Becoming Chloe (19 page)

“We did that last year,” Alexis says. “Because the mules were all filled up.”

“Was it fun?” Chloe asks.

“It was awesome. It was so cool.”

“I don’t know, though,” Chloe says. “It’s not the same as riding a mule. A mule is a real animal. A mule is a lot friendlier than a helicopter.”

“If you were on a mule on that narrow trail,” the mother says, “and you couldn’t balance with both feet in the stirrups, it could be a real disaster.”

“Maybe Jordy and I could ride double.”

“No. There’s a two-hundred-pound weight limit,” the father says. “I know because I just squeaked through. If you ride double or ride hurt, you might even be putting the mule in danger. You wouldn’t want to do that, would you?”

Thank you, I think. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I shoot him a grateful look and he catches it and returns a little nod.

“Then we’ll have to ride the helicopter,” Chloe says.

We all look quietly at the view for a few moments. I’m thinking what this is going to cost. How much money we’ll have left when it’s over. But it’s the canyon, and we’ve come all this way, and Chloe has to see it.

Then Chloe says, “Will you guys do me a favor?”

“Sure,” Alexis says. “What?”

“Go on the mule ride for me, too?”

“We don’t understand what you mean,” the mother says.

“I do,” Alexis says. “I’ll ride the mule for you. What’s your name?”

“Chloe.”

“I know what Chloe means, Mom. I think I do. You mean have fun with everything like you were there having fun, too.

Isn’t that what you mean, Chloe?”

“Right, like that. Just think of me while you’re riding and think how happy I’d be feeling if those were really my eyes you were looking out through. And maybe I’ll be able to tell when you do. I’m not sure, but maybe.”

“I can do that, Mom,” Alexis says.

“I guess there’s no harm in that.”

“I need a picture of Chloe. Take a picture of her, Dad.”

“I have a picture,” Chloe says.

And she does. She carries it in her shirt pocket. Has since leaving Angel Fire. One of the two pictures of us on Wheeler Peak. Taken by the brothers who appeared out of nowhere. We made double prints of all the photos, sent one set to Randy, kept one set for ourselves. But we kept both copies of this one, because it doesn’t have Randy’s sign in it. So there’s another packed in with our stuff. We just happen to have a spare.

“Wow,” Alexis says. “You climbed a mountain. Cool. That bites that you hurt yourself.”

“Alexis,” the mom says.

Chloe says, “It’s okay, because I have you to do this for me.”

“Give me one of your hairs,” Alexis says.

This time the parents don’t even dare interject. They’ve been aced out of this exchange the way I was when Chloe and Randy made their final pact. Everyone knows, on some deep level, the conversations in which they don’t belong.

Chloe pulls out one single strand of blond hair and Alexis wraps it around her finger.

Chloe says, “Want another, in case you lose it?”

“I won’t lose it. When we get back to our hotel I’ll tape it to the back of the picture. And then when we get to the bottom of the canyon, I’ll leave it. And all the way up and down I’ll look at the view for you. I bet you’ll know it.”

“I will,” Chloe says. After they walk away, after they’re long out of earshot, she says it again. “I will.” She’s still looking into the canyon.

We sit that way for a long time, until I think I can see how the light changes slightly and changes the colors of the stacked bands of stone. The curved formations, and the spaces between them. Even the color of the air seems to change.

There’s something about Chloe’s eyes. Something familiar, but for a minute I can’t place it. Then I can. Randy Banyan, thinking about the mountains.

Dear Dr. Reynoso. We found what we were looking for. I hope it’s enough.

When we get our cue to run out to the waiting copter, I really try to help Chloe. There’s a safety procedure. I would hate it if we had to miss out on this, too. This feels like a last chance. So we run—well, hobble—together like we just want to have our arms around each other. I hope nobody will notice how much I’m holding her up, keeping her from having to put weight on her bad foot and shielding her from that invisible tail rotor, the one that the safety video warned us about. I’d hate for them to know I have to handle all that for her.

A woman takes our picture before we board. I have no idea why. Either someone will try to sell it to us later, or they want some record of who all they’re searching for. One bad thought after another.

