Bicycle Tricks

My daughter's helmeted head is all I can see gliding above the grassy horizon. In a second or two, her shoulders rise out of the blades of yellowing summer green. Then the rest of her comes into view as she rounds the curve in the asphalt loop. From under a young dogwood across the park, I see her knees in a slow rhythm, moving barely enough to keep her steady and upright.

Then she stops, as does my heart.

A framed photo on the dresser in my daughter's room shows her pushing a red plastic sit-and-ride scooter made to look like a fire engine. She's smiling that unburdened smile of youth. It was taken seven years and two days ago at the daycare's Fourth of July parade. The children were supposed to ride their bikes or trikes in the holiday parade but, her being a bit older than 2 at the time, we hadn't thought about outdoor wheels for her yet. The sit-and-ride was all we had and, being tall for her age then as she has become  again today now that the Solu-Medrol IV drips and prednisone pills have stopped, she was probably already too big for that.

"She was having some problems riding it and keeping up with the others so she just started pushing it around instead," her teacher told us.

Ten weeks later, my daughter started having trouble standing up after sitting criss-cross applesauce on the daycare floor.

Ten more weeks after that and she couldn't walk at all.

"Can your child keep up with his/her peers while running or at play?" would become a constant mocking question on the health assessments the doctors had me fill out before every appointment.

When the hospital stays and medications started paying their dividends that December, she sat down on that fire engine scooter, braced her bare feet on the tile floor and pushed -- one miraculous spurt of inches after another -- through the foyer and into the living room toward the Christmas tree we had put up only a little while earlier.

In a year or so, she had her first bicycle with the training wheels that carried her around the paths under the nearby power lines and around corner to her friends' houses.

She's gone through several more models since that first purple-and-daisy frame model from the Super Target. Most tended to gather dust and flat tires in our garage between her growth spurts until the inevitable request for a bigger version when the sudden urge to ride overwhelmed her. Such was the case today when we traveled down to the park with the paved paths along our shoreline.

"I want to ride my bike around the circle again," she had said to me about 10 minutes earlier this day. The combination of words is like a foreign language. I nod and motion for her to go on ahead. I'm on foot and, in a minute, I'll catch up and find a shady place to soak in her navigation of the quarter-mile track.

But that minute has passed and now, here she is walking, pushing the bicycle along at her side.

("Can your child keep up with his/her peers while running or at play? Are her joints aching? Her muscles searing? Is she weak with exhaustion? You let her out without sunscreen once too often this spring, didn't you? She missed her meds that one time last month and twice the month before and soon you'll be back to the days of refined human blood product falling drop by drop down a plastic tube and into the man-made port in her chest, you stupid shit.")

I'm walking toward her, trying not to hurry, trying not to let the sink hole building in my chest swallow my voice.

"What happened, Pumpkin? Why'd you stop?"

She looks down to her right.

"The chain came off."

I look, and there it is, offside of the rear derailleur. I step back to take it all in and I see the links hang slack, forming the outline of a devilish grin.