Ariel's Crossing (5 page)

“We’ll see how you feel about things tomorrow,” said Sarah, looking at his ochred eyes. “Step at a time.”

Carl rose from the table. “Meantime, you’re alive, so get yourself a bath, for all our damn sakes,” he said, with a caballero nonchalance that disconcerted even the wary Calder, whose cup of black darjeeling had begun to bring him around. “See you later. Marcos?”

“Down in a minute.”

Kip liked the casual rhythms of the Montoya family and wondered what ironic angel bothered to direct him here. He glanced at his scratched hands and broken fingernails, still filthy though he had washed them. Must stink like a bosque skunk.

“Where you from, Bill?” Marcos sat down, displaying, like his father, an indifference toward the stranger’s dishevelment, and asking his question while he read yesterday’s
Albuquerque Journal.

“Originally?”

“Is there any other place a guy can come from but originally?”

“Marcos,” Sarah warned from the adjacent pantry.

“That’s a pretty good question,” Kip answered with a skewed but sincere smile that had the effect of making him look more unwell.

“See?” he told his mother, hoping to hide the fact he didn’t quite know what to make of this William. “No offense.”

“None taken. Besides, I’m the one who should apologize for crashing your morning. I’ll get out of your way as soon as I can.”

“You haven’t crashed anything and there’s no rush.”

Marcos studied the stranger’s glazed, meaning-filled eyes before returning to his coffee and rustling the paper as if to brush away the need for further talk. Poor dude. Doesn’t need to be pushed to get where he’s plainly going.

The front-page article was illustrated with murky colored photographs of walkers on the road to Chimayó. They estimated thirty thousand made the pilgrimage to the santuario during Holy Week, from as far away as Grants, Belen, El Rito. A few faithful had even walked from distant Alamogordo, down in the Tularosa basin where Marcos’s uncle Delfino lived. Marcos wondered, Don’t these people have work to do? and meant to mention this, but Sarah was speaking. More questions.

“You have family around here, William? Is there somebody you’d like me to call?”

“Nobody, no.”

“You were over at Chimayó for the services? Lot of people from out of town this time of the year.”

“So I saw.”

“I was there. Walk every year. I’m not much of a Catholic, but I always feel better for having done it.”

Marcos said, “Look, Chimayó was a holy place for the Indians long before Santo Niño knew his halo from a hole in the ground,” watching Kip tentatively eat a biscuit, noticing he was missing part of the little finger on his left hand. Old warhorse, he’d clearly seen his share.

“There must be somebody somewhere who’s looking for you?” she pressed.

Kip resisted, feigning an amateurish amnesia, shrugging his shoulders and moving his head slowly from left to right. Sarah missed this small spectacle, but Marcos didn’t. “He’s not sure, I don’t think.”

“Let William speak for himself.”

Marcos quietly got up to leave. Time to help Carl exercise the horses anyway.

“Thanks again,” Kip said.

“No problem.”

Kip passed the rest of that day sleeping in a guest-room bed, dressed in a pair of Carl’s pajamas, having vomited breakfast on his wet legs and feet as he showered in a bath whose walls were lined with festive Mexican tilework. That evening he managed to sit at dinner beneath a hammered-tin chandelier with the Montoya family He succeeded in keeping himself out of their conversation both as topic and as participant. Sarah tried to engage him once or twice, asking could he use another helping of posole, had he gotten some rest? She mentioned again that she wanted him to consider letting a Los Alamos doctor look him over.

Once more Kip refused, but though he’d begun to contemplate his escape, he started seriously to doubt whether it would be possible. “I’m really feeling much better now,” he said, settling on his face as healthy and robust a look as he could manage in the hope it would camouflage his dishonesty.

It didn’t. His eyes were tainted as trophy ivory, his face pleated with threadlike wrinkles, his tongue blanched. Kip looked worse after cleaning himself up and napping all day than he had when Sarah first stumbled upon him. He offered to help clear the dishes, but Carl said he had it under control, take it easy. Excusing himself, Kip returned to his room. Alone, he could smell his illness, taste its rot, like an animal licking a festered wound. He removed one shoe, undid a button of his shirt before collapsing onto the bed. All he really wanted was to descend into sleep, and if that sleep were to broaden into the deepest possible sleep, so be it. He whispered into the moist pillow as he writhed.

