Ariel's Crossing (11 page)

Musing through the notebook, Ariel admired its purple, blue, and black inks, its meticulous script. Here was a palimpsest of physics, facts, educated guesses, not to mention deep regrets from days as distant as the stars burning above in the present night. Flickering suns, fiery nuclear reactions chained to their positions in the sky, any one of which—all of which, really—might have burned out millennia ago, and who’d be the wiser?

Page after page was saturated with pyramiding blocks of theory—frustrating if not unnerving—punctuated where her eye might rest on something at least half recognizable, such as
RaLa core
or
betatron pulse
or
U235
, which she remembered from chemistry class and the table of elements that had hung
on
the wall at school. She turned the pages from left to right, as if reading Japanese, since what could it matter which way she traveled through this gnarly thicket of science.

What caught her fingers from pitching forward—or backward, as it were—was the sporadic island of English. Her grandfather making the occasional observation for his private keeping, all these years later reluctantly read by someone he’d never known.
Emma tonight at Norris’s shindig radiant in that new organza, a terrible splurge for her birthday but worth every penny.
And on another page,
Sick with flu these last four days, Kip down with same grippe, played pinochle with him, he won every time.
And another,
McCarthys over to dinner last night, roast of lamb with mint sauce, Mrs. McC ate only yams, testing vegetarianism and why not, more lamb for me this morning, Brice turning into an awful swell kid and I hope he has positive influence on the Kipper.

Thoughts such as these, the unadorned flow of people living their lives as simply as the top security and sequestration of Los Alamos would allow. The diary of this scientist, yes, and a deadly brilliant one at that, but withal a person who married a girl from a family on the outskirts of Havana—did this account in part for Ariel’s black irises and olive skin? she wondered, as a thrill ran through her at the probability—who bore him one son, the orphaned and orphaning Kip. The diarist meticulously kept what were surely prohibited, possibly treasonous records, from prebomb 1944 through the middle sixties, of his activities at the Los Alamos Research Laboratory, his specific work on the Project, his initial patriotism, subsequent growing doubts, and final dire misgivings about the results of his labors.

There were other darker elucidations in the book, and Ariel cast an eye over them as if over the history they encapsulated. How could she not shudder at the agony of

…
At least the murderer knows the horror of the knife driven into his victim’s heart, can try like Macbeth’s wife to wash that blood off stained hands, but how do I help sharpen these ten trillion knives to rain on the heads of victims I will never know, never meet, never bury with my hands
—
how in hell do I go about mourning them?
No hagas mal que bien no esperes,
Emma says
—
Don’t wrong others and expect kindness in return. Maybe that’s why my boy doesn’t like it here. Nothing I do makes him want to stay home. His eye is constantly looking away from mine. Nobody’s said anything to us about it but Emmy and I think everybody on the Hill knows what’s happening. They feel sorry but I just feel discouraged. Last week the MPs found him down in Bandelier, hiding in one of the Indian caves. Even camping in a cold cave is better, by his lights, than sleeping here under the same roof as his dad and mom. I
s
this what I’ve done? Our only child. Brought this on all of us
—
Kip, too?

Eyes welling, she clutched the ledger against her chest. It reeked richly of must, familiar, smelling like the rain-damp hay she and Brice used to spread as mulch over grass seed whenever one of those crazy apple trees toppled under a killing frost and had to be yanked out by its roots in spring, chopped up, and run through the chipper. She knew with the precision of a child’s memory where each tree used to stand, the ones she climbed when she was a kid, fell from, breaking her arm once, her wrist another time. She remembered her horse, Maxwell, on whose broad back she loved to fly through the summer woods, until he ran her beneath a low branch that dropped her to the ground, dislocating her shoulder and fracturing ribs. Life measured by broken bones. Remembered, too, how Buddha often acrobated the branches, bringing home once a fledgling wren from a nest he raided, not because he wanted to eat the poor beast—she shouted at him,
You’re overfed as it is, you murderer
—but because, as her father tried to explain while she cradled its gangly fluid corpse in her hands, —Ariel, cats kill birds. It’s in their blood. It seems cruel. But it’s natural, part of life.

And what about people? What’s in
their
blood? she’d wondered as she dug an afternoon grave for the tiny wren.

