Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [36]
There were other darker elucidations in the book, and Ariel cast an eye over them as if over the history they encapsulated. How could she not shudder at the agony of
… At least the murderer knows the horror of the knife driven into his victim’s heart, can try like Macbeth’s wife to wash that blood off stained hands, but how do I help sharpen these ten trillion knives to rain on the heads of victims I will never know, never meet, never bury with my hands—how in hell do I go about mourning them? No hagas mal que bien no esperes, Emma says—Don’t wrong others and expect kindness in return. Maybe that’s why my boy doesn’t like it here. Nothing I do makes him want to stay home. His eye is constantly looking away from mine. Nobody’s said anything to us about it but Emmy and I think everybody on the Hill knows what’s happening. They feel sorry but I just feel discouraged. Last week the MPs found him down in Bandelier, hiding in one of the Indian caves. Even camping in a cold cave is better, by his lights, than sleeping here under the same roof as his dad and mom. Is this what I’ve done? Our only child. Brought this on all of us—Kip, too?
Eyes welling, she clutched the ledger against her chest. It reeked richly of must, familiar, smelling like the rain-damp hay she and Brice used to spread as mulch over grass seed whenever one of those crazy apple trees toppled under a killing frost and had to be yanked out by its roots in spring, chopped up, and run through the chipper. She knew with the precision of a child’s memory where each tree used to stand, the ones she climbed when she was a kid, fell from, breaking her arm once, her wrist another time. She remembered her horse, Maxwell, on whose broad back she loved to fly through the summer woods, until he ran her beneath a low branch that dropped her to the ground, dislocating her shoulder and fracturing ribs. Life measured by broken bones. Remembered, too, how Buddha often acrobated the branches, bringing home once a fledgling wren from a nest he raided, not because he wanted to eat the poor beast—she shouted at him, You’re overfed as it is, you murderer—but because, as her father tried to explain while she cradled its gangly fluid corpse in her hands, —Ariel, cats kill birds. It’s in their blood. It seems cruel. But it’s natural, part of life.
And what about people? What’s in their blood? she’d wondered as she dug an afternoon grave for the tiny wren.
She could resolve, now, what had been posed those many years ago down in the field beyond the porch where she sat on this different but oddly similar evening: Kip was in her blood. And in the wake of her initial shock at learning those three years ago that he was her father, she had come to a quick judgment that beyond the shared genetics, the mutual biology, Kip should not be pertinent to her life. But he was. He was.
Yet if Kip’s was a runner’s blood, so might hers be. That would certainly explain why she had run—or if not exactly run, then walked deliberately—away from him when given the chance to encounter the man. Or had her refusal to deal with it been more a case of the ostrich burying its head in the sand? The ostrich that sometimes suffocates in the same sand that was meant to protect it from harm. Daughterhood, she thought, scrunching at the page before her, lit by a citronella candle that was supposed to discourage mosquitoes but didn’t. Who in their right mind would put a contentedly unaware nonentity through it? How could anybody feel compelled to drag serene nothingness from the void into the harshness of the baby cradle and not expect a great deal of justified crying and crapping? She shook her head. One problem at a time, she thought.
Reading deeper into the book she uncovered Kip’s hidden design, the text within a text he intended for her to find. Dear Ariel, his letter began where the elder Calder’s writings left off, abruptly,