Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [42]
—Probably
—Girls need sisters so they can have someone to talk to when, you know, things happen.
—What things?
—Things that make you unhappy, her grandmother said. And then she drifted away again into other worlds, musing on the fig tree under which Adam wept, or Augustine’s lust, and how that reminded her of the hike she and Brice’s father once made up the notch at San Agustin Pass. Which was where, her granddaughter surmised, Brice was conceived.
It occurred to Ariel, sitting on this summer porch, that right now she could use, as much as some sister, a good dose of Granna’s fearsome faith. Not to mention her talent for chasing hunches in circles, like a dog its own sometimes catchable tail.
Where had Ariel’s own thoughts now veered if not into mad cyclings, like the Milky Way, which while wheeling out of control cast light on so much? Here at the farm, the kitchen walls were also white. Plaster laced with cowhair rather than the pure adobe of New Mexico, true, but she liked the idea of connection between this house and Granna’s. Anything that proposed continuity, cohesion. Ariel could see by the citronellas flame that the siding could use some fresh paint. Maybe once she got things straightened out she’d do the job herself. Scraping, sanding, brushing the rows of parallel clapboard—tasks that smacked of normalcy and healing. A project Granna would find worthy.
After another trip inside to refill her glass, she returned to the porch. With David having agreed to drive up late after work, and given the magnitude of the news she had to tell him, getting smashed was not, perhaps, the best idea. Good thing she phoned him before cracking open the liquor cabinet. “Go away,” she shouted, addressing not so much her predicament as the doggerel music that would not dislodge its looping track from her head. What mad genius ever thought to rhyme lettuce with upset us? Some jingle she must have heard on David’s television, since she didn’t own one, hadn’t grown up with one—a childhood abnormality that once made her weird in the eyes of telesaturated kids at school. At recess, on the paved playground, they discussed shows about cookie monsters and ranch tycoons. Smiling, she’d nod if asked, Didn’t this or that episode sound great? Probably yes, but it was a world she didn’t know, which always left her a bit the outsider. She wondered what books Kip had read. And which, if any, had sent him into rapturous joy, or plunged him into doubt. His letter was more than articulate. It seemed inspired by the eloquence of knowing loss.
So Ariel thought, as vertigo voices singing Special orders don’t upset us carried on and on and she gazed beyond the yard, past the pond, and into the woods where white birches stood out like skinny ghosts, down where she often gathered mushrooms, having learned as a girl to distinguish the edible ones from the poisonous. And oh, she thought, before passing out in the hard chair, if only everything were as simple to sort as boletes from morels, morels from ringstalks, ringstalks from …
She jolted upright on hearing David’s car coming up the dirt road through the woods that surrounded the farm. Stiff and aching, Ariel felt the undeniable here-and-now upon her. The ledger had fallen from her lap and she grasped for it, clutched it again, oddly felt that without it she might float away. Parenthood, she thought, remembering what was inside her, the fetus, embryo, zygote. The idea of an idea. Like parentheses around a vital aside. Parents, parentheses.
Must be after midnight. Some of the stars seemed to be making lateral curlicuing movements, as if astronomical baton twirlers up there had fallen out of formation but kept their figure-eights going. She listened as wind moved gently around the house. Sounds carried here as if they made themselves up out of nothing.
The low grind of the engine climbing the hill, and the flash of headlamp light across the barrier