Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [71]
It would remain for Mary to persuade him to leave Nambé and move west to a place where they might both tackle the world from a greater vantage, and for Franny to be exposed and then retire to some kindly Kachina Village where witches would not torment her.
Accompanied by the younger of her sons, Bonnie Jean met Ariel at the emergency room. Aunt and niece had never been much closer than were Bonnie Jean and her somewhat estranged brother, Brice, but they kissed each other on the cheek in the hospital foyer. Bonnie stood in her daisy-print housedress, looking dazed and hapless. Her wispy browngray hair was bobby-pinned arbitrarily to her head, her drawn face was bleached by worry, and her bloodshot eyes conveyed that she, usually stalwart to a fault, had been weeping. She blinked as if, roused from a long nap, she discovered herself in a place where she had never been before. “Do they know what happened?”
“A mild stroke is what they’re saying,” answered Ariel, herself ashen. “They’ve got her stabilized, said they’ll know more over the next few hours. She’s going to be all right. She’s tough.”
“Too tough for her own good.”
“Well, she does things her way, if that’s what you mean.”
Bonnie Jean said to no one in particular, “I warned her. This was inevitable, smoking that pipe of hers like some merchant marine and drinking like a sailor. Eventually catches up with you.”
Sam adjusted his oversize stovepipe jeans on his narrow waist and nodded mute greetings to this cousin, who was more than a decade his senior. His basketball jersey was either half tucked in or purposely left half untucked, she couldn’t tell which.
Mountaintop hip-hop, thought Ariel. “I sure hope my showing up unexpected didn’t cause this to happen.”
“Of course not.”
“She was pretty wound up this morning.”
“How so?”
“We’d finished breakfast, and she was talking about, about the number thirteen—”
“Her latest fixation.”
“—and Christ and your father.”
“Her other two.”
“She was really lucid, but all over the place—”
“Was she drinking?”
“—then she suddenly got the strangest look on her face, and put her hands up in front of her, and I thought … well, I didn’t know what to think. Then she blacked out. That’s when I called Emergency and rode over in the ambulance with her. I would have phoned sooner, just it all happened so fast.”
“No need to explain, Ariel. If you hadn’t been there, who knows what would’ve happened. She was drinking?”
“Not much.”
Bonnie Jean smirked, raised her eyebrows.
Sam and Ariel sat in the waiting room while Bonnie conferred with the doctor and paid a visit to her mother in intensive care. Wearing rumpled black drawstring pants and the same black tank T-shirt she’d slept in, Ariel knotted her untied tennis shoes, conscious she was being watched. What a morning, what a life. At least it looked like Granna was going to pull through, poor angel. “You’ve grown a lot since I saw you last, Sam. How old are you now?”
“Me? Fifteen, almost.”
“Really,” she said, affecting a diplomatic distance and feigning surprise. “That’s getting there,” her voice cascading into deeper registers, elderly-aunt sounds, she supposed, to ward off his unequivocal gaze at her bralessness.
“Getting where?”
“You know what I mean. Older.”
“We’re all getting there.”
Ariel thought, Shut up, Sam. She rose and walked to the bank of tinted windows, which afforded a mesmerizing view of gnarly ponderosa pines in nearby yards and, beyond, forests, more forests rising above Los Alamos into the Jemez Mountains. She’d driven up there with Granna once, through Douglas firs and lodgepole pines, dizzy from the switchbacks and altitude—nine thousand feet, almost ten—and made it to Valle Caldera at the summit. She remembered being dumbstruck by that vast grassy crater, the product of an eruption some million years ago, whose lava had brought this finger mesa into being—this place where Sam had been born, Bonnie Jean, Brice and Kip, and the atom bomb itself, a pale imitation of such an instance of