“Ariel,” softly, trying to conjure his daughter’s face.

As he drifted away in his skiff of suffering, he could have sworn she was standing beside him here, smiling a prayerful smile while chanting the disannulling ritual
“Los Días de los Muertos”…
dreaming in words …
“y difuntos y sin espíritu y triste y profundo desolado” …
whispering . .
. “y en las altas horas de la noche”…
words he heard in Chimayó these past days. Words he’d known since childhood when he listened, hand cupped to his ear at a wall in the old Sundt house where he grew up, as his mother prayed those nights when his physicist father worked late at the lab. Ariel, he thought, and as he looked for her in the swimming imagery of this sea of pain it was as if his mortal soul were being drawn to float free of the bonds of this burning earth and quaking body.

Kip’s daughter would always remember with crisp clarity the day she was brought in on the secret.

“Ariel,” Brice began. “When my father passed away, and your mother and I went out to New Mexico for the funeral? I wonder if you remember what you said when we got back home.”

Sitting in her favorite old stuffed chenille chair as sunlight played across the threadbare kilim rug, Ariel confessed she wasn’t sure, why? Her wavy chestnut hair, like that of a younger Jessica Rankin, pirouetted in nine directions, and her prominent cheeks were flushed from the April breezes and the hasty walk to Chelsea that weekend morning. When her mother phoned, a tone of urgency edged her voice and Ariel threw on a mishmash of clothes. Secondhand pink cardigan sweater, camouflage cargo pants, a pair of rubber clogs. Truth to tell, she believed she was being summoned to learn that her grandmother McCarthy had died.

“You made a beautiful welcome-home sign and said something I’ll never forget. You told me that since I didn’t have a father anymore, you’d be my father from then on. It was one of the kindest things anybody ever said to me.”

Ariel watched Jessica’s hand move across the sofa to take her husband’s. Averting her eyes downward, she noticed her mismatched socks. Black and blue. Almost laughed, but the mood in the room did not encourage laughter.

Jessica said, “You know how much we’ve always loved you.”

“I love you, too. Is somebody dying?”

“You remember us telling you about our friend Kip Calder?” Brice’s barrister voice descended toward meekness, as if some sorcerer had turned down the volume on the room itself.

“The one who was killed in Vietnam?”

“Well, no, he wasn’t killed.”

“I remember you talking about him.”

Jessica said, “We’ve tried to figure out how to tell you this for years and years. But there’s no way to say it, other than that I was in love with him back in college. He was your father’s best friend and we all loved each other—”

“Pretty sixties.” Ariel tried to smile, hoping this wasn’t going to be what it clearly might.

“He’s your natural father. Your biological father.”

“What?” She could feel her pulse rise. They sat not looking at one another. Finally Ariel asked, quietly, “You’re sure?”

“We’re sure,” Brice said, watching her with a regard akin to terror. What a lovely young woman she was, with her dark eyes, her eloquent unspeaking lips, her long fingers weaving and unweaving themselves like warp and woof working invisible thread. How rarely over the years had he thought of her as a stepchild. Even now, in this stunningly awkward moment, it seemed inconceivable she wasn’t of his flesh. He wondered if telling the truth was everything it was cracked up to be.

“He ran off to the war, disappeared on all of us. In some ways even on himself. Brice and I fell in love after you were born.”

“Why are you making this up?”

“Kip is your blood father,” Brice said with a finality that sank the room into deepest silence.

“Well.” Ariel sighed, staring out at the seminary across the street. The window was open and wind stirred the tulip trees and ailanthus. Some nesting sparrows squabbled. The bell on the knife sharpener’s cart rang. “Look, if you held off telling me because you were worried I wouldn’t love you anymore, or love you as much, that wasn’t a good reason. Or if you thought I couldn’t deal with it—”

“There were a thousand reasons.”

Jessica added, “None of them good, in retrospect.”

“I understand, I think,” Ariel said, numb, still disbelieving. “We can handle this, definitely.”

