Becoming Chloe

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  “She really wants a dog,” I tell the older couple. “But we’re traveling.”

  “Well, we’re traveling, too,” the husband says. He’s mostly bald, with just a ring of hair over his ears and a tendency to run one hand over his bare scalp, as if it might not be lying down just right. “Ginger loves to ride in the car.”

  “Isn’t it hard to find lodging that will let you take the dog?”

  “Well, sometimes,” the wife says. “Sometimes it is hard.” She has a girlish voice. High and insubstantial. It makes her sound as if nothing she says could ever hold much gravity. “When we get to Niagara Falls, we’ll have to put Ginger in a kennel one night.”

  “Niagara Falls. That’s where we’re going. Chloe has never seen Niagara Falls.”

  “Newlyweds?” the wife asks. Rather hopefully, I think.

  “We’re just going to see Niagara Falls because Chloe has never seen it. She wants to see new things.”

  Meanwhile, we watch Chloe and the dog leap around. They both have long hair that flies in smooth waves away from their direction of travel. Ginger has a liking for the play bow, that silly dog thing with the front end down and the back end up, tail going like a hyperactive flag. Chloe seems dead set on learning it. All but the tail part, of course. Though I suppose she’d do that too if she could.

  “We go to Niagara Falls every year,” the wife says. “We honeymooned there, and now every year we go for our anniversary.”

  “Happy anniversary,” I say.

  “Why, thank you,” they both say at once. They sound pleased and truly amazed. As if it’s a miracle to find someone in a city park who actually cares enough to say those two words.

  “I’m Adele,” Adele says. “And this is Fred.”

  We shake hands.

  “Jordan,” I say. “And that’s Chloe. The energetic one.”

  Chloe is in a state of rapid motion. For a moment I wonder if she has enough energy stored up for this roughhousing stuff. She’s barely put on two pounds since the Great Pill Ordeal.

  As if reading my mind, Adele says, “She’s so thin. Is she always so thin? Has she been sick?”

  “Honey,” Fred says. “We don’t even know them.”

  “I’m just concerned, Fred.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. But I don’t know why I say that, because it’s really not. “The reason we’re traveling is because . . .” Why did I even start with this? Why am I telling them this? Then again, I think, why not? What can it hurt? It’s not information that can be used against us. But part of me is like Fred. Honey, we don’t even know them. But then there’s this other part of me that feels like I’m holding up the whole world in silence, and I just want to set it down for a second, just one second so I can rest. “Chloe’s been having some problems. Emotional stuff, mostly. Depression. She doesn’t eat much.”

  “Poor dear,” Adele says.

  Suddenly I understand why Chloe tells things to people she’s never going to see again. It feels good to dump a little bit of that load out loud, and a total stranger seems to make such a good target, because in a minute they’ll go away forever and take it all with them.

  “Well, it’s nice to see Ginger cheer her up,” Fred says.

  Chloe and Ginger have found a stick now and are growling and wrestling it out in a tug-of-war. Ginger seems to be winning. Ginger is backing up, and Chloe is being pulled forward.

  Adele says, “Ginger will sleep like a baby all the way to Niagara Falls. Where are you staying?”

  “We’re not sure yet. We’re camping. Is there a campground that you know of?”

  “Oh, yes, there are a couple. But one is much better than the other,” Adele says. “Much better location. Make sure you get the good one. We have to make sure they get the good one, Fred. Fred, go get the map and show him how to get to the good one.”

  While he’s gone we sit and watch. Chloe is playing hide-and-seek. Hiding behind a tree. Ginger’s tail is going like mad, waiting for Chloe to jump out and chase her. Maybe I really should get Chloe a dog. But it would complicate our situation tremendously. And, also, I hate to deprive her of the joy of playing with everybody else’s.

  Adele says, “You simply must go on the Maid of the Mist. You have to. The trip would be a waste without it.”

