Ariel's Crossing (25 page)

“You’ve come to get me out of here, haven’t you? We can go back home now, can’t we?”

“Not today, Clifford,” Sarah said.

“Why not?” he asked Sarah, never taking his eyes off the younger woman, whose cheeks now flushed crimson.

“Because Mary’s not ready to take you home today,” said Kip, intervening at last, gently touching Clifford’s forearm.

“What about tonight?”

Sarah said, “You don’t like it here anymore?”

“I do, I do,” answered Clifford, concentrating now on Sarah. “I just thought my niece had come to take me back to Gallup.”

Marcos tried to help. “She’s not from Gallup, Clifford.”

“I think you’re confusing me with somebody else.” Horrible.

“No.” Clifford shook his head, solid and swift, back and forth, gazing at the linoleum. “No, no.”

“Maybe Cliff and I should take a walk,” said Kip.

Clifford looked at Kip, still shaking his head.

“Let’s do it, pal,” Kip finished, standing, urging Clifford to his feet. And as if nothing unusual had happened, they walked down the corridor that led away from the atrium.

“Sorry, Franny,” Sarah apologized. “I never saw him act like that before.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “I understand.”

They had lunch at a restaurant near the Norris Bradbury Museum, Sarah’s treat, and though Kip had planned on joining them, he stayed behind at the center and ate with the patients instead. They talked about Tsankawi, about the incident with Clifford, about evening plans, as families do, but even the vigilant Franny failed to notice Sarah’s eyes on her. Having long since accepted Franny into her life, much as she embraced Kip, Sarah suspected that the day was coming when she’d have to ask Franny—much as she had challenged Kip—to reveal a little more about herself. Yes, Clifford was mentally out of it, but where in fact was Franny’s mother, Mrs. Johnson? Why all the delays that Franny had alluded to in her coming west to meet Marcos and the Montoya family in Nambé, where her daughter had been living? On holidays, when she didn’t phone her mother or get any calls from Princeton, Marcos must have asked himself these same questions, but looked blindly beyond whatever she might be harboring. Sarah inferred that day a different history might range behind this business of Franny’s mother. Franny disguised her secrets well, but after Clifford’s peculiar onslaught, Sarah sensed some fabrication subtly betraying itself. She didn’t know what, but the stitching showed, the persona’s mask had fallen a tad askew.

After lunch, the couple headed home. On the way they stopped at Otowi, the sacred place—according to San Ildefonso belief—where the Rio Grande speaks. With pants rolled up to their knees, they waded along the narrow silty shore, listening to the river burble and chatter and sough.

“What do the Indians believe it’s saying?”

“Whatever you think it says,” he answered.

As Franny understood it, the river spoke of continuity. Itself a continuity, it spoke of cycles, flooding forward to the Gulf of Mexico, some of it evaporating and rising, condensing into a cloud, precipitating, becoming part of the water table, reentering the river, circling around again. An autobiographical river. Was she, too, condemned to travel in circles?

That night, as Franny lay close to Marcos, her legs aching from the climb, her mind aswarm with images of the day—evocative cliffs and provocative Clifford—she broke her pledge to Marcos and exhausted her skimpy knowledge of Vietnamese by whispering in his ear,
“Tôi met, tôi may man. Tôi an hân.”

“You promised,” Marcos whispered back. “No more Kipamese.” A quarter of an hour later he softly asked, “Okay, what does it mean?”

“It means, Thank you for today.”

“That isn’t what it means.”

“How do you know?”

“I could tell it meant something else.”

“Tôi met
means I’m tired.
Tôi may man
means I’m grateful.”

“Wasn’t there something more?”

“Now you speak Vietnamese, too?”

“You never know.”

Franny fell asleep before interpreting
Tôi an hân
for Marcos, who drifted away into sleep himself and would not remember to ask again the following morning. I’m sorry.

Like entering a time capsule. Viewed by flashlight until Ariel found the string connected to a bulb. The room was small, twelve by twelve. Flavor of mold in the air. Shapes under sheets. She pulled one back, as might an investigator, to identify what was beneath. A wingback chair from midcentury, its brocade as bright as on an upholsterer’s bolt. She ran her hand over its cushion. Under another sheet was a wardrobe, inside which were suits of clothes. Nothing elaborate, nothing Madison Avenue, but the gabardines and lush flannels of the day. Some camisoles. Undraping one more, she found a bookcase, the stacking kind that lawyers used to have in their offices. She’d always wanted one. But thought, More fitting to give it to Brice. Heaven knows, he might even remember seeing it in the Calder house when he was a boy.

