Ariel Read online

  Of course he had seen Ariel before—the time he dropped off Roberta, and before that at Caleb’s funeral. But this was the first time he had ever truly experienced the child. The child. That was Roberta’s phrase for her, and he was beginning to understand the usage. There was something curious about her, a quality unquestionably evident even in a brief meeting of the eyes. A sort of transported quality, at once disturbing and compelling.

  “Mr. Channing? This way please.”

  He followed a slender young woman into a sizable windowed office where a thickset woman in her late thirties sat behind a large blond oak desk. She rose at Jeff’s approach, introduced herself as Ms. Anne-Marie Craig, and shook hands like a man. She sat down again and Jeff took a chair across the desk from her.

  “Now let me make certain I understand the situation,” she said. “You’re an attorney representing Mr. and Mrs. David Jardell. Is that right?”

  “Not quite. My client is Mrs. Jardell.”

  “The Jardells have separated?”

  He shook his head. “But my inquiries are being undertaken on Mrs. Jardell’s behalf and without her husband’s knowledge.”

  “I see.” Her eyes dropped to a sheet of paper on her desk. “The Jardells adopted a female infant through our agency some twelve years ago. I believe they named her Ariel.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And your purpose in coming here—”

  “Is to inquire into Ariel’s parentage.”

  ”I’m afraid that’s impossible. CPS has a policy absolutely forbidding the release of such information. It’s a two-way street, Mr. Channing. The natural mother is absolutely prevented from making contact with her child, and the child and his adoptive parents are not permitted to know who the mother is. I’m afraid we’re quite strict about that, and I’m sure you can appreciate the advantages of the rule.”

  “There have been some cases recently challenging that sort of policy.”

  Ms. Craig nodded briskly. “Several of them, and the courts have ruled differently in different states. There’s an argument that an adopted child has a right to information about his or her parentage. Our own policy has been revised accordingly, without altering its basic purpose. When a child reaches maturity, which we define as the age of eighteen, he or she can advise us that he or she—why don’t I just say she since the Jardell child is female?”

  “Fine.”

  “She can advise us that she wants to contact her natural mother. At this point we release no information. Instead we make an effort to contact the mother ourselves, informing her that the daughter wishes to make contact. If the natural mother is not interested in allowing this, her right to privacy is respected. If the natural mother does want the child made aware of her identity, then we furnish the child with that information. In this particular case, the child will not be eighteen years old for over five years. When the child is a minor, we do not even set about attempting to trace the mother and ascertain her wishes. That’s policy, Mr. Channing, and we won’t bend it.”

  He nodded; he’d expected as much. “Suppose what I want, what my client wants, is information about the natural parents.”

  “Information which would not serve specifically to identify them?”

  “That’s right. The question’s a medical one, Ms. Craig. My client’s concerned about the medical history of the biological parents and the possibility of inherited predisposition to disease.”

  “If there were anything of that sort she would have been informed prior to the adoption. You mean some sort of genetic illness like hemophilia or Huntington’s chorea? I checked our files before seeing you, Mr. Channing. Our records indicate the natural mother was in perfect health and had nothing ominous in her medical history.”

  “And the father?”

  “We have no data on the father.”

  “He’s unknown?”

  “Unknown to us,” Ms. Craig said. “He may have been known to the mother but she may have elected to keep that information to herself. Many of our mothers prefer to do that.”

  He thought of Roberta, keeping the fact of Caleb’s paternity from him. Did Ariel’s father even know that he’d sired a child?

  “So there’s nothing known about the father’s medical history,” he said.

  “Nothing, I’m afraid. Is Ariel displaying symptoms of some illness?”

  “Not a physical illness.”

  “Oh?”

  “My client is concerned about her daughter’s emotional health. She thought if there were any information available about the mother, information not dealing with her identity per se, it might be helpful in evaluating her present condition. If you could tell us anything about her personality, her lifestyle, her background—”

  “Excuse me a moment, Mr. Channing.” He waited while she disappeared through a door on the left. He sat looking out through the window, watching traffic on the boulevard, until she returned.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I’m afraid there’s no one here who worked at CPS at the time Ariel was born, so no one remembers her mother. Our records don’t indicate mental illness or eccentricity of personality or anything of the sort. Is Ariel institutionalized at present?”

  “No, she’s living with the Jardells.”

  “Is she receiving psychiatric treatment?”

  “No.”

  “But your client is concerned about her emotional state?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ariel must be on the verge of puberty. A great many children find that stage a stressful one. Sometimes the answer is treatment, sometimes they just have to be allowed to grow out of it. But the problem’s rarely hereditary, Mr. Channing. Adoptive parents sometimes like to think a problem is hereditary in order to absolve themselves of blame. Perhaps you could find a tactful way to suggest as much to Mrs. Jardell.”

