Ariel's Crossing (40 page)

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Seriously. It just dawned on me they roll up the sidewalk at seven o’clock on the Hill. Nothing’s going to be open. Even the motel keepers up there bolt the latches early.”

Circling back through Tesuque, they traveled a narrow road by a dark creek, Haydn having given way to Ravel’s
Le Gibet,
and half an hour later found themselves checking into the grandest old hotel on the plaza. La Fonda was a splurge, yes, but they took a suite and held their guilt at bay, knowing that tomorrow they would enter another world to share the responsibility of helping with Mother’s recovery. Tonight was their night, Brice reasoned, since tonight they could do nothing to ease his mother’s burden. Into the wee hours they walked arm in arm around the square and had margaritas at some local hot spot, returning to the inn to fall into bed exhilarated, tipsy, and finally exhausted.

Rather than dropping in unannounced the next day, Brice phoned Bonnie Jean midmorning, but as usual lately, no one answered. Maybe the gray skies and thick rain influenced their mood, perhaps the mild tequila headaches contributed, or possibly it was their waking up so near Los Alamos and the gravity of affliction to be faced there, but as they checked out and retrieved their rental from the underground lot, their prior festiveness dissolved into a kind of unreal mist.

On the road lay real mist, the showers now streaming down at odd angles, driven by winds that couldn’t seem to make up their minds—if winds had minds—which way to blow. Brice knew these southwestern storms tended to clear as fast as they cropped up so wasn’t surprised by the columns of light that pierced the clouds over honeycombed cliffs and rain-sparkling ridges of the mesas. But Jessica stared, awed, at the graduated vistas draped in vapor, popping into sudden brilliance whenever a cleft opened in one of the cloudbanks, allowing the morning sun its passage onto plateaus and into their flanking valleys.

This route was so deeply inscribed in Brice’s memory that he could almost drive it blind, which in a way he did. Questions for his sister began to bother him, some mistrusting, some accusing, none of them very genial, and all of them too familiar. The same old Brice-versus-Bonnie interrogatories that plagued them since forever. Yet he wondered, feeling this somber mood settling over him even as the storm lifted and the morning promised a beautiful day, what would happen if, just this once, he let it slide? Wouldn’t it be best for their mother to see the two of them getting along?

Funny how such a generous idea could make you feel depressed. Bonnie would chastise him, as always, for having left the Hill and gone on to build a life elsewhere. She never shelved her judgment that in disavowing Los Alamos, Brice disowned not merely his birthplace but also the family that continued to call it home. Although he considered himself more a flag waiver than a flag waver, he knew he might spend the rest of his life trying to make peace with the place, attempting to hammer out some kind of personal deterrence pact.

Just because you’re forged in the same furnace doesn’t mean you’re shaped for the same task. Ask any cog, ask a girder. But as he and his wife passed the abandoned guardtower and the landing strip at the edge of town, Brice had an epiphany. One that their mother would understand. Turning the other cheek, wasn’t that the traditional gesture of righteousness? As he drove to his sister’s house, Brice promised himself that no matter what, he wouldn’t chide, recriminate, or quarrel. Bonnie was who she was. Ariel, too, and Kip.

Father and Mother had both been—still were, really, since death didn’t have the power to transform the unique
youness
of any given
you.
Just cuts you off from further variations on the theme. But why brood about death? Here was the house, ever the same. Dusty millers and geraniums on the front steps. The door framing the lean figure of his nephew Sam. Wonder if he’d recognize his uncle. Last visit he displayed no sign of even knowing he had one.

This time was different. As Brice and Jessica strolled up the puddled walk, Sam said, “They’re gone.”

“Sam, you remember your aunt Jessica?”

The boy had shot up a good foot, was now a young man, all in little more than three short years.

“Hi, Sam,” Jessica said, now on the porch, the boy’s face behind the screen coming into focus.

“They’re at the hospital with Granna.”

“Sam, you okay?” Brice asked.

“I’m supposed to stay here,” he said.

“All right, then. We’ll go over to the convalescent center. I think I know where it is.”

“Not there, the hospital.”

“Is it about Grandmother, Sam? Did she get sick again?”

“I think so.”

“Sam, have you been crying?”

