The Compass

by Tammy Kling

  Later in life, when Lacy and Boo entered the picture, I switched from road biking to the mountains. Lacy asked me to trade in my Trek street bike with its slick tires for a Gary Fisher mountain bike with fat tires and a knobby tread. I welcomed the change and the chance to ride up into the hills and forest over rocks and roots. The mountain, she reasoned, would be much more forgiving than the traffic on the streets of Orange County.

  Besides, she had said, “I’m selfish. I don’t want to be a single parent.”

  In those first years with my new bike, I woke up each Saturday and headed out for a fifteen-minute drive toward a trail, the bike secured tightly on the back of the car. I traded my spandex for heavy canvas bike shorts and felt like a warrior, a man of the mountains riding into the wilderness and away from suburbia. Those weekend mornings were my escape, my release of energy from work and family and the mundane things that threatened to suffocate the adventure out of my life.

  Having a new baby was an adventure in itself, but it was a double-sided coin. Something about the permanence of suburbia was smothering, and there was still a small shard of the man I once had been, screaming out for individuality. The division was hard to explain then, and almost unconscious.

  Driving into Amersfoort I passed through a town square where hundreds of bikes were locked up, side by side, an awesome sight. I had ridden my bike all over the coast of California, but I had never seen anything like this. A sign near the train station announced a bike rental for sixteen euros a day, and I considered stopping but decided to continue on, in search of a small hotel.

  I stopped in a large open public square with shops and flower carts and vendors and left the car at the curb in front of a store, not knowing whether I had parked illegally or not. I followed the walk past a butcher shop, a few restaurants, and some clothing stores until I saw a small bicycle store and ducked inside.

  “Hello,” I said, embarrassed that I didn’t even know the basic words in Dutch.

  A woman stood at the register.

  “Hallo,” she said.

  “Hallo,” I repeated. “I’d like a rental.”

  The woman pointed to a photograph on the wall with three types of bikes, then looked over her shoulder and shouted toward the back room.

  “Toin!”

  Bicycles in mainly silver and black were stacked up on vertical racks on the walls of the tight space, and a rack in the center of the store housed bicycle shorts and Dutch racing team shirts. Black and white photographs of old races, and others of a man on a bike holding a trophy, graced the wall above the register. The woman motioned me to the back, where a man sat at a truing stand, working on a bike. He was wearing a t-shirt printed with Keistad Fietsen, the name of the bike shop. His black hair was spiked on top and tipped in blue, and he wore three silver earrings in one ear. He used a small alignment gauge to adjust the rear derailleur.

  “Hoe gaat het?” he asked, without looking up. His fingertips were black with grease.

  “I, ah . . . uh. Hallo.”

  “American?”

  “Da,” I replied out of habit, using the Romanian word for yes. “I mean, yes. I want to rent a bike.”

  The man continued working, testing gears with a special tool.

  “How long?” he asked, looking in my direction.

  I shrugged. He reached for a small pad of rental forms and pulled the top sheet off, writing the date.

  “Name?”

  “Jonathan Taylor.”

  “Beginner, medium, or advance?”

  I pondered the question and looked around the shop. Some of the bicycles were foreign to me, but others were Trek and familiar brands I’d seen in the States. I wondered if “beginner” meant cheaper, and if “advanced” meant I’d be paying as much to rent a bicycle as it would cost me to rent a car.

  “Advanced,” I said, taking the plunge.

  A smile traveled slowly across his face.

  “You are advance?”

  “I used to ride back in America,” I said confidently. “A Gary Fisher.”

  He pointed to a far wall where the rental bikes were racked and then continued working.

  “We don’t rent those, but we do sell them. Rentals are there. Choose one.”

  “I see you’re using Pedros,” I said. “Same tools we use in America.” I walked closer, and I noticed for the first time that he was sitting in a wheelchair.

  “You know bike tools?” he asked.

  I nodded. “I used to work on bikes since I was a kid. Building them with my grandfather.” I pulled a chain off of the counter and slid it through my fingers, remembering the bikes we’d fixed for the neighborhood kids when I was young. My grandfather’s shop in the back yard was a hub of activity for those who needed brakes adjusted, or a new sprocket put on. He could refurbish a bike from scratch, and, by the time I was twelve, he had taught me to use a disc mount facing tool to work on brakes, and, by the time I was thirteen, I knew the name of every tool, knew how to ensure that disc brakes functioned smoothly, and how to teach other kids to fix basic gear and chain problems.

  He held up a tool with a blue handle.

  “You know this one?”

