Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [37]
Dear Ariel, she read,
There was a man I met and knew for a while many years ago who believed in every religion and religious book, read the Bible and was versed in it, and who loved above everything else to quote from Proverbs. I don’t know whether or not you are a religious person, but I liked this man, and in time I came to like some of his quotes. One in particular comes to mind now, which went, No one who conceals transgressions will prosper, but one who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy. I apologize for this terrible beginning to what must be a terrible letter to read (one you may never read but that I need to write), but I wanted to say that the proverb promises, in exchange for setting things right, nothing more than clemency, maybe a kind of pity, in the best sense. I hope that you will find it in your heart to feel mercy for me even though you don’t owe me mercy or anything else. There is nothing more I could wish for, however, than clemency, mercy, whatever the right word would be. If you can’t give it, you can’t, and you would certainly be within your rights not to. Love is out of the question, I realize. You don’t know me and logically you cannot love what you don’t know. What’s more, I’m not sure love would even be appropriate to the circumstances. Understanding may be the best I can hope for, and at least a chance to end my concealment, because the time has come for me to give that up for the rotten burden it always was. If you can find enough patience to hear me out, my ghost will be grateful.
Eyes going out of focus, Ariel whispered that last clause, my ghost will be grateful. Her voice, and she heard it, strained not to be taut with rebuke. What was to rebuke? Here was a man trying to articulate what must have been inarticulable, as he set pen to a notebook that his own father had begun. Two ghosts speaking to her from the portal of one book would be overwhelming in any circumstances, but in her current state of mind the whole thing seemed altogether unearthly.
Written in different inks, apparently at different times and in different places, this letter unfurled over some dozen pages. Kip plainly had started his letter, then started it again and again. His addendum constituted a mess of addenda. The document attached to Calder senior’s might be deemed a father’s final failure to communicate with his daughter or, inversely, his most faithful possible account of the bewilderment he felt. And what had Kip made of his own father’s confessions of remorse, his feelings of accountability, the growing perplexities that had been terminated when the physicist and his wife were killed on their way to visit a son who himself was about to spin off the planet? She lifted the glass to her lips and drained it down, shuddering at its bitter juniper bite.
I will probably be dead by the time you read this, and good riddance. Your parents, among the best friends I ever had when we were all younger than you are now, will have told you about our friendship, about how your mother and I were together and in love, and how I went off to serve in Ca Mau, a dump way to the south of Saigon, then went underground in Laos, trying in that same gesture to find and lose myself. I got the latter done, but now failingly work at the former. Better never to lose yourself. Saves the trouble of having to go on a hunt. They’ll have told you that Jess was pregnant with you and that I didn’t trust her, or Brice, and believed you were not my child. I’ve had years to concoct every kind of rationale for my abandonment of you, Jess, Brice, the world I knew, choosing instead to