Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [138]
“This isn’t fair. I couldn’t find a place to spend the night, so I was forced to rough it.”
“Actually, it’s kind of sweet.”
“Sweet?”
“You heard me.”
When they rolled past Santa Fe and back into the darkness of the highway stretching through unpopulous pueblo terrain, the idea of reaching Los Alamos after midnight began to seem iffy. As the sign for Tesuque drew into view, Brice realized his allusion to sleeping in a car those few years ago had some relevance. Without warning, he took the turnoff, and when Jess asked what was up, he said, “I think we ought to go back and spend the night in Santa Fe. Rumor has it you prefer beds to backseats.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Seriously. It just dawned on me they roll up the sidewalk at seven o’clock on the Hill. Nothing’s going to be open. Even the motel keepers up there bolt the latches early.”
Circling back through Tesuque, they traveled a narrow road by a dark creek, Haydn having given way to Ravel’s Le Gibet, and half an hour later found themselves checking into the grandest old hotel on the plaza. La Fonda was a splurge, yes, but they took a suite and held their guilt at bay, knowing that tomorrow they would enter another world to share the responsibility of helping with Mother’s recovery. Tonight was their night, Brice reasoned, since tonight they could do nothing to ease his mother’s burden. Into the wee hours they walked arm in arm around the square and had margaritas at some local hot spot, returning to the inn to fall into bed exhilarated, tipsy, and finally exhausted.
Rather than dropping in unannounced the next day, Brice phoned Bonnie Jean midmorning, but as usual lately, no one answered. Maybe the gray skies and thick rain influenced their mood, perhaps the mild tequila headaches contributed, or possibly it was their waking up so near Los Alamos and the gravity of affliction to be faced there, but as they checked out and retrieved their rental from the underground lot, their prior festiveness dissolved into a kind of unreal mist.
On the road lay real mist, the showers now streaming down at odd angles, driven by winds that couldn’t seem to make up their minds—if winds had minds—which way to blow. Brice knew these southwestern storms tended to clear as fast as they cropped up so wasn’t surprised by the columns of light that pierced the clouds over honeycombed cliffs and rain-sparkling ridges of the mesas. But Jessica stared, awed, at the graduated vistas draped in vapor, popping into sudden brilliance whenever a cleft opened in one of the cloudbanks, allowing the morning sun its passage onto plateaus and into their flanking valleys.
This route was so deeply inscribed in Brice’s memory that he could almost drive it blind, which in a way he did. Questions for his sister began to bother him, some mistrusting, some accusing, none of them very genial, and all of them too familiar. The same old Brice-versus-Bonnie interrogatories that plagued them since forever. Yet he wondered, feeling this somber mood settling over him even as the storm lifted and the morning promised a beautiful day, what would happen if, just this once, he let it slide? Wouldn’t it be best for their mother to see the two of them getting along?
Funny how such a generous idea could make you feel depressed. Bonnie would chastise him, as always, for having left the Hill and gone on to build a life elsewhere. She never shelved her judgment that in disavowing Los Alamos, Brice disowned not merely his birthplace but also the family that continued to call it home. Although he considered himself more a flag waiver than a flag waver, he knew he might spend the rest of his life trying to make peace with the place, attempting to hammer out some kind of personal deterrence pact.
Just because you’re forged in the same furnace doesn’t mean you’re shaped for the same task. Ask any cog, ask a girder. But as he and his wife passed the abandoned guardtower