Ariel Read online

  Elbac.

  Laceb.

  Blace.

  Oh, please don’t let me think about Caleb. I feel terrible when I think about him.

  I don’t care for the name Roberta. I don’t like women’s names that you get by tacking an ending onto a man’s name. Pauline, Georgette. There’s a girl in my geography class called Davida and I really feel sorry for her. It’s as if her parents are telling the whole world right out that they wanted a boy so much they couldn’t be bothered thinking of a girl’s name.

  I wonder what my real name is.

  That sentence looks so weird I decided to leave plenty of space around it. But I know what it means and it makes sense to me.

  I have thought about this a lot. How when my mother was pregnant with me she decided to put me up for adoption. Maybe she had no choice. I don’t know anything about that.

  But she carried me for nine months, unless I was premature (which I probably was, just to be different), and during that time she must have done some thinking. In the hospital, waiting to give birth to me, she must have had thoughts. Even knowing she was putting me up for adoption, even knowing that she would never set eyes on me, she would have been wondering if I would be a boy or a girl.

  And she would have picked out names. She might not have wanted to, knowing it would just hurt her, knowing it would make it that much harder to give me up, but I honestly don’t see how she could have helped herself. Oh, I myself will sometimes think up names for kids, and I am only twelve years old and not pregnant, nor likely to be, thank you all the same! But I will now and then imagine myself married and with children, which I can imagine easily enough, and I’ll think, well, I would call the boy Ethelbert and the girl Davida, or whatever names I am crazy about that particular day.

  Now she must have done this. So she had a name in mind for me. So in a sense that is my real name and Ariel is just what they call me.

  They call me Ariel, the Adopted.

  I don’t have a nickname. Back when she used to like me Roberta would sometimes call me Honey or Darling but they were never specific names for me, just all-purpose pet names that she used. And David used to call me Little Pooch. I don’t know where he got the name from. Now that I think about it, I don’t guess it’s awfully flattering. But I used to like the idea that he had a special name for me.

  Now he generally calls me Ariel, like everybody else.

  There was a girl, Linda Goodenow, who was sort of my best friend two years ago, but not quite. I didn’t have anyone I liked better but I never felt close enough to Linda to call her a best friend. Anyway, the point is that she used to call me Airy. She didn’t ask if I wanted to be called that. She just one day called me Airy and went on with it.

  I hated it. Thinking back, I don’t know why I didn’t ask her not to call me Airy. How was she to know I hated it if I never said anything? But I never did and she went right on calling me Airy, probably because it made her feel more like best friends to be the only person to call me by that name. Some best friend to be the only person in the world calling me by a name I hated!

  But then her father got transferred and they moved. All the way to California. She wrote me four letters. I answered the first one and it took me forever to think of enough things to write to fill a page, even writing large. Then I didn’t answer the next three letters and I guess she took the hint. She doesn’t even have my new address since we moved. I guess if she wrote to the old one they would forward it.

  Linda called her parents Jack and Rita. She said that was what they taught her to do. She called them that from the time she was a little kid, which is weird to imagine, a little kid calling out, “Hi, Jack! Hi, Rita!”

  If I called Roberta Roberta I think she would shit. I don’t know what David would do. Needless to say I have never called either of them by name, or even referred to them by name to other kids. I suppose I would to Erskine if we got to know each other well.

  So far I only call them David and Roberta in my mind. And nobody knows what’s in my mind.

  Sometimes I don’t even know—

  Back to David and Roberta. I was just thinking. I don’t really call them anything. I always used to call them Mommy and Daddy. Since I am going to be officially a teenager soon I suppose I ought to switch to Mother and Father. But lately I don’t use a name of any sort when I talk to them.

  Sometimes it used to bother me, calling them Mommy and Daddy. I had the feeling of being disloyal to the real mother and father I had wandering around somewhere in the world. But I never got too worked up at the thought because I had brains enough to realize it’s not terribly logical.

  I may be crazy but I’m not stupid.

  But what’s hysterical is Linda Goodenow with real parents she calls by their first names, and me, adopted, calling mine Mommy and Daddy.

  Call me Ariel, the Adopted.

  Or call me Ishmael, if you prefer.

  There’s another book I didn’t finish. Moby Dick. Twenty pages in the library was enough to convince me I didn’t care all that much about whales, and what I did care about whales was that people would stop hunting them to extinction, so the last thing I wanted to read was a book about men hunting whales.

  I loved that opening sentence, though. “Call me Ishmael.” It really grabs you.

  Imagine being the last individual of a vanishing species. Like if you were the last whale in the universe. Except how would you know you were the last one? Although whales are supposed to be super intelligent and God only knows what they know and don’t know.

  My Secret Thoughts, by Arnold the Whale.

  I was just standing over at the window. It’s been raining on and off all day. I can get mournful just from the weather. You would think the funeral would have been on a day like this one instead of a good bright day with the sun shining.

  Let’s think of something else.

  At least it’s interesting here looking out the window. When we lived on Coteswood you could stare out the window all day and never see anything more exciting than someone mowing his lawn. Now there are always people walking around, and a lot of interesting dogs that don’t have to be on leashes.

