Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [78]
Ariel woke up wired. Wired and disconcerted. Her week on the long road, culminating in that Friday reality-check reckoning in Chimayó, had finally weighed in on her. Having tossed, turned, remembered where she was and why, she pulled back the sheets and tiptoed—though there was no reason to do so, since the house was empty—into Granna’s kitchen. Sitting at the table with a glass of milk, she thought about how much Granna wanted to join her husband. After Ariel said goodnight, the woman’s parting words, garbled by drugs and the stroke, were, “Maybe a gaw nigh in Heaven.”
“It’s always a good night in Heaven, right, Granna?”
“You come too when’s your time, awrigh?”
“I’ll do my best. Meanwhile, get some sleep. Heaven’s not ready for you yet.”
She thought about how much her grandfather McCarthy had liked to sit at this very table with her, drinking warm milk to soothe his ulcer. He loved physics and a good conundrum, those two things maybe more than anything else besides Granna. Work and wife made sense, but his devotion to riddles was a character quirk, no doubt about it.
The old man was a master of conundra, as he liked incorrectly to call them, penumbras of cognition. Trick questions he collected. Ariel remembered how much he delighted in posing even simple classic riddles like, —What’s black and white and red all over? in his crumbly dry voice, then awaiting her response.
If his granddaughter guessed, —Newspaper, he would say, —Sunburned zebra.
If she guessed, —Sunburned zebra, he’d say, —Communist Manifesto.
If she tried another tack and guessed, —Ovaltine in a red cup, he’d say, —Not bad. But not right, either.
He loved answering one conundrum with another’s solution.
—The more you take the more you leave behind, what’s that?
Ariel considered the problem for a minute, but it wasn’t a difficult one. She answered, —Footsteps?
—No, he said. Try again.
—Breaths, breathing.
—Closer.
—Come on, Grampa. Footsteps was the right answer.
—The correct answer was wedding rings. Here’s another. What single word has the most letters in it?
She knew this, knew the answer was post office, but said, —The alphabet.
Naturally, calmly, swiftly, he said, —That’s correct, by god.
It was two words, but so is post office. —Hey, Grampa, what can fill a room but doesn’t take up any room?
—Light.
—Nope. Light takes up room.
—Darkness.
—Naw, come on. Darkness takes up room.
—Air?
—No. Air takes up room, too. You’re not trying very hard.
—I give up.
—Silence! she shouted.
—One could make the case that silence is spatial, you know.
These games endured through their brief years as granddaughter and grandpa, on the telephone, in letters, in person. She rose to every occasion and he marveled at her mind, telling his son once, —Do whatever you can to nurture this girl’s imagination and nothing to hurt it. She’s special.
Brice concurred, saying he was doing his best.
—Why is Grampa’s eye so milky, like there’s a cloud in it? she asked Jessica after the McCarthys made one of their rare visits to New York, some seven months before he died. No conundrum; Ariel’s forehead was furrowed, her arms were crossed, her black shoes were locked side by side. At times such as this, she looked mature well beyond her baker’s dozen years. Her mother explained that this was something that happened to certain people when they got older.
—It’s called a cataract.
When Ariel looked the word up in the dictionary, she found that it came from a much older term for waterfall, for abrupt, for floodgate, and for striking down. She remembered those backgrounding words when her conundrumming pal was gone. As she wept in her bedroom, she thought how abrupt death can be in striking us down, how those who are left behind are flooded in tears. A heart attack seemed so unfair, she believed, to come to a man who had such a good heart.
During that last visit to the city, he asked her the queerest question. She recalled it because it was his