Becoming Chloe (22 page)

I really want to know. I’m looking past her out the window, watching cacti rush by. They seem to be reaching. Just like they reached for us that night. In the moonlight they look like giant arms, reaching. Only they can’t get to us, and it isn’t spooky anymore, anyway. More of a lonely reaching. Only for what, I don’t know. For a long time nobody whispers anything. We just watch the cacti fly by. I’m beginning to accept that they have always been reaching and always will be. I look at the weird guy across the aisle again. He’s still looking at his eyeballs. I wonder what he’s reaching for.

Chloe still hasn’t said what she’s decided, and I still don’t want to ask. Maybe I was wrong to think she was about to tell me. Maybe I read that in. After all, we haven’t seen everything yet. We haven’t seen Big Sur or ridden horses on the beach.

It really isn’t fair to decide yet.

I set my head down on her shoulder, and she strokes my hair.

Pets me like I was a good dog. I try not to go to sleep because we hardly have any trip left, and I hate to miss anything.

We get off the bus at Paso Robles, hitchhike to Highway 1. Then our ride is going south, away from Big Sur, so we wait for a long time at the intersection of Highway 46 and Highway 1, hoping somebody will come along and give us a ride. Lots of cars pass, but nobody stops.

It’s just green pastures here. No ocean yet. Just green hilly pastures. We’ve been shedding belongings all along the way.

Now we’re down to the two saddlebags sitting on the pavement beside us.

“Where’s the ocean?” Chloe asks. “I thought Highway 1 ran right by the ocean.”

“Maybe other parts of it do,” I say. “Maybe just not right here.”

“I thought we’d see it by now.”

“Well, I don’t know, Chlo. Maybe pretty soon. Hopefully pretty soon.”

After a minute or two a big old Cadillac comes down the road, and I stick my thumb out, fairly desperately. He stops a few yards up the road, so we carry the bags up to his car.

“Where you young folks headed?” the driver asks. He’s old, maybe eighty or more. Maybe a lot more.

I pile Chloe and myself into the backseat. Then I say, “Big Sur, sir,” which sounds weird.

“Well, you’re lucky then, because I’m going all the way to Monterey.”

Chloe asks, “Is that farther than Big Sur?”

The driver says it is.

“When will we see the ocean?” she asks. “I never saw the ocean before.”

“Soon now,” he says. “Another four or five miles.”

We ride in silence, and at no time does he ask what happened to Chloe’s face. Or to my face. Which I silently bless him for.

When we reach a stoplight at the northern end of the next town, the driver puts on his left-turn signal. He makes a left off the highway, then a quick right onto a road called Moonstone Beach Drive, and suddenly there it is, spread out before us. All the way out to the horizon.

“Wow,” Chloe says.

The driver pulls off into the dirt and parks. “Not that you won’t see plenty of it on the drive. But this is your first look, so get your fill.”

He lets us watch silently for a few minutes.

Then he says to Chloe, or to me, or both, “What’s in Big Sur?”

“Horseback riding,” Chloe says. “We’re looking for things that are beautiful. We have all these things we’ve seen, all these beautiful things, but not horseback riding on the beach at Big Sur. We saw Niagara Falls and the Rocky Mountains and the Grand Canyon and the Painted Desert. But we still have to ride horses on the beach at Big Sur.”

“Those are all big things,” he says. “What about little things?”

“We saw little things. We saw cats and cows and trees. But the ocean is a big thing, and I’m sure glad we get to see it.”

“Not everything about the ocean is big,” he says. “You should walk down there and see. Right up there. I’m going to stop up there, at Leffingwell Landing. I’m going to eat my sandwich in the parking lot. You should walk down the steps and onto the rocks. There are tide pools in the rocks. Look very close. Then when I’m done eating you can tell me what you saw.”

On the drive, the man tells us his name is Maximilian. Not Max, he says; he doesn’t think it’s asking too much to say it out.

He parks in the little Leffingwell Landing parking lot and pulls a peanut butter and jelly sandwich out of a brown paper bag.

He points to the railed, wooden stairs in front of the Cadillac.

“Go look around and tell me what you see,” Maximilian says.

Chloe and I walk down the rough wooden stairs and pick our way out onto the rocks. So far I only see rocks, eroded to hold little pools of seawater, with waves splashing against the far end.

