Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [97]
Ariel wondered, as she got out of her car and walked toward the twin glass doors of the convalescent center, if she hadn’t embarked upon failing her stepfather in much the same way he’d failed her. Stepfather—she’d never thought of Brice in that sense before, the cool, distancing legality of the word. What was its etymology if not one-step-removed father? She decided that the term was, in her case, grossly inappropriate. Lawful, but false. She’d never use it again. But how would she react when Bonnie insisted that it was the “only possible term,” as soon she undoubtedly would do? Could she really respond, “Terms are what criminals headed to prison get, and Brice is no criminal”—as she would?
Yes, but not before Sam greeted her in the visitors’ lounge of the center, wearing his uniform, Bulls jersey and camouflage army surplus cargoes, with the new addition of a tiny silver nose ring. She began to compliment the jewelry by way of making some gesture toward the boy, but Sam beat her counterfeit compliment to the draw, blurting, “Why look for some guy you don’t know?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that.”
“How so?”
“Listen, Sam. Where’s your mother?”
“With Grandma.”
“In her room?”
“No, down in the solarum.”
Ariel’s instinct to say solarium was subsumed by the absolute need to unburden herself, come clean about Kip with those here who did love her and were presences, rather than an absence, in her life.
As she began walking side by side down the corridor with her cousin—who’d asked, “So what’s with this Kip guy, anyhow?”—Ariel pressed ahead with an explanation, as if to rehearse her words for Bonnie. They passed the nurses’ station, passed some patients’ rooms. And they passed the office of Sarah Montoya, who was seated with the family of a dying invalid, citing, as she had done quite often in these past couple of years, the case of a veteran she’d encountered at death’s verge and who, despite every indication he would never pull through, was now living strong in his remission and had become nothing less than a member of her own family.
“Hope isn’t the worst risk you can take,” she said. “Without really meaning to, my friend Kip has taught me that—”
“Kip is my—” Ariel said, then stopped, having heard this echo quietly resound from the open doorway beside her. She glanced in at the woman seated behind a table within, and the woman, who’d heard that echo, too, looked up at the convergingly hopeful face of a youthful female Kip Calder, and recognized instantly who she was.
Knowing she’d misheard, sure of it, Ariel took her cousin by the arm and proceeded, shaking her head. Sarah Montoya apologized to the family seated there, rose from her chair, promising she’d be right back. Ariel and Sam were nearly at the solarium doors when Sarah caught up to them, calling, “Ariel Calder?”
If Ariel had been miles underwater, she might not have moved so slowly turning to face the woman who had spoken her name, the name that might have been hers had everyone’s life been lived just somewhat differently.
Ariel Calder. Stepfather. Invented words, inaccurate but tenable, too.
“Yes,” she breathed.
“My name is Sarah Montoya, and I know a man who’d be very happy to meet you.”
Ariel’s face drained white. She reached for Sam’s bony shoulder, but missed, and would have fallen to the floor had her cousin and Sarah not caught her in their collective arms.
So much was happening at the same time.
For Jessica, as always, the rising moon upstate meant blue shadows cast by the apple trees in the scraggly orchard, and the last brave fireflies of the season twirling slowly upward in search of mates, so slowly in the nocturnal warmth that you could easily palm one and place it in a hollyhock blossom and imprison it there by sealing the petals shut with a toothpick. The hollyhock would then come alive with eerie light. If you caught another firefly, and another, and detained them in hollyhock flowers, you’d soon