Though these several things were hers, bequested by Kip, she looked at them only for a matter of minutes before resheeting everything, pulling the light string again, and locking the door of the storage room.

“We sent him letters from time to time, you know, telling him that he might just want to let us go through it for him, update the inventory, since he said he didn’t have one. Probably what he’s got in there isn’t worth a tenth of what he’s been paying in storage over all these years.”

“Well,” said Ariel, signing the registry. “He did what he thought was best, undoubtedly.”

“People’re funny about their stuff. Some of them take better care of what they got in storage than themselves.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“You’re right I’m right.”

“Well, thanks,” turning to leave.

“Miss Rankin?”

“Yes?”

“Will you be closing the account, then? Disposing of the articles?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“All right, then.”

Ariel understood. “I’m sorry.” She reached into her wallet for a check. “God, there must be a three-year outstanding bill for the storage fees. How much do I owe you?”

“No,” the woman waved her off. “Everything’s paid up, as ever. Never missed a rental payment yet. That’s why we keep it in such good order. Those sheets in there, I laid them on the furniture myself.”

“That was nice of you.”

“They was old sheets, anyway.”

“What you said about the storage rent’s being up to date, you mean to say it was paid long in advance?”

“No, once a year, every year. Like clockwork, last week of December. If everybody was as responsible as Mr. Calder, this world would be a better place.”

How could she not have thought of it before? “You must know where he’s living, then.”

“Even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to say.”

“I’m his daughter, as I told you. I have the key only because he passed it along to me.”

“Don’t take me wrong, but if he passed it on to you, don’t you know his whereabouts? If he’s your father.”

“I’ve lost track of him. That’s why I ask.”

The woman considered this for a moment. “He was living in Rancho de Taos for some while, but left there.”

“Does he pay in person?”

“By post.”

“What’s the return address?”

“He doesn’t give one anymore, I’m afraid.”

“Is there a home address on the checks?”

“Certified bank check, anonymous as it gets.”

Ariel frowned.

“Like I say, I think he’s throwing away good money keeping all that in there. We’re in business to make a living, of course. But it seems a shame to see somebody wasting forty dollars a month for no good reason.”

“I agree, but he must have some attachment to it or else he’d have let it go. It’s my responsibility now.”

“What happens when I get the payment from him?”

“If there’s really no return address on the envelope, then hold the money. If there is, send it back to him.”

“And tell him what?”

“Tell him Ariel has come to claim him.”

A dozen red roses, stems rubber-banded, wrapped in a pretty cone of plain white paper. Another dozen, and a few others. Five bouquets altogether for Delfino, who, having paid more for these roses than all the other flowers he’d bought in his entire life, carried them into the cemetery near Chimayó, where he laid them, pausing on a knee at each of the weathered headstones of his mother, Kayley McDougal Montoya, and Gil Montoya, his father, and at the resting places of his grandmother Emily Montoya, and Juliar Montoya, 1839–1899, his grandfather these almost hundred years deceased, the man who’d inherited Pajarito from the de Peñas of Nambé. In Agnes’s honor, he set the last bouquet beside a grave whose headstone was so worn that the name and dates had been erased. The dead don’t mind sharing.

Late that afternoon he returned from Chimayó in high spirits about his visit to Rancho Pajarito. Marcos had grown into a fine young man. Carl could be proud. Sarah was as good a woman as ever walked the earth. Delfino himself, however much he admired Pajarito and all Carl and Sarah had done with the place, felt that he, too, had gotten it right years ago when he chose to set out on his own into the world. One could make the case his life hadn’t unfolded quite the way he envisioned, but Agnes and he had experienced much happiness withal. He wouldn’t trade one moment with her for anything, though he would forever regret that she and he had only so briefly shared the home they’d built together in the shadow of the Oscuras. Could have been better, could have been much worse. The roses were laid on the graves, the world spun on like an oblivious toy top.