She could resolve, now, what had been posed those many years ago down in the field beyond the porch where she sat on this different but oddly similar evening: Kip was in her blood. And in the wake of her initial shock at learning those three years ago that he was her father, she had come to a quick judgment that beyond the shared genetics, the mutual biology, Kip should not be pertinent to her life. But he was. He was.

Yet if Kip’s was a runner’s blood, so might hers be. That would certainly explain why she had run—or if not exactly run, then walked deliberately—away from him when given the chance to encounter the man. Or had her refusal to deal with it been more a case of the ostrich burying its head in the sand? The ostrich that sometimes suffocates in the same sand that was meant to protect it from harm. Daughterhood, she thought, scrunching at the page before her, lit by a citronella candle that was supposed to discourage mosquitoes but didn’t. Who in their right mind would put a contentedly unaware nonentity through it? How could anybody feel compelled to drag serene nothingness from the void into the harshness of the baby cradle and not expect a great deal of justified crying and crapping? She shook her head. One problem at a time, she thought.

Reading deeper into the book she uncovered Kip’s hidden design, the text within a text he intended for her to find.
Dear Ariel,
his letter began where the elder Calder’s writings left off, abruptly, after a diary entry for 1968 alluding to an imminent trip to New York, where his and Emma Inez’s son was drifting and ruckusing his way through Columbia. Ariel wondered whether Brice’s eyes had passed over these words but sensed not. Given he hadn’t mentioned any letter from Kip back when he presented her with his confession and this battered inheritance, he probably didn’t know that her other father had written his own thoughts in an addendum.

Dear Ariel,
she read,

There was a man I met and knew for a while many years ago who believed in every religion and religious book, read the Bible and was versed in it, and who loved above everything else to quote from Proverbs. I don’t know whether or not you are a religious person, but I liked this man, and in time I came to like some of his quotes. One in particular comes to mind now, which went, No one who conceals transgressions will prosper, but one who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy. I apologize for this terrible beginning to what must be a terrible letter to read (one you may never read but that I need to write), but I wanted to say that the proverb promises, in exchange for setting things right, nothing more than clemency, maybe a kind of pity, in the best sense. I hope that you will find it in your heart to feel mercy for me even though you don’t owe me mercy or anything else. There is nothing more I could wish for, however, than clemency, mercy, whatever the right word would be. If you can’t give it, you can’t, and you would certainly be within your rights not to. Love is out of the question, I realize. You don’t know me and logically you cannot love what you don’t know. What’s more, I’m not sure love would even be appropriate to the circumstances. Understanding may be the best I can hope for, and at least a chance to end my concealment, because the time has come for me to give that up for the rotten burden it always was. If you can find enough patience to hear me out, my ghost will be grateful.

Eyes going out of focus, Ariel whispered that last clause,
my ghost will be grateful.
Her voice, and she heard it, strained not to be taut with rebuke. What was to rebuke? Here was a man trying to articulate what must have been inarticulable, as he set pen to a notebook that his own father had begun. Two ghosts speaking to her from the portal of one book would be overwhelming in any circumstances, but in her current state of mind the whole thing seemed altogether unearthly.

Written in different inks, apparently at different times and in different places, this letter unfurled over some dozen pages. Kip plainly had started his letter, then started it again and again. His addendum constituted a mess of addenda. The document attached to Calder senior’s might be deemed a father’s final failure to communicate with his daughter or, inversely, his most faithful possible account of the bewilderment he felt. And what had Kip made of his own father’s confessions of remorse, his feelings of accountability, the growing perplexities that had been terminated when the physicist and his wife were killed on their way to visit a son who himself was about to spin off the planet? She lifted the glass to her lips and drained it down, shuddering at its bitter juniper bite.

I will probably be dead by the time you read this, and good riddance. Your parents, among the best friends I ever had when we were all younger than you are now, will have told you about our friendship, about how your mother and I were together and in love, and how I went off to serve in Ca Mau, a dump way to the south of Saigon, then went underground in Laos, trying in that same gesture to find and lose myself. I got the latter done, but now failingly work at the former. Better never to lose yourself. Saves the trouble of having to go on a hunt. They’ll have told you that Jess was pregnant with you and that I didn’t trust her, or Brice, and believed you were not my child. I’ve had years to concoct every kind of rationale for my abandonment of you, Jess, Brice, the world I knew, choosing instead to marry mistrust and return to a war that I barely believed in anymore either, but that in my callous juvenile stupidity seemed more reasonable to me
—
can you imagine?

