Ariel's Crossing (28 page)

The solitariness of Granna’s sainthood was confirmed by how rarely her phone rang. If not Bonnie Jean, the caller was either Brice or someone soliciting for a magazine subscription or new, lower long-distance rates. Hearing Charlie on the other end was unexpected, then, but what he asked was more surprising yet because the issue he raised was so conspicuous, so indisputable, so obvious, that it should never have escaped Ariel’s attention in the first place. Embarrassing—how could she have posted those signs inquiring after the lost Kip and really have believed her aunt, uncle, cousin, grandmother—
someone
in the family—wouldn’t become aware of her search? She’d come close that night in White Rock to confessing why she was here. Close wasn’t disclosure, however. What a mare’s nest.

“Sam told me,” Charlie said. “What’s this all about, Ariel?”

Was his voice quivering? What was the protocol?

“I guess those posters are a little confusing, Uncle Charles.” She who never addressed him by his proper name.

“You’re right about that.”

“Does Aunt Bonnie know?”

“I told Sam to keep his mouth shut. Apparently she hasn’t seen anything. But my question is, again, what’s going on?”

Just say it. “Brice is my stepfather.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Brice isn’t my birth father. Kip is.”

A silence, then, “How come you never told us?”

Protocol, once more, decorum. How crazy was it that these conventions, meant to sustain social order, as often as not skewed things between people? Again, though, Ariel had always imagined this revelation to be Brice’s sole prerogative and she’d followed his continued silence in the matter with what now appeared to her to be an unmanageable devotion. The truth was out now. She realized, for better or worse, it was as much her truth as anyone else’s. Speak, say something. “I only found out myself a few years ago.”

“So you’re telling me Kip Calder’s your father?”

“Biologically, is all.”

“Is all?”

Charlie had other questions but ceased asking. Perhaps Bonnie Jean hadn’t been so wrong about Brice all these years. Obviously he did have a screw loose in the ethics department. “Sam and I can only play dumb for so long, and Bonnie’s bound to find out sometime. Why not tell her, Ariel? She’d appreciate the gesture, and besides, your aunt loves you a little more than I think you give her credit for.”

Everything had become about articulation, had it not. Ariel’d never heard her uncle speak more thoughtfully, cogently. She agreed to his gentle request. “She’s probably over at the center, isn’t she.”

“Where else?”

“I’m going now,” Ariel said.

“Just tell her, that’s all.”

“Thanks, Uncle Charles.”

“Please.
Charlie.”

“Thanks, Uncle Charlie.”

During the drive over, Ariel composed her words to Bonnie Jean but found herself much more concerned with how her grandmother would react—presuming, that is, she should be apprised at all. Why hadn’t she gone around and taken down those stupid posters after she decided to abandon the hunt? The apostate at work again? Backsliding away from her firm decision because some hope of finding him still lived in her? It was true, regarding matters still living, that she hadn’t taken any steps to arrange the abortion, either. What was she doing?

She’d closely followed her grandmother McCarthy’s recovery, its daily routines and subtle victories. With Ariel at her side, the woman now pushed her walker down the center’s linoleum corridors, greeting those she had gotten to know a little, and then out into the stone-enclosed garden, where she might sit and proselytize for Christ, preacher to the choir. She glowed with renewed life. Ariel had splurged on a silk robe for her, bright blue with white piping to match her blue leather slippers. Bonnie did her hair and painted her nails. Her appetite, never ravenous, grew day by day. Applesauce and rice pudding had graduated to gravied chicken with hot biscuits. She could read for herself but still loved to hear Ariel’s voice, so feigned eye strain—they both knew it was a ruse—to prompt her granddaughter, whose delivery was as impassioned as if she’d written the words herself. Oddly, Granna had not mentioned Brice in all this time. Had she forgotten him in some neuropathway fracture? She’d initially struggled in speech therapy with simple words like
fish
and
foot
while recognizing, uttering, and defining with marvelous ease more abstruse terms—
neuropathway,
for instance, and
fracture.
Had his name fallen between synaptic cracks?

