Ariel's Crossing (3 page)

Franny turned nineteen before finally writing her parents she was fine, not to worry. She took a bus to Denver to mail this letter, believing the postmark would help foil any attempt to track her. The ride back down the front range was strangely gloomy. She understood, gazing at the disinterested landscape out the window, just how alone she truly was. This small epiphany made her want to cling all the more to her ambition—a girlhood dream launched in darkened theaters, crystallizing when she first waited tables at Gallup’s most famous hotel, El Rancho, where every star who’d ever shot a western dined back in the heyday of black-and-white Hollywood—but progress was slow. She lived a spartan life, but still the money didn’t pile up the way she’d hoped. What was more, Franny had grown to enjoy the role of an incognita.

Marcos met her at the downtown restaurant where she worked the counter. He’d come to run some errands for his mother, Sarah, niggling little nothing errands she used to get him off the ranch.

—Boy’s going to die a bachelor, she said at breakfast.

—I’m not a boy.

—Just my point.

Though Marcos, twenty-five now, had circled through liaisons with a couple of women he’d met on the show circuit—easy-in, easy-out affairs—he couldn’t fairly contradict her. He dropped into Franny’s diner because it happened to be next door to the bootery where he’d done the last of his grunts, as he called them. And, too, because he had noticed a waitress here the last time he was in town.

He ordered pecan pie and sugared coffee after coffee while watching her. Thin, even skinny, Franny moved with the fluid gestures of a dancer. Her lips were drawn into a benign pout, her nose and prominent cheeks were mildly freckled. She had rings on most of her fingers. Azure, her eyes were filled with light around the irises and rimmed by a fine line of black—eyes that reminded him of exquisite markings he’d seen on butterflies, so perfect as to seem counterfeit. Over the course of an hour he found himself infatuated.

—You keep drinking all that coffee and eating all that sugar, you’ll be able to float home, she said when Marcos ordered yet another piece of pie.

He laughed.—Franny’s a curious name, he said, reading her embroidered blouse.

—What name isn’t?

—Marcos, for one.

—Unless you live in Paris.

—There must be plenty of Marcoses in Paris, Texas.

Small talk, but it went on for an hour beyond Franny’s shift, the two having left to stroll around the plaza. Marcos surprised himself by inviting her out to Nambé, and she surprised herself by accepting. He offered Franny a ride home, and though she declined—she didn’t want him to see where she lived, her room outfitted with a plywood-on-cinderblock bed, a wobbly pine table and chair, a tarnished mirror edged with masking tape, and little more—she shook his hand as if they’d been friends for years.

Next Saturday afternoon he picked her up in front of the Palace of the Governors. The day was gusty and promised rain. As they drove up out of Santa Fe valley toward the pueblolands to the north, Marcos asked Franny to tell him more about herself, where she came from, what she wanted to do one day. And Franny obliged him with all the ingenuities Mary could convene.

She felt no guilt over telling deceptive stories, having had good reason to fabricate Franny, just as her father had his for not pressing Gallup authorities to search for his runaway daughter. She’d been legally of age, almost. Let her go if that’s her game, was his philosophy. He’d had enough of their battles, enough of trying to discipline his daughter. God bless and good riddance. Mary could almost hear him intoning to wife, children, any neighbor who would listen,—She had her eye on the horizon from day one, but she’ll find out the hard way, and when she does, she can come limping back home to see whether the door’s open or locked.

Well, she thought, he could keep his door and the prison that went with it.

—I was an only daughter, she lied to Marcos. Brought up by her mother, since her father was a career military man who spent years at a time on duty overseas. Served in the Gulf War. Her mother was some kind of mathematician at Princeton, an important one, so far as mathematicians could be important.

—They can, believe me. Marcos nodded his head toward the mountains where Los Alamos sparkled in the buttes beneath Redondo. —My mother knows a few of them up there on the Hill who’ve had a hand in changing the way the world works. Where’s your father stationed now?

—He died.

—I’m sorry, Marcos said as they drove past Camel Rock. Out the window he could see it was storming over Quemazón and Caballo to the north. Broom rain fell at an angle from a blueblack thunderhead. —Typical New Mexico weather, clouded on one horizon and sunny on the other.