The copter holds five, but it’s just us and one other woman.

One very big woman. There are three seats facing forward and she sits in the middle one. A guy has to help her get the seat belt adjusted out to the max, and I can tell it cuts into her anyway.

She has to wear it underneath her enormous belly, like big men sometimes do with their pants. Chloe and I sit in the two seats across from her, facing backward. I really try not to stare. But you don’t see a woman this big every day. I’m not trying to be cruel, believe me. There’s just this very human tendency to stare.

Chloe says to her, “I bet you couldn’t get on the mule ride either, huh?”

The woman says, “What did you say?”

“Two-hundred-pound weight limit.” I squeeze Chloe’s hand tightly but it’s really too late. “This is better, I guess, ’cause they don’t even know how much you weigh.”

I sense that on the one hand this woman is tired of defending herself and on the other hand it’s second nature by now.

“Hell they don’t, honey.”

“How would they know?”

“Remember when they asked you to stand on that carpet square in front of the counter?”

“Yeah.”

I can tell Chloe is waiting for more information, so I provide it myself. “That was a scale, Chlo.”

“You’re kidding! Who knew? Well, anyway, we all made it.”

“Honey,” the woman says, “you’re not even a blip on their seismic radar.”

Chloe has no frame of reference for that comment, so she says, “I’m glad you get to go.”

The woman changes right before my eyes. Her eyes deepen.

She steps out of character by taking us into her confidence. “I made a reservation for a party of three,” she says. I get a sense that she’s just admitted a difficult thing.

Then we put on our headphones and lift off. At first we just barely skim over the tops of the trees, but we gain altitude as we go. I watch the shadow of the copter slide across the ground, watch the dull circle above, made by the near-invisible rotor.

As we get out near the rim, the theme from 2001 starts blasting into our ears. But the pilot keeps interrupting it to tell us what we’re about to see. Chloe loses patience quickly and ditches the headphones altogether, so I do, too.

Then we look down and we don’t see trees. We’re looking a mile down into the canyon. It feels so weird, like falling. Also, there’s a strong, gusty wind and the flight is a little bumpy. I look over at Chloe to see if she looks scared or sick, but she isn’t any of that. She’s just silently staring, eyes wide, joy radar on full alert. I’m surprised by the complexity of the canyon from the inside.

The internal walls, formations, faces. I guess I thought that as I stood on one rim, I was looking across to the jagged other side. But it’s more complicated than I thought. When you get inside, it’s more complex than it looks. Like everything, I guess.

I look at the woman across from us and she’s looking back at me. I smile, and she changes again. Softens. She ditches her headphones, too, which I take as a vote of confidence. We’re all three bonded now. We’re the last chance club.

“Look, Jordy,” Chloe says. “There’s a river down there.”

I guess she forgot that I told her there would be a river. After all, that was so long ago. Connecticut was practically another life.

“Of course there’s a river, Chlo. If there wasn’t a river, there wouldn’t be a canyon. The river carved the canyon.”

“No way.”

“Really.”

“No effing way, Jordy.”

I look to our flying companion and she nods that it’s true.

“That and the wind,” she says.

“How can it do that? It’s water. And air. And that’s rock.

How can it?”

“It just has all the time in the world,” the woman says. “It just takes years.”

“How many years?”

“Hundreds of millions.”

Chloe doesn’t relate to years very well, so I don’t try to explain hundreds of millions. It would just be a waste of everybody’s time. But I find myself looking at it through Chloe’s eyes and I’m shocked to realize that she’s right. It’s impossible. I try to imagine how long a river would have to rage over rock to carve away enough to barely be visible. An inch, maybe. You’d have to watch for an eternity to see even an inch of change. Then I try to multiply that by forty miles wide and a mile deep. The world has been here, making itself, doing what it does, for such an unimaginable length of time. Anybody can say it. Hundreds of millions of years. But now I don’t just say it. I actually try to understand what it means.

Since I’ve had this chance to see the world with Chloe, I’ve been doing that. Not just looking at the world, but actually trying to understand what it means. Instead of just spouting data about the realities of the world, I’m letting it inside. Letting it define a few things about me.

