Loving Chloe Page 2

  Now that Asa’s reconciled with Claire, that leaves my Irvine condo empty, so I’ve arranged for a small property management firm to take over renting it until it can be sold. You don’t need to fret details in that regard. Mom, I’m optimistic you and Dad will wish Chloe and me well, and be excited for us about the baby. Take care of yourself, and write when you can.

  Your loving son,

  Henry

  Hank signed his name to the letter, sealed the flap, and finished addressing the envelope alone at the kitchen table, the glow of an oil lamp casting flickering light across his hands. Chloe had gone to bed two hours earlier, blaming the clean air, saying smog withdrawal was making her sick, but Hank knew the pregnancy claimed priority on her body, and that adjusting to the altitude wasn’t helping matters. He was fine here alone.

  He blew out the lamp and stood at the window, holding the curtain away from the glass. Far across the sky, he could see momentary jags of lightning flicker out toward the Grand Canyon. Exactly how far away it was, he couldn’t tell. Out here the miles stretched endless and uncharitable, playing tricks on the eye. He opened the back door and stood in the doorway, chilly but content to watch the storm roll in across the prairie.

  2

  “How far along do you think you are?” Dr. Lois Carrywater asked as she scanned the medical history Chloe had labored over in the clinic waiting room.

  An embarrassing number of spaces had had to be left blank. Chloe eyed the woman who was going to deliver her baby. Not much older than herself, she wore blue jeans and an orange T-shirt beneath her lab coat, and she was FBI: full-blooded Indian. Chloe’d heard her say something in Navajo to the patient she’d crossed paths with in the narrow hallway. Forget the smile; this broad had access to cupboards full of nasty instruments with sharp points. “Five months, maybe? I’ve never had regular periods.”

  “Does that kind of cycle run in your family?”

  Chloe rustled the stiff paper gown and gave her a flinty laugh. “Really couldn’t tell you since Mama gave me up for adoption when I was two.”

  Dr. Carrywater set her file down on the exam room’s short wooden countertop and snapped her strong-looking hands into latex gloves. “Sorry. I always have to ask.”

  She began the examination by listening to Chloe’s heart and lungs. As she opened the gown, she fingered the scar on Chloe’s back, unable to disguise her alarm at the makeshift stitching job from the old jumping accident. “Tell me, was the quack who sewed up your shoulder drunk and blind?”

  “Neither, but Lord, is he handsome. Veterinarian buddy of mine. He did the best he could. I figured since it didn’t cost anything, I was ahead of the game. I mean, it’s not like I spend much time looking at my back.”

  The doctor made her perform some arm rotations to check the range of motion. “You’re lucky the tendon wasn’t affected.” Then she discovered the scar above her right nipple. “The shape of this scarring almost looks like a human bite.”

  Chloe met her eyes evenly. “Oh?”

  The silence in the exam room built as each woman refused to back down. “Well, then,” Dr. Carrywater said and moved on to measuring Chloe’s belly. The completion of each task brought closer the moment when she would ask her to lie down and she would lift the speculum from the instrument tray. Chloe steeled herself, tensing until she was nearly bowed above the exam table. The doctor placed a gloved palm against Chloe’s clenched fingers. “Don’t be nervous.”

  “I understand why you have to do it, but this poking around inside stuff’s never set well with me.”

  Dr. Carrywater smiled sympathetically. “It’s true, sometimes it can be unpleasant. I’ll try to be gentle and quick.”

  Every step of the way she explained what she was doing and asked if Chloe was all right. Mostly she was, but not until she felt the release of the instruments and heard them clatter onto the tray did she relax. Mental pictures and echoes of another exam she didn’t like to think about crowded her. Once encouraged, bad memories liked nothing better than to run away with the reins in their teeth.

  “You like this job? Looking inside ladies’ boxes all day?”

  “Sure. I get to help bring new life into the world. Find me another career with those kind of perks.”

  “I’ll bet you have to have a strong stomach.”

