Ariel's Crossing (13 page)

So Ariel thought, as vertigo voices singing
Special orders don’t upset us
carried on and on and she gazed beyond the yard, past the pond, and into the woods where white birches stood out like skinny ghosts, down where she often gathered mushrooms, having learned as a girl to distinguish the edible ones from the poisonous. And oh, she thought, before passing out in the hard chair, if only everything were as simple to sort as boletes from morels, morels from ringstalks, ringstalks from …

She jolted upright on hearing David’s car coming up the dirt road through the woods that surrounded the farm. Stiff and aching, Ariel felt the undeniable here-and-now upon her. The ledger had fallen from her lap and she grasped for it, clutched it again, oddly felt that without it she might float away. Parenthood, she thought, remembering what was inside her, the fetus, embryo, zygote. The idea of an idea. Like parentheses around a vital aside. Parents, parentheses.

Must be after midnight. Some of the stars seemed to be making lateral curlicuing movements, as if astronomical baton twirlers up there had fallen out of formation but kept their figure-eights going. She listened as wind moved gently around the house. Sounds carried here as if they made themselves up out of nothing.

The low grind of the engine climbing the hill, and the flash of headlamp light across the barrier of trees. Crunch of stone in the short curved driveway. She didn’t move but heard David open and then slam shut the door of the car on the opposite side of the house. She tensed, willing the batoning stars to cease whirling, willing Mrs. McCarthy back into her kitchen those couple thousand miles away, willing herself to get undrunk and face David.

She rose unsteadily to her feet, hearing him call her name, which echoed in the shallow valley.

“Back here,” she answered.

“Sorry I’m so late.”

David kissed her upturned face, Ariel kissing the air as she half turned away.

“Sorry for the short notice,” she said. “You want a drink, something to eat?”

“I had dinner in the city before coming up, but some scotch would be good.”

He knew where the liquor cabinet was, knew where everything was in this house. He and Ariel had spent many days and nights here together, sometimes visiting her parents, often by themselves. As he poured his drink he hesitated, lingering a moment in the pantry to listen to the voluminous silence of the place, a stillness that always soothed and frightened him. How could the world tolerate such a quiet corner as this? Life prefers clamor. If only to prove it is living. Carrying his glass back to the porch, he dreaded whatever he was about to hear. Ariel had never phoned him out of the blue like this with such an adamant request.

“Is it something we could put off until the weekend?” he had asked. “I’ve got to be at work early tomorrow.”

“It’s nothing we should put off.”

She’d sounded grim. So he’d agreed, telling her he would cancel a morning meeting that, in any event, was not on his schedule. Now he sat beside her and, assuring himself there was nothing to worry about in the long run, took a breath of night air and a taste of his scotch.

Ariel wasted no time with preliminaries. “I’m pregnant.”

After a moment he said, “You’re joking, right?”

“Do I look like I’m joking?”

“You look like you’ve been drinking.”

“I’m not joking. I’ve been drinking. I’m pregnant.”

It occurred to him that he had expected much worse, somehow, though he’d not construed the precise possibilities, or at least never anticipated this one. Without thinking, he said, “I’m really sorry.”

“What’s to be sorry about?”

How hateful the assumption that funded his automatic response, even though his instinct wasn’t so different from her own. When he continued, not missing a beat, saying, “Look, it’s my responsibility to pay,” she passingly wondered whether David hadn’t been through this before.

“Pay what?”

“You have to suffer through the procedure, so I should cover the cost.”

“That’s very generous of you, but who said I’m getting an abortion?”

Here, then, was that worse crisis he had forecast. “But Ariel, in all the time I’ve known you, you’ve never once expressed any interest in having children.”

She couldn’t contradict him.

“What’s this?” he asked, pointing with his scotch at the ledger cradled in her arms. “Is it what I think it is?”

Ariel nodded in the flickering light. Poor David—couldn’t blame him for wanting to change the subject.

“No wonder you’re so upset,” he tried, reaching over to take her hand, which was very cold, though she pressed his in return.

“There’s a letter from Kip Calder inside.”

