Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [44]
When she awoke, the sun was pointing gentle light into the room where they lay in bed, its warmth baking her pained eyes and her pounding temples as she ascended like some poor bat startled from its daytime lair into flying blind at noon. However burdened by bad sleep and a blameworthy conscience, she understood that her failure to tell David what she really thought—that they’d reached the end of their road together—offered her a fresh chance at imagining why her parents had themselves failed for so many years to tell her about Kip. When it came to furnishing the facts and acknowledging the truth, however hurtful, and hurtful to whomever, be it the teller or the one told, she had not measured up any better than they.
Feeling her way to the staircase, palms flattened against the night’s damp cool in the walls, she stopped and laid her cheek against the plaster, as if to cool her mind as well.
David slept on while she withdrew downstairs, semidrunk still, clasping the smooth oak handrail with both hands. How she wished she could cry. Wasn’t that what one ought to do? She paused at the newel, breathed through pursed lips. No tears, just thinnest breath. As if her grandmother McCarthy were beside her, she thought she heard that familiar raspy voice whisper, Hair of the dog ad majorem Dei gloriam, which didn’t make her laugh.
Instead she found her way to the kitchen sink, whispering a matin prayer of sorts. She drank tap water from the bowl of her cupped hands. Coughed and shivered but still found no tears to shed over the twin misery and abundance that faltered inside her. Without a thought, she ducked her head under the faucet and allowed the water, now running much colder from deep in the well, to flow over the back of her neck. A thin thread trickled over her shoulders and along the furrow of her spine, coursing like a glass snake down her thigh and calf to the kitchen floor of wide hemlock planks, where it pooled, a trembling mirror reflecting the morning sun. When she glanced down, through the thin fabric of her slip, she sensed her breasts and flat belly had, even if imperceptibly, ripened with this pregnancy. Was that possible?
Her sunlit body seemed suddenly like a candled egg. She closed the faucet, sank to her knees, sat back against the cabinet door. Supporting her downcast head on fisted hands, she stared at the sun’s tiny face dancing on the puddle of water. She noted its purling eye but wasn’t sure, in that moment, whether it was withering from view because she was crying or because the miniature sea had merely cast her back upon herself, as a wave might a broken bit of coral.
When David joined her an hour later, the spirit of nostalgia had vanished. She was down by the pond drinking her cup of coffee, sitting cross-legged on the grass, watching a whitetail dragonfly flit among the asters. As he approached, he could see her body’s profile through the sheer beige of her shift and recognized that these might be among their final minutes together. Whereas he’d always respected, even revered, the deep solidity, the centeredness and strengths of Ariel in times past, this morning he found himself resenting them. Shouldn’t one as exposed as she was, there in the bowl of wildflowers and deep calm water, seem vulnerable? Seem disarmed and defenseless in the face of nature, somehow? Not Ariel, at least not here and now. On the contrary, she seemed impregnable. Irony of ironies. He sat beside her, irritated that they had to argue over the indisputable fact they weren’t going through with this baby stuff. “You must feel awful.”
“I feel fine,” she rused.
“I meant, having overdone it with the gin.”
She nodded, not looking at him, not truly looking at anything.
“We