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By Root 1585 0

she was, the woman gave her the number for Rancho Pajarito. As she dialed, Jessica experienced her own epiphany, or something more basic than an epiphany, a simple truth that she seemed temporarily to have forgotten, to have let go, unremembered somehow this past month. That was to say, she had lost track of herself, utterly, in losing touch with her daughter. She’d intuited what lay behind Ariel’s erraticism, though perhaps not down to any specific problem; she wasn’t psychic. But it was becoming clear to her that her daughter’s journey away from home was to some degree an invitation to embrace. Why else had she tramped all this way, if not to claim more family, another family? That wasn’t rejection. It was a need proclaimed. She could be wrong, of course. She’d been wrong before. But still the idea took hold.

Carl answered.

“You don’t know me, but I think my daughter may be staying with you—Ariel Rankin?”

“Where you calling from?”

“Los Alamos.”

“You got a piece of paper?”

They dropped by Pear Street on the way to Nambé. Brice spent a few minutes alone inside. He poured sour milk down the kitchen drain and collected from his mother’s refrigerator uneaten food—cheese ringed with green halos, a cutlet still wrapped in butcher paper, old relish, an apple, placing everything slowly into a black garbage bag. He watered the plants. He wandered the few rooms, touching surfaces. A few of Ariel’s clothes hung in the closet of his mother’s bedroom, alongside hers. These he touched, too, with tentative fingers, then withdrew. On his way out, he locked the doors his trusting daughter had left open, knowing as he did that there was little left to protect here beyond memories. Returning to the car, he remembered that Ariel might not have a key, and so went back to the front door and unlocked it.

The place where they headed, usually a place of routine, the workaday, was thrown into its own disorder. Sarah was on the phone, following one false lead after another. And Carl found Franny, or Mary, in Kips fieldhouse. Sarah had told him she might be down there.

He had seen the world fly into pieces now and again, and this to him was a pretty fine example of things falling apart, like the poet said. Not his poet, but Kip’s. He’d appreciated the line when Kip first used it and asked him where it came from.

—Irish poet, Kip answered.

—Friend of yours?

—In a way.

The fieldhouse looked startling to Carl, captured in sunlight as it was. Like some perfect haven from a world where things fell apart. “Mary?”

So he knew. She got up from where she sat on Kip’s bed as Carl walked in. “Did Sarah find them?”

“Either they’re giving her the runaround or else they really don’t know whether they’re out there or not.”

“Which is it?”

“My guess is runaround. I know you already told Sarah about—everything. But maybe you could explain it to me, too. I don’t think I’ve ever come up against anything quite so strange as knowing somebody who turns out to be somebody else.”

Mary sat back down, gathered her hands together as if in restless prayer. “My apologies, under the circumstances, probably don’t amount to much. Any reasoning there may’ve been behind my secrecy seems beside the point with everything else that’s going on. I really and truly do apologize, though. I hope Marcos wasn’t so angry or hurt by my telling him that he’s gone out and done something stupid.”

“He may get arrested, they all might, but other than that I’m kind of glad he’s down there. Delfino and Kip got no business doing what they’re doing. I don’t know. I grew up lucky, I guess. Luckier than my brother who always had the itch to move on, make a new life where the old one wasn’t all so bad. He’d disagree to this day, but that’s him. Delf and Kip are cut from the same cloth. Maybe you are, too.”

“Until I met Marcos.”

“You might’ve had better reasons. None of my business, most likely. Screwing up is what most of us do most of our lives, day in, day out. So long as you set things right once you recognize you crossed up, you’re fine.”

“What if other people don’t let you set things