  “It’s a cone wrench. Park Tool Company. Blue handle gives it away.”

  He shuffled through a row of blue handled tools and held up another.

  “This one?” he challenged.

  “Tire lever. Lifts the tire from the rim. Come on,” I said, grinning. “That’s simple. Let’s get out of the sandbox.”

  He looked at me curiously.

  “The sandbox. Child’s play. A fifth grader would know what a tire lever was.”

  He reached down to a box on the floor and opened it. He pulled out a tool and held it up.

  “This one?”

  The tool was distinctly different from the others.

  “It’s for a cassette,” I said.

  “Easy guess. But wrong. Another guess?”

  I studied it carefully.

  “Not sure,” I said. “It looks strange.”

  “It’s a wrench for installing or replacing disk brake rotors. It’s Dutch. A small company here makes it.” He smiled. “I’m Toin,” he said, extending his hand.

  “What kind of name is that?” I took his hand, and his grip was strong.

  “Dutch. 100 percent.” He went back to working on the bike, checking the tension cable. “What kind of name is Jonathan?”

  “American,” I said. “100 percent.”

  “You want to work?” he asked. “My part-time assistant is away on holiday. We need help.”

  “Are you serious?” I looked around. The shop had city bikes with rear fenders to keep the rooster spray off the back of your clothes if you were biking your way to work, and then there were professional road racing bikes by various manufacturers. On one wall was a series of mountain bikes with and without suspension, for all sizes and abilities.

  I felt the excitement building. I was in my element.

  “Yes,” I said, nodding. “I’d love to.”

  I had grown used to following the pull of the universe, the path that had been drawing me through time as if I’d had an invisible compass in the center of my soul. It was that way when I graduated from college and was led to my first job. It felt natural, it was presented quickly, it was a magnetic pull. It was that way when I first met Lacy, as if the compass within me had a magnetic force that led toward her.

  Along the way I learned that the Earth, in all of its energetic glory, is a huge magnet with two poles on each end. Without the magnetic pull, a true compass would be useless, and I couldn’t help but believe that it was the same way with our lives. Sometimes the most powerful force you can feel is between one space and another in that moment of time between now and the next step. The magnetic pull is everything.

  “Where are you staying?” Toin asked.

  “I was going to stay at the hotel I passed earlier,” I said. “Got any suggestions?”

  “The Berg Hotel?”

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nbsp; I nodded.

  “It is a great hotel, but it is a conference hotel, and it is very large and expensive, no?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe just one night and then I’ll find something else.”

  “You can stay here,” Toin offered, and he pointed upstairs. “We have an apartment above the shop. It’s three bedrooms, and you can rent it in exchange for work if you’d like.”

  I thought about the offer.

  “Really,” he said. “It’s very nice.”

  The woman came out from the back carrying a small brown bag. She placed it on the table beside him.

  “Anja will show it to you,” he said.

  I toured the apartment and in ten minutes Anja convinced me that I might as well stay. She explained their routine and how she and Toin worked in the shop most days and ate out most nights.

  Toin had been injured in a career-ending biking accident, Anja said. He had started the bike shop to repair bikes in town, and they were the number one supplier of city bikes. She took me downstairs and told Toin I’d be starting work in the morning.

  He glanced at his watch.

  “You want to go to the pub with us?” he asked. “We are going now.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Sounds like fun.”

  “Can I get a hand first?” he asked, motioning me over.

  I lifted the bike off of the truing stand. “Where do you want it?”

  Toin pointed to a rack high on the wall. I hoisted the bike above my head and stood on my toes to place it gently on the rack.

  “Flip it,” he said. “Wheels that way.” He pointed toward the front of the shop.

  I turned the bike around and positioned it.

  Toin dried his hands with a wipe and then a towel. He moved the wheels of his chair until he was out and around the front counter, headed to the door.

  “We go,” he said, and after he had locked the front door, Anja and I followed him down the street and into a lively pub. We passed the bar and moved to a side table, where Toin’s wheelchair slid perfectly into it. The barkeep waved a towel at us and in seconds a pitcher of dark ale was delivered. The waitress kissed Toin and Anja both on the cheek and extended her hand to me.

  “I’m Nu Nu,” she said, and she was so physically striking that I could not reply. Her mouth was small and her cheekbones high, overstated, and she had jet-black hair that fell below her shoulders like a thick cashmere blanket. It was a startling color, like nothing I’d seen on any woman in the United States, a combination of midnight blue and black. She wore sherpa boots and a short denim skirt.

  “This is Jon,” Anja said, smiling.

