Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [125]
“Isn’t it more a matter of your allegiances?”
“You’re saying that by telling them where Ariel is, I’m crossing Marcos and Delfino.”
“Crossing me, too, kind of.”
“You didn’t ask me to swear not to say anything.”
“It was implied, don’t you think.”
For a long mile Sarah was quiet. This was forcing her into duplicities, not her stock in trade.
“The Hill must be the only place in the world where if you don’t know physics you’re in the minority. I’m no physicist by any stretch, but I do believe in the relativity of everything. If space and time can bend, then truth can too, I guess. I’ll let them know more or less where Ariel is, more or less what’s up.”
Mary’s turn to fall quiet. Then she said, “After what we talked about this morning, it might sound overbold of me but aren’t half-truths also half-lies?”
“Look, Mary. I have another idea. Let’s just do the best we can and see what happens. I think the same goes for you with Clifford. Just do him the favor of being his niece. No one in your family’s come to see him for a while, except a nephew named Jim.”
“My brother.” What a strange feeling to say in front of Sarah that she had a brother.
“Nice man. You might want to meet him again sometime.”
“I guess for all my father’s patriotism, paying honor to his hero brother was a bit much.”
“For what it’s worth, they used to visit. But then Clifford stopped showing any recognition of your family, until you. It’s a long drive from Gallup just to sit for an hour with somebody who’s become something of a living ghost. Happens more than you might think. Families tire and fade out of the picture. Your Jim’s been by three, four times a year, though. Maybe it’s because he’s in the military, too. Fellow soldier camaraderie.”
Mary had seen him wearing a uniform in Albuquerque at the San Felipe de Nerí festival on her birthday—centuries ago it now seemed. She remembered how young Jimmy used to rib their dad about that black POW/MIA flag. She wanted to ask Sarah about him, and about Johnny. And Rose—did Sarah know what she was doing now? Stifling the urge to learn more, Mary wondered at her own wonder. These names, these people, of course they percolated through her thoughts and dreams from time to time, but she’d come to regard them much as they did Clifford. Distant and distanced enough to have become like characters in a work of drama.
Why was it our minds thrived on forgetfulness? As if the world depended not upon remembering, but forgetting. That she wanted to know new things about those she’d tried with considerable success to forget was something of an internal seismic revolution.
Sarah slowed as they crossed the bridge at Otowi, where the wind walloped crabwise upriver, brawling with gusts that rolled down the canyon ahead.
“That’s some storm coming.”
“Thanks for helping me, Sarah,” Mary said.
Fingerprint-shaped droplets blew sideways over the windshield, soon to gust in torrential squalls so inundating that Sarah had to pull the Jeep over onto the shoulder of the road for a few minutes. Desert deluge, like riding through the carwash, one of Mary Carpenter’s favorite Saturday afternoon adventures when she was a girl. She pictured her father in the front seat, her brothers and sister in the back, faces pressed against the windows to watch the soapy tempest.
“There are times when I think things didn’t need to go as bad as they did,” Mary shouted above the din. “With my family, I mean.”
“What brings that to mind?”
“Nothing, the storm just kicked up a memory, is all.”
“Bad memory?”
“Good one, actually.” Then, “I don’t think Marcos will ever trust me again.”
Little shadow raindrops crawled down Sarah’s face as she looked at Mary. “I guess what you need to think about is whether you want him to.”
“He’ll be all right down there? With Delfino and the others?”
“He’s all right.”
The storm strengthened as they continued up the winding pass. At the convalescent center the night staff was signing out. Rain thrashed against the