When a wave hits, it throws water into the air in big individual drops that sparkle like crystals in a moving chandelier. I let Chloe lean on my shoulder because her foot is still sore.

“Look, Jordy,” she says. Her voice is hopeful and excited, more than it has been for a long time.

I look where she’s pointing—between the vertical rock face and the rocks under our feet. There’s a crevice, and it’s full of little crabs. They stare out of the dark, pincers at the ready in front of their chests, doing something that looks strangely like push-ups.

We watch them for a while, which seems to make them nervous.

Then Chloe gets down on her knees on the rocks and we look more closely at the tide pools. They’re filled with all kinds of life, things you might not notice at first glance.

“Shells,” Chloe says.

“More than just shells,” I say. “The shell is what’s left when the animal dies. These are still alive.”

“Those are animals?”

Just as she asks, a cone-shaped shell skitters across the pool on crablike legs. Chloe laughs.

“And all these,” I say, pointing to barnacles and colorful little cap-shaped shells clinging to the rock. “These are all live animals. Now look at this.” I point to a rounded stone, differentlooking from the stones around it. It looks sticky, and bits of gravel-sized stones and shell have stuck all over it, decorating it.

“I bet you think that’s a rock.”

“It isn’t?”

“Touch it.”

Chloe touches it, and it contracts. Draws in and squirts water.

Chloe shrieks with laughter. It’s so damn good to hear.

We go back to the car. Maximilian is done with his sandwich and he’s eating an apple. He’s cutting it up with a penknife to eat it. I wonder if that means his teeth are not his own. He’s drinking a carton of milk with a straw.

Chloe tells him about the crabs, and the shells that turned out to be alive, and the rock that turned out not to be a rock at all.

“Nothing wrong with the Grand Canyon,” Maximilian says.

“Nothing wrong with wanting to see the ocean. Nothing wrong with big beautiful things. But sometimes beauty can be some pretty close work.”

As we cruise up the Big Sur coast, the road goes higher. Rises up onto cliffs over the ocean, causing the horizon to stretch out. So there’s even more ocean than we realized. And it’s not all one color. It’s dark navy out toward the horizon, turning turquoise at a fairly distinct line closer to shore. Then foamy white against the jagged rocks. Also patches of maroon-brown kelp float on the water like big shadows.

I always assumed the ocean was blue all over. Just blue.

“You’re a little late for whales,” Maximilian says. “But watch anyway. Who knows? Most of them go by November through March. But I’ve seen stragglers. Never saw one quite this late, but that doesn’t mean I never will. World is full of things I’ve never seen.”

“How would you see one?” Chloe asks. “Don’t they swim under the water?”

“Oh, they have ways of showing themselves. Sometimes you see them blow. Sometimes you see a fluke come up and then slap down on the water. Sometimes you’ll get to see a whale breach.

That’s when they throw their whole body up out of the water and then splash down again. Now that’s a sight.”

“What’s a fluke?” Chloe asks.

“That’s their big tail fin.”

“Maximilian,” Chloe says, “you’re so old. How come you haven’t seen everything already?”

“Nobody gets to see everything,” he says.

“Really?”

“Really,” he says. “Nobody is that lucky. We collect all the sights we can, and it’s still just the tip of the iceberg. I’m ninety years old and I’ve only just about scratched the surface.”

When we get into Big Sur, Maximilian turns off the main road and drives us downhill to a stable. A stable with horses all saddled up and ready to go. Tied to a hitching post, waiting. Randy Banyan was right again.

“Goodbye, Maximilian,” Chloe says. “Thanks for showing me the ocean.”

“Oh, I doubt you could have missed it,” Maximilian says.

“Whether I was here or not.”

The woman who rents out the horses looks about fifty, and a little angry. A little hard. Her face is weather-worn and set against whatever I might be about to say.

“We want to rent a horse,” I say.

“Last trail ride doesn’t go out till three and it’s full.”

Chloe sits down in the dirt by the barn. We have no idea where we’ll stay tonight. We have very little money. Pretty much just enough for the riding and for lunch. We don’t have a plan B.

“Any way we can go out on a horse alone?”

“You keep saying ‘horse,’ ” she says. “There are two of you.