  I nodded. “Nu Nu? That’s a unique name.”

  “It’s a nickname my grandmother gave me. I’ve just hung onto it.”

  Nu Nu walked away, and I thought of my girls then. Lacy and Boo were towheads, so platinum in fact that they were showstoppers everywhere we went, whether it was at the town square or the farmers market on Saturday. Your hair is beautiful! people would exclaim, asking my wife, is that your real color? The latter question frustrated her because of the obvious connection to our child who had the same exact hair.

  And if it wasn’t her natural color, who cared? In the world we lived in, with processed food, whitener in the toothpaste, and chemicals in the air and water, she reasoned, what was natural anyway?

  I drank the glass of ale Toin poured for me and had a flashback to those last sterile days in the hospital, sitting by Lacy’s side, and how her hair color had changed. Something about the medication made it turn a darker blonde, almost honey, and it happened within three weeks.

  Boo was gone. I had spoken to no one from my former life for months now, but there was no way to avoid the connection to the past. These days I was hit from nowhere with flashbacks, shards of memory flooding in. Lacy in a coma after the accident, the doctors by her side. Lacy uttering small words in the fourth week, emerging out of her cocoon while I moved more and more into mine, a ball of hatred and anger, unable to be the husband I needed to be.

  Her mother, her sister, and all of our friends were camped out in the lobby of the sterile hospital, 24/7, and I found myself with no freedom available for my mind and thoughts to grow. I walked out of Lacy’s room, and there was always someone there, waiting to offer words that would cure everything that had happened.

  The blog someone had set up for donations.

  The influx of meals and smells coming into the house.

  I was forced to play the role of the devastated father, the caring husband, but it was all false, and, finally, I found that I couldn’t do it anymore. Inside of me, there was a hatred that threatened to consume me.

  How could she?

  The police report was clear. Lacy had been text messaging a girlfriend. Something simple. Something stupid. Just one simple sentence that ended my daughter’s life.

  Six words.

  One thoughtless, careless moment of communication and our entire universe had changed. I couldn’t be the caring husband. I wouldn’t play the game.

  Only my brother understood why or how, or that I was even gone. Only my brother was aware enough and outside of himself and his emotions enough to feel what I was feeling.

  Mentally, emotionally, and physically even sitting there in the hospital, I had already left. I didn’t care about connectedness; I didn’t care about a cell phone, about the house or the yard, or the bills.

  Two months after the accident, I ran away, while Lacy lay there in a coma in Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, her life a hinge on the door of tomorrow.

  “You okay?” Anja asked. “You look like you just lost your best friend.”

  I felt sick. I had. I couldn’t respond.

  I drank down the ale and poured another. Someone turned the music up louder, and the human noise at the bar increased a decibel to rise above it, making it difficult to think.

  “What brought you here?” she asked.

  “I’m having a breakdown.”

  Toin rolled his eyes. My new friends considered this for a moment.

  “Maybe you’re not having a breakdown, but a breakthrough,” he said. He raised his glass toward mine and we clanked them together. We drank ale after ale, and I told him about my journey from the desert, and the people I’d met along the way. I told him how I had sat in the cabin in the Adirondacks for about three days without doing anything more than looking out the window or getting out of bed to go to the bathroom.

  Anja and Toin drank with me and listened and ordered another pitcher when the first one ran dry.

  People streamed in and out of the pub, and many walked over and either hugged Toin or waved at him from across the room. Everyone seemed to know him, and when the waitress came with the last pint, I pulled out my credit card, but she refused to take it.

  “Toin drinks for free,” she said, “and if you’re a friend of Toin’s you drink free, too.”

  I was feeling light. The ale had traveled to my head, making my thoughts fuzzy.

  “Really?” I said. “I’m liking this friendship already.”

  A man approached the table with a pen and a photograph and asked Toin to sign it. They spoke in Dutch for a while.

  “So are you a rock star, or what?” I asked.

  Anja just laughed. “Are you kidding?”

  “Domestique,” Toin said sternly. “You are not a biker. Not a real one, anyway.”

  “Toin,” Anja said. “You’ve had too much beer.”

  “He is not an avid biker, or he would know.”

  “Toin won the greatest Tour in the Netherlands,” she explained. “He was a very famous biker, competing in the Tour de France.”

  I sat and stared at them.

  “I’m sorry . . . oh gosh, I’m so sorry.” I stared at the wheelchair. “But how . . . ”

  “Are all Americans like you?” Toin asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are they all pathetic assholes who sit around and feel sorry for themselves?�
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  Anja stood up then and walked to the bar.