That second evening at dinner, Delfino’s sister-in-law broached a subject she’d brought up before. That he consider moving back to Nambé. While he figured Sarah would suggest this—why should he go on living alone in Tularosa when he could be among people who loved him?—he hadn’t prepared any viable response.

“Christ knows,” his brother grumbled, “you might even make yourself useful for a change.”

“I don’t want to be useful any more than you do.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not. Ask Marcos.”

“He’s not, Uncle Delf. Kip and I could use some more muscle around here,” Marcos said, knowing he often wound up the fall guy in these verbal jousts between the Montoya brothers. He was game, though, why not?

“You be the brawn, I’ll be the brains,” Carl went on.

“This dump’s headed into the ditch with that kind of setup.”

“You’re too weak to even steer it into the ditch. Marcos, never mind. Bad idea.”

“That’s enough,” said Sarah. “I’m serious.”

“Sarah’s serious, watch out,” Carl said.

“I know she’s serious, you know why? Because she’s the only real brains over here.”

“If that’s the case, why did I go and marry your brother?”

They laughed, Kip along with them, and Franny, though both saw this was family banter, intimate and breakneck, and knew to stay clear.

“Because you were too smart to marry a dusty desert mule like Delf here, is why. Like that self-portrait photograph he brought.”

“She just likes older men,” said Delfino.

“Shit. Mature, more like,” said Carl.

“Very old men,” Delfino said.

“Refined.”

“Legend in his own mind.”

“A seasoned stud.”

“Broke-down plow horse.”

“Wild bronco.”

“Sodbust jenny.”

“What does Franny think?”

“Jesus, don’t drag her into this,” Marcos grinned.

“Gelding. Glue base.”

“That’s enough already,” Sarah said. “Really, Delf. Don’t say no without giving it some thought.”

Carl reversed course, abruptly becoming tranquil, pensive. “So what was on your agenda today, Montoya? Saw your truck was gone the afternoon.”

This was how it was done, by hard turns. Delfino immediately joined his brother’s solemnity. “I went over to visit Kayley and Daddy. Been a while since I was there. Quite a few fresh stones.”

“That’s what happens in graveyards.”

Was this why skulls smiled? Kip wondered.

“You’ll know soon enough,” Delfino couldn’t resist. “Laid some fresh flowers for the grandparents, too. Hard to imagine Juliar’s been dead almost a century.”

“If Marcos here has children who have children, I wonder if they’ll bother to lay fresh-cut flowers at our graves.”

“Plastic ones, more like,” Marcos said, “or virtual,” trying to joust, to keep up with the other Montoya men, though the mention of his great-grandfather stirred a memory of his youthful sightings of what he still believed was a ghost from Juliar’s day, the woman rumored to have built this ranch.

“Better plastic than nothing. Or virtual, whatever that is.”

As the evening drew on, conversation flowed with great affable angularity, while Marcos withdrew into his thoughts, recalling that apparition and wondering whether, if he ever had a son or daughter, he or she would walk that same river road and see her in the cottonwood field. Ghosts were, he’d decided, for children. Adults with heads screwed on straight couldn’t see them—at least he hadn’t been able to, he who had seen her easily enough when he was younger. Maybe ghosts are attracted to children, since what they must really wish for is to be as wildly alive as youngsters. Maybe it was the wine, or the visit to Tsankawi, or that look Kip was giving him from beyond some pale himself, but Marcos had the strangest thought. This nonexistent child of his, would it understand what was happening when it was still in the womb? Comprehend through some process of human biology—the same process of information coding that told its small body to develop five fingers on each hand—what its life might be like? Was a fetus like a prebirth ghost? Could it predream? Sarah once told him that she’d held a radio up to her belly when she was pregnant with him and he’d responded with a vigorous dance recital. Brahms, Chubby Checker, it didn’t matter. After that she’d often let the unborn Marcos listen to music, he and she playing together that way, across the distance of her taut skin. How had he known the Twist? When he kicked and punched and pushed, what had he, the unnamed Marcos, believed he was seeing through his closed eyes in that amniotic cosmos?

God, it was getting late. For all of them. From cemetery to womb and back to the life that lay between. Marcos took Franny’s hand and said goodnight. Sarah hoped everybody would sleep well. Carl yawned and went to bed. Delfino and Kip sat at the table alone, washed by silence, saying nothing yet somehow everything.