Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [15]
“Ariel,” softly, trying to conjure his daughter’s face.
As he drifted away in his skiff of suffering, he could have sworn she was standing beside him here, smiling a prayerful smile while chanting the disannulling ritual “Los Días de los Muertos”… dreaming in words … “y difuntos y sin espíritu y triste y profundo desolado” … whispering . . . “y en las altas horas de la noche”… words he heard in Chimayó these past days. Words he’d known since childhood when he listened, hand cupped to his ear at a wall in the old Sundt house where he grew up, as his mother prayed those nights when his physicist father worked late at the lab. Ariel, he thought, and as he looked for her in the swimming imagery of this sea of pain it was as if his mortal soul were being drawn to float free of the bonds of this burning earth and quaking body.
Kip’s daughter would always remember with crisp clarity the day she was brought in on the secret.
“Ariel,” Brice began. “When my father passed away, and your mother and I went out to New Mexico for the funeral? I wonder if you remember what you said when we got back home.”
Sitting in her favorite old stuffed chenille chair as sunlight played across the threadbare kilim rug, Ariel confessed she wasn’t sure, why? Her wavy chestnut hair, like that of a younger Jessica Rankin, pirouetted in nine directions, and her prominent cheeks were flushed from the April breezes and the hasty walk to Chelsea that weekend morning. When her mother phoned, a tone of urgency edged her voice and Ariel threw on a mishmash of clothes. Secondhand pink cardigan sweater, camouflage cargo pants, a pair of rubber clogs. Truth to tell, she believed she was being summoned to learn that her grandmother McCarthy had died.
“You made a beautiful welcome-home sign and said something I’ll never forget. You told me that since I didn’t have a father anymore, you’d be my father from then on. It was one of the kindest things anybody ever said to me.”
Ariel watched Jessica’s hand move across the sofa to take her husband’s. Averting her eyes downward, she noticed her mismatched socks. Black and blue. Almost laughed, but the mood in the room did not encourage laughter.
Jessica said, “You know how much we’ve always loved you.”
“I love you, too. Is somebody dying?”
“You remember us telling you about our friend Kip Calder?” Brice’s barrister voice descended toward meekness, as if some sorcerer had turned down the volume on the room itself.
“The one who was killed in Vietnam?”
“Well, no, he wasn’t killed.”
“I remember you talking about him.”
Jessica said, “We’ve tried to figure out how to tell you this for years and years. But there’s no way to say it, other than that I was in love with him back in college. He was your father’s best friend and we all loved each other—”
“Pretty sixties.” Ariel tried to smile, hoping this wasn’t going to be what it clearly might.
“He’s your natural father. Your biological father.”
“What?” She could feel her pulse rise. They sat not looking at one another. Finally Ariel asked, quietly, “You’re sure?”
“We’re sure,” Brice said, watching her with a regard akin to terror. What a lovely young woman she was, with her dark eyes, her eloquent unspeaking lips, her long fingers weaving and unweaving themselves like warp and woof working invisible thread. How rarely over the years had he thought of her as a stepchild. Even now, in this stunningly awkward moment, it seemed inconceivable she wasn’t of his flesh. He wondered if telling the truth was everything it was cracked up to be.
“He ran off to the war, disappeared on all of us. In some ways even on himself. Brice and I fell in love after you were born.”
“Why are you making this up?”
“Kip is your blood father,” Brice said with a finality that sank the room into deepest silence.
“Well.