Now my mind is just as boggled as hers, and, you know, it’s not a bad place to be.

You could do worse than to be amazed.

❃ ❃ ❃

After the canyon we find a campground we like, and we set up camp and stay awhile. The woman who’s supposed to collect fees, Esther, won’t collect anything from us. She’s so outraged that some guy ran us off the road and never stopped. It’s like life owes us this big debt and she’s going to pay us back just a little bit of it out of her own pocket.

Esther has a cabin way in the back, and she has us in for dinner most nights. We play gin, and she teaches Chloe how to knit. She liked me right away, and I think Chloe sort of grew on her. I think I really appreciate that about Esther, because it seems like with most people it’s the other way around.

She thinks we should stay until Chloe can get out of this big, clunky cast and into a lighter walking cast. It seems like pretty sound advice.

There’s a stream that runs all the way down the west side of the campground, and Chloe decides she wants to catch a fish.

She borrows a fishing pole from Esther, and we sit by the creek all day and catch nothing. We dig worms, thread them onto the hook at great personal sacrifice, and Chloe casts her line into the water and we wait.

While we wait, we talk about things. Things we’ve seen.

Things we think about things we’ve seen. What the things will be like that we haven’t seen yet, like the beach at Big Sur. Or we don’t talk at all. There’s just the sound of running water, and birds. Now and again the faraway voice of another camper. The trees over our heads shift in the wind, so the dapple of sun and shade moves across us while we’re not saying anything.

That’s nice, too.

The second day we go out and also don’t catch a fish.

By the third day I’m ready to do something different, but Chloe is determined to catch something. She’s set her mind’s eye on it, and she’s not about to let go. We sit out all day and she catches nothing.

Late in the fourth day we actually get a nibble. Chloe suddenly isn’t sure what to do, so I remind her how that reel thing works, and she reels it in. It’s a fish, all right. It’s bright and silvery, about seven or eight inches long. It flips its body desperately back and forth, swinging the line wildly. Chloe isn’t sure about grabbing it. So I grab it and hold it for her. Then she holds it.

Then she says, “I feel bad for it, Jordy. That must suck to get caught. I feel bad now that I caught it.”

“You want to throw it back?”

“Yeah. Take the hook out, Jordy. I want to let it go.”

I free the hook as gently as I can, and Chloe flips him back into the stream. As he flies, she says, “Goodbye,” and then, “sorry.”

I guess it was something to do for four days at least.

When the time comes for Chloe to get a light walking cast, Esther drives us in to the hospital. Even though it’s two and a half hours away by car.

She says she’s going to miss us when we move on. I believe her. It must be hard to be Esther, meeting all these people who are just about to get up and go somewhere else.

We’re on Route 87, headed south, between Second Mesa and Winslow. We’re riding in a Volvo station wagon with a nice young woman named Dana. She’s on a three-day vacation from her kids, and she’s being nice to us. She wasn’t planning on swinging so far east, but she wants Chloe to see the Painted Desert as much as Chloe wants to see it. Also, I don’t think she’s in much of a hurry to get back to her kids. She pulls off to the side of the road so Chloe and I can step out and get a better look.

Breathe it all in.

It’s nearly dusk, with the light on a long slant, making this world even redder and more dramatic. It hardly looks real. In front of us is a hill, stained in horizontal stripes. Tan and ocher and deep red and an almost purplish hue. The road, deep black with striking white lines and a yellow center divider, bends left to avoid the hill. The blue sky finishes off the painting. And white clouds, going to black and silver on their bottoms.

I feel like I could look forever.

“It really is painted,” Chloe says.

“Well, not really painted,” I say. “It’s different kinds of rock, and it’s stained by things like carbon and iron oxide.” Wow. I actually remembered something from school. More amazing yet, I actually had some use for something I learned in school.

“Well, maybe that’s how God paints,” she says.

“Apparently so.”

“I thought it was just the Grand Canyon,” she says.

I have no idea what that means.

“You thought what was just the Grand Canyon?”

“It was supposed to be so beautiful. I was expecting that. But then there were all those other places on the way. And then the Grand Canyon was enough, but now here it is again. All this beauty. How many places are there? That are this beautiful?”