Ariel wondered, as she got out of her car and walked toward the twin glass doors of the convalescent center, if she hadn’t embarked upon failing her stepfather in much the same way he’d failed her.
Stepfather
—she’d never thought of Brice in that sense before, the cool, distancing legality of the word. What was its etymology if not
one-step-removed father?
She decided that the term was, in her case, grossly inappropriate. Lawful, but false. She’d never use it again. But how would she react when Bonnie insisted that it was the “only possible term,” as soon she undoubtedly would do? Could she really respond, “Terms are what criminals headed to prison get, and Brice is no criminal”—as she would?

Yes, but not before Sam greeted her in the visitors’ lounge of the center, wearing his uniform, Bulls jersey and camouflage army surplus cargoes, with the new addition of a tiny silver nose ring. She began to compliment the jewelry by way of making some gesture toward the boy, but Sam beat her counterfeit compliment to the draw, blurting, “Why look for some guy you don’t know?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that.”

“How so?”

“Listen, Sam. Where’s your mother?”

“With Grandma.”

“In her room?”

“No, down in the solarum.”

Ariel’s instinct to say
solarium
was subsumed by the absolute need to unburden herself, come clean about Kip with those here who did love her and were presences, rather than an absence, in her life.

As she began walking side by side down the corridor with her cousin—who’d asked, “So what’s with this Kip guy, anyhow?”—Ariel pressed ahead with an explanation, as if to rehearse her words for Bonnie. They passed the nurses’ station, passed some patients’ rooms. And they passed the office of Sarah Montoya, who was seated with the family of a dying invalid, citing, as she had done quite often in these past couple of years, the case of a veteran she’d encountered at death’s verge and who, despite every indication he would never pull through, was now living strong in his remission and had become nothing less than a member of her own family.

“Hope isn’t the worst risk you can take,” she said. “Without really meaning to, my friend Kip has taught me that—”

“Kip is my—” Ariel said, then stopped, having heard this echo quietly resound from the open doorway beside her. She glanced in at the woman seated behind a table within, and the woman, who’d heard that echo, too, looked up at the convergingly hopeful face of a youthful female Kip Calder, and recognized instantly who she was.

Knowing she’d misheard, sure of it, Ariel took her cousin by the arm and proceeded, shaking her head. Sarah Montoya apologized to the family seated there, rose from her chair, promising she’d be right back. Ariel and Sam were nearly at the solarium doors when Sarah caught up to them, calling, “Ariel Calder?”

If Ariel had been miles underwater, she might not have moved so slowly turning to face the woman who had spoken her name, the name that might have been hers had everyone’s life been lived just somewhat differently.

Ariel Calder. Stepfather.
Invented words, inaccurate but tenable, too.

“Yes,” she breathed.

“My name is Sarah Montoya, and I know a man who’d be very happy to meet you.”

Ariel’s face drained white. She reached for Sam’s bony shoulder, but missed, and would have fallen to the floor had her cousin and Sarah not caught her in their collective arms.

So much was happening at the same time.

For Jessica, as always, the rising moon upstate meant blue shadows cast by the apple trees in the scraggly orchard, and the last brave fireflies of the season twirling slowly upward in search of mates, so slowly in the nocturnal warmth that you could easily palm one and place it in a hollyhock blossom and imprison it there by sealing the petals shut with a toothpick. The hollyhock would then come alive with eerie light. If you caught another firefly, and another, and detained them in hollyhock flowers, you’d soon have a miraculous twinkling hedge of hollyhocks, the sight of which you would never forget.

It was the full moon, and Jessica, who hadn’t played this rather pitiless game for many years, stood out under its barren amber in the field above the orchard, beside the old creamery, neither quite laughing nor crying. She’d learned the hollyhock trick from Ariel, who had learned it in turn from the boys at the bottom of the road, down at the dairy farm. Those boys had all of them grown up now, just like Ariel, and were gone, as was Ariel. Wasn’t it one of the laws of nature that everything runs down, moves away from its source? Was that Isaac Newton? Ariel would know. Jessica herself had once known, but memory runs down more precipitously than other things in nature. Law of forgetfulness.

