Second Hand Heart (29 page)

“Not exactly,” I said. “I mean, it just feels like remembering. It just feels like any other kind of remembering. The only difference is that you know you never saw the place you’re remembering. You know you couldn’t have.”

“Wow!” he said. “More things in heaven and earth, huh?”

And then we wolfed down the rest of the pizza without saying anything.

“Well,” he said. And got to his feet the same way he got down, only in reverse. No hands. He just unfolded and then he was up, holding the empty pizza box. “I’ll let you kids get some sleep. If I don’t see you in the morning, have a safe trip. Godspeed. And all that.”

He started to walk away, but then I got up and ran the few steps after him. I had to use my hands to get up, though.

I grabbed him from behind and gave him a hug. My arms didn’t even go all the way around his big belly.

I said, “I’ll try to come back through and say hi sometime.”

And he said, “I hope your new heart finds what it’s looking for.”

And then I let him go, and he did.

Flipping a Coin in Williams

W
hen we got to Williams, Arizona, we had to sleep in the car. Turns out in the summer, this close to the Grand Canyon, things are a little busy. It’s kind of hard to get a camping spot on short notice. Especially since it turned out it was a Saturday night. We didn’t know that. What day it was. Victor and I lost track of that a long time ago. Until we tried to get a camping spot. And then we found out it was Saturday night and we’d have to sleep in the car.

Now, sleeping in the car was not the easiest thing in the world to figure out.

Fortunately it was a big car. A big old Oldsmobile, with a solid bench seat up front, thank goodness.

But still.

The only way we could figure to fit Jax into the picture was to let him sleep on the back seat with me, all the way against one of the doors, and then I would have to curl up in a tiny little ball and use him for a pillow.

We tried it for a little while when it first got nearly dark. But it was hard to go to sleep that way.

So I said, “Victor? Are you asleep?”

He said, “Nope.”

I said, “I think I’m going to have to be really tired to sleep in the car.”

“So what do you want to do?”

“You want to take Jax for a little walk?”

“Sure,” he said.

So we got out. And we put on Jax’s leash, because Williams was busy with cars. And we walked down a few streets in the nearly dark.

It was a little before nine, and we walked by a place that gave visitor information. It was just closing.

“Hey,” I said. “Stay here with Jax, OK?”

And I went inside and asked the lady, who seemed sort of nice but tired, if she had some information about the Grand Canyon and Sedona. She laughed in a way that was like snorting. I guess that’s mostly what she had.

Anyway, she quick piled up a few brochures, and a little newspaper-type-thing for the Grand Canyon park, and then handed them all over to me and we walked out together. And she put out the closed sign on the way out, and locked the door behind us.

I said to Victor, “I thought this might help us decide.”

He said, “I thought we were going to just flip a coin.”

“Well, we can if you want.”

So we stood under a street light, and Victor took out a quarter.

“Heads, Grand Canyon,” he said. “Tails, Sedona. OK?”

“OK.”

I watched it flip up into the air and fall end over end, and I knew I wanted heads.

“Tails,” Victor said. “Sedona.”

“OK.”

I guess I wanted Grand Canyon more, but I promised I’d do what the coin said, and, anyway, we could always go to the Grand Canyon later on.

•  •  •

I woke up in the night, and I was stiff, but there was no way to really stretch. I don’t know what time it was, because I never wear a watch. But the streets were empty. Not a person or a sound.

We were parked too close to a street light, and I blinked into it, and it was hard to keep my eyes open because it was too bright.

Jax stirred and tried to stretch, but he really couldn’t, so then he gave up right away and went back to sleep.

I had somehow knocked down all the brochures. Or Jax had. Before I went to sleep, they were on that shelf under the back window, but now they were fallen down all around me. I’d been sleeping with my cheek on one. It was wedged between my face and Jax’s side. I guess I was sweating a little, because I had to peel it off my cheek. It was sort of stuck there.

I looked at it in the light from outside. It was puckered from my sweat. It was a brochure about hiking in the Grand Canyon. I was looking at the back cover.

On the bottom, in big red letters, guess what it said? “Warning: Do not attempt to hike to the river and back in one day.”

“Victor,” I said. “Victor. Wake up.”

“What?” he said. I think he said it while he was still asleep.

“I know where we’re going now.”

“Sedona.”

“No. Grand Canyon.”

“You said Sedona.”

“You don’t get it. I mean, I know now. Where the place is. It’s the Grand Canyon that I remember. That’s what I’m looking for. That’s the place.”

“You mean we don’t have to go all those other places?”

“Right.”

“Good.”

We were quiet for a minute, and then I said, “OK, I guess you can go back to sleep now.”

But he never answered. So I guess he already had.

On My Having a Dream

T
his is important. This is a big thing.

