by Riley LaShea
By accident, I had made myself Ariel’s enemy, something she had to fear. She must have thought she had no allies, would never believe I was still on her side, and with no one to stand with her if it came to defending herself, she had to be extra careful. Glances and speech were weapons that could be turned around on her, so she used them sparingly whenever I was near.
Much to my surprised delight, it was touch, for which I no longer dared hope, that came first. Leaving Nan’s room one morning, I felt Ariel’s hand on my arm outside the door and turned to find her right there, so close I wanted to press into her, to invite her comforts, to embrace the part of myself I had been desperately trying to push away.
“She’s dying,” Ariel declared, and I felt the instant chill where her hand had been hot on my skin only a moment before.
Ariel’s eyes turning kind on me for the first time since the garden, they tried to provide some solace, and I couldn’t stop staring into them, feeling as if it had been a lifetime since they last looked at me that way.
I wanted her to have stopped me for a different reason, a better reason, to tell me what I’d been longing to hear without acknowledging it, that she felt what I felt. Not that it was okay to feel that way, because I knew that it wasn’t, but that we at least felt that way together, and if we were going to feel those things, and be damned to Hell for feeling, we may as well have the benefits that went with it.
“No,” I disagreed with her assessment of Nan’s condition automatically. “She’s...” Fine, I thought to myself, but it was a lie I couldn’t buy or sell. Nan was the same in spirit, but she was no way near the woman I once watched put out a fire in the kitchen with nothing but a folded newspaper and determination.
“She’s dying, Elizabeth,” Ariel risked another touch upon my arm, but didn’t let it linger. “She doesn’t want you to know, but I think it’s important for you to know. You should spend all the time with her you can. I’ll stay out of your way.”
In the face of what she was telling me, I couldn’t rally my irritation to remind her I wasn’t the one doing the avoiding, that I still came and still wanted something I couldn’t explain, but felt anyway, that her last touch on my arm had left something other than traces of sympathy behind.
“How long?” Tears filled my eyes, and Ariel reached for me again, but just as my heart leapt in anticipation of her touch, she diverted her hand, tucking it into the crook of her opposite elbow as if to trap it in place.
“A few weeks,” she replied. “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you for telling me,” I heard myself utter, though I wasn’t sure why. It was the polite thing to respond, just the thing people said in such situations. No one was ever thankful for being told she was about to be robbed of one of the most important people in her life.
“She wants to have dinner in the dining room when your brother gets here,” Ariel went on, and I wondered how I could have forgotten about Scott, and his upcoming visit, if only for a second. “It will be nice for her. She’s proud of all of you. You should be happy about that. She’s had a good, long life, and she knows it. I know that doesn’t make it easier for you, but it does for her.”
When I could think of nothing to say in response, because death pretty much trumped all arguments, Ariel turned and started back into Nan’s room without another word.
“Ariel?” I meant to call to her, but it came out like a prayer, and when Ariel glanced back at me, sympathy and affection warred with something less forgiving on her face.
I didn’t know what to say to her, what I wanted to say to her. I just didn’t want her to go. I wanted to feel her arms around me, to get lost in her, and I wasn’t sure what I might do to make it happen.
Recognizing, perhaps, what a danger I posed to both of us, Ariel stole my chance, continuing through the door of Nan’s room and leaving me barely afloat in my confusion.
Nan would die, I realized. It was as inevitable as the sun disappearing from the sky at night, or the garden losing its flowers come winter. And, when she died, Ariel would leave. And, though those two things should have been a million ticks apart on the spectrum of loss, both were of equal pain.
Chapter Five
Nan allowed Ariel’s close monitoring, but she didn’t want her life saved when it was time for it to be over. She didn’t want doctors called in, or to be put into a hospital.
Ariel didn’t tell me that. I overheard Mama and Daddy talking about it one night, Mama’s voice coated thicker with sadness than I expected, seeing as she and Nan barely got along.