The death of her father, she did admit, seemed weirdly abstract to her, like a series of numbers and symbols in one of her mother’s books, because she hardly knew the man, given his perennial absence. Marcos hadn’t asked, but she told him he’d gone down in a transport somewhere in Africa. Mozambique, maybe. News about it had been suppressed from the inside so that the media wouldn’t get involved. She ventured that it was likely he hadn’t heard about any of this, and he agreed he had not. Franny gave a melodious downward sigh and went on to say she hadn’t made up her mind what she wanted to do with her life. Growing up as she had in an academic environment, she decided to kick around some before going to college, and her mother consented.

—That’s surprising.

In a cautious voice, —Not everybody knows what they want to do with the rest of their lives.

—That’s not what I meant.

Mary sensed Franny had slipped so remained silent, noting for the first time Marcos’s hands which lay casually atop the steering wheel as if slumbering one on the other like awkward yet comfortable creatures, callused and crosshatched with old scars and fresh nicks. Aged hands for one so young.

—I meant, isn’t it unusual for a mother who’s a teacher—

—Professor, she managed inconspicuously.

—not to make her daughter stay in school?

Should she say, My mother doesn’t make me do anything I don’t want to do? Instead she considered questioning him about Pajarito, his own apparent choice, or nonchoice, to stay home on the ranch, but again thought better of it. —My mother’s unusual that way.

—You’re lucky.

While Mary admired both the irony and truth of the idea, Franny said, —I guess. She then waved her hand, as if swatting away from her face something visible only to her, before continuing. So here she was in Santa Fe. Once she saved enough money, she told Marcos, she planned on traveling overseas somewhere. No maps, no destination. Patagonia, Malaysia, Timbuktu. Elsewhere, anywhere elsewhere, all the elsewheres she could find. She made no mention of the framed, autographed images of movie stars back at El Rancho that had inspired her toward Tinseltown, not Capetown, as she suffered the premonition she would come off shallow. Which naturally caused her to wonder whether it wasn’t just that. Shallow, hollow. Change the subject, now. —And what about you?

Already the Jemez rain had ceased and the massive banks of clouds were silvering, while still others rearranged themselves up over Cerros del Abrigo and down along the Dome Wilderness. Even when Einstein lived in Princeton, she thought, the skies probably never put on shows like this. Should she say as much? No, be quiet.

Marcos discovered Franny hadn’t ever ridden a horse only after he’d saddled a pair and brought them out into a paddock. —I’ve always been afraid of them, she confessed, but she was willing to learn that very day, and more or less began to do just that. She knew nothing of life on a breeding ranch, though it did remind her of some film she’d seen, Gable and Monroe? The weekend following, Marcos drove her up to a ranch in Abiquiu, to watch him and a veterinarian get a semen collection out of one of his three-year-old Arabians. Strange idea for a second date, she thought, but why not. Marcos admired how she behaved as the two of them did their violent chore, calmly observing as they shouted and shoved the struggling horse into place where he mounted an artificial mare. Once the job was done, they gathered in the small lab adjacent to the collection barn. With a pipette they dotted a specimen on a thin glass slide, turned on the phase-contrast microscope, and adjusted its focusing knob. After the vet said he was pleased by the frenzied spermatozoa he saw in the bright-green field, Marcos took a look, then turned to Franny with an open smile.

—Want to see? Progressive motility makes the world go round.

—Progressive?

—Means they’re swimming forward.

—Sometimes they swim backwards?

—Like everything else on this crazy planet.

Mary was aware that her doppelgänger, Franny, was freer than she herself had ever been and seemed possessed of a bona fide boldness, an ability to embrace things around her. Mary envied this a little, though Franny was willing to share. As time passed, however, Mary became more vigilant because she understood that she and Franny were breaking a cardinal rule: Marcos was becoming Franny’s friend. Not in the plan. There were no contingencies for such a development, so the closer Marcos got to Franny, the further Mary felt she must recede.

