Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [112]
“Franny, you okay?” Sarah’s aside had gone nearly unnoticed as Ariel asked Marcos where Kip’s daily routine might have taken him, since she and Sarah hadn’t found him down at the fieldhouse.
Mary offered Sarah a tenuous nod.
“I’m not sure,” Marcos told Ariel, buying himself some time, he supposed, until he could figure out what next to do. It dawned on him how shockingly easy it was to fabricate a lie right here, cool as the proverbial cucumber, in front of his mother. “Did you look around the paddocks and barn? Might be helping Carl.”
“Why don’t you walk Ariel down there and see,” Sarah said.
Too much pulling him in too many directions. He instinctively looked at Franny—no, Mary—who said, “We can finish our talk later if you want.”
“Okay, then. Later, Franny,” thinking Franny?—how effortlessly these small deceits multiplied—as he walked alongside Ariel across the yard beyond which the stable lights burned. But to gather so many lies that you create a whole new person out of them?
Ariel was saying something. “Did he ever mention to you that he had a daughter?”
“Kip? Yes, he did, but made it sound like you would never want to have anything to do with him.”
“He said that?”
“Not in so many words, maybe. Just my impression.”
“That’s sad,” she said.
“He might’ve felt sad, but if he did he never let it show. He seemed to think you were within your rights not to bother with him.”
“God, I hope he doesn’t hate me.”
Where the hell was everybody? “Carl?” Marcos shouted down the long corridor as the scoria crunched familiarly underfoot. “Maybe they’re in the east field. I know it needed irrigating,” he assured Ariel, uncertain whether Carl was there or not, but beginning to wonder whether his promise to Delfino might not be outweighed by Ariel’s ambition of finding her father. What if his uncle and Kip were arrested on White Sands, what if they got killed, inadvertently or otherwise? What if they both disappeared without a trace—a remote possibility, but who knew? People are good at keeping secrets, and governments are better, but the military keep secrets at all costs, from friend and foe alike. Even a professional spook like Kip might well change direction if he knew his daughter was here, rather than risk becoming the genesis of some official denial, some motley mystery. Say something, ask her something. “How’d you find out he was your father?”
“He wrote me asking my forgiveness,” she said. “But I’m the one who needs to be forgiven.”
“How’s that?”
“I knew he was sick and I didn’t come. Funny, I always thought of myself as a principled person, but what good are principles when you fail to act on such a basic instinct as loving your father? It’s a miracle, really, that I have a chance to set things right.”
Marcos listened, undistracted despite his turmoil. Ariel’s words settled him at once on the question of whether to confide in her.
“Marcos?” Carl was out here after all. His voice was quiet, though he shouted, and his black silhouette stood distant against the field whose borders were erased by late twilight.
“Yey.”
“Watch out, it’s mucky.”
“Carl, where’s Kip?”
“What boots you got on?”
“Carl, listen. Where’s Kip?”
“I was gonna ask you, damn it. I could’ve used his help this afternoon. What boots you got on?”
Ariel hovered at Marcos’s side in the closing darkness. The round moon had risen into wispy clouds that looked like they’d been combed. White hair gathered up with a luminescent barrette. Its light sparkled like cultured pearls on the flat flooded field. Now Marcos and Ariel could hear water trickling across the hard ground. They ventured out closer toward Carl’s far-off flashlight which shone in their direction.
“Not the right ones for irrigating.”
“Come help me anyway, you mind?”
“Carl, there’s someone here. It’s important. Kip’s daughter’s come to see him.”
“What? Look, I’m almost done,