  “Sometimes that comes in handy.” Dr. Carrywater drew a test tube of blood and handed it to the same woman who’d given Chloe the forms to fill out. Chloe held onto the cotton ball in the crook of her elbow and tried to reach for her clothes, but the doctor stopped her.

  “You waited so long to seek prenatal care. Here people have reasons. But California? There’s a clinic on every street corner.”

  “Maybe I wasn’t sure what I was going to do about it.”

  “And now you’re sure?”

  Commitment to the baby held the power to blot out all her worldly mistakes. “Yeah, of course. Hank wants this baby.”

  “Hank isn’t the one carrying it. Tell me how you feel.”

  The bleeding had stopped. Chloe pitched the cotton ball into the trash can. “About being pregnant? It’s not my first choice to bloat up and cry over every little thing. But I want it. I’ll do whatever it takes to help him get born healthy.”

  “Good.” Dr. Carrywater began assembling a bag of vitamins and literature for her to take home. “You know, we don’t have access to sonogram equipment out here. I’d like to send you into Flagstaff for that.”

  “Do I have to have one?”

  “It would provide me with more accurate information about the baby’s gestational age.”

  Chloe crossed her legs. “Here’s the way I look at it, Doctor. The less medical stuff the better, okay?”

  The doctor considered her words. “All right. I’m giving you a tentative due date of February second. Understand, without the sonogram, I might be off by as much as a month. And you must agree to come back in two weeks instead of four.”

  “Sounds like a deal I can live with.”

  Dr. Carrywater paused at the hollow-core door with its poster of the third trimester rendered in inhuman pinks and mauves, outside which real babies cried over vaccinations and patients waited while the unanswered phone rang on and on, begging for attention. “Any questions?”

  “Yeah.” Chloe presented her case logically and calmly. “I used to be a horse trainer in California. Been riding all my life. I’ve brought this colt out here I’m trying to gentle. It’s okay to work him, isn’t it? Hank’s all paranoid. He said I had to ask.”

  “If you’re talking about walking him by hand, and he minds his manners, I have no objections for the next few weeks.”

  “But a little riding’s not going to hurt anything, right?”

  “Riding?” The doctor laughed. “You’re done with that for the remainder of the pregnancy.”

  “But I rode every single day back in California. Even with a broken ankle.”

  “This is Arizona. I’m a medical doctor, not a veterinarian. And last time I checked, ankles weren’t babies. Maybe you need me to provide some more graphic examples.”

  “No thanks.” Chloe made a face and went to the outer office to discuss the payment schedule with the pale-skinned girl who sat smiling behind the desk in her Peter Pan collar.

  “We arrange payment on a sliding scale,” she happily told Chloe as she pressed more literature into her hands. “Do you have regular employment?”

  I used to, Chloe wanted to tell her. I had a waitress job that paid great tips. I had riding students waiting on line, and kept close to current on whatever I owed. Maybe they weren’t the best shots, but I called them, and my life worked pretty damn well. She shook her head no. “My boyfriend’s paying.”

  “Could you fill out his name and address on this form, please?”

  “Sure.” Chloe wrote Hank’s name down, then put ditto marks on the address section. “It’s all the same,” she said, handing the paper back. “Everything except for our names.”

/>   “I see.”

  The town of Tuba City, which wasn’t really a town at all but an administrative and trade center for the western Navajo tribe, seemed to be pretty evenly divided between the two camps, Mormon and Navajo. The high-buttoned blouse, the sensible blond haircut, and the smile that didn’t quit even when her moral stance was obviously offended pretty much indicated this one’s camp was the former.

  “If you could just have a seat for one second while I answer this phone, I’ll set up your appointment schedule.”

