Ariel's Crossing (7 page)

Too weak to do much more than swear his strength was returning, Kip spent the next weeks strolling his I.V. tree up the corridors and down, with a brave smile on his unshaven face. On good days he did what he could to pay, as it were, his way. He encouraged an old fellow from Guachupangue, one Alvas Trujillo, to play cards—he, Kip, who’d never much liked games—speaking with him in more than passingly competent Spanish until the viejito’s emphysema worsened. Kip gathered, even before the doctor ordered him to be moved, that the tubes expediting oxygen to his nostrils were insufficient life support to keep him alive and the ambulance that might have taken Kip over to Los Alamos Community took Trujillo instead. And he engaged others in various states of decline—the overdose patient here; the head-injury patient there; the forlorn smiling little woman who clutched to her chest an exhausted Teddy bear in one hand and a Porky Pig in the other. The center managed several dozen residents, with a bed or two to spare. He asked Sarah if he could sweep the floors, or mop, or help out in the kitchen.

“Get better, we’ll square things some other day,” she told him, an arrangement that made Kip more restless than becalmed, as his continued impostoring began to weigh on him. Sarah was so straight, he so crooked. More than once he contemplated slipping out one night and running away from the Hill, presumably this time forever. But he knew it was a coward’s game, so stayed put.

Weeks ran into months. Some days were better than others. He and Sarah managed to make light of his unevenness after their own fashion. Mornings, she came into the room, brushed the curtain aside, and asked, “How’s the weather, my friend?” Depending on how he felt, Kip would reply, “Overcast with possible showers,” or “Sunny and continued warm.” If he didn’t have a sense of how the day was going to go, he might say, “Barometer’s broken.”

The Montoyas continued to be charitable. Carl dropped in to visit once a week and Marcos came by from time to time with his friend Franny and talked about horses—his Western Pleasure stud, a new yearling filly. Kind of them, but it begged the question, Who should care about Kip Calder? He had led a life of not much trusting people, and now he was doing just that with Sarah—trusting her. Had he really agreed to undergo the procedure, the chemotherapy, and see what happened? They’d done blood work, taken the scans, discovered the tumor. Hard to believe she’d managed to win such concessions from him. Suicide was no longer in the cards.

Meanwhile, the Ariel question came to temporary closure. She hadn’t come to find him. All for the best. He now wanted to get well in order not to see but evade her. Of late, not a night passed during which he failed to castigate himself for having invited Brice to Chimayó to set the record straight. History is meant to be elusive, unfinished and unfinishable. By trying to tame his past he only unleashed more of the present. He certainly wouldn’t blame Ariel if she trashed his pathetic tokens and told Brice and Jess that it was all too late.

Finish this chemo, put on a few pounds, get his strength back, and split. He could get a cash job somewhere and send the money to Sarah. Alone again, nameless. It was a pretty dream, but he knew he wasn’t employable. Knew his running days were over. Knew his avenues of escape had closed.

Beyond his window the skies continually changed from azure to white to pink to amethyst to amber to mauve. Summer walked by, fall behind it, and then it snowed outside, and the snow draped itself in the boughs of ponderosas on the bluffs of Acid Canyon and set white hats on the strawberry pots on the patio, itself covered in powder. The flowering fruit trees then blossomed, and patients planted seeds and seedlings in the raised beds—homely snapdragons and ugly petunias—which they could access from their wheelchairs and walkers. Cassin finches returned to the bird feeders, and still he was not dead. Indeed, Kip, having balded last autumn at the behest of chemicals and then, over winter and into this spring, regrown a head of hair in their aftermath, was more alive than Sarah had ever seen him. He pushed patients’ wheelchairs, even bounced around atop large red exercise-therapy balls with other convalescents, rocking and rolling to Menudo on the loudspeaker. He watched
I Love Lucy
dubbed into Spanish on the television with a fellow who looked for all the world like a very old baby in a robe printed with foxhunting scenes. Kip was coming along so nicely that the resident nurse allowed him to take over feeding the tropical fish in the saltwater aquarium—a red-eye tetra and Indian dwarf botia, an exotic silvery bichir that he contemplated for hours on end. When Sarah inquired, the doctors agreed that all indications were his cancer was in remission. The question was what to
do
with him. Once more, he had nowhere to go and soon would have nowhere to stay, either.