  “Oh. Yeah. That’s a great thing. I did that once as a kid. Thing is, we’re doing this trip on the cheap. I mean, we have money. We have some savings. But the longer it lasts, the longer we stay out on the road, seeing beautiful things. I really want us to be able to stay out a long time. Because . . . you know . . .” But of course she doesn’t. Why would she? “Because I’m not really sure what to expect when it’s over. I just know she’s okay right now. I don’t know how it’s going to be when it’s over.”

  Chloe and Ginger are collapsed in the grass now, Chloe with her arms around the dog’s neck. Ginger’s tongue is hanging crooked out of one side of her mouth, but she looks like she’d go again in a heartbeat if somebody said the word. Adele pats my hand, then wraps her own hand around it and holds on. Her skin feels warm and dry. First I think, How weird is this? Sitting in the park holding hands with a complete stranger. Then I decide that there are a lot of weird things in the world, and this is not the very worst of them.

  When we climb in the truck again, Chloe takes out her little notebook and pencil.

  “What kind of dog was Ginger again?”

  “Irish setter.”

  “How many t’s in setter?”

  “Two.”

  “Irish setters are really pretty.”

  “I agree.”

  “And fun.”

  Maybe I really should get Chloe a dog. When the trip is over. Depending on what happens when the trip is over. Or maybe we should just stay out here forever, and then everything will always be okay.

  We’re standing at the railing of the American Falls, and I’m holding Chloe around her waist, just to be on the safe side. Not that she’s leaning over dangerously far. But with Chloe, you never know. She likes a real hands-on experience. The roar of the falls fills my ears and head in a pleasant way, driving out unnecessary thoughts. A cool mist settles, wave after wave, on our faces. There’s something cleansing about the whole thing. Chloe feels it, too. I can tell.

  “What happened to the people who went over in barrels?” she says.

  I’m surprised she knows that anybody did. I wonder if she heard a story like that as a kid. Or maybe she overheard something since we arrived here, because she was paying better attention than I was.

  “They either all died or most of them did.”

  “Did anyone live?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t remember. I bet we could find out easily enough.” I mostly remember this place from my childhood. At the time the barrel thing was not famous as a successful endeavor, but maybe they’re making barrels better than they used to. “When I came here as a kid there was a big ship hung up on the rocks. Maybe a few hundred yards back from the falls. It was all rusted out. It’s been there a long time. I guess it got stuck on some rocks instead of going over. Talk about luck.”

  “What happened to the people on it?”

  “They got rescued.” That’s the way I remember it, anyway. I can’t figure out if the boat is gone, long ago rusted away and broken apart by erosion, or if I’m looking in the wrong place.

  I want to show Chloe the point of no return, but I can’t remember how far upriver it is. I don’t think we can walk there from here, but I can’t remember. I just remember that I always found it at least as compelling as the falls, if not more so. It’s like someone drew a line across the river, and just at that line the water knows to jump into rapids. The kind of rapids you don’t row out of. You either miraculously hang up on the rocks or it’s over. After that nothing can save you but sheer, dumb luck. Or grace, if you believe in it. Either God throws you a bone or He forsakes you. And I don’t know too many instances of boats hanging up on the rocks.

  “Maybe tomorrow we c
an go on the Maid of the Mist,” I say. I shouldn’t say that until I find out how much it costs. But I’m beginning to think there’s no point staying out on the road forever if we have to miss the best stuff. “You’d like it. It’s a way to see the falls from a boat.”

  “No way!” Chloe says.

  “It’s fun, really. I’ve done it.”

  “No way am I getting on a boat on that. Who goes on that ride?”

  “No, Chloe, not on the river. Down there. Below the falls.”

  I point, and Chloe looks, and sure enough, there it is. The Maid of the Mist, carrying a group of hooded, slickered tourists taking close-up snapshots of Horseshoe Falls.

  “Oh, down there,” Chloe says. “That could be fun.”

  “Well, let’s wait and see what it costs. Let’s not decide until we see.”

  A policeman wanders by on foot, and Chloe says, a bit too loudly, “I bet he’d know.”

  He stops walking.