  Chloe chose a plastic chair next to five other pregnant women, four of whom looked just about ready to deliver. They were all Indian, speaking their own language. The magazines on the beat-up coffee table featured Mormon life, Mormon literature, and no doubt some really pithy Mormon prenatal issues. The free literature on birth control and STDs in the wall pockets looked too intimidating to consider. There was an urn with free coffee substitute set on a card table, but Chloe wasn’t feeling that desperate. She hadn’t seen a gynecologist in maybe six or seven years and imagine that, in all that time the process hadn’t gotten any more pleasant. The whole waiting-room thing was giving her a major headache. “Tell you what, I’ll give you a call,” she said to the receptionist and blew out the front door without waiting for an answer.

  Five miles west of Tuba City on U.S. 160, about midway between the junction and U.S. 89, she pulled the truck over from the highway into the dirt shoulder. The stretch of road was unfamiliar. The sight of this wide-open prairie sent her heart scudding around inside her chest like the organ had torn loose from its mooring. Who could ever imagine sky this blue, this empty, unbroken by neon or power lines? The land before her stretched emptily to the north and west as if it had all day to get wherever it was going. Where were the thrown-together housing developments, the fast-food restaurants, the cheesy strip malls? Back in California, that’s where. The baby fluttered inside her, and despite the red rocks’ gradient splendor, she felt lonesome for all she’d left—near-gridlock traffic, working two jobs, never having quite enough money to pay her bills, Kit Wedler’s endless teenage questions, something predictable on which she could hang her hat.

  When Hank had come back from Flagstaff in his good jacket bearing bad news from the university, she half expected him to say, Let’s pack up and go home. Home—California. But she could tell he wanted to stay here, that his grandmother’s cabin meant something to him the way horses meant the world to her. Screw those university eggheads, she’d told him. They don’t know what they’re missing. That night they’d lain on their sides in bed facing each other, making love with as much enthusiasm as two people could scrounge from thrift shop sheets and a dwindling bank account. Between them the bulk of pregnancy had never felt more present, so life-altering, so damned expensive. Try as she might, Chloe couldn’t lose herself in the spirit of their loving. A part of her felt reined-in and responsible. When Hank came, hollering his gratitude into her bare shoulder, she didn’t miss the close-to-tears catch in his voice. She rubbed his back and planted kisses up and down his neck. Told him that he was her best lover—so far. That made him laugh and fall asleep smiling.

  But he had found a job after all, and now Hank said he wouldn’t allow her to work. You’ll rest until the baby is born. I’ll take care of you. When she opened her mouth to complain, he laid a finger across her lips. Think of these last couple of months like a long-overdue vacation, he’d said. If only someone could tell her how to do that. She wasn’t a TV kind of person, not that they had one, and taking long walks with the dog had its moments, such as finding pottery shards, spotting the jack-in-the-box prairie dogs and picking the occasional wildflower. But it sure wasn’t a reason to jump out of bed in the morning.

  Just ahead on her side of the highway stood some of those roadside stands featuring bright Indian blanket roofs. She shut off the engine and hiked over to give them a look.

  On the road to the Grand Canyon, which they hadn’t gotten around to seeing yet, Chief Yellowhorse’s hand-painted billboards and directionals abounded. Friendly Indians here! We take ’em MasterCards! Stop! Turn back now or miss deal of lifetime! The Indians manning these booths barely nodded a polite hello to her. She walked along looking at the jewelry and trinkets, then at the last stall, picked up a horse blanket.

  “Eight-dollar special today only,” the man in the dark recess of the booth said, then added softly, “That’s a fair price.”

  “I agree.” Chloe reached into her pocket to count her roll of dollar bills. She laid the money down. “This red and gray will look great on my horse when he’s gentle enough to ride. He’s chestnut, with a white—”

  “Got bridles,” the man interrupted, motioning to a cardboard box on the ground next to his booth. Chloe bent down to check them out. The hardware was good for nothing except decorating the homes of yuppies passionate for Western motif. Most of it was old cowboy paraphernalia, gag bits designed to choke a horse into submission, gimmicks to force him to spin faster or perform demeaning tricks under the threat of pain. Underneath the tangle of junk, though, she found a gray-and-white braided horsehair halter. “How much for this?”