Kip faced a new dilemma brought about by, of all things, his improving health. One question formulated deep in the night when he couldn’t sleep any better than other insomniacs who resided at the center was whether or not he should allow himself to continue with the broadening respect he felt toward Sarah Montoya. Where did she think he ought to go? What should he do? Could he tell her that the drifting, seesaw fantasy of reuniting with or running from his abandoned daughter made him feel more alone than ever? Could he try to tell her who he was? Did he even know anymore?

As it happened, he needn’t have worried about some of what he wanted to confide to her. Having slowly turned it over in her mind as Kip processed through his recovery, Sarah remembered the name suddenly, an unusual joining of Anglo and Hispanic, not unlike her own. Emma Inez, she thought as she walked from Juniper across the long grass lawn toward Fuller Lodge, where, in a cluster of small rooms on the top floor, she meant to look it up in the records of the Historical Museum. All of it came back to her as she stood on the grounds of that most recognizable landmark in town, where the Manhattan Project physicists had argued theory, schedule, strategy, and everything else under the sun about their atomic gadget during colloquia in the greatroom, held before the massive tuffstone fireplace where burning logs big as men cast an amicable glow over the proceedings. A butterfly wafted by Sarah like some sentient rusted leaf as she recalled hearing how this Emma Inez and her husband had been killed in a car crash—something to do with a trip back east, in the late sixties, to visit their boy at college in New York. That boy, nicknamed Kip was he not, would be this very same William Calder, her charge now. The wind, still invested with winter, ruffled her navy blue wool coat fronted with bone buttons as she turned back toward where she’d parked near the movie theater. She walked with her arms crossed, deep in thought.

The day on which she intended to confront him as to why he would want to remain anonymous in this place where he had been born and raised, and from which he’d gone on to be a local but unknown hero in Asia, was the same day Kip decided to attempt his revelations to Sarah in his own roundabout way. Not finding him in his room, she was told that he was out back of the infirmary, where she came upon him raking stones and troweling the flower bed in which columbines and lavender would soon be blooming.

She wished him good morning, and he her. “Have a moment?” she asked and Kip, face pinkened by the morning light and his exertions, answered by saying he’d been wanting to discuss a couple of things with her if she had the time. He rose stiffly and sat on one of the rocks that served as perimeter for the garden. Sarah sat beside him.

“At the risk of sounding like an ingrate, I hope you don’t mind my saying I don’t understand why I’m alive.”

“You let us help you is why.”

“I appreciate that. But what I mean is, I’m left with the question, What for?”

“You’re obviously meant to be alive or else you wouldn’t be.”

“It wasn’t what I wanted at the time, but whether I wanted it or not, I’m here thanks to you.”

“Thank you back.”

“Why thank me?”

She shrugged a shoulder. “Because you lose most of your people in a place like this. Sometimes they go in a matter of days or weeks, other times they’re among the living dead for years. Dignity and comfort are just about all we can offer. What I’m saying is, I appreciate your recuperation.”

Kip quietly said, “Dying’s easy compared to living. Don’t get me wrong. Like I say, I’m grateful. But if I don’t do something that makes up for it somehow, don’t use this spare chance, what’s the point? The world doesn’t need another air waster.”

“I’m not all that romantic or religious but you’ll forgive me for saying there’s some purpose to everything. Living on a ranch, I see it every day. Ecosystems—you’re still part of one, like it or not.”

She wondered how to broach her question. As she opened her mouth to speak—ask him directly; he was a direct man, she’d come to believe, despite the fact his mind sometimes cruised in ellipses—Kip asked her something instead, out of the blue.

Did she know that the Spaniards, who’d had difficulty pronouncing the Tewa language, had renamed Nambé after Francis of Assisi, feeling a greater affinity toward him than any crazy local bird spirit—
k’untsire
—for whom the pueblo people cast cornmeal heavenward during ceremonies that the colonialist padres frowned upon as fetishist?

“You’ve been reading,” she said.

“Somebody left a book behind.”

“Well Saint Francis, I know, is the patron saint of the poor and crippled,” Sarah said, wondering where this new exchange was leading.

