Walk Two Moons

41 THE OVERLOOK

At Coeur d’Alene, we went straight to the hospital. Gramps had tried to wake Gram when he saw the lake. “Gooseberry?” Gramps said. She slumped sideways on the seat. “Gooseberry?”

The doctors said Gram had had a stroke. Gramps insisted on being with her while she underwent tests, though an intern had tried to dissuade him. “She’s unconscious,” the intern said. “She won’t know whether you’re here or not.”

“Sonny, I’ve been by her side for fifty-one years, except for three days when she left me for the egg man. I’m holding on to her hand, see? If you want me to let go, you’ll have to chop my hand off.”

They let him stay with her. While I was waiting in the lobby, a man came in with an old beagle. The receptionist told him he would have to leave the dog outside. “By herself?” the man said.

I said, “I’ll watch her. I had a dog just like her once.” I took the old beagle outside, and when I sat down on the grass, the beagle put her head in my lap and murmured in that special way dogs have. Gramps calls it a dog’s purr.

I wondered if Gram’s snake bite had anything to do with her stroke, and if Gramps felt guilty for whizzing off the highway and stopping at that river. If we hadn’t gone to that river, Gram would never have been bitten by that snake. And then I started thinking about my mother’s stillborn baby and maybe if I hadn’t climbed that tree and if my mother hadn’t carried me, maybe the baby would have lived and my mother never would have gone away, and everything would still be as it used to be.

But as I sat there thinking these things, it occurred to me that a person couldn’t stay all locked up in the house like Phoebe and her mother had tried to do at first. A person had to go out and do things and see things, and I wondered, for the first time, if this had something to do with Gram and Gramps taking me on this trip.

The beagle in my lap was just like our Moody Blue. I rubbed her head and prayed for Gram. I thought about Moody Blue’s litter of puppies. For the first week, Moody Blue wouldn’t let anyone come anywhere near those puppies. She licked them clean and nuzzled them. They squealed and pawed their way up to her with their eyes still sealed.

Gradually, Moody Blue let us touch the puppies, but she kept her sharp eyes on us, and if we tried to take a puppy out of her sight, she growled. Within a few weeks, the puppies were stumbling away from her, and Moody Blue spent her days herding them back, but when they were about six weeks old, Moody Blue started ignoring them. She snapped at them and pushed them away. I told my mother that Moody Blue was being terrible. “She hates her puppies.”

“It’s not terrible,” my mother said. “It’s normal. She’s weaning them from her.”

“Does she have to do that? Why can’t they stay with her?”

“It isn’t good for her or for them. They have to become independent. What if something happened to Moody Blue? They wouldn’t know how to survive without her.”

While I prayed for Gram outside the hospital, I wondered if my mother’s trip to Idaho was like Moody Blue’s behavior. Maybe part of it was for my mother and part of it was for me.

When the beagle’s owner returned, I went back inside. It was after midnight when a nurse told me I could see Gram. She was lying, still and gray, on the bed. A little dribble was coming out of one side of her mouth. Gramps was leaning over her, whispering in her ear. A nurse said, “I don’t think she can hear you.”

“Of course she can hear me,” Gramps said. “She’ll always be able to hear me.”

Gram’s eyes were closed. Wires were attached to her chest and to a monitor, and a tube was taped to her hand. I wanted to hold her and wake her up. Gramps said, “We’re gonna be here a while, chickabiddy.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out his car keys. “Here, in case you need anything from the car.” He handed me a crumpled wad of money. “In case you need it.”

“I don’t want to leave Gram,” I said.

“Heck,” he said. “She doesn’t want you sitting around this old hospital. You just whisper in her ear if you want to tell her anything, and then you go do what you have to do. We’re not going anywhere, your grandmother and I. We’ll be right here.” He winked at me. “You be careful, chickabiddy.”

I leaned over and whispered in Gram’s ear and then I left. In the car, I studied the map, leaned back in the seat, and closed my eyes. Gramps knew what I was going to do.

The key was cold in my hand. I studied the map again. One curvy road ran direct from Coeur d’Alene to Lewiston. I started the car, backed it up, drove around the parking lot, stopped, and turned off the engine. I counted the money in my pocket and looked at the map once more.

In the course of a lifetime, there were some things that mattered.

Although I was terrified when I drove out of the parking lot, once I was on the highway, I felt better. I drove slowly, and I knew how to do it. I prayed to every passing tree, and there were a thumping lot of trees along the way.

It was a narrow, winding road, without traffic. It took me four hours to drive the hundred miles from Coeur d’Alene to the top of Lewiston Hill—which, to me, was more of a mountain than a hill. I pulled into the overlook at the top. In the valley far below was Lewiston, with the Snake River winding through it. Between me and Lewiston was the treacherous road with its hairpin turns that twisted back and forth down the mountain.

I peered over the rail, looking for the bus that I knew was still somewhere down there on the side of the mountain, but I couldn’t see it. “I can do this,” I said to myself over and over. “I can do this.”

I eased the car back onto the road. At the first curve, my heart started thumping. My palms were sweating and slippery on the wheel. I crept along with my foot on the brake, but the road doubled back so sharply and plunged so steeply that even with my foot on the brake, the car was going faster than I wanted it to. When I came out of that curve, I was in the outside lane, the one nearest to the side of the cliff. It was a sharp drop down, with only a thin cable strung between occasional posts to mark the edge of the road.

Back and forth across the hill the road snaked. For a half mile, I was on the inside against the hill and felt safer, and then I came to one of those awful curves, and for the next half mile I was on the outside, and the dark slide of the hillside stretched down, down, down. Back and forth I went: a half mile safe, a curve, a half mile edging the side of the cliff.

Halfway down was another overlook, a thin extra lane marked off less as an opportunity to gaze at the scenery, I thought, than to allow drivers a chance to stop and gather their wits. I wondered how many people had abandoned their cars at this point and walked the remaining miles down. As I stood looking over the side, another car pulled into the overlook. A man got out and stood near me, smoking a cigarette. “Where are the others?” he asked.

“What others?”

“Whoever’s with you. Whoever’s driving.”

“Oh,” I said. “Around—”

“Taking a pee, eh?” he said, referring, I gathered, to whoever was supposedly with me. “A helluva road to be driving at night, isn’t it? I do it every night. I work up in Pullman and live down there—” He pointed to the lights of Lewiston and the black river. “You been here before?” he said.

“No.”

“See that?” He pointed to a spot somewhere below.

I peered into the darkness. Then I saw the severed treetops and the rough path cut through the brush. At the end of this path I could see something shiny and metallic reflecting the moonlight. It was the one thing I had been looking for.

“A bus went off the road here—a year or more ago,” he said. “Skidded right there, coming out of that last turn, and went sliding into this here overlook and on through the railing and rolled over and over into those trees. A helluva thing. When I came home that night, rescuers were still hacking their way through the brush to get to it. Only one person survived, ya know?”

I knew.