  I like this house so much better. The first day we moved in I was completely at home here. It’s big and it rambles and Roberta and David kept getting confused at the beginning. They would try to walk from the kitchen to the downstairs lavatory and wind up in the living room instead. But I never had this problem. As though I had a map of the inside of the house in my head before I ever saw the place.

  A floorplan, I mean. Couldn’t think of the word.

  I think that’s Roberta’s car. I’ll go look.

  Yes it is.

  I even knew what this house would look like before I saw it. I guess I must have heard them discussing it. But when we first came here and parked down the block I knew right away which house we were going to look at. I mean I just knew, as if I had seen a picture before and I was recognizing it.

  I never mentioned this to them. I think they already figure I’m crazy so why make trouble?

  She’s on the stairs now. Roberta. “Hello?” But it’s easier not to pay attention.

  The stairs always creak when she climbs up or down them. They never creak when I do.

  It’s funny.

  I’ve got homework, arithmetic and social studies, and I just don’t feel like doing it. Of course that’s what Roberta thinks I’m doing right now.

  This is great. She’s standing in the doorway of my room watching me and I’m pretending I don’t even know she’s there. She thinks I’m doing homework, writing in my spiral notebook, and I’m writing about her. This is really neat.

  There. She left. Because of course she wouldn’t want to disturb me when I’m busy with my work. Just another way this book has it all over My Secret Thoughts.

  Footsteps on the stairs. Creak creak creak!

  Homework is boring and stupid, so of course she wouldn’t dream of interrupting it. But if she knew I was doi
ng something that mattered to me, like what I’m writing now or like my music, then she’d make a point of cutting in.

  Caleb used to love it when I played the flute for him. At least I think he did. I would go to his room and play for a long time and he just loved to listen.

  Nobody else in this house does. They think I’m just fooling around.

  I think Roberta’s finally beginning to get the message that I don’t want flute lessons. She says if I were to take lessons I could have a real flute. What popped into my head the first time she said that was that I don’t want a real flute, I want an adopted one. Another example of the kind of thing I think is hysterical but nobody else would.

  I like my flute. It’s sort of tinny but I like the sounds it can make. It fits into the kind of music I want to play. As hard as it is to play, I don’t think you could call it a toy.

  I never heard another instrument that makes just this sound.

  That’s why I like it and I suppose that’s why Roberta doesn’t.

  Oh, I’ll get at my homework in a few minutes. I always do. I’m always prepared and I always do well in school and get good grades. When I switched schools they were doing completely different things in some of my classes on account of being in the City of Charleston school system. I picked it all up in the middle of the term and got good marks right from the beginning without even having to kill myself doing it.

  It’s how I am.

  I guess I must have had intelligent parents. Even if they did manage to be stupid about one particular thing.

  At least my mother decided to have me. She could have had an abortion, and then where would I be? And who would be having all these thoughts?

  I wonder what she was like. I wonder about both of my parents, but I especially wonder about my mother.

  I wonder if she was evil.

  FOUR

  Two of the three stove-top pilot lights were out. Roberta relit them with a wooden kitchen match, then put a copper-bottomed teakettle on to boil. She measured out instant coffee and powdered chickory root and waited impatiently for the teakettle to whistle. Her mind wandered while she waited, and when the kettle whistled the sound startled her.

  Nerves, she thought. She was a nervous wreck.

  Why did the pilot lights go out all the time? The damp chill air of the kitchen seemed an unsatisfactory explanation. Maybe there were air currents in the room that blew out pilot lights on a whim. Maybe there was something wrong with the old stove itself, some eccentricity in the gas line that would shut off the flow of gas long enough for the flame to die.

  The gas company had sent a man to check the stove and its connections. He’d found nothing wrong, assuring Roberta that she had a great old stove. “They made this baby to last,” he told her. “You made a range like this today, nobody could afford to buy it. Your gas line’s sound and all your fittings are tight. There’s no leak anywhere.”

  “But the pilot lights—”

  “No reason they should be going out.”

  He’d said this with a sullen certainty, as if implying that some unmentionable action of hers was responsible for the trouble with the pilot lights, and that was patently absurd Air currents in the kitchen, she told herself, or perhaps an intermittent blockage in the stove’s gas line, or something related to the damp in the kitchen. She didn’t really understand these things, but couldn’t it be that some sort of inert gas rose up from the damp brick floor, hovering in the air long enough to smother the flame of the pilot lights? Maybe such a hypothesis didn’t make hard scientific sense, but wasn’t it possible all the same?

  In a house where ghosts walked, where healthy babies died abruptly in their sleep, wasn’t almost anything possible?

  She lit a cigarette and sipped her coffee. A couple of nights ago, when all three pilot lights had gone out, she’d asked David about the possibility of having the pilots shut off altogether and lighting the burners with a match. She thought it might be safer that way. The idea of gas escaping silently and invisibly from an extinguished pilot light frightened her.

