Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [111]
He’d not come as far as he might have hoped. His sense of position was primitive, as he didn’t know the area, but from what he could glean, keying off what must be North Oscura Peak due west, peering over the sunken barrel of furred ribs, his hike would take at least another long day.
Sickness came in waves, but he knew he could do it. He’d been in tough places before and got the job done. Besides, he did belong here. He was right where he belonged.
Accustomed to being Franny, Mary was going to miss her. But Franny Johnson was abolished now, kicked like the bad habit she’d become. Lying in bed in Santa Fe, Mary watched a spider spin a corner web. Her accidental confession to Marcos—that Franny was a stitched fabric of deceit meant to cloak an unhappy childhood and dress up the admittedly fading dream of starstruck adolescence—hadn’t gone the way she might have wanted. Indeed, yesterday’s admission had played out the reverse of how she envisioned it. She hoped that surely Marcos would understand how a screwed-up youth could have led her to such desperate measures. Yes, okay, she lied in the beginning to protect herself, and continued with the ruse because she was afraid. But Marcos would sympathize and forgive, she brought herself to believe. With Kip’s fieldhouse finished, and summer at its end, conclusions were in the air. All she meant to bring to a close was her fictitious self, not every single factual thing around her.
Instead, safe to say, Marcos quietly flipped out. Less safe to assume that Mary herself felt inchoate jealousy, or rivalry, or some undefined anxiety toward Ariel, who left with him abruptly on the same night their lives collided. First laying eyes on Ariel ranging tall behind Sarah at the opened door of Marcos’s room, Mary was struck by the thought that here was a woman whom Franny, some real Franny with realizable instead of unfounded dreams, might look like. A fine, haunted face conveying all the paradoxes of stardom. And as Ariel’s story unfolded, the four of them having moved from the room to the portal outside, in the evening air so rich with calm that Mary only wished it might envelop them and wash away all these human crises, her sense that Ariel was a preeminent Franny had the effect of further discouraging her. Ironic, given that Mary wanted to renounce Franny anyway.
The confluences were crazy. Like the made-up Franny, Ariel had been raised back east. Like Franny, Ariel had an educated mother and an absent father. Like the Franny invented in Santa Fe, the persona that Mary had presented to Marcos back in those early months when they first started seeing each other, this Ariel appeared to be determined rather than disoriented. She seemed possessed of a will to know things—though rather than wanting to learn how to ride, or about the artificial insemination of horses, or about how life worked on a pueblo ranch, Ariel was motivated by the dramatic heft of a true tale, starring a father who abandoned everything, thereafter to wander the world. By her very inflections and gestures, Ariel seemed to shine with the earthy elegance that Mary had tried always to inspire in Franny. Standing in the umbra, Mary listened, wilting, as