As best they could manage, her parents elaborated about Kip. About life a lifetime ago. About how, after his folks had died, he’d volunteered for service at just the same time Brice was becoming more active in the antiwar movement at Columbia—intimates since youth diverging at the crossroads—and had then gone the crazy extra mile into Thailand and Laos. How he’d slipped over the bamboo fence, become an invisible member of a covert paramilitary group known as the Ravens, working with anti-Communist Hmong in the jungle mountains of Long Tieng. About how he’d slipped forever into his own distant abyss, having left behind his pregnant girlfriend. And how Jessica had fallen in love with Brice, and Brice with Jess, who had never withdrawn from the memory of Kip, but had made the decision to move forward into her life.

“Why now?”

Brice told her about meeting with Kip in Chimayó. “He didn’t ask for much, just that we tell you about him and give you these,” handing her the ledger and envelope.

“Didn’t ask for much,” she echoed, holding the artifacts in limp hands. Everything was as if in a grainy black-and-white film, at a remove from itself, like life remembered rather than life being lived. “He didn’t ask for much, is that what he said?”

“Does it matter?”

She set the ledger, bound in black pebbly cloth, and the soiled envelope on the floor beside her chair. “No, I suppose it doesn’t. I never interested him, so why should he suddenly interest me?”

“Because he’s not well,” Brice said.

“No one is,” she responded, though with a voice she recognized as insincerely cold.

Jessica came over to Ariel and lay her hand on her daughter’s shoulder. “I hope you can forgive us for not telling you before.”

“We’ll get through it. He doesn’t really exist, does he, at least not in our lives.”

Fathering her father. Momming her mother. She could do that, could begin right now by urging them to believe she was fine, better than fine. All shall be well, she found herself thinking, even as she drifted into a temporary parallel universe, not wanting to admit such a cataclysm was happening to her. But look, it was. Ariel shook her head, snapping to. She must have begun to cry given how damp Brice’s handkerchief felt in her hand and how worried Jessica’s face looked as she helped her daughter drink from this glass of water. She told them she was sorry to be abrupt but she needed to get some air.

“You want one of us to walk with you?”

“I’d rather be by myself for a while.”

“You’ll be all right?”

Ariel kissed them and left. Ledger under arm and envelope stuck without ceremony in the back pocket of her pants, she walked and walked as one can only in New York, in rich silence framed by squealing brakes, talking pedestrians, nearby sirens, the subway rumbling belowfoot, every kind of noise. She was weeping and not weeping, blindly finding her way along. No matter what, she had to acknowledge that the magical ordinariness of her life had been blown to bits. She bought cigarettes at a kiosk, though she rarely smoked, and kept walking in a daze until she found herself by the boat basin in Central Park. A flash of light reflected off a white toy schooner, a model whose sails had caught a gust that knocked it flat on the surface of the brown pool where it began to swamp. Two small boys, its landlocked captains, argued over what to do. She watched this sinking as if it were the most interesting event she’d ever seen. Sitting on the concrete lip of the basin, she thought of how her past was similarly humbled now, like a silly play boat succumbing to brackish water and fickle wind.

Who did she think she had been up until now? Brice once said, punning on her name, —You’re a view from above. An airy spirit.

But from this new vantage, what kind of view had that been, and how free a spirit was she?

Never having had reason to believe otherwise, she’d presumed for all the world that she knew herself, insofar as anybody could know such a thing. Absurd hubris, but the idea had endured through two dozen years. All that was undone by this news. Busted, shattered, despite her assurances otherwise to her parents. Still, lighting yet another cigarette, Ariel remembered fondly the visceral sense of being a little girl sure about this or that. Of knowing she’d been born not far from this very spot. That every night at eight her father would read her to sleep. That her mother would walk her to school until she was old enough to get there by herself. Trusting the basics, the building blocks.

Most of what she’d always believed remained true, though, did it not? The problem was degrees of familiarity fading toward the unknowable. Brice’s mother, the religious one in the family, once told her that her name was also that of a desert city in the Book of Isaiah. How could she save the person Ariel from the fate of her namesake city, destroyed millennia ago? Architects know better than to build on uncertain bedrock, but Ariel lacked an architect’s skills, never having faced the need before. One clear memory could prove that much—the memory of a sharply determined city kid on an innocent afternoon in deep December, asked along with the other children in her grade-school class to make a faithful rendering of the buildings outside their bedroom windows. She could recall her excitement on that darkening day which threatened the first snowfall of the season, and the glorious dread her teacher stirred in her beating heart with that word
faithful.