Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [26]
The possible answer occurred to her that day of confirmation. She left Gramercy, pace quickening all the way. Having climbed the steps of her walk-up two at a time, she turned the key in the lock with a quaking hand. She pulled a chair into her book closet and climbed up to retrieve the dusty box in which Kip’s banished gifts had languished for these past three years.
Her old Dodge Dart was parked on the street a block away. She carried the finches in their cage down the hall and gave them to her surprised, elated neighbor who had always coveted the little birds. She threw together some clothes, locked her windows and doors, and left for the funky, cherished family farmhouse upstate. It was the only place in the world where Ariel could truly be by herself. And as the Palisades loomed north above the Hudson while she drove across the George Washington Bridge, she thought if ever solitude might serve her well it was now. Hadn’t her childhood hero Thoreau, that other David, chosen seclusion over social engagement? What about solitary Emily Dickinson, loner Coleridge?
Wind on her face felt good. The long slow burn of delaying the inevitable had flared into a wildfire of wanting to know who Kip was. Banishment tripped toward an embrace of needing to fill in the vast rift of willful ignorance. David himself had long ago urged her to do this. “You’re never going to be a whole person until you meet him,” he’d argued.
“My wholeness or lack of it has nothing to do with Kip Calder,” was her response. She could almost hear the faltering in her voice from this present vantage.
“You know how when somebody loses a leg, they say they still have feeling in it? Whether you want to admit it or not, you must have feelings for him.”
“I never had the leg to begin with, and I don’t see the point of trying to walk on it now.”
She remembered his shrug. “My analogy may be off,” he persisted, “but I still think you need to connect with the man, if only once.”
Why hadn’t she listened? she thought as she turned off the quick-way and drove through broad hilly farmlands muggy with summer steam. Would that he were always so insightful. The David who had suggested she meet her birth father was the best David, a man she realized she lost months ago. If only it were that David rather than this disaffected one whom she would have to face in her present predicament. She who didn’t feel she had anything to say to anyone. Who wrote that to achieve greatness all one had to do was learn to sit in a room and be quiet? Some French philosopher who wouldn’t want his name invoked.
Maybe the bias wasn’t so aberrant. Perhaps the most gregarious among us are quietly dying to be left alone. So she thought as she pulled into the dirt drive that led to the isolated white clapboard farmhouse, set in the middle of green grass edged by daisy fleabane and wild basil, by ferns and the sheltering forest beyond. She cut the engine, climbed out, walked down to the pond ringed by cattails and the bald stalks of irises she’d planted with her own hands long ago, now spent. Shedding her clothes and shoes, she walked into the water which received her