Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [92]
Once they moved her out of intensive care and into her own room, she brightened up altogether. Fewer external stimuli, no moaning beyond the drawn curtain. Less frightening equipment, just intravenous and a catheter. Her cheeks blushed with new color when she found she could clasp a rubber ball. Bonnie Jean and Ariel worked out an alternating routine—Ariel in the morning, Bonnie the afternoon, either or both in the evening—so she was never alone during visiting hours. Daughter watched television with her, soap operas and talk shows. Granddaughter arranged orchids in a round glass bowl of water and set them on her windowsill. Granna saw that the mountains were upside down in the globular vase.
“Refrac … shion,” she said slowly, appreciatively.
Ariel chose books to read to her from Granna’s shelves. She brought a Bible to the hospital, and other volumes that appeared to have been left purposely within reach of her reading chair in the cottage living room.
“Wall Whitman,” the patient requested, impatient with her diffident tongue. Then tried again a bit harder, straining and succeeding with, “Walt Whitman or … or Eh … merson.”
Ariel read from an essay by the latter. “‘My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also. We pass for what we are.’”
She lifted her fingers then her braceleted wrist and quaking arm off the bedsheets and said the words Self and Reliance separately, enunciating each with painstaking care. Nodding, Ariel continued as the woman lay her hand on her chest with deliberate heedfulness, as if she were holding some gossamer string connected to life itself.
Sooner than any of them might have expected, the doctors advised Bonnie Jean that her mother had made wonderful progress and needed to begin physical and speech therapy. The prognosis for a complete recovery was entirely positive. Plans were made to transfer her to a convalescent facility where she could recuperate. Under cloudless blue skies and a white sun that made her blink and brought to her lips another partly lopsided smile, she was moved in an ambulette van. Her daughter decorated her new room with metallic balloons emblazoned with the words Get Well Soon and a huge—Bonnie might have thought a little overhuge—arrangement of gladiolas from Brice and Jessica. Explaining to her mother that no, this wasn’t a nursing home, Bonnie Jean assured her she was going to be here for only a month, or six weeks at the most, and then it would be back to Pear Street. Ariel added that her departure would be not in a wheelchair but on her own two feet.
“That sounds good, doesn’t it?”
“Yeh,” gazing as it were into Ariel’s very soul.
And into her soul, that very evening at Granna’s house, Ariel herself began, in the wake of this aberration from her purpose here, to address anew her own quixotic quest. She’d finally reached Brice the day after his mother’s hospitalization and told him everything, reassuring him there was no immediate need to fly out. She felt a twinge of guilty selfishness about wanting her parents to stay away from Los Alamos for the time being. That and a sense of disgraceful collusion with her aunt, whose sibling rivalry with Brice she found distasteful. But Ariel desperately desired to have a week or two to finish what she’d begun, removed from Jessica and her father. She saw this with cold clarity, and the idea caused a shiver to run through her. Be that as it may, when Brice agreed that Ariel and her aunt could handle matters until Granna settled into this convalescent center, whereafter he’d come assist with whatever there was to shoulder, Ariel exonerated herself from further worry. There was the question, also, of when or if Brice intended to tell his mother and sister about Kip Calder’s true relationship with Ariel herself. For the moment, she let it pass. Family dynamics. As always, the indelicate balance.
Afternoons, she continued looking for Kip. She drove