  I’m thinking Chloe is going to ask him how much it costs to ride on the Maid of the Mist.

  Chloe says, “Jordy and I were wondering about all the people who went over the falls in a barrel. Did they all die?”

  “No, ma’am,” he says. “Quite a few survived. But we definitely don’t recommend it.”

  I half expect Chloe to write that down. In which column, I’m not sure. But I guess she was only asking out of idle curiosity.

  When we get to the campground, there’s a bored teenager with acne collecting fees in the booth.

  “Your name’s not Jordan, is it?” he asks.

  Chloe says, “Yeah. How did you know? How did he know, Jordy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “This is for you,” the kid says, and he hands me an envelope.

  “What is this?”

  “How should I know? Some people left it here and said to give it to you when you came in. If you came in.”

  “What people? What kind of people?”

  “An old guy and his wife in a station wagon with this really hyper dog in the back.”

  I open the envelope. Inside are two tickets to ride on the Maid of the Mist.

  Chloe is looking over my shoulder. “Cool,” she says. “If you’re sure that ride doesn’t start up on the river part.”

  “Positive,” I say. “Trust me on this.”

  * * *

  We’re on the deck of the little boat with rain slickers on. They provide the slickers as part of the deal. The boat is rocking gently under our feet, and the mist is hitting our faces, and it makes Chloe laugh. The hands-on nature of the whole experience just makes her laugh out loud. Fills her with too much joy to contain, and that’s what she does to release the balance. She’s standing at the rail, and I’m standing behind her with my arms around her waist, just to be double safe.

  I get that feeling again. We’ve seen the falls from the top and now from the bottom, and we’ve been given a present by relative strangers, and Chloe hasn’t written anything new down in her notebook. So I’m still falling down on the job.

  I remember her saying—kneeling on the bathroom floor that awful day—maybe you could show me. Maybe she didn’t mean just take her to the beautiful places. Maybe she meant show her that they were beautiful. Help her see them through my eyes.

  So I plow straight into that theory. “Do you think Niagara Falls is beautiful, Chloe?”

  We have to raise our voices to be heard over the falls. Then again, it’s harder for anyone else to overhear, so the moment remains private.

  “I love it,” she says. “It’s great.”

  “Why didn’t you write it down?”

  “Oh. Right. I forgot. I will when we get off the boat.”

  “Just Niagara Falls?”

  “I guess. What else?”

  “Well, Ginger’s people gave us a present. And we hardly even knew them. That’s a nice thing, right?”

  “Oh, yeah. I guess I wasn’t thinking about stuff like that. I was thinking about beauty, like, that you can see.”

  “There are so many other kinds, though. Like you said yourself, Irish setters are not only pretty, they’re fun.”

  “So fun is like another kind of beauty?”

  “Yeah, I guess. I mean, it’s another good thing. And nice is another one, like when people who hardly know us want to give us a chance to do something fun.”

  “There’s fun again!” she says. “I’ll have to write that one down twice.”

  This is when I realize I really do need to be the tour guide for beauty. It seems weird, because all that time we lived in the worst surroundings Chloe always found the best in everything. Now I have to teach her. Which is kind of depressing and strange. But then again, if we go all over everywhere and I’m on the lookout for good, I’ll find it. Everywhere we go. Now I understand that I get to go places and see things, too.

  We glide through New York state at a very slow rate of speed. Not only do we not drive fast, but we make a lot of stops along the way. We try to take the most scenic routes. We stop and roll down the windows and talk to strangers and ask them to tell us the prettiest roads. And they all do, quite happily, because they love where they live and they want people to see the parts they love best. It strikes me that this pride of place is a subtly beautiful thing, but it’s a little abstract to explain to Chloe. I’m trying to stick with things she can spell.

  While I’m thinking this, a rabbit scurries across the road.

  “There,” I say. “Look.”

  “What?”

  She doesn’t look up in time, and she misses it.

  “There was something beautiful, but you missed it. Next time I say ‘there,’ look real quick, okay? Try to see where I’m pointing.”

