not ready to go back.

I tell her I’m not one bit sorry, and I mean it.

We’ve just come through Gallup, and we’re bearing down on the Grand Canyon. A couple of days will do it. Chloe is pedaling faster, like she can smell it.

Things are better than they’ve ever been, we’re both feeling happy, it’s a beautiful day, and then all of a sudden a car comes by and runs us off the road.

I don’t think he does it on purpose. But he does it. Swerves over, and doesn’t hit us, but forces us to plow off the road to avoid the collision. I smack up against a barbed-wire fence, which rips my jeans and part of my leg, and then I fall over the handlebars onto my hands. I look up just as I’m falling and I get a flash of the car, the driver reaching down, his head down, like he’s digging for something on the passenger-side floor.

I get up and run to Chloe, who missed the fence. She landed in a place where the fence line breaks for a driveway. So she came down on asphalt, and she somehow managed to get her foot caught in the spokes of the bike. She’s also holding her wrist, like she hurt it when she landed on it, and the heels of her hands are bloody.

I look up, expecting the car to stop, but it never does. The guy apparently never sees what he’s done. He just drives on like nothing ever happened.

“You okay, Chlo?”

“Ow. Ow, my foot, Jordy. Help me get my foot out.”

I try to free it but the bike wheel turns slightly and Chloe screams. That’s when I realize her foot isn’t just sore. It’s injured.

Then there’s a man standing behind us, and he wants to know if we’re okay.

“Not really,” I say. “Her foot is caught, and she’s hurt.”

We work together, and I hold the bike wheel so it can’t turn and he grabs the spokes and bends them out so her foot slips free.

It really doesn’t matter what happens with the bike, anyway.

Chloe is hurt, and besides, the wheel is all bent and screwed up from the fall.

Chloe puts one arm over each of our shoulders and we carry her back to this guy’s car. He’s got a really nice Mercedes-Benz.

He’s got a cell phone. He makes calls to find out where there’s a hospital. A general hospital. The kind of place that won’t tell you to buzz off if you have no insurance. Meanwhile, I take the trailers apart from the bikes and load everything into this guy’s trunk. It doesn’t close and we don’t have rope, so we just drive away with it open.

“I don’t believe that guy,” he says. “He never even saw what he did. He wasn’t even looking at the road. People drive like idiots.

People can be such assholes.”

I say nothing, because I appreciate his help so much, but I was just making some headway getting Chloe to think people are mostly decent.

“Jordy is trying to show me that people are okay,” Chloe says.

It comes out with a long breath, kind of tight and strained, and I can tell she’s in a lot of pain.

“Well, that asshole certainly didn’t help,” he says.

We sit in the hospital cafeteria for a long time. Chloe has a big, clunky cast on her left foot and a brace on her right wrist. I have five stitches in my right thigh and a series of bandages on the smaller cuts and tears. The bikes are locked up out front, and I can only hope that all of our stuff is still with them. That our saddlebags and trailers are still full.

Chloe is staring at a bottle of Vicodin that I know she won’t take.

“I guess we’ll have to rethink our travel plans,” I say.

“Oh, please, Jordy. I want to see the Grand Canyon so much.”

“We’ll see it, Chlo, I don’t mean we shouldn’t go, but we obviously can’t bike there now.”

“Oh. Right.”

“I guess I’ll sell the bikes and we’ll go back to hitchhiking.”

“We’ll have an awful lot of stuff to carry.”

And Chloe will be on crutches, so I’ll pretty much have to carry it. Maybe we can wheel one or both of those bike trailers by hand.

“Well, we’ll ditch the coldweather gear. It’s almost spring and we’re headed to Arizona.”

“It gets cold at night in the desert. Didn’t you tell me that?

We might need the jackets.”

“Maybe. I’m thinking the snowshoes can go.”

Chloe laughs, which I know is hard for her. I can see she’s in an awful lot of pain.

“Why did that guy do that, Jordy? We weren’t doing anything to him.”

“I don’t think he did it on purpose. He just wasn’t looking.”

“Oh. So, is he an asshole?”

“I don’t know, Chlo. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe he was being careless, I don’t know, but maybe everybody looks away from the road for a second. Sometime.”

“That guy in the nice car said he was an asshole.”

“Yeah, well, it’s really easy to call somebody else an asshole.”

“So you don’t think he was?”

“I don’t know, Chloe. I just know I wish he’d looked where he was going.”

We’re so devoid of plans that we spend the night in the hospital lobby. Chloe sleeps on the one and only couch and I sleep on the floor. It must look strange, but nobody tells us we can’t do it. Nobody has the heart to tell us to hit the road.

The next part of the trip is pretty awkward and difficult. I don’t want to leave Chloe alone while I sell the bikes, and I have no idea where or how to begin selling them. We end up just ditching them instead. We have to get rides for even the shortest distances.

I have to talk a total stranger into driving us from the hospital parking lot back out to the street. I’m carrying the two big saddlebags on my shoulders and wheeling both trailers.

Chloe hobbles along on crutches without benefit of pain pills.