I finally got back to sleep. It took hours, because I was all excited. I thought I never would get back to sleep, but then hours later, when it was almost getting light outside, I did.

I had a dream.

I dreamed I was standing up above this big stone patio that looks out over the Grand Canyon.

It was right on the edge of the canyon rim, and had this low stone wall so people wouldn’t fall right in, and flat stone making up the patio itself, and a bunch of big chairs with arms. Some were big enough for one person and some were big enough for two. Doubles. The chairs were almost all lined up looking toward the edge, facing the low wall. Facing out. So that people could sit there and stare into the Grand Canyon for as long as they wanted.

I stood there in my dream and memorized everything, like I knew even in the dream that I would need it all. That I would need every single detail again.

And then I looked at all the people, and one of them was Richard. But he was younger. A lot younger, like maybe in his twenties. But it was definitely him. There was no doubt about that.

He looked really tired and discouraged.

I started to walk over. To say something to him. And just then Jax tried to scratch his ear with a back paw and it woke me up.

I tried to get back to sleep to finish the dream, but I never could.

The Grand Canyon

I
t was a Sunday morning. It was early.

I’d been very deeply asleep. Or very lightly asleep. Does it seem odd that I wouldn’t know the difference? Yeah. To me, too. But there’s this certain type of dream state that feels different from most. Different how, I can’t quite say. It just feels … OK, I’m tired of saying different. But any new words I might use to describe it won’t seem to flow.

Sometimes this kind of dreaming happens to me at the bottom of a REM cycle, but other times I have oddly vivid dreams when I’m drifting in that no-man’s-land of neither awake nor asleep. So there’s my confusion about that in a nutshell.

I guess I mentioned that I didn’t used to be a person who went on and on about things.

In my dream, I was reliving the story I’d told Connie. The story of the Grand Canyon, and meeting Lorrie for the first time. Oddly, I seemed to be dreaming not so much of that time itself, but the telling of it. Maybe just because those details were fresh in my mind, freshly unearthed. But I found myself lingering in each section of that experience — the river, the hike, the camp, the lodge — in just about the same time frame and detail as I had in the telling.

Until I got to the part where Connie cut me off.

In the telling of this tale to Connie, after Lorrie sat down and mentioned that she’d seen me on the trail, my dinner conversation had made a sudden forced turn and ended abruptly.

Oddly enough, at this exact same moment in the dream, I woke up.

I lay in bed, the sun just barely glowing through the curtain, letting the moment continue inside me. Enjoying not being pulled off track.

“So, could you just fall over and die?” Lorrie had asked.

And it had taken me a minute to realize she was referring to the hike. Our exhaustion from the hike. Somehow I’d thought she’d meant … I was about ready to fall over and die because she’d dropped into my life without warning, and was sharing a seat with me and chatting like we were old friends …

Anyway. I was tongue-tied, and didn’t answer, so she turned her attention out into the canyon.

And she said, “We should be sick to death of it, shouldn’t we? We should’ve gotten our fill by now. But here we are. Still staring. It’s just so vast and beautiful.”

I sat up in bed.

Vida was looking for the Grand Canyon.

I shook the sleep out of my brain. Rubbed my eyes. Talked myself out of it.

I lay back down.

That was a big jump. That was a bit silly. Just because the words vast and beautiful came up in more than one place.

But then I thought about Vida’s postcard. About how she’d asked me if Lorrie was a hiker. She must have remembered something about one of Lorrie’s hikes. Which one would likely come through as the most important? That’s obvious, right? If she was going to remember one hike, wouldn’t the Grand Canyon hike be the one?

I talked myself out of it again. I was only putting things together a certain way because I wanted them that way. I was adding two and two and getting thirtyone.

Except … then there was also that postcard she’d left for Abigail. She’d said she was looking for something. And Isabelle, of course, had also said she was looking for something, something that had everything to do with me.

Vida was looking for something vast and beautiful that had everything to do with me and something to do with hiking.

I sat back up again.

My first coherent thought was this: Boy, are you ever going to feel stupid when you haul all the way out to the Grand Canyon and find out you were only imagining things. That you were being completely delusional.

But, do you notice I said when? I didn’t say if.

There was already no doubt in my mind that, stupid or not, delusional or not, I was going. I had limited options in this situation. Who even knew how many chances I might get? Right or wrong, crazy or sane, I had to take this shot.

•  •  •

I checked my email before I left, in case Vida had emailed. After all, she obviously hadn’t called. And she’d sworn I’d be the second to know.

Nothing from Vida.

But, as if life thrived on upping the ante of my profound confusion, I did find a note from Connie.

From:
Connie Matsuko
To:
Richard Bailey

Sorry this took me so long, I guess I had too many internal tapes playing on the subject of what was going on inside your head. What you must think of me. I guess it’s none of my business, though, so here it is.