“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, different-looking 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 i
s 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. This goes deeper.
“Want to go fast, Chlo?”
“Ask Cisco how he feels about it.”
I drum on his sides gently with my heels and he breaks into a few beats of bumpy trot and then a smooth canter. A wave comes high up onto the beach and his hooves splash droplets up into the air, and they land on the legs of our jeans. Then I pull him up to a stop and we stand there, Cisco’s hooves planted in the wet, shiny, pebbly sand at the edge of the country. The exact opposite edge of the country from everything we knew before.
“Jordy,” Chloe says. Her voice is strained and quiet with wonder. “We did it, Jordy. We made it.” We look off to the horizon awhile longer while I let the truth of that simple statement fill me up. Then Chloe says, “Jordy, let me down now.”
It gives me an uneasy feeling.
“Why?”
“Just let me down. Please.”
I swing down off the horse and lift Chloe down. I set her gently on the sand. “What are you going to do, Chlo?”
“I’m going to go for a swim,” she says. “Just like we did in Trent’s swimming hole. Only this time it’s the real ocean.”
“But, Chloe,” I say. “It’s so cold.”
“I know,” she says. “But maybe I’ll never get to swim in the ocean again.”
“I’m going in with you,” I say. So I can’t possibly lose her.
I expect Cisco to ditch us and run back to the barn. He doesn’t. He waits patiently on the sand. Shaking his mane now and again. He must think we’re crazy. Probably we are.
I sit with her by the edge of the water, Cisco standing close beside us. Chloe holds his reins. We’re soaking wet. We couldn’t dry off before getting dressed again, so we got our clothes all wet and sandy, and now we’re sitting wet in a stiff breeze, and our teeth are chattering. But damn it, we swam in the ocean. Together.
“Thank you for taking me to see everything,” she says.
I open my mouth to speak, but unfortunately I’m not about to say “you’re welcome.” I’m about to have this out, here and now. “Chloe,” I say. “I have to tell you something. I’m not letting you go. I lied about that just to get you to go on the trip, because I was so sure it would help you. Or I wanted to be sure. I lied when I said I promised. I’m breaking my promise. No matter what you decide, I’m not letting you go.”
“You’re breaking your promise, Jordy?”
“Yes. I am. I’m sorry.”
“How can you just break a promise like that?”
“You’ve broken promises to me. You promised to take your pills. You promised you wouldn’t hurt yourself.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t know I was going to. I tried to keep them. I didn’t just lie.”
“I’m sorry, Chlo. I just think some promises don’t deserve to be kept. I just think this is one of those.”
We sit quietly for a while. We watch the whitecaps roll in, set after set. Watch them hit the rocks and throw foam into the air. Chloe is rolling Cisco’s reins around in her hand.
“Well, I guess that’s okay,” she says. “Because I really wanted to stay now anyway.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I was thinking we haven’t seen everything yet, and now I don’t want to miss anything.”
“That’s great, Chlo. That’s really good.” But then I say, “Well, then why were you arguing with me about it?”
“Because it’s a promise,” she says. “You can’t just break a promise.”
“Okay. Sorry, Chlo. I promise it won’t happen again.”
One by one, we put our wet, sandy feet in the stirrups and swing onto Cisco’s back.
I rein Cisco around and he takes us up the bluff, steadily, calmly, without hesitation. We lean forward over the saddle horn to make his job easier.
Chloe says, “What did Maximilian mean about the tip of the iceberg?”
“Oh. It’s just an expression. He wasn’t talking about a real iceberg.”
“Yeah. It didn’t sound like he was.”
“The way icebergs float, about ninety or ninety-five percent of them is floating under the water where you can’t see. So when someone says it’s only the tip of the iceberg, it means that however much you see, there’s like ten times more that you don’t see.”
“Oh. You would think ninety years would be enough to see everything.”
“Nobody can see everything. It’s infinite. There’s no end to it.”
“Oh. That’s good, I guess. That makes it really hard for anybody to get bored.”
We walk on the shoulder of the highway, a nice comfortable downhill slope.
We walk through giant redwood trees, past campgrounds and rental cabins.
We walk until the ocean is stretched out at our feet again.
We can see miles down the coast. The coastline itself sits in fingers, in folds, with scatterings of rock strewn at its fingertips. We can see all the way down to a bridge with high, curved supports rising up from the water to the road.
I realize we only have twenty-two dollars to our name, but it doesn’t really matter. One way or the other we’re starting all over from scratch. We have twenty-two dollars in my pocket and the future is open in front of us like a calendar with no dates written in yet. It’s a blank book. It can be anything we make it. It can be anything. It can start right now.
I look out toward the horizon and I think I see a spout—a chute of water—fly u
p into the air. Just as I’m convincing myself it’s only my hopeful imagination, the fluke rises out of the ocean, then slaps down with a splash and disappears again.
Chloe sees it, too. She raises her hand and points to it, in case I don’t see.
“There, Jordy,” she says. “Right there.”
April 14
Dear Dr. Reynoso,
Chloe and I were going to write you a letter together. One letter between us, answering your question. Telling you what we decided about the world. Then I started thinking it would be better if we did it separately. After all, we each have a brain and a pair of eyes, and even though we saw the same things, we couldn’t possibly have seen them the same way or drawn the same conclusions.
I hope you even remember that you asked me to do this. I’m figuring you wouldn’t have said it if you didn’t really want to know. At first I thought you would write back and say if I was right or not, like a test. Now I wonder if you asked because you weren’t entirely sure yourself.
Well, here goes.
We met a lot of people all over the country. We found out that people all over the country are pretty much the same. Most of them are helpful and sweet. Some of them are crazy and thoughtless and careless and mean. More of them were helpful and sweet, though. In fact, so many people went out of their way to treat us like family that it was really hard when we got run off the road and I got beaten for no particular reason.
I was thinking at first that it would’ve been a lot easier to believe in the beauty of things if that hadn’t happened. But now I feel like anybody can think the world is beautiful when it’s all going their way. That’s just like untested faith. But when you’ve got one eye swollen shut and you still know it’s better than it is bad, then you’re onto something.
I hope I’m making any sense here at all.
My conclusion is this: It’s a beautiful world, but also a scary one. I used to think something couldn’t be both. But then I remembered the point of no return on the Niagara River, and how much it fascinated me as a kid. Because it was just that: beautiful and scary. It’s like once you get that sense that there’s no real security, that anything at all can happen to you, then every minute you’re okay is a joy. Part of the joy is feeling like you can make your way in a world that isn’t always easy.
Becoming Chloe Page 18
