Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [9]
Abundant invented stories were woven by Mary into this evolving Franny, and Mary believed them even as she spun them quicker than a spider, so that remembering what she’d said at first presented her with no problem. Sometimes, in bed, listening to her sham river out the window, Mary worried she was falling for Marcos. Or that Franny was. Another voice would point out that the more of a life she built here, the more Gallup could become a faraway mirage, reflecting only itself over a domain of broken mirrors. Whenever Mary grew troubled, Franny reassured her. And when Franny became distressed, Mary would breathe slowly and deeply, as she’d taught herself to do those nights when her father came into her room, after her sister, Rose, had fallen asleep, to apologize for having smacked her over this or that quarrel.
—Let’s forget about it, all right? he would whisper into the burning ear of his mute daughter, a confident hand stroking her cold forehead.
She did not want to get involved with Marcos, however sane and normal such a thing might be, but Marcos, after Franny’s half dozen visits to Nambé, asked if he could kiss her.
—Maybe that’s not such a great idea, she said, both charmed by his old-fashioned backwardness and perplexed by her own terror. She ran her eye down his profile as he looked away. The brown hair that spilled over the sheer straight cliff of his forehead was beautiful, she thought. His sunburned nose and long lean cheeks and brown lips drawn taut, beautiful as any she’d ever seen. She never met a more western westerner. —Look, it’s not you. I’m overly wary. We’ll see, all right? All right, echoing her father.
Marcos nodded, and Franny thanked him, though she did have to wonder why Mary was afraid of such a natural proposition. That is, until she calculated once more the fact that propositions were for mathematicians, not for impostors on the lam. Especially impostors who aspired to careers of make-believe.
Francisca’s mother was calling to her. She remembered not only the affectionate nickname but the timbre of that voice, the lightly trilling para of esparaván, the waveringly weak final syllable ván that modulated the word into a question.
—Francisca, esparaván?
That one voice was joined by others, voices Francisca de Peña could not so easily recognize. Women, children, men, the utterances of wind animals. These wild fugal cries came and went in waves, and the more often they disturbed the shade of her vacant fieldhouse, the more fearful she became, she who hadn’t really known anything of fear for the longest time. She understood why she was afraid, and this fear of what was so obvious and necessary made her disgusted with herself, made her say, Unspeakable, made her say, Execrable y no sembrado. Yet the dying seed was sown.
The ghost Francisca spent nights and days in her adobe prison. Sometimes, nodding off toward nothingness, she found that she had unintentionally drifted through the mud walls and out into the pasture, or floated through the coyote fence toward the riverbank. She would come to as if slapped by hard cold water, dazedly reorient herself, then return to the fieldhouse more confused than ever. She’d lost almost all interest in the lives of those who came and went into and out of the hacienda. Her ability to distinguish colors and shapes was failing. What she saw was parallax and dim. She couldn’t even remember her mother’s name. Strella, Stella? And her father? Where was he? Who had he become?
But she did recognize the boy Marcos, and Marcos recognized her that third and final time he would ever see her, or at least know with certainty he was seeing her.
Months, superb tiny whiskers of time, had elapsed. Franny joined a regional theater company and finally confessed to Marcos her acting aspirations. After he gamely sat through