Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [45]
“You don’t need to worry,” she said, quietly. “I’m freeing you of all responsibility.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just what I said. You don’t want to deal with it and I’m not going to make you.”
“Great. Perfect.”
“In fact, why don’t I just free you of me altogether?”
“Even better.” Such stoniness surprised him, but his mind, too, was made up. They stood and walked back to the house. A quarter hour later, before throwing himself into the car and backing crazily, furiously, out of the driveway, he taunted, “What’s going on here is a delayed reaction to what started when you learned about your biological father.”
“Maybe so, probably not.”
“You’re finally angry about having been lied to your whole life by your parents.”
“They have nothing to do with this.”
“Transference is what it is. You’re displacing hostility—”
“David, don’t play psychologist with me. I don’t feel hostile toward you. I don’t feel much of anything, if you want to know.”
“This is destructive behavior. You’re not mother material.”
Not unfair, but as Ariel sat once more in the Adirondack chair to stare at the prolific bed of orange tiger lilies her parents had planted in honor of her junior high graduation, she thought of chain reactions. First her nucleus had been split by one father’s merging with another. Then she’d become the hapless next split atom. Then the private tissue of her own ovum, like some puzzling nuclear core, had been halved by the saturation of sperm protons. Ariel could almost hear Jessica, who scolded her whenever she thought with her mind absent her heart.
And now David was gone. His last words hadn’t been amiable. He told her he didn’t “get them” anymore. That he couldn’t love somebody who didn’t know who she was or had been or was becoming. That he couldn’t see their having a baby together, not when they hardly had each other, or themselves. They’d been a couple once, but coupledom seemed to be a thing of the past.
“Coupledom?” she’d groaned, the hangover she’d earned having abruptly arrived.
Ariel had developed a private face, one at times as difficult to read as any of her more abstruse books. And that was the face she’d worn as the discussion ended, though David would have a few words to add before slamming shut his car door and raising pebbles and dust as he backed out of the drive with his bare foot pressed hard against the accelerator pedal. He knew he was leaving behind drawers of clothing in the armoire in their shared bedroom, and downstairs in the mudroom snowshoes, his hiking boots, camping paraphernalia, the sleeping bag in which he and Ariel had spent nights together during chilly autumns just before hunting season, when the stars were at their thickest and in the mornings wild turkeys would drift through the fallen leaves, pecking and scratching their way along, clucking and foraging. Ariel watched all this, eyes bloodshot, in a state of suspended disbelief.
She asked for it and got it. Maybe he was right, maybe wrong. Maybe she didn’t know what she was talking about.
One thing was certain. The person she needed to tell about this pregnancy was none other than Kip Calder, since he was the only one who could give her the straight dope on what it felt like to abandon your child even before that child was born.
The house and surrounding woods were silent again. She dressed and walked to a place where she used to love to hide as a girl. Lying on the long, warm lichened capstones of the barn wall, past the apple orchard, she sweated out the toxins in air laden with midday light. She tried to get her beating mind to think slowly, carefully. A voice that mingled with her own, her mother’s, and even that of Granna asked, Was she sure she should go to New Mexico and raise dust that had settled so long ago? Told her Kip was most probably dead by now, that she’d blown it by being so damn diffident in the first place. Declared that if there was any chance she might go ahead and have this baby, she’d have to lay off drinking. Poor thing was probably wretched in there,