Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [103]
“Except you.”
“Just so.”
Better to be talking, thought Delfino. Keeps apprehension more at bay. You talk, you stay calm, stay strong that way. Silence was dangerous, Agnes had always believed. One of her sayings went, —In silence we the tempest fear.
If she’d only known it, Franny would have concurred with Agnes’s truism when she got back to Pajarito that night after work to find Marcos more agitated than she’d ever seen him. Up and down their room he was pacing in angry silence, enraged but not with anyone other than himself. “My god,” she asked, “what’s the matter?”
“I’m an idiot is what’s the matter,” not glancing up but instead pounding his fists against his thighs as he marched back and forth.
Franny knew she’d been found out. He refused even to look at her. She sat on the end of the bed, waiting. Mary, so infrequently real to anyone, entered Franny’s consciousness and pleaded the inevitable. Tell him everything, and tell him now. Apologize from your soul and maybe take the chance of asking if we shouldn’t start over, give it a fresh try in a new place where neither of us has a past. Who knows but good might come of it? Franny asked Marcos again, in a tentative voice, what was wrong.
He didn’t hear her, or maybe her voice was so subdued by anxiety that it never left her lips. She found herself simply conceding, “Marcos, I guess you know I’m not who I’ve been saying I am. But I hope you’ll hear me out.”
“What?” he asked, only mildly distracted from his own thoughts.
“I said, I’m not who you think I am.”
“Nobody ever is.” Crisp cynicism, unusual for Marcos. Maybe she’d misunderstood the cause of his anger. She sat still, not daring to tip the uneasy balance one way or the other. But it was too late. Marcos turned a very confused, questioning eye on her. “What are you talking about, Franny?”
“You shouldn’t call me that anymore.”
“Has everybody around here gone mental?”
“I’m not Franny Johnson.”
Marcos looked at the ceiling, then back at her. “Great, fine, wonderful. Would you mind telling me who you are, then?”
“My name is Mary.”
His unbreathing mouth tensed into a slow frown. This was, he sensed, a moment whose magnitudes of disappointment were of a kind everybody must experience at some point in life, and from which few entirely bounce back.
“Mary Carpenter,” she whispered through first tears.
Even if Marcos had wanted to say something—repeat this new name, try it out—he wouldn’t have been able to. His voice, along with his faith in Franny, escaped him. He listened to her explanation of who she really was, and how and why she had transformed herself from Mary, a runaway from Gallup, into Franny. He was awed, stunned, impressed, really, by the breadth of her fraudulence.
“I’m the same person, Marcos. I’m exactly the same inside.” She didn’t, however, bring up Los Angeles, or the possible Utopian future that could come with his forgiveness and their fresh beginning.
He sat on the bed beside her, his back to her, elbows on knees and head in hands. The silence welled until she broke it, her voice trembling, “Isn’t that what you were angry about?”
“What, that you’ve completely lied to me about yourself from the first moment we met? You’re too good a phony for me to have found out on my own. That isn’t what I was pissed about before.”
“I don’t understand. What’s wrong?”
“Everything, now.”
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing. Everything. I’ve got to go stop them.”
“Stop who?”
“Idiots, all three of us. Me especially.” He told her that Delfino and Kip had gone south, chasing a verdict against the government, and that they’d given him the responsibility of informing Carl and Sarah the day after tomorrow. He couldn’t tell his parents because they’d call the police, and he didn’t want Kip and Delfino to get into trouble with the authorities even before they’d broken any laws. He had to go after them, and she had to cover his absence, no matter whether she was the fucking Virgin Mary or Mary Magdalene.
“That’s not funny.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.” He handed her Delfino’s documents and said, “Give these to Sarah