“No,” he lied, sheepish.

They stood, the three of them, on opposite sides of the screen door, through a few more awkward moments, before Brice said, “We better get to the hospital.”

He recognized her face from a distance down the corridor and saw how pale was his sister, how bent and stiffened by grief, and he knew, without having to ask, that their mother was gone. Bonnie Jean embraced him, weeping, apologizing, her countenance rent by what seemed a mad smile but was instead the most sorrowful grimace Brice ever witnessed. Stricken by what he saw in that face, he felt the weight of his own loss fully hit home. He wanted to weep but somehow couldn’t. Even through his own coursing grief, Brice understood his sister’s world had changed profoundly, irrevocably, saw that she had lost her mother in a way he himself had perhaps not. Eyes shut tight, he tried to picture Ariel’s granna but could conjure only Ariel herself. He asked, “When?”

“This morning.”

They pulled away from their embrace. Charlie joined them, shook Brice’s hand. “Bonnie, I’m so sorry,” said Jessica, as her husband drew her in to his side. A clumsiness of inhibition—or was it the silence that comes when anything expressed seems paltry?—overcame them, until Charlie said, “She had a massive stroke, they think. Nothing anybody could do.”

They walked, a sad stricken family, down the hall. He couldn’t help but think how close he’d come to seeing her alive one last time. Guilt began working the edges of his thoughts, all too late. The promise he’d made to himself before would have to be observed, now, to a fault. He and Bonnie Jean were the elders and had best act as such. Little mattered more than honoring that and helping to bury their mother beside their father. Indeed, nothing mattered more, with the exception of seeing Ariel. Jessica’s thoughts were much the same, and while Brice briefly disappeared to pay respects, she floated the question. “Can I ask, where’s Ariel?”

Bonnie nodded as her husband said, “She’s been staying at Mother’s. Was with her all the time until just a couple days back.”

“She’s been a real caring granddaughter.”

“Where is she? Does she know what’s happened?”

“She went down with the lady who works over at the center.”

“Convalescent center? Went down where?”

“Went with her down to Nambé.”

“The lady at the center, what’s her name?”

“Sarah Montoya. She brought Mother in. She was just here.”

Jessica excused herself and asked at the nursing station where she could find a pay phone. The receptionist at the convalescent center said Sarah had left for the day, but after Jessica explained who she was, the woman gave her the number for Rancho Pajarito. As she dialed, Jessica experienced her own epiphany, or something more basic than an epiphany, a simple truth that she seemed temporarily to have forgotten, to have let go, unremembered somehow this past month. That was to say, she had lost track of herself, utterly, in losing touch with her daughter. She’d intuited what lay behind Ariel’s erraticism, though perhaps not down to any specific problem; she wasn’t psychic. But it was becoming clear to her that her daughter’s journey away from home was to some degree an invitation to embrace. Why else had she tramped all this way, if not to claim more family, another family? That wasn’t rejection. It was a need proclaimed. She could be wrong, of course. She’d been wrong before. But still the idea took hold.

Carl answered.

“You don’t know me, but I think my daughter may be staying with you—Ariel Rankin?”

“Where you calling from?”

“Los Alamos.”

“You got a piece of paper?”

They dropped by Pear Street on the way to Nambé. Brice spent a few minutes alone inside. He poured sour milk down the kitchen drain and collected from his mother’s refrigerator uneaten food—cheese ringed with green halos, a cutlet still wrapped in butcher paper, old relish, an apple, placing everything slowly into a black garbage bag. He watered the plants. He wandered the few rooms, touching surfaces. A few of Ariel’s clothes hung in the closet of his mother’s bedroom, alongside hers. These he touched, too, with tentative fingers, then withdrew. On his way out, he locked the doors his trusting daughter had left open, knowing as he did that there was little left to protect here beyond memories. Returning to the car, he remembered that Ariel might not have a key, and so went back to the front door and unlocked it.

The place where they headed, usually a place of routine, the workaday, was thrown into its own disorder. Sarah was on the phone, following one false lead after another. And Carl found Franny, or Mary, in Kips fieldhouse. Sarah had told him she might be down there.