  He had insisted it was nothing to worry about. “There’s not that much gas involved,” he explained. “Just a trickle, just enough to nourish the tiniest possible flame. If it goes out it’s an inconvenience but it’s not a danger. The small amount of gas that escapes gets dispersed right away. It can’t build up enough to cause an explosion, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

  “But I can smell it. I walk into the room and I can smell it.”

  “It’s not even the gas you smell. Natural gas is odorless. The manufacturers are required to add a chemical to it, and that’s what you smell.”

  It seemed academic to her whether she smelled the gas or a substance that had been added to the gas. If the gas were such a harmless compound, why would the law require the addition of this chemical? Gas was dangerous. It burned, it exploded, it asphyxiated people.

  She drew on her cigarette, blew out a thin column of smoke. She remembered a news story from a few years ago. A town somewhere in the north, Pennsylvania or New Jersey, she couldn’t remember exactly where. They had had trouble with underground gas lines freezing and thawing during the winter. Several homes had exploded, with more than a few deaths resulting.

  One incident had made an indelible impression. A woman evacuated her house just minutes before it exploded. She lost all her possessions but escaped with her life. After her house blew up, she took shelter with a neighbor a couple of blocks away. Whereupon the neighbor’s house exploded, killing the woman.

  Roberta had thought at the time that the story was enough to make a fatalist out of anyone. If you were destined to die in a gas explosion, one house was as good as the next. God would get you wherever you ran.

  It was easy enough to believe that when your involvement was limited to a few lines in the newspaper and a few minutes on the seven o’clock news. But how well did the belief hold up when the smell of gas was present in your own kitchen?

  She got up, checked the pilot lights. All three were in good order.

  Outside, a stout middle-aged woman in tight corduroy slacks was walking a small terrier. The dog was not on a leash. He raced on ahead of the woman, sniffed at the base of a tree, scampered back behind the woman, barked at a squirrel, then raced to keep up with the woman, who strode on at a steady pace, looking neither left nor right and paying no evident attention to the dog whatsoever.

  Roberta watched them until they disappeared from view. Maybe she should get a dog, she thought. But she didn’t want a dog. She’d had the one thing she wanted and it had been taken from her, and its place could not be taken by some yapping little terrier.

  She reached for her cigarettes, put them down, then gave up and lit one. She’d been living on coffee and cigarettes ever since Caleb’s death. She didn’t know how much weight she’d lost but she could tell from the fit of her clothes that she was losing flesh.

  Upstairs, Ariel sounded a few tentative notes on her tin flute. Roberta winced. There was no escaping the child’s music, she thought. It didn’t help to close doors. The notes slithered through walls and floorboards, penetrating to every corner of the huge old house. And she wouldn’t play a proper song, something with a discernible tune to it. Instead she insisted on making up her own horrible dirges, inventing as she went along.

  An image: Ariel as the Pied Piper. Slippers on her feet with turned-up toes. A peaked cap perched on her head. The tin flute at her lips. And an endless parade of rats and assorted vermin following her as she played.

  Pied Piper, Act Two: Ariel with her flute, a devilish smile on her lips. Followed now not by rats but by all the town’s children, the innocent children, and all of them looked like Caleb, and—

  Roberta sat up straight, gave her head a violent shake to dislodge the images forming within it.

  What was the matter with her? Instead of becoming increasingly able to accept Caleb’s death, she remained appalled at the injustice of it. Her mind, evidently requiring someone
to focus blame upon, seemed to have settled on Ariel. It didn’t make sense, and she knew it didn’t make sense, but there didn’t seem to be anything she could do about it. There was no way to deal with the thoughts that came to mind. She couldn’t seem to talk to anyone about them. She couldn’t talk to Ariel at all, about anything, and she couldn’t even admit her thoughts to David, and who else was there?

  Gintzler? Several times she’d been on the point of calling the psychiatrist, but each time she’d resisted, feeling that she already knew what he would tell her. He’d interpret the woman who’d appeared in her bedroom as something she’d conjured up out of guilt or anxiety, and no doubt he’d come up with some interesting symbolic explanation for the apparition, but his scientific bias was such that he’d never for a moment allow the possibility that the house was somehow haunted, that the woman was a manifestation of some force present within its walls, that she’d either signaled Caleb’s imminent death or actually caused it, taking him away to another plane of existence.

  Gintzler would raise an eloquent eyebrow if she even dared to suggest the possibility that the apparition was real. He’d shame her out of it, and she was enough of a people-pleaser to go along with him, pretending that her thoughts were no more than an indication of the instability of her mind. And could she be sure that wasn’t the case?

  She couldn’t be sure of anything.

  She crushed out her cigarette. Ariel’s flute had gone silent again, she noticed. At least if you heard the flute you knew where the child was. She’d turned into such a sneak lately, slipping around the house like a ghost herself. When she or David climbed the stairs, a board or two invariably groaned underfoot. Similarly, neither of them could walk the length of the second-floor hallway without setting the floorboards to creak. But Ariel padded silently through the house as if her feet never touched the ground. You never heard her in the hallway or on the stairs. She weighed considerably less than they did, certainly, but Roberta was convinced there was more to it than that.