“No use meddling with death,” Nan responded when I asked her why she would make such a decision. “It just keeps coming, and it always wins in the end.”
“I always thought you’d live forever,” I whispered, and her laugh turned to a cough that had Ariel rushing over to check on her, before tapering into a wheezing sound that made me want to cry the tears Nan wouldn’t.
“I don’t want to live forever,” Nan declared. “I just want to live well while I’m here. A beating heart doesn’t mean a life worth having. Isn’t that right, Ariel?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Ariel replied, and it sounded as if she was giving her consent.
Watching her walk off again, leaving Nan and I alone at the bed, anger boiled inside me, and, without thinking, I pushed to my feet to trail Ariel to the window. Looking back over my shoulder to make sure we were far enough that Nan couldn’t hear, when I turned back to Ariel, she looked bothered, like she didn’t want to be even that alone with me.
“You agree with her?” I asked, but Ariel’s eyes never moved from whatever she was staring at on the other side of the glass. “You want to just let her die?”
“I don’t want her to die,” Ariel returned in a firm whisper, “but I can’t stop that. I can let her do it with as much control and dignity as possible.”
“So, she could die tomorrow,” I announced, and when Ariel pulled her eyes from the window to glance beyond me, I knew to lower my voice. “Or she could live three more months, and you’re saying tomorrow is okay?”
“It’s what she wants,” Ariel returned.
“That’s not right,” I uttered. All those Sunday school teachings about the sanctity of life and appreciating what God gave us, I thought I understood what they meant. So young, I thought I could fathom the pains of old age, the fear of poor health, and I couldn’t imagine a single reason alive would ever be worse than dead. “I’m going to tell her it’s not right,” I declared. “She should do everything she can to stay alive.”
Whirling away, I forced Ariel’s hand, which shot out to catch my arm and prevent my intervention. “Don’t pressure her.” Her eyes were stern as they finally landed on me. “She will do what you want.”
“I’m glad,” I returned, trying to break away, but Ariel engaged her other hand to keep me from asking Nan for something I didn’t understand I had no right to ask of her.
“She’s tired, Elizabeth,” her voice gentled, her eyes filling with tears as her hands turned softer on my arms. “She’s hurting. Let her go.”
At the time, I didn’t recognize it as some of the best advice I would ever be given, to know when to hold on and when to open my hands to set someone free. All I knew was Ariel’s hands were entrancing where they slid up and down my arms, her eyes peered through the wall that had formed between us, and the light pouring through the window made her look radiant.
Realizing how much I wanted her to kiss me, right there in front of Nan and God and the transparent glass through which the entire world might see, I stepped out of her touch and tried to draw elusive breath.
“I should go help Mama with dinner,” I raised my voice so Nan would hear my excuse to escape.
“What time will your brother be here?” Ariel asked.
“Around five,” I said, and she nodded as if to say she would have Nan ready.
Turning to look at Nan, she was much too curious where she watched us from the bed, and I wondered how much she had seen, if
she knew we were talking about her, and then that I had almost forgotten she was there at all. “I’ll make sure he comes in as soon as he gets here,” I told her.
“He’d better,” Nan replied.
“Are you having dinner with us?” The question, tossed over my shoulder, came out of nowhere, and I didn’t know what I was doing asking it. No one had mentioned Ariel’s presence, not even Scott, and I didn’t have the authority to offer such an invitation without going through a tribunal. In a moment of impulse, I had simply seized power, as if I was the master of the house and my word could be made law.
When Ariel said nothing, I knew she thought I wasn’t talking to her, that I was simply reaffirming Nan’s place at the dinner table. “Ariel?” I turned back, and the ruthless sunlight turned her near golden. “Are you having dinner with us?”
“No,” she shook her head. “This is your family.”
“Scott is bringing a friend,” I felt stung by her answer. “I’m sure Mama won’t mind.”
Well aware of how Mama felt about her, and about her presence in our home, Ariel could only laugh, and I knew, if I asked a hundred different ways, she would say no a hundred different times.
