Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [113]
“This won’t take but a few minutes,” Marcos apologized. “Let me help him, then we’ll go find Kip.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“No, look, it’s all mud.”
Ariel did follow him into the blackness of the settling night, but after catching one of her boots in the deepening mire, she dropped back and watched them moving like shadow pantomime figures a hundred yards upslope toward the far top of the enclosure. Water gurgled around her where she stood, as if the earth itself were murmuring some garbled message. So, tell me what it is you want to say, she thought. Nothing but burbles. Old baby earth. She laughed silently, sadly. Something was wrong. He wasn’t here. Marcos knew it, she could tell. The planet itself was trying to clue her in. And that girl Franny looked like she’d just witnessed a murder.
“So you say you’re Kip Calder’s kid?” Carl shook her hand, having walked with Marcos back to where she waited.
“He says he’s my dad.”
Their faces were illuminated by flashlights.
“Good man, your father. Let’s go find him.”
They searched Rancho Pajarito for Kip and Delfino both, Marcos feeling rotten for putting his parents and Ariel through all these unnecessary paces. More than once he reasoned himself into blurting out what he knew, but a remembrance of Kip’s resolute handshake and his uncle’s proud farewell embrace compelled him to go on with his absurd performance.
When Carl finally saw that Delfino’s truck was missing, he made the correct assumption they’d gone off together. “Old coots are probably over in Española painting the town,” he encouraged Ariel.
“Such as it is to paint,” Marcos said, trying but failing to lighten the edgy, somber mood.
Carl said, “I wouldn’t worry. Delfino’s been visiting from out of town these past couple days, and him and Kip hit it off, so like I say, I’d bet they’re out somewhere getting happy.”
“Maybe I’ll take you up on that offer to drop me back at the Hill tonight, if it isn’t too much trouble,” Ariel said at last. Sarah persuaded her to have a quick bite with them before Marcos drove her home. As Ariel sat and ate with the Montoyas and Franny, she imagined Kip doing the same these past years. Noticing how Marcos glared across at Franny, who kept her eyes on anyone else at the table but him, she said, “It probably wasn’t the best idea for me to drop in on him like this anyway. Tomorrow I can drive back down after I’ve spoken with him on the phone. Make sure he really wants to meet me.”
“Of course he does,” said Sarah.
Marcos carried his plate into the kitchen after Ariel turned to Franny and said, “I apologize for barging in on you.”
“What’s more important than finding a parent,” Mary asked in an answering voice.
“Finding yourself, I guess? “Ariel answered in an asking voice.
“Is there a difference?”
“I hope there is, put it that way.”
“Franny lost her father in the service,” Sarah said.
“I’m sorry.”
Mary suddenly left the room after offering her own regrets, confessing she wasn’t feeling well. Before she went, she, too, assured Ariel that Kip would be elated to meet his daughter. Marcos returned from the kitchen meaning to follow her, but decided not to, so sat again. He would later look back on that moment as defining, though hearing Mary’s car in the gravel drive might have clued him in then and there on the way things were going.
Within the course of that conflating hour, Kip coughed up blood on the same tree Delfino had once leaned against where the jackbottom loped, way back when, out behind the bungalow where Agnes’s widower was now fixing dinner for his guest; and Marcos discovered that Mary’s clothes were gone and the dresser drawers left ajar; and Ariel learned from that same Marcos—after they left Pajarito headed west toward Los Alamos but then, down at the intersection where Pojoaque ended and San Ildefonso began, veered downstate instead, past Santa Fe and Albuquerque and Belen—that they needed to catch up with Delfino and Kip Calder before the two men inaugurated another journey; and Carl and Sarah