Reasonable! An idea that only someone who’d reached real depths of unreason could muster. But yes, more reasonable at the time, than shouldering what could have been the authentic mission. I failed you, failed myself failed everyone. There is no defense.

One gift you can give yourself, if you have the patience to listen to someone you have every right to ignore, would he to cut your mother and father, Jessica and Brice, all the slack you can manage. None of this is their fault, just as none of it is yours. Where does the fault lie, other than with me? I have been all over the world, running and now walking, slowing down as I’ve come to the place where I begin to see that it lies nowhere, maybe. If I’m nowhere and the fault lies with me, then the fault lies nowhere. You’ll agree there’s a logic, a complementum as your grandfather’s sometime colleague Niels Bohr used to put it, to such a lie of reasoning.

And as tears streamed down Ariel’s cheeks, she wondered whether he meant to misspell that word
line.

In her role as incognita, Franny Johnson was freed of the awkward truths most lovers must face about their romantic pasts. She could make hers up as she went along, and so she did. Her powers of invention surprised her at times. Although she’d never really had a boyfriend before, she conceived of several. The relationships were nothing serious, she assured Marcos. Sergio had been an exchange student back in Princeton, from northern Italy, near Milan. He’d hoped to become a diplomat one day. After he went back home, he wrote her a nice letter inviting her to join him in Venice, but she never did, and that was that. Then there was a graduate student, a research assistant who was her mother’s acolyte. His name was—Peter, Peter Cummington. Came from a good family, blue-blooded rather than red-blooded. Tall, slender, memorable for his cable-knit sweaters and tortoiseshell glasses but little else. No chemistry, a total fizz. The sound of his wingtip shoes clomping down the corridor of the mathematics building still made her shudder. The last was Sebastian, before she swore off men altogether and prepared herself for a life of celibacy. Sebastian was clever but conceited, handsome in a vain sort of way. The last time she saw him—well, never mind.

All of this would have been a perfect backstory for Audrey Hepburn in the film
Love in the Afternoon,
had Marcos resembled the game if aging Gary Cooper, which he didn’t. But for all its fraudulence, her Billy Wilder-worthy performances did project curious truths—among them her desire to make her man covetous—and through the course of her fictions, Franny watched a most unexpected thing develop. A love affair. One that deepened from ideas to words, from words to acts, on the very stage they themselves walked.

Yet Mary lingered, enigma that she was, in the wings. That day on which she had begun but failed to reveal herself to Kip receded into the past. Honoring her silence, he never broached the matter again. And honoring his, she willfully neglected it, a path abandoned at least temporarily for fear of finding out what lay at its end. One question she neglected to ask herself was whether Marcos would not have been just as happy to know the real Mary as the fabricated Franny. Mary tried to bring this to Franny’s attention, and while the question never quite formulated itself, it nagged at her in subtle and unsubtle ways. She dropped a bowl of black bean soup at work for no reason. She lost the key to her house so many times that she finally hid it as a matter of course under the doormat, and even then it disappeared. When driving out to Pajarito, she forgot her license—her only remaining piece of material evidence that Franny Johnson didn’t truly exist—hidden in the medicine cabinet.

The whole damn mess was nearly brought to an abrupt end on the feast day of San Felipe de Nerí, Mary’s twenty-first birthday. It was a Saturday morning bright and blue as her eyes, and Franny’s day, as she’d foreseen it, was going to be spent at home, alone, maybe reading, maybe just sleeping. When Marcos turned up at her door unannounced—she had at last, though reluctantly, divulged where she lived—and told her that Sarah, Carl, and Kip had come along with him “to go to the celebration for San Franny and San Felipe,” she recoiled imperceptibly. Which is to say, a smile spread across her face and she waved toward those waiting for her in the Jeep, while her heart sank paradoxically at the prospect of spending this birthday with people she treasured.