“Of course, she’s coming to dinner,” Nan came to my aid, and it wasn’t so much her words that were jolting, but the strength with which she declared them. “She’s had to leave her own life to stay at the bedside of an old lady for months. The least we can do is give her a good meal.”
Though my word had attempted to masquerade as it only moments before, even Ariel recognized Nan’s word truly was the law of the house, so she did her best to look delighted as she turned from the window. “Well then, I guess I am coming.”
“Good,” I said, a thrill going through me when I knew I should have been worried. “I’ll let Mama know.”
Turning a bright smile on Nan as I turned to go, for getting the answer I wanted out of Ariel, even if it shouldn’t have been the answer I wanted, I was certain I heard Ariel’s troubled sigh clear across the room.
All afternoon spent in the kitchen with Mama, my ears were perked for the sound of Scott’s arrival. The instant I heard the familiar crackle of gravel that always brought Daddy home from work, I rushed from mixing up the coleslaw into the evening sun, which glinted off the hood of an unknown car as it came to a stop in the drive.
Whipping Scott from the passenger’s seat before he could get his feet beneath him, I latched on with all my might, so glad to have him home, that he hadn’t abandoned me, even if it felt like he was about to abandon me to go fight Nazis, with no guarantee which he would come back, a hero or a corpse.
“Did you miss me?” Scott sounded nothing but amused by my enthusiastic greeting.
“You know I did,” I clung more tightly to him.
“I’ve only been gone three months,” he returned, and it was hard to believe.
In those months, so much had happened. I had changed so much. When he left, I thought it was Scott who would be different when he came back, but I was the one who wasn’t the same person.
“Three too many,” I mumbled into his Army shirt, knowing I’d given myself away when Scott pushed me back.
“You okay, Lizzie?” he questioned, his concerned eyes scanning mine, and I knew if there was any person I could trust not to let them send me to the asylum, anyone who would understand what it was I felt for Ariel, it was Scott, who had his own crush on her, but the shutting of the driver’s door reminded me we weren’t alone.
Glancing up as the sandy-haired man a few years older, and few inches taller, than Scott came around the front of the car, I tried to find my composure, to be a proper lady in the stranger’s presence.
“Lizzie, this is my friend Jackson,” Scott introduced us.
“Hello there,” Jackson held his hand out to me.
“Hello.” I quickly shook it, and slipped my hand free again.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Jackson smiled broadly, and I suspected I was supposed to feel something, that normal girls would, that Jackson’s piercing blue eyes and straight white teeth should be as beautiful to me as Ariel was standing in the rays of light streaming through Nan’s window. “Sorry about your dog,” he added, distracting me from everything I didn’t feel.
“What did you tell him?” I turned threatening eyes on Scott.
“Only the truth,” Scott grinned. “How you cried for a week and a half when Max died.”
“Don’t tell people that!” I slapped him on the arm, and, even after weeks of training at being tough, Scott flinched and raised his hand to the spot.
“You’re the reason we could never have another pet!” he came back at me, and, though I would have liked to have said something in my defense, there was nothing I could say. Not only was it true, it was proof I had always been the weak one, the one who never had been able to endure life with all its loss and disappointment and fear. I was the last person who needed to be different in any way, to feel things that were abnormal, to have thoughts beyond my control.
“I’m sorry.” I was utterly grateful when Jackson started talking again and stopped the torrent of painful realizations. “It’s my fault. Scott told me about you, and I just wanted to know more and more. He forgot to tell me how pretty you were, though.”
Surprised by the compliment, I accepted it with a blushing smile, as a lady should, neither arguing against his opinion, nor surrendering modesty to vanity.
“Eww,” Scott was happy to throw in his disagreement on my behalf. “Why would I tell you that?”
“Anyway,” Jackson went on with a small laugh. “Now you can tell me about yourself, and protect all your secrets.”
