Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [176]
When they were asked by authorities if they wanted to rebuild, and asked what had been lost and what they assessed the damage to be, they couldn’t correctly answer the questions.
“What would Granna want us to do?” Ariel asked Bonnie Jean.
“I wonder,” she said, wiping her eyes as they stood on the pavement of the street, its trees now skeletons, its sidewalks thick with melancholy wet ash mud, stinking of defeat.
“I have an idea,” said Ariel.
Her aunt listened, straightaway agreed, and though they made their decision without consulting Brice, they knew he would concur.
“Nothing,” Bonnie told the FEMA adjustor.
“Sorry?”
“We mean we want you to do nothing here. Nothing at all.”
“You want to sell it, you mean?”
“Never.”
“You want help cleaning up the debris?”
“Good of you to offer,” said Ariel.
“But we’ll take care of it ourselves,” Bonnie finished.
He looked at them. “That’s it, then?” he said.
“Yes,” they said. “Thank you.”
Later that same day, and on a number of days that followed, they came back with Marcos and begin to pick through the remains, clean up the lot so it could renaturalize. They found relics here and there. The brass knocker from the front door. A little glass pig she kept for good luck. The bone-handled knife used to carve Thanksgiving turkey when Brice and Bonnie were yet kids, now singed beyond purpose but identified and soon to become part of a tiny McCarthy museum in her daughter’s house.
“It was a miracle no one died,” Ariel said one afternoon as they worked their way across the lot, Marcos beside her with a shovel covered in soot.
“Well, some did, many did,” Bonnie Jean said quietly. “They might not know, but they did, no doubt.”
Eventually the lot would become a homemade memorial park. Around the seedlings and small bushes they planted in the raked soil, a blade of grass sprouted, and another before that summer ended. Then some wildflowers, and then some more.
She had come to think of the river as a friend. Walking the narrow dirt path beside it at dusk, as now, was one of her most cherished indulgences. Her mind cleared. Her heart slowed. If she needed to ponder a problem, she could. If she wanted only to listen to evening birds and scuttling stream stones and contemplate nothing whatever, she could. Whenever she was able to grab an hour at the end of the day, while the grandparents or Uncle Delfino looked after little Miranda, or Marcos took over fathering her, she loved walking east along the shambled bank to Conchas Park, where weathered poplars and cottonwoods jutted forth, their roots exposed because the loam had given way under quickwash from hard rains. The Chimayó lowrider gang that used to party here had moved on, leaving nothing behind except for a rusting oil drum knocked onto its side, their bonfire barrel now a cylindrical sculpture some coydog might nose for prey in the night before trotting on. Otherwise only the running water, rustling leaves prodded by lazy air, birdcalls, and overhead the vast purpling heaven and its first faint stars.
Conchas Park, conscious park. She heard the crunch of earth underfoot, turning back toward home this evening, heard her small rhythmic contribution to nature’s improvised music. She heard her breathing, which came more easily now than it had when she first moved in at the ranch after the wedding. Ironic that living in thin air made your blood grow richer. But hers, she thought, was richer in ways that had nothing to do with altitudes above sea level. And this unborn life inside her, this gift of her love with Marcos, this boy—as the sonogram promised—whom her husband had finally named Chase because he imagined him a venturer as Kip had been, was his blood equally enriched? When he kicked, as just now, was he dancing to the quiet rhythm of her stride, as his father once had danced in Sarah’s womb? Yes, surely it was so.
The sun had gone down half an hour ago and she saw the moon meagerly