Becoming Chloe

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  “Good night, Mona.”

  “What did you say, Jordan?” my mother asks.

  “Nothing. I was talking to someone else.”

  “Are you all right, Jordan? You sound like you’re not all right.” She seems irritated. Impatient. Like if I could just be all right, we could get this damned thing over with.

  “I’m fine, Mom.”

  “Are you still with that odd girl?”

  “Yeah, Mom. But she’s . . . sick. Chloe’s sick.”

  “I’m sorry, Jordan. But she’ll get better. Right?”

  “Sure, Mom. Right. I’m sure she will.”

  “Tell her I said hello.”

  “Will do.”

  “Was that all?”

  I squeeze my eyes shut. Sigh.

  “I don’t think you’ll probably understand what I’m about to tell you, Mom, but listen anyway, okay? Let me just say it. For me. When I was in New York, something really bad happened. I never told this to anybody before. Except Chloe. Well, she was there.” And Dr. Reynoso, but . . . Keep your thoughts straight, I tell myself. Don’t get off track. There’s a high window in the hospital lobby, and I look up through it and see the first stars. The sky is still halfway light, but the stars are beginning to show. The desert is good for stars. “I did something bad there. I didn’t mean to. On the one hand, it was an accident and I didn’t mean to. But on the other hand, it really was my fault. I don’t think I’m a bad person, but I definitely did this thing, and it was a really bad thing. I’ve been trying not to think about it since then. But then tonight I was sitting in this hospital in Phoenix watching Chloe sleep, and I thought, maybe that’s how it was with Dad. And I just wanted to call and say I forgive you. Both. Because if I don’t . . . If I can’t forgive you, then what am I? You know? Then what does that make me?” I listen to the silence. Look up through the windows again and get a sense that the stars are listening, too. “I won’t be calling again, Mom.”

  “This sounds so final, Jordan. You’re not suicidal, are you?”

  “Oh, God no, Mom. Nothing like that. I’m feeling really strong. I feel better than I ever have. I’m just not going to call again. I’m just tying up those last loose ends and then I’m going to go ahead with life and I’m not going to touch base with home anymore.”

  “I thought you’d done that a long time ago.”

  “Yeah. So did I. Can I talk to Pammy? Just for a minute?”

  “She’s asleep. It’s late here.”

  “Oh. Okay. Well, I don’t want to wake her up, then. Just tell her I love her, okay?”

  “I will.”

  “Don’t forget.”

  “I won’t forget.”

  “Please. It’s important. When you get off the phone, just write a note that says, ‘Jordy loves you’ and put it on her pillow. Okay?”

  “I will. I promise.”

  “Thanks, Mom. Because I’m not sure I ever told her.”

  “Well, goodbye, Jordan.”

  “I love you, Mom.”

  “Thank you, dear. That’s very sweet.”

  “You just can’t do it, can you?” A silence that I think must strain us both. “Your own son, and you just can’t bring yourself to say ‘I love you.’ ”

  “You know I’m not good with these things, Jordan.”

  “Right. I know that, Mom. I forgive you for that, too.”

  Chloe is still on the six-bed ward. This took some talking, believe me. They wanted her in the psych ward for the balance of her stay. I begged and wheedled and cajoled and they took the path of least resistance and let her stay. Anything to shut me up. Anything to keep her from freaking out again. I assured them this would help.

  Still only one other bed is occupied. Mrs. Juarez, an old woman dying of stomach cancer. She’s still in a good mood, though. Dying of cancer doesn’t make her any less sweet. We’ve had other roommates over the past few days. They all checked out, one way or the other. Chloe is sleeping, just as she was when I left.

  I sit by Chloe’s bed again. It’s dark outside, and I look out the window. It’s hard to look at Chloe because her arms are strapped down. I hate that. But it’s the only way to keep her from ripping out the IV. She hates having a needle in the back of her hand. She hates it so much that they have to strap her hands down. And she hates being strapped down so much that they have to keep her sedated. It just keeps going around and around like that.

  “You look like you’ve been crying.”

  I look up. Mrs. Juarez said that. I thought she was asleep.

  “I’m okay, though.”

  “I know,” she says. “I know you are.”

  Chloe wakes in the night. It’s rare for her to be awake anymore. The sedatives prevent it ninety percent of the time.