The statement a reminder of just how perilous my secrets had become, I was glad Scott was reaching into the car as my smile wavered, because he had a way of noticing those things.
“Where’s Mom?” he asked, slinging his pack onto his shoulder, and I forced the smile back onto my face.
“Kitchen,” I replied weakly. “There’s only a few minutes left on the chicken, so she couldn’t come out.”
“Well, don’t want that to burn,” Scott gave a brilliant grin at the mention of Mama’s cooking. “Let’s go see her.”
“You should see Nan first,” I said, and, pausing in his happy homecoming, Scott appeared to realize in a single frozen step that the days he had with us, before he shipped off, were the last days he would ever spend with Nan.
“It’s bad?” he asked, and, not quite able to relay the information I’d collected from all my different sources, I could only nod in response.
When he appeared suddenly younger, like a little boy playing dress up in a soldier’s uniform, I wanted to be Scott’s big sister, to hug him because he needed hugged, instead of because I did, but, with Jackson standing right there beside him, I knew Scott would hate it.
“Well then,” Scott blew out a breath. “Let’s go see Nan.”
Turning to lead the way, because it was the only thing I could do, accept things with grace and try to be a good hostess, I was surprised again when Jackson caught up to me, offering his arm, and, with no real excuse not to, I took it.
Chapter Six
Though it was held in our own dining room, with it being Scott’s first time home in months, dinner was a special occasion. Putting on a dress midway between my daily wear and the dresses I kept in pristine condition for public events, I thought I knew what it meant to dress for dinner. Until I walked into the dining room and saw Ariel, and she looked like so much more of a lady than me, so elegant and so perfect, different somehow than normal, but exactly like herself.
The flowing burgundy dress she wore sweeping the floor, I envied its fabric, wondering what it felt like to the touch, what it felt like for her, where it lay against her body.
At the table, I sat between Mama and Jackson, with Nan and Ariel across the way, and Daddy and Scott at the table’s ends. Nan’s wheelchair taking up so much space, Ariel wasn’t quite across from me, but, facing
my way as she was, I thought she would be forced to see me. Amazingly, though, every time they glanced her way, Ariel managed to avoid my eyes as if they weren’t in front of her.
After the night of the meteor shower, before our fateful day in the garden, I would often turn to find her watching me, a soft smile coming to her lips when I caught her, as if she knew it was okay to look. I should have known then what the feeling I got in the pit of my stomach meant, but, not wanting to know, I chose to pretend it simply didn’t exist.
Sitting there at the dinner table, all I wanted was for Ariel to look at me that way again, as if she liked finding me close by, but, like Adam and Eve, our sins from the garden would forever follow us it seemed. Any chance we had at paradise was gone.
Ariel was uncomfortable even being in the room, I could tell. She had come at Nan’s command, and would have liked to have been just about anyplace else. If spoken to, she responded, at appropriate places in everyone’s stories, she smiled, but she never told her own - feeling, perhaps, she had none safe to tell - and those fleeting smiles that came to her lips were fake.
With such focus on Scott and Jackson, no one else noticed Ariel’s silence, or perhaps they just thought it appropriate in the context of a family dinner where she wasn’t an immediate member.
That didn’t stop Jackson from going on, though. As Daddy asked questions about the Army’s accelerated training and where they would go when they shipped out, Jackson was as quick to respond as Scott, and the rest of us left them to their discussion, even Nan keeping her thoughts largely to herself.
It wasn’t until Mama went to collect dessert, and Daddy volunteered to help in my place, that Jackson turned his attention fully on me. Throughout the evening, he’d kept me in the circle of his responses, looking to me for reaction when he shared a story he thought would get a laugh, but left with only Scott, Ariel and Nan, Jackson turned in his chair, his hand reaching out to rest on the back of mine, and it was reflex to pull away as his knee touched my thigh.
“You haven’t said much,” he said, and I realized he had registered my silence as I had registered Ariel’s.