He had seen the world fly into pieces now and again, and this to him was a pretty fine example of things falling apart, like the poet said. Not his poet, but Kip’s. He’d appreciated the line when Kip first used it and asked him where it came from.

—Irish poet, Kip answered.

—Friend of yours?

—In a way.

The fieldhouse looked startling to Carl, captured in sunlight as it was. Like some perfect haven from a world where things fell apart. “Mary?”

So he knew. She got up from where she sat on Kip’s bed as Carl walked in. “Did Sarah find them?”

“Either they’re giving her the runaround or else they really don’t know whether they’re out there or not.”

“Which is it?”

“My guess is runaround. I know you already told Sarah about—everything. But maybe you could explain it to me, too. I don’t think I’ve ever come up against anything quite so strange as knowing somebody who turns out to be somebody else.”

Mary sat back down, gathered her hands together as if in restless prayer. “My apologies, under the circumstances, probably don’t amount to much. Any reasoning there may’ve been behind my secrecy seems beside the point with everything else that’s going on. I really and truly do apologize, though. I hope Marcos wasn’t so angry or hurt by my telling him that he’s gone out and done something stupid.”

“He may get arrested, they all might, but other than that I’m kind of glad he’s down there. Delfino and Kip got no business doing what they’re doing. I don’t know. I grew up lucky, I guess. Luckier than my brother who always had the itch to move on, make a new life where the old one wasn’t all so bad. He’d disagree to this day, but that’s him. Delf and Kip are cut from the same cloth. Maybe you are, too.”

“Until I met Marcos.”

“You might’ve had better reasons. None of my business, most likely. Screwing up is what most of us do most of our lives, day in, day out. So long as you set things right once you recognize you crossed up, you’re fine.”

“What if other people don’t let you set things right?”

“You’ve done your job. You can’t save them from their messes. But we think of you like family. You’re square with Marcos, you’re square with all of us. Which isn’t to say I’d like to do this again, find out your name is—”

“Mary Carpenter and nobody else.”

“Good name.”

“That’s what Kip said.”

“Let’s get back to the house.”

They walked up together, Carl with his hand on Mary’s shoulder for part of the way. Mary hadn’t the heart to tell him she was leaving for Los Angeles as soon as she could manage.

Startled out of his sleep by a nauseous cry, Marcos jolted upright. Embers in the small fire glowed like incandescent beads. Delfino snored, he who was supposed to be sentry, curled on the earth in his blankets. Cause for concern. Maybe this really was beyond the man. What did they think they were doing, sleeping unprotected out here? Better cold in the ruined house than warm in the open. Seeing that Ariel wasn’t in her bedroll, Marcos hoped she’d simply had the good sense to return inside. His mind flitted as he climbed to his feet and made toward the house to check. Then again, a soft retching whimper outside the theater of firelight.

He turned toward the noise thinking, Kip? All was suddenly quiet, then more vomiting, painful to hear against this tranquil darkness. Maybe some animal.

Instead, by the windmill, Ariel half sat, half leaned, forehead pressed against the wooden wall of the collection tank.

Marcos tripped on a concrete rim of some sort, or rock slab, but didn’t fall. Made his way through the black. She was crying.

“Ariel? What’s the matter?”

“I’m all right.”

He hesitated. “Can I do something?”

“No.”

Finding her with his fingertips, he knelt and held her by the shoulders, steadying her. He’d never touched her before. “You’re probably sick from, I don’t know, maybe the water’s a little off. Or from exhaustion, nerves.”

She said nothing, ceased with the tears.

“We better talk with Delf about getting you out of here in the morning. I’ll come back for Kip myself, or we can phone them, tell them there’s a man who wandered onto their precious firing range by mistake.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said. Her body was drenched with sweat. What she wouldn’t give to climb into a hot bath. She spat and wiped her sleeve across her mouth.

“You can’t very well stay out here like this.”

“I’m not sick, and it’s not tainted water.”

Aware of his clumsiness, Marcos felt her forehead, not really knowing what else to do. “What’s wrong, then?”

Her confession that she was pregnant was so softly whispered he misbelieved his ears. His eyes had adjusted to the moonlight now and he could see the travail on her face.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s not like I’m going to have the baby. At least I don’t think I am. There’s no husband, no fiancé, no boyfriend, even.”