  “Tell me what you saw, Jordy, and I’ll write it down anyway.”

  “A rabbit running across the road.”

  She takes out her notebook.

  I say, “R-a-b-b-i-t.”

  “I knew that one, Jordy.”

  “Okay. Sorry.” Then, “There. Look.” I slow the truck and point to a smoky charcoal-gray cat sitting on the roof of a house.

  “Ooh, stop, Jordy, I want to look at that some more.”

  We sit by the side of the road and the cat watches us back with yellow eyes.

  I realize that the more I show her things that are beautiful, the more she’ll want to stop and take it all in. And the slower we’ll go. But since my secret desire is to never get to the end of the road, I guess I should just keep finding more things. Next I point to a bull scratching his butt on a fence post. Chloe laughs. I laugh. It’s really a pretty bizarre sight. Back and forth, up and down. This great, fierce beast looking absolutely preposterous because his butt itches.

  We sit there and watch until he’s done. It’s just too good to miss.

  Chloe says, “You really didn’t even have to point to that one, Jordy. I could have found that one on my own.”

  We’re headed south. Picking up as southern a route as possible, because we’re going to be gradually heading into winter. Because we’ll be out here for months, and so will the cold weather. And we’re camping, so we need the weather on our side.

  Pennsylvania slides by like a pleasant dream, though it takes us nearly ten days to dream it. For some reason we go particularly slowly through Pennsylvania. Must be all the trees.

  Then after many fairly uneventful days, we hit a day that’s hard. It rains. We want to stop somewhere and get something to eat, but there isn’t anywhere. I mean, not on the road we’re traveling. Chloe’s gotten to really like back roads and scenic routes. More cats and cows and rabbits scurrying across the road. Chloe likes to be the one to ask now. Now she’s the one who likes to talk to total strangers. I stop and she asks. “What’s the prettiest way to go?”

  So the road we’re on is pretty, but there’s no place to stop. No civilization. No services. And the rain is a hard rain. And no cars have passed us. We haven’t seen a soul. We’ve already driven farther than we usually drive at a
stretch, and the rain is so hard that there’s really nothing outside to see except the rain. And the rain has stopped looking beautiful.

  Then I realize we’re going up quite a steep grade. So I downshift the gears. I’m using more gas but going slower. I look up and the rain is falling faster than the wipers can sweep it aside, and the grade just keeps getting steeper, and it goes on forever. Miles. As far as my eyes can see, upgrade, with no end in sight. I’m suddenly prone to believing this whole back-road thing was a lousy idea. We should’ve stayed on the main highway. Because what if the truck won’t make it up this grade? Where would we find a call box? How long would it be before some helpful motorist or state trooper happened by? Could be days.

  Almost before I finish that thought, the truck engine makes this god-awful bang. It’s like a shot fired. Then I realize that the thought didn’t come out of nowhere. I was listening to the engine grind and strain, and the noise it was making was wrong. I just couldn’t admit it to myself consciously until after the bang.

  The engine dies and we lose momentum almost immediately, and I pull over fast and stop before we start drifting backward downhill. I wrench on the hand brake as hard as I possibly can. Little whisps of smoke are coming up through the grille, and the rain is slicing and twisting them, stopping them from rising. Nearly stopping them from existing at all.

  Chloe looks at me and I look at her. Nobody asks the question about what comes next, but it seems to be hanging in the truck anyway. So I turn the key to see if the engine will start. It screams out, that awful metal-on-metal scream, and rattles and bangs, and when I shut it off again, another big puff of smoke comes up from the grille to be dampened down by the rain. I turn the key all the way to off, and it’s quiet except for the torrent outside. The windshield wipers have stopped, so the windshield is just a muted sheet of water. It’s cold without the heater.

  Chloe says, “Maybe somebody’ll come by.”

  “Sure. Sooner or later somebody will.”

  Only we’ve been on this road for hours and haven’t seen one other motorist. And that was by day. Now the sun is nearly down. We’re hungry. We don’t have anything to eat or drink.