  I squeeze her shoulder and kiss her on the top of the head. “My mother says hi, Chlo.”

  “Jordy,” she says. “You need to get me out of these straps. I really hate these straps.”

  “I’m trying, Chlo. I’ve been trying to talk them into letting you go without them. But every time they do, you rip out your IV.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Well, you have to, Chloe. You have to start caring.”

  “So, how do I get out of them?”

  “You have to stop fighting everything.” I’m talking quietly because it’s late and I don’t want to wake Mrs. Juarez. “You spend all your energy fighting the straps and the needles. If you would leave the IV in your hand, you wouldn’t have to have the straps. If you could just relax, they could treat you much better. You’re spending all your energy fighting the wrong things.”

  “How do I just relax?”

  “We’ve been working on that the whole trip, remember?”

  “We worked on how to relax and have fun. I’m not sure how to relax when nothing is fun.”

  “I’ll help you. I’ll hold your hand the whole time. All day. I’ll hold your hand and we’ll talk about all the places we’ve seen and after a while you’ll forget the needle is even there.”

  Actually, I’ll have to hold her wrist because her hands have cuts.

  “Can we sing?”

  “In the morning,” I say. “Not now. We’d wake Mrs. Juarez.”

  “Mrs. Juarez is already awake,” Mrs. Juarez says.

  Chloe and I both look over. Then I turn on the little light over Chloe’s bed.

  “I’m sorry we woke you, Mrs. Juarez.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” she says. “Pretty soon I’ll get to sleep a long time. Right now I hate to miss anything. Go ahead and sing.”

  “It won’t disturb you?”

  “Fighting is disturbing,” Mrs. Juarez says. “Cussing is disturbing. Singing is a good thing. Maybe I could even sing along. If it’s a song I know.”

  Chloe says, “Do you know ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’?”

  “Can’t say as I do, but that’s okay. You go ahead. I’ll just listen.”

  Chloe raises her voice to the song. To me it sounds like she isn’t raising it very high. She sings like an angel. Tonight her voice sounds thin and, well . . . pale. To me, anyway. But then I’ve heard her sing before, back in the more childlike days. Mrs. Juarez hasn’t.

  “You have a lovely singing voice, dear,” Mrs. Juarez says.

  Chloe stops singing between verses, just long enough to say “Thank you.”

  Then she starts onto the second verse and I join along. I’m not a singer. Never have been. But I told Chloe I would sing with her, so I guess I’ll have to get credit for caring enough to do it. I’ll have to hope it’s not the talent I’m being graded on. While we’re singing, I undo the straps. Then I hold both of her wrists. If she can’t move her right hand, she can’t tear out the IV. If she doesn’t move her left hand, she’s less likely to notice it’s there.

  We go all the way through that song twice.

  Then Chloe says, “This isn’t fair. We need to sing something that Mrs. Juarez knows. What songs do you know, Mrs. Juarez?”

  “Hmm
m,” Mrs. Juarez says.

  I hold Chloe’s wrists even more tightly because we’re not singing. She’s doing her part, though. She’s trying. She’s looking out the window at stars, and smiling. She really wants to get out of those straps. Even if she has to relax to do it.

  “How about, ‘Do You Know the Way to San Jose?’ ” Mrs. Juarez asks.

  Chloe thinks hard, then shakes her head. “Sorry.”

  “What about, ‘The Name Game’?”

  “Is it a game or a song?” Chloe asks.

  “Sort of both,” she says. “You take a name. Like Chloe. And then you sing it, like, ‘Chloe, Chloe, Bo-Bohee . . .’ ”

  “I know that one,” I say. “I bet I could teach it to Chloe.”

  “Other than that,” Mrs. Juarez says, “all I can think of is Christmas carols. Everybody always knows Christmas carols. No matter how old or young you are, or what kind of life you’ve had, you always know all the words to ‘Jingle Bells.’ ”

  “I know that one,” Chloe says. “That’s the one that goes, ‘Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way.’ ”

  We start to sing it, all three of us. It’s a nice, happy, rousing song, so I guess by the third or fourth round we get pretty loud.

  After a while a nurse comes in. A heavy young black woman with a disapproving face.

  “What the hell is going on in here?” she asks. She turns on the overhead light.

  I realize we’ve never seen this nurse before, which is strange, because we know all the nurses here. No one in this hospital is a stranger.

  “We’re singing,” Chloe says.