Abundant invented stories were woven by Mary into this evolving Franny, and Mary believed them even as she spun them quicker than a spider, so that remembering what she’d said at first presented her with no problem. Sometimes, in bed, listening to her sham river out the window, Mary worried she was falling for Marcos. Or that Franny was. Another voice would point out that the more of a life she built here, the more Gallup could become a faraway mirage, reflecting only itself over a domain of broken mirrors. Whenever Mary grew troubled, Franny reassured her. And when Franny became distressed, Mary would breathe slowly and deeply, as she’d taught herself to do those nights when her father came into her room, after her sister, Rose, had fallen asleep, to apologize for having smacked her over this or that quarrel.

—Let’s forget about it, all right? he would whisper into the burning ear of his mute daughter, a confident hand stroking her cold forehead.

She did not want to get involved with Marcos, however sane and normal such a thing might be, but Marcos, after Franny’s half dozen visits to Nambé, asked if he could kiss her.

—Maybe that’s not such a great idea, she said, both charmed by his old-fashioned backwardness and perplexed by her own terror. She ran her eye down his profile as he looked away. The brown hair that spilled over the sheer straight cliff of his forehead was beautiful, she thought. His sunburned nose and long lean cheeks and brown lips drawn taut, beautiful as any she’d ever seen. She never met a more western westerner. —Look, it’s not you. I’m overly wary. We’ll see, all right?
All right,
echoing her father.

Marcos nodded, and Franny thanked him, though she did have to wonder why Mary was afraid of such a natural proposition. That is, until she calculated once more the fact that propositions were for mathematicians, not for impostors on the lam. Especially impostors who aspired to careers of make-believe.

Francisca’s mother was calling to her. She remembered not only the affectionate nickname but the timbre of that voice, the lightly trilling
para
of
esparaván,
the waveringly weak final syllable
ván
that modulated the word into a question.

—Francisca,
esparaván?

That one voice was joined by others, voices Francisca de Peña could not so easily recognize. Women, children, men, the utterances of wind animals. These wild fugal cries came and went in waves, and the more often they disturbed the shade of her vacant fieldhouse, the more fearful she became, she who hadn’t really known anything of fear for the longest time. She understood why she was afraid, and this fear of what was so obvious and necessary made her disgusted with herself, made her say,
Unspeakable,
made her say,
Execrable y no sembrado.
Yet the dying seed was sown.

The ghost Francisca spent nights and days in her adobe prison. Sometimes, nodding off toward nothingness, she found that she had unintentionally drifted through the mud walls and out into the pasture, or floated through the coyote fence toward the riverbank. She would come to as if slapped by hard cold water, dazedly reorient herself, then return to the fieldhouse more confused than ever. She’d lost almost all interest in the lives of those who came and went into and out of the hacienda. Her ability to distinguish colors and shapes was failing. What she saw was parallax and dim. She couldn’t even remember her mother’s name. Strella, Stella? And her father? Where was he? Who had he become?

But she did recognize the boy Marcos, and Marcos recognized her that third and final time he would ever see her, or at least know with certainty he was seeing her.

Months, superb tiny whiskers of time, had elapsed. Franny joined a regional theater company and finally confessed to Marcos her acting aspirations. After he gamely sat through a pretty long performance of one of Shakespeare’s plays—he counted more people onstage than in the audience—they kissed in the parking lot, then kissed again the next night and the next. Mary telephoned her mother to let her know she was still in Denver and all was well. She couldn’t bear to hear the tearful pleas that she come home and so hung up, feeling for all the world like some thankless monster, but promising herself never to call again. Marcos’s parents slowly became surrogates, flesh-and-blood variations on her imagined ideal of what parents might be in a perfect Mary world. Carl’s gruff taciturnity. Sarah’s ease with anyone and everything. Even the dogs sleeping on the
portal,
the doves in their cages, the horses in their pastures, seemed faultless. Rancho Pajarito carried all the weight of what home might have meant, had fate launched a kinder stork on the day of her birth.

And Marcos, the Marcos of this third encounter with Francisca de Peña, took Franny on a midnight ramble along Rio Nambé to show her a thing he used to do when he was a kid. Hand in hand they walked toward Conchas to see if the
vatos
were partying. That they weren’t didn’t bother her. She liked to be here with him. To feel her life being lived near his.