Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [170]
“Seems I’m over that part of the pregnancy.”
“Great.”
“I’m glad I went through it for a while, though.”
“Why? You some kind of masochist?”
“No, listen. If I hadn’t gotten sick that night out at Dripping Spring, I wouldn’t have told you I was pregnant, and it was a good thing I did.”
“Not that I was much help.”
“You were, believe me.”
“I’m not sure how.”
She said, “Trust me. Telling you, knowing you knew, was unbelievably helpful.”
“So, Ariel?”
“Yeah?”
“You fat yet?”
Mocked them away from sweet talk, though as more weeks passed they found themselves speaking often about what they loved, why they cherished what they cherished—all the things that had brought them to these affections and affinities. Ariel read him passages from the Calder ledger, surprising both of them one evening when she shared Kip’s letter. Marcos told her about Franny Johnson, who’d turned out to be Mary Carpenter, and Ariel filled him in about David Moore and why she was about to become a single mother.
“Aren’t you obligated legally to tell him he’s going to be a father?” Marcos asked, noting as he did how the question made his stomach churn.
“In fact, no. But more than legally, sometimes I still think I owe him the moral courtesy—except then I remember I already did that. When he left, the issue was dead, literally dead, done with. He mailed me a check for the procedure—“
“Abortion?”
“—abortion. I found it in the mailbox when I got back and I threw it out. I’ve tried to reach him, but nothing doing. He’s known all along how to get in touch with me if he had any interest in the matter. He doesn’t. There’s nothing to talk with him about. Does that sound cold?”
“More sad than cold.”
Ariel agreed with Marcos. It was sad. But there was no changing what happened. You wove with the length of thread fate spun out, did your best to weave well. If others laid scissors to the fabric, you patched the damage and hoped it wouldn’t happen again. If it did, you patched the damage once more.
In November, just before Kip was diagnosed as terminal, Marcos visited him in the fieldhouse where he’d taken up residence again in the wake of Tularosa. He wanted to tell Kip about Ariel, about his feelings for this woman whom he now knew more as a voice than a flesh-and-blood person.
Kip welcomed him, exchanged small talk about this new horse or that, then asked what was up.
“I’m going to New York. To visit Ariel,” Marcos said.
“Sounds good,” said Kip.
“You don’t mind?”
“Mind what?”
“You’re right, never mind.”
Kip wasn’t going to be very helpful, so Marcos shifted subjects.
“Do you miss Mary?”
“I miss everybody, Marcos. It’s a sign of getting old.”
“Come on, I’m serious.”
“I miss Ariel.”
“So do I,” Marcos said—out of his mouth before he knew it.
“I’ve noticed.”
“You don’t mind?”
“That’s the second time you’ve asked. Mind what?”
“Something’s going on between me and Ariel.”
“No reason it shouldn’t.”
“We’re completely different, though. She’s a city person. I’m a pueblo valley horse breeder.”
“The only woman I ever fell in love with was a city person, and when we met I’d come from these same sticks as you. You know it doesn’t matter.”
When Marcos flew east to see her in Manhattan, Kip’s words would carry resonance. His room at the Gramercy Park sat empty throughout his stay, while he and Ariel spent long nights talking about all and everything, holding hands, crashing side by side atop the coverlet on her bed. Faces close, they breathed each other’s breath until they half fainted from intoxication.
Accompanying her to an obstetrician’s appointment the morning of his last day in town, he was asked by the receptionist, “You’re the father-to-be?”
“No,” he said, at the same instant Ariel said, “Yes.”
“Yes,” at the same time Ariel said, “No.”
Which was the moment, the intimation, that led them beyond talk and handholding,