“I like Francis, but
k’untsire
and the idea that we should act with goodwill and generosity toward the gods—those things are even better. Fact they need our goodwill keeps the gods in their place.”

“It’s good if you think gods need to be put in their place.”

“Oh, they do,” Kip nodded.

“Saint Francis fed the birds but he always knew that it was the birds who were letting him feed them. It was their gift to him, not the other way around. Kind of the same thing.”

Kip said, “A little different, I think, but I get your drift.”

“Would you rather be Saint Francis or the birds?”

“Either way.”

Now Kip was getting lost.

“You know what the word
Nambé
means in Tewa, too, then?”

“Something to do with circling,” said Kip.

They watched a hummingbird, a rufous, at the plastic feeder, both of them quiet in the warming light.

“You’re from around here, aren’t you.”

“Nambé
means ‘roundish earth’ or ‘circle of earth,’ doesn’t it? And the pueblo is protected by some kind of water dragon.”

“People used to call you Kip, didn’t they.”

He paused to look down at his hands, which silently clapped, palms touching, fingers splayed. His profile was sharp, forehead smoother than riverstone though finely lined; his jaw and nose were so clearly defined as to seem drawn in ink.

“This book said that the Nambé Indians buried the water dragon when they built their dam up in the Sangre foothills by the falls.”

Her turn to nod. A long silence before Kip spoke again.

“I used to go hunting down in the box canyons around here when I was young. Jackrabbits mostly. I remember being haunted by this strange feeling that they could sense me taking aim at them. They couldn’t see me, couldn’t smell me. But they knew. You could see them square themselves in the crosshairs of the rifle scope. Like they knew they were about to take the bullet and just like that be gone. Well, that’s how I’m feeling. Squared up in the crosshairs. Maybe I always felt this way but never admitted it to myself.”

“I’m sorry, Kip. Kip’s the name, right?”

“People used to call me all kinds of stuff,” he said. “But I haven’t lied to you, if that’s what you’re implying.”

Sarah didn’t flinch. Again out of the blue, Kip asked, “What happens when you spend your life running away from home and then life forces you to go back, but there’s no one waiting for you?”

“If Saint Francis is your patron saint, and I think he is, you find out that other people are willing to make their home yours,” she said, causing him to look at her with the first wholehearted smile Sarah had ever seen on his face. Their dialogue did not come to an end before Kip confessed what had brought him to Chimayó a year earlier, and what had driven him across the desert into her life and the lives of her family.

In the weeks after she learned about Kip Calder, Ariel kept to her routine. Mornings, she strode up Broadway, passing through Union Square with its statues of Washington on horseback and Gandhi carrying his humble staff. She walked with shoulder bags full of manuscripts—a studious burro with panniers, she liked to joke—crosstown to the West Thirties. At the publishing house where she worked she’d recently been promoted from editorial assistant to assistant editor, a titular hopscotch that brought her little more money but twice the work. Which she didn’t mind. She felt lucky to have a window in the cluttered niche that served as her office and everyone else’s file closet. From it she could see other glass and steel buildings, like a colossal forest of quartz crystals, when glancing up from the page at hand. If her budget allowed, she ate lunch at a soba restaurant with other women from the office. An apple and yogurt on solo days. Evenings, she retraced her steps, stopping by a favorite bookstore to browse the new-arrivals table. Some nights she went out with friends, but often she settled in with the book of the moment or her journal, which she filled with word sketches, ideas toward a narrative of her own.

Ariel’s friendship with her parents continued uninterrupted, almost as if nothing had happened. She looked forward as much as ever to Sunday night dinners with them in Chelsea. She and Jessica cooked ratatouille or pasta primavera while Brice uncorked wine and parodied the news in preposterous Elizabethan doggerel. This prime minister was a whoreson dog. That defense contractor a boodle of lily-livered knaves.

So yes, she not only went on loving the father she knew, but went on liking him as one of her two oldest pals. She admired him as ever for his outmoded lefty politics, his amused cynicism about how readily his generation had sold out, cashed in, traded tie-dyes for pinstripes. All those doves become bulls and bears. All those dreamy hippies now weighing their retirement options. A defense attorney, Brice was committed to representing idealists, pacifists, protestors in need of legal help. Ethical remained the word for him, Ariel believed. For both her parents, despite their one grand mistruth, now expunged from the record.