Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [139]
Father and Mother had both been—still were, really, since death didn’t have the power to transform the unique youness of any given you. Just cuts you off from further variations on the theme. But why brood about death? Here was the house, ever the same. Dusty millers and geraniums on the front steps. The door framing the lean figure of his nephew Sam. Wonder if he’d recognize his uncle. Last visit he displayed no sign of even knowing he had one.
This time was different. As Brice and Jessica strolled up the puddled walk, Sam said, “They’re gone.”
“Sam, you remember your aunt Jessica?”
The boy had shot up a good foot, was now a young man, all in little more than three short years.
“Hi, Sam,” Jessica said, now on the porch, the boy’s face behind the screen coming into focus.
“They’re at the hospital with Granna.”
“Sam, you okay?” Brice asked.
“I’m supposed to stay here,” he said.
“All right, then. We’ll go over to the convalescent center. I think I know where it is.”
“Not there, the hospital.”
“Is it about Grandmother, Sam? Did she get sick again?”
“I think so.”
“Sam, have you been crying?”
“No,” he lied, sheepish.
They stood, the three of them, on opposite sides of the screen door, through a few more awkward moments, before Brice said, “We better get to the hospital.”
He recognized her face from a distance down the corridor and saw how pale was his sister, how bent and stiffened by grief, and he knew, without having to ask, that their mother was gone. Bonnie Jean embraced him, weeping, apologizing, her countenance rent by what seemed a mad smile but was instead the most sorrowful grimace Brice ever witnessed. Stricken by what he saw in that face, he felt the weight of his own loss fully hit home. He wanted to weep but somehow couldn’t. Even through his own coursing grief, Brice understood his sister’s world had changed profoundly, irrevocably, saw that she had lost her mother in a way he himself had perhaps not. Eyes shut tight, he tried to picture Ariel’s granna but could conjure only Ariel herself. He asked, “When?”
“This morning.”
They pulled away from their embrace. Charlie joined them, shook Brice’s hand. “Bonnie, I’m so sorry,” said Jessica, as her husband drew her in to his side. A clumsiness of inhibition—or was it the silence that comes when anything expressed seems paltry?—overcame them, until Charlie said, “She had a massive stroke, they think. Nothing anybody could do.”
They walked, a sad stricken family, down the hall. He couldn’t help but think how close he’d come to seeing her alive one last time. Guilt began working the edges of his thoughts, all too late. The promise he’d made to himself before would have to be observed, now, to a fault. He and Bonnie Jean were the elders and had best act as such. Little mattered more than honoring that and helping to bury their mother beside their father. Indeed, nothing mattered more, with the exception of seeing Ariel. Jessica’s thoughts were much the same, and while Brice briefly disappeared to pay respects, she floated the question. “Can I ask, where’s Ariel?”
Bonnie nodded as her husband said, “She’s been staying at Mother’s. Was with her all the time until just a couple days back.”
“She’s been a real caring granddaughter.”
“Where is she? Does she know what’s happened?”
“She went down with the lady who works over at the center.”
“Convalescent center? Went down where?”
“Went with her down to Nambé.”
“The lady at the center, what’s her name?”
“Sarah Montoya. She brought Mother in. She was just here.”
Jessica excused herself and asked at the nursing station where she could find a pay phone. The receptionist at the convalescent center said Sarah had left for the day, but after Jessica explained who