Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [16]
“There were a thousand reasons.”
Jessica added, “None of them good, in retrospect.”
“I understand, I think,” Ariel said, numb, still disbelieving. “We can handle this, definitely.”
As best they could manage, her parents elaborated about Kip. About life a lifetime ago. About how, after his folks had died, he’d volunteered for service at just the same time Brice was becoming more active in the antiwar movement at Columbia—intimates since youth diverging at the crossroads—and had then gone the crazy extra mile into Thailand and Laos. How he’d slipped over the bamboo fence, become an invisible member of a covert paramilitary group known as the Ravens, working with anti-Communist Hmong in the jungle mountains of Long Tieng. About how he’d slipped forever into his own distant abyss, having left behind his pregnant girlfriend. And how Jessica had fallen in love with Brice, and Brice with Jess, who had never withdrawn from the memory of Kip, but had made the decision to move forward into her life.
“Why now?”
Brice told her about meeting with Kip in Chimayó. “He didn’t ask for much, just that we tell you about him and give you these,” handing her the ledger and envelope.
“Didn’t ask for much,” she echoed, holding the artifacts in limp hands. Everything was as if in a grainy black-and-white film, at a remove from itself, like life remembered rather than life being lived. “He didn’t ask for much, is that what he said?”
“Does it matter?”
She set the ledger, bound in black pebbly cloth, and the soiled envelope on the floor beside her chair. “No, I suppose it doesn’t. I never interested him, so why should he suddenly interest me?”
“Because he’s not well,” Brice said.
“No one is,” she responded, though with a voice she recognized as insincerely cold.
Jessica came over to Ariel and lay her hand on her daughter’s shoulder. “I hope you can forgive us for not telling you before.”
“We’ll get through it. He doesn’t really exist, does he, at least not in our lives.”
Fathering her father. Momming her mother. She could do that, could begin right now by urging them to believe she was fine, better than fine. All shall be well, she found herself thinking, even as she drifted into a temporary parallel universe, not wanting to admit such a cataclysm was happening to her. But look, it was. Ariel shook her head, snapping to. She must have begun to cry given how damp Brice’s handkerchief felt in her hand and how worried Jessica’s face looked as she helped her daughter drink from this glass of water. She told them she was sorry to be abrupt but she needed to get some air.
“You want one of us to walk with you?”
“I’d rather be by myself for a while.”
“You’ll be all right?”
Ariel kissed them and left. Ledger under arm and envelope stuck without ceremony in the back pocket of her pants, she walked and walked as one can only in New York, in rich silence framed by squealing brakes, talking pedestrians, nearby sirens, the subway rumbling belowfoot, every kind of noise. She was weeping and not weeping, blindly finding her way along. No matter what, she had to acknowledge that the magical ordinariness of her life had been blown to bits. She bought cigarettes at a kiosk, though she rarely smoked, and kept walking in a daze until she found herself by the boat basin in Central Park. A flash of light reflected off a white toy schooner, a model whose sails had caught a gust that knocked it flat on the surface of the brown pool where it began to swamp. Two small boys, its landlocked captains, argued over what to do. She watched this sinking as if it were the most interesting event she’d ever seen. Sitting on the concrete lip of the basin, she thought of how her past was