She lay on the pond dock. Its grayed planks were still warm from the long day. Pressure-treated wood—it started out slime green but forgot its color. There you go. She could smell the algae carpet on the water’s stagnant surface, green foam teeming with photosynthetic life. The wise trout swam in the cold depths. The stand of cattails stirred, though there was no wind. A frog gulped. A thrush called, another replied. Jessica looked at the first stars, thinking, Families are supposed to last. Memories go, minds go, but family is family. What on earth remained with Ariel gone? Neither Jessica nor her husband, however much they loved their daughter, could have suspected how central she was to their ecology, their balance and sanity. Kip wouldn’t try to turn her against them, would he? Probably not, but the abruptness of Ariel’s departure, combined with her rare uncommunicativeness, did leave Jessica open to all kinds of bleak thoughts.

Her husband remained, though he’d drifted these last few weeks in the absence of his version of a norm. More white hair, she could have sworn, at his temples and filigreed on his forearms. An extra punitive glass or three of wine at dinner. His distracted morning face, new dark rings under his eyes, drinking coffee after intermittent sleep.

Jessica had come to the farm alone. She needed time away from the city. The only problem was this. The house was as if haunted by Ariel, her recent presence reflected in every room. This half-read book left on the kitchen bench. That pair of sunglasses in the pantry—had she forgotten to take them?

The man in the moon regarded Jessica with the same poker-faced insouciance he showed toward all who ever stared at that unblinking eye. Sure, he was aloof and self-composed, but he had no answers. Having revisited that not completely uncruel game with the fireflies and hollyhocks, Ariel’s mother had released them before coming down to the dock, flicking toothpicks here and there as she demystified the garden, robbed it of its faux Japanese lanterns. As for the man in the moon, he could take a flying leap.

Should she go to New Mexico to help Ariel? The idea seemed as threadbare as the cotton dress she wore in this drowning light. What else was left her? To wait and worry?

Her daughter, at that very moment, two time zones removed from Jess’s early glowing evening, was bringing Sarah Montoya into Granna’s room, where the elderly woman lay on her bed asleep in the dying afternoon. Whispering so as not to wake her, Bonnie rose from her bedside chair and told Mrs. Montoya how glad she was to see her again. They had met once before, Bonnie recalled, when Mother was admitted, though she didn’t quite understand what all the fuss was about just now, as Sarah and Ariel quietly spoke of connections about to be made. Something was wrong. Ariel and Kip Calder? What was this all about? And what did it have to do with Mrs. Montoya? When Bonnie asked if they should wake Granna to let her know her granddaughter was off to Nambé, Ariel said not to disturb her—she’d be back soon. Bonnie looked at Sam, who was staring at Ariel wondering whether he had ever been alone in the same room with four women before.

Inside the farmhouse, walking its pearlescent rooms, Jessica thought about what life might have been like if Kip had come back between tours of duty and believed, as he should have, that Ariel was his daughter. What kind of father would Kip have made? How differently would Ariel have turned out? What would it have been like to be friends with Brice, to watch him marry another woman, maybe have five kids instead of just the one, who wasn’t his own flesh and blood. They had made their rounds from doctor to doctor and finally discovered it was not Brice but Jessica who was barren. Harsh word, good for what it meant. She remembered Brice’s using a male word for it,
impotent,
just as bad, and remembered shouting, “Barren, the word is
barren,
unless you mean
incompetent.”
That wasn’t their best week together, yet, like the week itself, the crisis passed.

Jessica telephoned Brice to say goodnight and soon fell asleep not in her bed but Ariel’s. Her last image of the day was neither of daughter nor husband but rather of a young man she’d known back in the sixties who’d been terribly sure of himself. A man with long fluent hands, beautiful in his pleasures as well as his anger, eloquent in his lovemaking and in his words, softly telling her that he and she had been more than intimate that summer night in June.

—You’re going to have a child now.

She could hear his voice all these years later.

—I don’t get pregnant, she’d whispered back.

—Wait and see.

Long time ago. All the more incomprehensible that Kip would not believe his own prophecy. Would become so different and damaged a Kip that the falsehoods he concocted about Brice and Jessica were more real to him than his own true knowledge.

During his third tour in Laos, by then having abandoned America altogether, Kip told Wagner about his possible clairvoyance that one time, and Wagner said, —Everybody knows when they’ve made more than love. I remember being conceived.