We have to hitch from the street to the highway. Walking half or three-quarters of a mile is out of the question. When we get dropped off, we just have to sit there on the shoulder of the highway, more or less immobile, until another ride comes along.

But we’re only about two hundred miles from the canyon. By bike, that’s a long way. By car, it’s less than four hours, if we can keep getting rides. I promised Chloe I’d show her the Colorado River snaking through the Grand Canyon. And damn it, if I have to abandon our stuff and carry her across Arizona on my back, that’s what I’m going to do.

We get a ride from Williams, Arizona, right to the South Rim. We don’t even have to pay to get in. We ride with a guy who lives in Williams and works at the visitor center.

“Take the mule trip,” he says. “Best way there is to see the canyon.”

He’s wearing one of those string ties that I’ve only seen on TV.

“But Chloe’s got a big cast on her foot,” I say.

“Oh,” he says. Like it never occurred to him. “Oh, right.

Maybe that’s not such a good idea, then.”

But Chloe is on it already. Chloe likes mules. She’s never seen a mule, that I know of. But she just knows she would like them. “But the mules are the best way, Jordy.”

“But they’re for people who aren’t hurt, Chlo. Who can put both feet in the stirrups.”

“I’ll be fine, Jordy. I want to take the mules.”

We’re driving up a long narrow highway with nothing but forest on either side. Just undeveloped forest as far as the eye can see.

“We’ll talk about it when we get there, Chlo.”

“Sorry I brought it up,” the guy says.

Me too, but I don’t say so, because he meant no harm and I don’t want to make him feel bad. Besides, he makes it up to us by letting us leave our stuff in his office for the day. Now all I have to worry about hauling around is Chloe.

The trip from the visitor center to the South Rim requires a certain amount of walking. I pick Chloe up and carry her there piggyback.

Now that the mule idea has set up camp in her head, I have no idea how to get it to leave again. I can really understand how much a thing like that would mean to her. Especially since we can’t hike. But we can’t do the mules, either. It’s as simple as that.

When we reach the canyon rim, I set her down. We look around. I never saw the Grand Canyon before. I was so busy thinking about showing it to Chloe, but now this feels like it’s at least partly about me. The only sound I hear is the wind against my ears. I feel like I can hear it whirling around the reddish green layered rock formations that stretch out into a sort of haze of distance. It sounds like I can hear the sound of it blowing through the scrub that grows out of solid rock. How does a plant do that? And can I really hear the wind blow through it, or is that just the sound it makes on my own eardrums? I had no idea the world was so big.

Dear Dr. Reynoso. The world is bigger than I thought.

I can hear Chloe suck in a long breath. “Wow, Jordy. This is even better than I thought.”

I say, “Yeah. That makes two of us.”

Then there’s a couple there with a little girl. I didn’t hear them come up. The wind and the view were too loud, I guess. A yuppie couple in their late thirties, the kind who would drive a BMW. The girl looks about eleven and has braces on her teeth.

The girl watches as I let Chloe down off my back.

We sit down on one of the benches. Chloe looks around the way she did on the mountain. Like she’s looking for a place to point but slowly realizing that would have to be everywhere.

Everywhere at once. I can see how she takes all that physical beauty in. Lets it become part of her. Like breathing air and eating food, and then using that to make new cells and feed the old ones. I wish I knew how to do that like she does. I think I had it for just a second, maybe on the mountain, but then I lost it again.

“It’s pretty, huh?” the little girl asks.

“Beautiful,” Chloe says.

“I guess you won’t get to hike the canyon, huh?”

“Alexis,” the mother says. “Leave the lady alone.” I think Chloe makes her a little nervous.

“It’s okay. I’m still really happy I’m here. I never saw this before.

Did you?”

“We were here last year,” Alexis says. “But it was crowded, and we couldn’t get a mule ride, and my parents promised we could come back for the mule ride. We’re going tomorrow.”

“We’re going to ride mules, too,” Chloe says.

“Actually,” I say, “I’m not sure Chloe’s up to the trip.”

“I’m fine,” Chloe says. “He worries too much.”

“I agree with him,” the mother says. “We have friends who’ve done it already. It’s a two-day ride and they say it’s surprising how tired you are when you come back. And you can’t really get out of it easily once you get into it. I’d reconsider if I were you.”

She’s talking to Chloe like she’s a child. Which most people do.

But in this case, it’s not in a good way. She has one hand on her daughter’s shoulder and is pulling her in closer. As if to say, Stay away from the lady, Alexis. We don’t know quite what’s wrong with her yet.

“But, Mom,” Alexis says. “She’s never been to the Grand Canyon before and she really wants to do it.” Alexis knows there’s nothing wrong with Chloe. Nothing that matters, anyway.

“Hush, hon,” her mom says.

The husband speaks up for the first time. “Take a helicopter ride,” he says. “They’re spectacular. And you can get short rides, just a half hour or an hour. You’d see all the views and it wouldn’t take much out of you.”

“Sounds expensive,” I say.

“Less expensive than a two-day mule trip.”