And besides, we don’t let people go out alone. They act like idiots.

Abuse the horses.”

I pull her aside, off where Chloe can’t hear. “The two of us together don’t weigh much more than one big guy.” I’m wondering if she’ll charge us for two people if she only rents out one horse. “And we would never abuse a horse.”

She looks past me to Chloe sitting in the dirt. “What happened to her head? What happened to your eye? You two get in an accident or something?”

I’m not sure why, but I decide the truth might work on our side. I tell her, in about the ninety-second version, why we left Connecticut, what we’re hoping to prove, and how important this final leg of the trip could be in the decision. I even tell her how I got beat up in the desert and about Chloe flipping out and banging her head into the mirror.

The woman looks at me for a long time, a little cold. Still sizing me up. I don’t think I’m getting through. I think I might’ve overestimated her. Then she says, “You think I want to give one of my horses to a girl who flips out and hurts things?”

“Only herself,” I say. “She’d never hurt another living thing.”

“Yeah, but still. If she’s that unpredictable—”

“But that’s just it. Don’t you see?” She looks right into me for the first time. Like she might see if she looked harder. “This is her last chance to see something better. It’s like a huge important wish. How can you deny somebody like that a chance to see something better?”

“Easy. I know people. I know what they do. You can’t believe what’ll happen to a horse. They get kicked, run to death. Their mouths pulled at till they bleed. Like they can’t even feel the pain. Like they’re just there to have fun with.”

“Right,” I say. “Exactly. That’s it.”

“That’s what?”

“You just described what’s happened to Chloe all her life.

Don’t you see?”

She looks into me a minute more, but I guess she doesn’t see, because she turns and walks away. Turns her back on us and walks into the barn. I turn back to Chloe. Try to think how you apologize for something like this. Try to think where we’ll go and what we’ll do and how we’ll get back here and when we’ll get on a horse, if we ever do.

“Chloe . . . ,” I say.

But she’s looking past me, and her face is all lit up, beaming.

I look around and see the woman come out of the barn leading a saddled horse, a big, dappled Appaloosa. She holds the reins while I lift Chloe by her waist. Hoist her up until she can throw a leg over the saddle.

“What’s his name?” Chloe asks, holding tight to the saddle horn.

“Cisco,” the woman says. “Now look. I want you to really respect—”

She stops in midsentence. Chloe is draped over Cisco’s neck, hugging him. “Never mind,” she says.

I reach into my pocket and pull out the last of our money.

Twenty-two dollars.

“Thank you,” I say. “Really. Thank you. How much?”

The woman shakes her head. “Can’t charge for a last chance to see something better. Wouldn’t be right.”

“Thank you,” I say again. I mount the horse behind Chloe.

We barely fit in the same saddle, but we manage to. It’s not comfortable, but we manage. “I don’t know the way to the beach.”

“You don’t have to,” she says. “He does.”

Cisco carries us through a stream, which he fords without concern.

Down a long dirt path lined with trees. The wind is high, and it makes the trees creak. Some of the smaller trees lean.

Now and then we have to duck our heads. I ride with one hand on the top of Chloe’s head just to make sure she remembers to duck. We see a monarch butterfly that flutters between Cisco’s ears before the wind takes him away again. We ride through a flat clearing with high grass blowing like wheat and bright orange poppies scattered around.

“How far to the ocean?” Chloe asks.

“I’m not sure.”

“Cisco knows?”

“Yeah. Cisco knows.”

When we get to the top of the bluff we see the ocean below, a sort of horseshoe-shaped cove. Big, imposing rocks sit near the shore, churning the ocean turquoise-white all around them. We can see the green mountains behind us. See the highway wind south down the coast. When I see where we were, then I understand where we are. Then I get that we’re here.

Cisco picks his way down a switchback trail with pieces of railroad ties set in every few feet like steps. One steady hoof after another. We lean back in the saddle to make his job easier.

My feet are in the stirrups, and Chloe is riding with her heels on top of my toes. Balancing on my feet. It reminds me of the way fathers teach their little girls to dance.

When we get down onto the beach we steer Cisco along the edge of the water. He doesn’t seem to mind. I’m holding Chloe tightly. I’m not sure why. I guess so she can’t possibly go away.

She’s being quiet. I’m used to that, but this quiet feels different.