“We can’t have a baby, Ariel. We’ve been struggling as it is.”

“You’re probably going to think I’m out of my mind, but I’ve decided that I made a mistake, a bad one, when I didn’t go out to New Mexico to find my father after I first learned about him.”

“I remember being an advocate of that idea when you told me.”

“You were. I should have listened to you.”

He resisted the easy comeback, that she should listen to him now regarding this new issue. Instead he stood, took the Calder ledger from Ariel’s other hand and set it on the wide arm of the chair, then drew her up from where she sat and gathered her unsteadily against him. How familiar she felt, her body banking into his, holding him close, her face burrowed into the crook of his shoulder. “I’m sorry you’re having a hard time,” he said, but she neither responded nor resisted when he walked her upstairs, saying that she needed sleep, they would figure it all out in the morning. She said nothing, since there was nothing else she could think to say, except that an abortion was temporarily not a possibility, however much he clearly assumed it was a probability. Let the world go away for a few hours, she dizzily thought.

When she awoke, the sun was pointing gentle light into the room where they lay in bed, its warmth baking her pained eyes and her pounding temples as she ascended like some poor bat startled from its daytime lair into flying blind at noon. However burdened by bad sleep and a blameworthy conscience, she understood that her failure to tell David what she really thought—that they’d reached the end of their road together—offered her a fresh chance at imagining why her parents had themselves failed for so many years to tell her about Kip. When it came to furnishing the facts and acknowledging the truth, however hurtful, and hurtful to whomever, be it the teller or the one told, she had not measured up any better than they.

Feeling her way to the staircase, palms flattened against the night’s damp cool in the walls, she stopped and laid her cheek against the plaster, as if to cool her mind as well.

David slept on while she withdrew downstairs, semidrunk still, clasping the smooth oak handrail with both hands. How she wished she could cry. Wasn’t that what one ought to do? She paused at the newel, breathed through pursed lips. No tears, just thinnest breath. As if her grandmother McCarthy were beside her, she thought she heard that familiar raspy voice whisper,
Hair of the dog ad majorem Dei gloriam,
which didn’t make her laugh.

Instead she found her way to the kitchen sink, whispering a matin prayer of sorts. She drank tap water from the bowl of her cupped hands. Coughed and shivered but still found no tears to shed over the twin misery and abundance that faltered inside her. Without a thought, she ducked her head under the faucet and allowed the water, now running much colder from deep in the well, to flow over the back of her neck. A thin thread trickled over her shoulders and along the furrow of her spine, coursing like a glass snake down her thigh and calf to the kitchen floor of wide hemlock planks, where it pooled, a trembling mirror reflecting the morning sun. When she glanced down, through the thin fabric of her slip, she sensed her breasts and flat belly had, even if imperceptibly, ripened with this pregnancy. Was that possible?

Her sunlit body seemed suddenly like a candled egg. She closed the faucet, sank to her knees, sat back against the cabinet door. Supporting her downcast head on fisted hands, she stared at the sun’s tiny face dancing on the puddle of water. She noted its purling eye but wasn’t sure, in that moment, whether it was withering from view because she was crying or because the miniature sea had merely cast her back upon herself, as a wave might a broken bit of coral.

When David joined her an hour later, the spirit of nostalgia had vanished. She was down by the pond drinking her cup of coffee, sitting cross-legged on the grass, watching a whitetail dragonfly flit among the asters. As he approached, he could see her body’s profile through the sheer beige of her shift and recognized that these might be among their final minutes together. Whereas he’d always respected, even revered, the deep solidity, the centeredness and strengths of Ariel in times past, this morning he found himself resenting them. Shouldn’t one as exposed as she was, there in the bowl of wildflowers and deep calm water, seem vulnerable? Seem disarmed and defenseless in the face of nature, somehow? Not Ariel, at least not here and now. On the contrary, she seemed impregnable. Irony of ironies. He sat beside her, irritated that they had to argue over the indisputable fact they weren’t going through with this baby stuff. “You must feel awful.”

“I feel fine,” she rused.

“I meant, having overdone it with the gin.”