  TWELVE

  The lilting song of the flute filled Ariel’s bedroom. But she was not playing now. She sat on the edge of her bed listening to a cassette she had recorded earlier. She heard it all the way through, sitting with her eyes closed, her body swaying very slightly with the music. Now and then expressions played over her face in response to something she heard.

  When the music stopped she rewound the tape and let it play through a second time. This time she did not give the music her undivided attention. While she listened, she wrote in her diary.

  This is very strange. Listening to myself on Erskine’s tape recorder. It’s like hearing myself for the first time. I can’t really hear myself when I play because I have to concentrate on playing.

  The reason all of this is happening is I couldn’t play the flute for Erskine. He kept saying he’d like to hear me play and I kept saying he wasn’t missing much, and finally the other day I dragged the flute over to his house after school and we went up to his room and I tried to play. But I couldn’t make it come out right. I could hear the notes in my head but I couldn’t seem to find them on the flute.

  So he thought of the tape recorder. It’s a Japanese one, portable, and you can plug it in or use batteries, and you get half an hour on each side of the tape. He said I could take it home with me and just put it on when I play, and before I knew it I would forget it was even in the same room with me.

  “You’ve been on tape before,” he said, and he found a cassette and played it for me, and it was a conversation we had the other day about how he found out I have to be eighteen before I can try to trace my real mother. He had taped it without me knowing anything of it.

  When he played the tape I got properly pissed. I don’t guess there was anything on it you couldn’t play in church but it was the idea of him doing it secretly that bothered me. I told him if he was President he could get impeached for carrying on like that, taping people without them knowing it, and then we would up running some jokes on the subject which took the edge off my pissed-offedness. (If there’s even such a word, which there is now!)

  Anyway, listening to myself talking on tape was weird in the
same way that listening to myself play the flute on tape was. That’s nothing like I always thought I sounded. Erskine says everybody’s voice sounds weird to them because you normally hear yourself differently from the way other people hear you, because of some of the sound being carried to your ears through the bones in your skull. Sounds travel differently through solid objects, he said, which I told him would apply more to his head than to mine.

  He said he always figured mine was hollow.

  What he should do is get contact lenses when he’s older. His eyes are very attractive.

  Anyway, tomorrow he can listen to Ariel Plays the Flute. He says once that’s over and done with I’ll be able to play in front of him with no hassle, but I don’t know about that.

  What’s funny is I can play with Roberta in the house and it never bothers me. Of course I don’t actually play in front of her. And the fact that I know she’s not listening probably makes it easier.

  The following afternoon the two of them walked home from school together. Ariel had not brought the recorder to school so they walked to her house to pick it up. The maroon Buick didn’t show up. She thought she’d seen the car twice since the time she and Channing had taken a long look at each other, but there had been no confrontation since then.

  Roberta’s car was gone when they reached the house. “Come on in,” Ariel suggested.

  “It’s okay. I’ll wait out here.”

  “Nobody’s home. Roberta’s out somewhere. You’ve never seen my house.”

  “I can see it fine from here. Just get the recorder and we’ll go to my place.”

  “We always go to your place.”

  “I’m a creature of habit.”

  She started for the door. Then she changed her mind and turned around. “The thing is,” she said, “I really want you to come in.”

  “Fuck it,” he said. “I don’t mind.”

  “The reason I like you is you’re charming.”

  “I was wondering what it was.”

  She led him into the house and up the stairs to the second floor. The tape recorder was all packed up in its canvas carrying case. He asked her if she wouldn’t like to play it then and there but she shook her head. “Listen to it by yourself,” she said.

  “You’d be embarrassed?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Did you play it back or anything? Or haven’t you listened to it either?”

  “I listened to it twice. Two and a half times, actually, and then Roberta came up and said maybe it was a little late for music. Meaning it was driving her crazy. Two and a half times that I listened to it plus the time I played to record it. She didn’t even know it was a tape and she said I’d be tired today from playing so long. Oh, and look at this. She gave me this the day before yesterday. Teach Yourself to Play the Flute.”

  “Is it any good?”

  “How would you like it if your mother gave you a book that would tell you how to turn the car radio on and off?”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s the worst. If you go all the way through the book you wind up learning how to play Go Tell Aunt Rhody and Be Kind to Your Web-Footed Friends. Just what I want to sit around and do. The thing is she thinks she’s being nice to me. I’m tons more advanced than the book but she doesn’t have any idea.”

  “What song did you say? Not Web-Footed Friends but the other one.”

  “Go Tell Aunt Rhody.”

  “I never heard of it,” he said. “What are you supposed to tell old Aunt Rhody?”

  “That her bird died,” Ariel said. She sang:

  Go tell Aunt Rhody

  Go tell Aunt Rhody

  Go tell Aunt Rho-o-o-ody

  The old gray goose is dead.

  He looked at her. “That’s it?”

