Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [51]
Pretty harsh. Still, she never felt more alone. And as such, she wished she knew how to pray. Whom to pray to. Eyes closed, she even tried. Dear God, Ariel here, asking your help. You probably already know that I’m Ariel. You probably already know everything. Well, of course you do. What I wanted to ask is … Maybe never mind. I’m sorry. Amen.
No better than usual, she thought, washing her face. Once you come up against omniscience, any presumption of dialogue collapses.
Poor believing Granna had tried to teach her years before. Having admonished Ariel that it was bad luck to bow in prayer at the end of a bed, the woman had knelt with her, elbow to elbow, during one of the girl’s half dozen previous solo trips to Los Alamos. Ariel could even now see that bed covered with its white broderie de Marseilles wedding quilt patterned with laurel and mockingbirds, an antique older than Brice’s mother’s mother, from whom she had inherited it. Ariel could still hear Granna saying, in a voice frighteningly gentle, —Dear Lord Savior, in Jesus’ name I beseech thee, come unto this young girl and show her, Lord, how to address thee, in God’s name, and how to beseech thy grace and comfort … and on and on, until Ariel thought how Granna’s prayer was lasting for many more minutes than she would have imagined necessary for God to make contact with them had he so desired. But then, how was anybody, God included, supposed to hear Granna’s whispering so softly that even she who was on bended knee right next to her had to strain to understand? The prayer lesson might have seemed a consummate failure had her grandmother not declared it quite successful.
Now things weren’t so pure as that beautiful quilt. Granna’s prayerful clarity held no sway over this ungentle night. Now everything in Ariel’s surround seemed struck by discord, disorder, and dislocation.
Back in bed, she pulled the ledger onto her lap and opened it to that page on which her grandfather questioned why his son kept running away. Outside, in the distance, the familiar sound of a siren disrupted Kip’s father’s written voice and harkened her back to New York and the day of her revelation. How curious that a moment so consequential could already be hazing over in memory. Was this a mind protecting itself, detraumatizing the pain by making its own personal history murky? She felt mildly comforted, as the siren faded into the distance, by a growing belief that this new truth was the right one.
“Ariel Calder,” she tried it out loud. The old Ariel truths were frauds, sort of, but she decided not to dismiss them. She made a decision, a cutting off of all other possibilities, which was after all what the word decision meant. She wouldn’t banish the old truths, however crippled they were, because they still were truths. They might be contradictory, but both old and new truths were irrefutable.
She flipped the wall switch beside the bed to extinguish the lights, tried to sleep, but couldn’t. The hard fact that she was in Pojoaque, seven thousand-plus feet above sea level, two thousand miles or so from the farmhouse, and possibly near the man who’d given her life, sat like a stone in her gut.
Ariel had daydreamed her way west. She opened her eyes into the pulsating darkness, closed them to some pretense of sleep, but still reveries came in evolving bundles. They came in color; they came in shades of gold. They streamed, or swelled. She reached for the lamp toggle and pushed. She dialed David in New York and when he answered, she said, “I’m really sorry about what’s happened and I don’t blame you for any of it.” He hung up. Quivering, after listening to the dial tone for some seconds, she replaced the handset on the bedside table and turned on the television, of all things, for distraction. A game show, Jeopardy! Just perfect, she thought. Jeopardy before and jeopardy behind. She pulled the sheets over her head.
Before she finally fell asleep again, one of the things her grandfather McCarthy used to tell her came to mind. When one person does a foolish thing, it’s foolish. When two people