She nodded, not looking at him, not truly looking at anything.

“We can’t have a child, Ariel, and you know it.”

“You don’t need to worry,” she said, quietly. “I’m freeing you of all responsibility.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just what I said. You don’t want to deal with it and I’m not going to make you.”

“Great. Perfect.”

“In fact, why don’t I just free you of me altogether?”

“Even better.” Such stoniness surprised him, but his mind, too, was made up. They stood and walked back to the house. A quarter hour later, before throwing himself into the car and backing crazily, furiously, out of the driveway, he taunted, “What’s going on here is a delayed reaction to what started when you learned about your biological father.”

“Maybe so, probably not.”

“You’re finally angry about having been lied to your whole life by your parents.”

“They have nothing to do with this.”

“Transference is what it is. You’re displacing hostility—”

“David, don’t play psychologist with me. I don’t feel hostile toward you. I don’t feel much of anything, if you want to know.”

“This is destructive behavior. You’re not mother material.”

Not unfair, but as Ariel sat once more in the Adirondack chair to stare at the prolific bed of orange tiger lilies her parents had planted in honor of her junior high graduation, she thought of chain reactions. First her nucleus had been split by one father’s merging with another. Then she’d become the hapless next split atom. Then the private tissue of her own ovum, like some puzzling nuclear core, had been halved by the saturation of sperm protons. Ariel could almost hear Jessica, who scolded her whenever she thought with her mind absent her heart.

And now David was gone. His last words hadn’t been amiable. He told her he didn’t “get them” anymore. That he couldn’t love somebody who didn’t know who she was or had been or was becoming. That he couldn’t see their having a baby together, not when they hardly had each other, or themselves. They’d been a couple once, but coupledom seemed to be a thing of the past.

“Coupledom?” she’d groaned, the hangover she’d earned having abruptly arrived.

Ariel had developed a private face, one at times as difficult to read as any of her more abstruse books. And that was the face she’d worn as the discussion ended, though David would have a few words to add before slamming shut his car door and raising pebbles and dust as he backed out of the drive with his bare foot pressed hard against the accelerator pedal. He knew he was leaving behind drawers of clothing in the armoire in their shared bedroom, and downstairs in the mudroom snowshoes, his hiking boots, camping paraphernalia, the sleeping bag in which he and Ariel had spent nights together during chilly autumns just before hunting season, when the stars were at their thickest and in the mornings wild turkeys would drift through the fallen leaves, pecking and scratching their way along, clucking and foraging. Ariel watched all this, eyes bloodshot, in a state of suspended disbelief.

She asked for it and got it. Maybe he was right, maybe wrong. Maybe she didn’t know what she was talking about.

One thing was certain. The person she needed to tell about this pregnancy was none other than Kip Calder, since he was the only one who could give her the straight dope on what it felt like to abandon your child even before that child was born.

The house and surrounding woods were silent again. She dressed and walked to a place where she used to love to hide as a girl. Lying on the long, warm lichened capstones of the barn wall, past the apple orchard, she sweated out the toxins in air laden with midday light. She tried to get her beating mind to think slowly, carefully. A voice that mingled with her own, her mother’s, and even that of Granna asked, Was she sure she should go to New Mexico and raise dust that had settled so long ago? Told her Kip was most probably dead by now, that she’d blown it by being so damn diffident in the first place. Declared that if there was any chance she might go ahead and have this baby, she’d have to lay off drinking. Poor thing was probably wretched in there, adrift in a gin cauldron.
Poor thing
—listen to her. Best she not begin thinking that way.

Having barely slept the night before, she nodded off in the sun, hands folded on her chest, and was awakened, startled, hours later by her cat Buddha, who nuzzled her cheek and then bounded down off the wall into the underbrush of blackberries. Buddha boy? How she used to love watching him stalk chipmunks and mice and butterflies and then stretch out to sleep on this bluestone garden wall, smiling his gray, unperturbable smile.

“Buddy?”

Sitting up, coming back to consciousness, she remembered he was long dead and buried. Maybe a spider had brushed against her. A fieldmouse.