  “Well, I hear that. You all must be crazy. Singing Christmas carols out here in the middle of the desert in the middle of the night.” But she doesn’t look all that disapproving anymore. Chloe is still humming “Jingle Bells” and I guess the cheeriness of it has won the nurse over to some degree.

  “Who are you?” Mrs. Juarez asks. “We’ve never even seen you before.”

  “Evelyn Reid,” the nurse says. “I just transferred here from Tucson.”

  She moves across the room as she tells us this. Busies herself checking Chloe’s IV bag.

  She looks at the wall beside Chloe’s bed. Taped up at Chloe’s eye level is the photo of us standing on Randy’s mountain. Next to that are the pictures of people riding horses on the beach. The one thing we haven’t gotten around to yet. “You climbed a mountain?” she asks.

  “Yep,” Chloe says. “We’ve done just about everything. Except the horses on the beach. I rode a real horse, though. I rode a horse named Margie. Just not on the beach. We went to Niagara Falls and then rode a bike all the way to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Then I broke my foot. Then we went to the Grand Canyon.”

  The nurse looks down and sees that Chloe’s hands are free of her restraints. She frowns.

  “According to the chart, I’m to see that this woman’s hands are strapped down at all times. It says that otherwise she’ll rip out that IV.”

  I hold Chloe more tightly. Because she’s just become a lot more likely to rip out her IV. Because Evelyn Reid just reminded her it was there. “But she’s not ripping out her IV,” I say. “Is she?” A silence falls, and lasts. And waits. In it, I know, rests a lot that’s important. A lot that could make all the difference right now. “Chloe is learning how to relax, because if she relaxes, she won’t waste all her energy fighting the straps, and she won’t need so much sedative.”

  More heavy silence. Evelyn Reid sighs. “That’s right, put my job on the line, first night I’m here. If she starts getting anything short of relaxed, you ring for me, and I mean fast.”

  “How can she be anything but relaxed,” I say, “when we’re all singing ‘Jingle Bells’?”

  Mrs. Juarez starts up the chorus again, and Chloe joins in. Her voice sounds stronger now. I join them. The volume comes up to a cheerful sort of rowdiness.

  “Sing it with us, Evelyn,” I say. “Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way . . .”

  Evelyn rolls her eyes. “I think you’re all out of your minds,” she says.

  She snaps off the overhead light on her way out the door.

  After we burn out on “Jingle Bells,” I teach Chloe the “Name Game” song. She picks it up right away.

  “That’s a really silly song,” she says.

  “That’s the beauty of it,” Mrs. Juarez says back.

  When we’ve used up our own names we do Evelyn. It’s clumsy and awkward. It works better with one or two syllables. But we’re not ashamed. We really belt it out anyway.

  Evelyn sticks her head through the door.

  “Don’t even,” she says.

  SEVEN

  * * *

  JOY

  We’re riding a Greyhound bus west, out toward the coast. Chloe and me.

  It’s night, and the lights are off in the cabin of the bus, and almost everybody is asleep. Other than us, the only passenger I think is awake is an odd, disheveled man across the aisle. He has his personal light on, and he’s holding a mirror, and pulling his eyelids out away from his eyes, and examining his eyeballs in the mirror. At first I thought he had something in his eye, but he’s been doing it for hours now, so it must go deeper than that.

  Chloe has the window seat because she likes to watch the desert go by. There’s a full moon tonight, so everything is pearly and shadowy but visible. It gives me the feeling of something stolen, something I wasn’t supposed to be able to see. Some treasure not normally mine.

  When Chloe speaks, it’s in a whisper. Only a whisper will do with all these sleeping people around. Also, this talk I feel coming is only for us, only for each other, and if the other passengers were awake, we might not have it at all. “Jordy,” she says. “The trip is almost over.”

  I’m thinking she’s about to tell me where she landed. On “everything was going fine” or on “it all fell apart again.” I want to say, Don’t tell me. I don’t know and I don’t want to know. I want to say, Don’t talk about this. But that’s not fair. Sooner or later we have to. Sooner. I’m beginning to think sooner.

  “I know, Chlo.”

  If only we could have somehow ended the trip on Randy’s mountain, or at the Grand Canyon. Or even at Esther’s campground. If only we hadn’t been hitching in the desert at night. Why did that have to happen? Why do things like that happen? 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.”