  “There’s other verses telling what he died of and how broken-up Aunt Rhody is, but that’s it. That’s all the notes there are to play in it.”

  “It’s got a nice beat to it,” he said solemnly, “and the words tell a story, and you could dance to it. I’d give it about a seventy-five.”

  They went downstairs and she showed him through the first floor. In the kitchen she poured two glasses of milk and found a package of chocolate-covered graham crackers.

  “It’s a neat house,” he said.

  “I hope we don’t move.”

  “Why would you move?”

  “Crazy Roberta. She wants to sell the house and move.”

  “Where to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Like out of the neighborhood or what?”

  “I don’t know. She’s crazy, that’s all. The house spooks her or something. I heard her talking to David and she was saying the same thing on the phone the other day.”

  “Do you think you would really move?”

  “Who knows?” She rinsed out her glass in the sink, turned to him. “Aren’t you going to finish your milk?”

  “I’ve had enough.”

  “Then give me your glass. Roberta’s been acting really weird lately.”

  “How?”

  “Oh, giving me strange looks when she doesn’t think I’m paying any attention. I’ll get a glimpse of her out of the corner of my eye and there’s old Roberta studying me like a rare species of insect.”

  “Ugh.”

  “Sorry,” she said. Erskine had a thing about bugs, and it even bothered him to hear about them. “I’m glad I was adopted. Otherwise I’d worry about going crazy like Roberta. I wish I didn’t have to wait until I was eighteen.”

  “I suppose you could try lying about your age.”

  “Funny.”

  “You were going to work on David, weren’t you? To find out if he knows anything?”

  “I haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

  “Well, don’t expect too much, anyway. Even if you find out who your mother is, she’ll probably turn out to be just as bad as Roberta. You met my mother, don’t forget.”

  Ariel had met Mrs. Wold several days earlier when the woman was returning home from work just as Ariel was getting ready to leave. Mrs. Wold was a tall overbearing woman, her slate gray hair pulled severely back from a bulbous forehead, and she had spoken with the overprecise enunciation of a kindergarten teacher. “I am so happy to meet you, Ariel. I want to tell you how much Mr. Wold and I appreciate your spending time with Erskine. We are both just so pleased that he finally has a friend. You know, Erskine is a very special child. His health is extremely delicate and that has affected his development in many ways. Believe me, Ariel, my husband and I are both very grateful to you.”

  Erskine had been in the room throughout this little speech. Afterward he and Ariel could hardly look at each other.

  “Parents are horrible,” he said now. “Real or adopted, it doesn’t make any difference. Parents suck.”

  “And what happens when you’re a parent?”

  He shook his head. “That’ll never happen.”

  “Why? If kids are better than parents, wouldn’t you want to have some around?”

  “Are you kidding? Actually bring something into your house that’s going to know what a total shit you are? That would be really stupid, Jardell.”

  She stared at him. “Erskine Weird,” she said.

  “Very funny.”

  “Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you the upstairs.”

  “We were already there.”

  “Have to get the tape recorder anyway. And all you saw was my room. Come on.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Blowing out the pilot light.”

  “Why?”

  “No particular reason. Come on.”

  She showed him the master bedroom and he was not surprised by the twin beds. “They had a double bed at the other house,” she told him. “But they got rid of it when we moved.”

  “They actually used to sleep together?”

  “No, they took turns using the bed.”

  “Mine would, if it was a choice between that or sleeping toge
ther.”

  “Well, they slept together once, didn’t they?”

  “Sure, and look what it got them.”

  “You.”

  “Right. So they won’t make that mistake again. How about if we screw in their bed? That would be better than blowing out a pilot light.” He pointed at a closed door. “What’s that, the bathroom? No, the bathroom’s down the hall. Whats that?”

  “Caleb’s room.”

  “The room where he—”

  “Died,” Ariel said.

  “What’s it like?”

  “Like a baby’s room. A crib and a bathinet and a playpen and things like that.”

  “And the door’s kept shut all the time? Does anybody ever go in there?”

  “Roberta, sometimes. She sneaks in and out sometimes.”

  “Honestly?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How about you? Do you ever go in there?”

  “I used to. I would play the flute for Caleb or tickle him or things like that.”

  “What’s wrong, Ariel?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. Why?”

  “The expression on your face. Like something bad was happening in your mind.”

  “No. Maybe it was just the lighting.”

  “I suppose.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about anything besides what I was saying.”

  “Don’t you ever go in there now that the room’s empty?”

  “It’s not empty. All his things are there. The only thing missing is Caleb.”

  “Well? Don’t you ever go in?”

  “I’m not supposed to. Roberta says nobody should go in there.”

  “So?”

  She hesitated. “Once or twice when I was all alone in the house. I don’t know. It feels funny.”

  “When you have an old house, there’s always rooms that somebody died in at one time or another.”

  “Any minute now I’m going to start talking about bugs.”