  “Forty,” the man said.

  Back home at El Toro Feed and Tack, a length of pelo de caballo not even half this finely crafted cost seventy-five dollars. She put more money down, her fingers resting atop the wrinkled twenties. Be practical. You have no job. Doctor visits cost money. Hank won’t let you ride. But imagining the pleasure of seeing the halter on the colt’s ungainly head, practicality took a flying leap. It wasn’t denial to buy the tack. Denial was when Gabe Hubbard grinned after she asked him what he thought the funny twitchings in her belly could be. The veterinarian had howled with laughter, as if any woman who’d quit menstruating and couldn’t recognize the advancing symptoms of pregnancy was beyond his scope. “You make this?” she asked the Indian.

  “My brother Ned got all shot up in the war. Don’t get out much. Sits and braids in his wheelchair.”

  “Well, tell Ned I’ll put his handiwork to good use.”

  The Indian flattened her twenties into his cash box, then looked away vacantly, as if he heard such claims all day long.

  Chloe felt compelled to make conversation, to establish the truth of what she was saying, to connect. “Such a big, empty chunk of nothing out there, isn’t it? Sometimes it scares the crap out of me.”

  His raisin-black eyes seemed to look right through her. “Earth’s our grandmother. Plant some squash, take a walk. No call to be afraid.”

  She gave him a half smile. “Yeah. Maybe it’s the people who come walking into view we got to watch out for.” She thought of Iris Oliver and wished she hadn’t. Hank’s mother’s letters were bad enough; an actual visit might blow the house down.

  A group of tourists began to inspect the Indian’s wares and Chloe stepped back to give them room. He gave them his full, if lukewarm attention. She walked back to her truck and sat inside.

  Not particularly hungry, she took a few bites of an apple, thinking how happy her eating fruit would make Hank. Apples weren’t broccoli, but they were close friends, and Hank was heavily pressing the food groups. She stared northwest until her tiredness made those funny little heat shimmers before her eyes: A band of wild horses moving toward her, an Appaloosa and a gray, a buckskin, one remarkable pinto. They were unbridled, trotting, kicking up red dust, led by a horse so black and shining she knew at once that here was her Absalom, come back from horse heaven, equipped with perfect legs in this life, rightfully crowned leader. Her eyes watered from concentrating to visualize the ermine spots on his pastern. The pain of losing her horse still cut deep. The prairie’s silence beat in her blood like drums, like the four-beat gait of hooves striking the tarmac running alongside the arena at her old stables. She longed to be where those horses were, but it was no place to be found on a map. Sometimes, back home in the canyon, when she was exhausted or worried about one of the lesson horses, her mind played tricks, went to strange places,
heard people talking in Spanish, calling out to her. Mija, lo siento, hasta la mañana, they said, as if they knew her. Whatever it meant was beyond her scope. She set the half-eaten apple on the dashboard. It tasted so grainy she spit the last mouthful out the truck’s window.

  You waited so long to seek prenatal care. Clinics in California on every corner…the last time she’d been anywhere near a hospital was when Fats Valentine died. What was there to recommend a place that couldn’t save the life of the first man she’d loved? And years before that she’d been raped, and had only gone to the emergency room because she knew enough about wounds to recognize that she needed at least eight stitches in her right breast or she might lose the nipple. Another pleasant medical interlude. Yes or No boxes didn’t afford room for that kind of medical history.

  She looked out the truck’s windshield, past the dusty reddish film that clouded the glass. Afternoon sun glared in her eyes, and she knew there was no escaping once the trigger had been squeezed. Sooner or later the memories would deliver her a sleepless night. The Arizona summer sun streamed in her truck’s windows, and Chloe was amazed all over again that even sixteen years removed physically, the rape kept at her, teaching her lessons. While it was going on, she thought it was the worst thing that could happen to a girl. But it wasn’t. There was more—stuff nobody knew, not even Hank.