Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [171]
She rode with him to LaGuardia the next morning and they walked together to the gate, hugging so closely that they half-stumbled sideways, and with every step kissing. When he asked her if she had a photo of herself, she gave him her driver’s license and they kissed in such a delirium he nearly missed his flight.
“How’d you get that?” she asked him before he boarded. She nodded toward the scar on his forearm.
“I was really young, first learning to ride. Got on a horse way beyond my abilities. It’s ugly, but I kind of see it as a badge of honor.”
She ran her fingertips over the distressed skin, as if stroking silk. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “Safe journey home.”
Everything moved quickly after Marcos left. She invited herself over to Chelsea that evening and, as she’d done so many times in the past, made dinner with Jessica. She announced her plans, savored her parents’ words of support. Within the week she gave notice on her apartment, put her belongings in storage, and moved west to Pear Street. At Christmas her parents joined her in New Mexico, passing some time themselves with their friend Kip as the first snow fell over the finger mesas. The childhood pals celebrated their shared birthday together surrounded by family, and by friends who’d become family.
As winter progressed, Ariel marveled at how Kip, readmitted to the convalescent center as a Los Alamos Hospital outpatient, became infatuated by books. Bedridden for most of the day, he couldn’t sit as before with others watching television. Instead, in January he traveled with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, in February with Ishmael and Ahab. Ariel brought some of Granna’s books from Pear Street, and he devoured them, a famished man at a feast, liking some better than others. His daughter could never predict his responses.
He had his own take on everything, unswayed by any canon or decorum. Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” provoked wicked laughter from the frail man as he read aloud to Ariel,
“Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
Forever piping songs forever new …
“God in heaven, what a load of slobber,” continuing,
“More happy love! more happy, happy love!
Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,
Forever panting, and forever young.
“Listen, Ariel, take it from one who knows. Nobody in their right mind wants to be forever panting. Let alone forever young.”
“But that’s one of the most famous poems ever written,” she argued.
He was being harsh, but she couldn’t dispute the underlying logic—horse sense, Marcos later said—and so did not. No one could say Kip Calder wasn’t wildly spirited in those last months before he finally succumbed to cancer. The way a flame sometimes surges into abrupt brilliance just before it gutters and goes out.
Kip survived to see his granddaughter born. Both he and Ariel were in the same hospital. The waiting room was a wonderful havoc. Jessica, Brice, Bonnie Jean, Sarah, Carl, Delfino. The patient and impatient. Marcos was there beside her holding her hand as she went into labor. Miranda was about to be a March baby, just like her mother.
Ariel could have sworn she heard one of the delivery doctors whisper, Stock the pond with mermaids. Well, maybe not. Dilating, swirling, spinning, she lay back against the wet sheets and pressed her knees away from one another and