by Brian Hodge
The flush of exultation ebbed, and Ariel felt the stiffness in her elbow, the shakiness in her legs. Where were her aspirins?
Oh.
She wouldn't need them. Except perhaps as an overdose. Because she still had to commit suicide, didn't she? But she was too tired to kill herself now. Wasn't that funny? Too tired to sleep forever. When she woke up, then she would do it. She turned the easel and crossed the room to slump on the ratty Chesterfield sofa. Perhaps she would die effortlessly if she just closed her eyes. They would find her a week from now, or a month, whenever the first stray dog began howling outside. Her corpse would be awful by then. Serve them right. And they would see the painting, and maybe they would even understandd when they wrote her obituary: Ariel Leppa died in childbirth at age seventy-four …
Amber
"Mother?"
Ariel's eyelids lifted like mechanical shutters. Something urgent and external was trying to reverse the entropy of her soul. And then she saw Amber and she knew she had died after all, right there on the Chesterfield. Everything else—the studio, the hum of the sump pump, the wind flapping a shingle on the roof—was like the hell on earth of her past, but here was her angel, whitely radiant with only her cat's green eyes for contrast, that and the faint gloss of her pink lips.
"Mother, get up!"
And that unheavenly impatience brought Ariel fully awake and alert to the fact that she was not dead.
A great fear swept over her as she struggled to a sitting position. Her old heart was beating like a fist on a mossy door. She twisted around to stare at the painting. The image was unchanged. Amber had not stepped out of the frame, life size, leaving an empty canvas. And yet…
How could this be happening?
Ariel swung back to gape at the flesh and blood reality before her. She had stepped out of it. Somehow. Yet how could flesh arise from paint? As if the oils were embrocations that had moistened some desiccated phantom of memory to life. But it couldn't be the pigments and oils—those same elements Ariel had mixed time and again—could it? It had to be the ashes. Her father's ashes.
Dysfunctional, desolate, disenfranchised Ariel Leppa wanted desperately to believe in magical interventions. Earth had failed her. She had lived in the shadows of life with only the hope of a retributive change—why shouldn't she be compensated? She had grown old waiting for her due, and the people who were required to pay it were now dead—the possibility of justice on earth was dead—so why shouldn't Amber be restored to her? Why shouldn't her guilty father make reparations from the grave? You didn't question magic. It just was. In a world of stumbling science and evolving impossibilities, call it a mutation of reality. If it worked, it would hang around. If it didn't, it would disappear. In the last summer of the millennium, in south central Minnesota, magic had appeared.
"Oh, my dear, my dear Amber …" she sighed at last with awe and delight.
A dart of annoyance shot from the cat green eyes. And the ten fingertips that had been bunched together in childlike indecision flew apart with a sweeping gesture at the room. "What's going on?” Amber said. “Where's the wallpaper, and the picture of Sir Aarfie?"
Ariel struggled to her feet, doubting again. The stiffness in her body was all too earthly. And Amber was forty-four years old and in a wheelchair. How could she be standing here disoriented, talking about wallpaper and Sir Aarfie—that absurd name given to a dog killed by a pickup truck decades ago? But there had been a picture—a painting Ariel had done of the toy collie—that hung in the studio, and the walls still would have been papered when Amber was nine. And then the clincher came, spoken by Amber with a hint of shock, as Ariel moved fully into the light, her sweater collar falling away from her face:
"You're not my mother …"
Ironically that disavowal more than anything else convinced Ariel that somehow her nine-year-old daughter really had returned. Because of course she was Amber's mother. And who else could have been at odds with her after only a few seconds?
"What an awful thing to say," Ariel spat out.
Amber shrank back then, her fingertips coming together again like ten tiny magnets. "You're ugly. You're old."
Ariel made a breathy sound of indignation, even as she teared up and reached trembling for her daughter. "Well. You haven't changed."
Amber peered hard, but by then Ariel had her by the wrist and was pulling her into her arms. A cold, bony hug. When had it ever been different? But then the little girl jumped away, and they stared at one another for long seconds.
"You don't remember growing up, do you?" Ariel asked softly.
“Growing up?"
“Never mind. Nothing has changed for you is all. Amber, Amber, it's really you."
"Why are you talking like that?"
"It doesn’t matter," she laughed, her inexplicable joy deepening the scowl on her daughter's face. "Listen, listen, dear, if everything is strange, don't be upset. I'll explain it gradually. But we must not rush. We have all the time in the world for explanations. Do you understand that?"
Of course Amber didn't understand. She was asking about her dog. Soon she would want to know where her father was, and why yesterday wasn't yesterday. She would have to know the truth, except … what was the truth?
"Don't think about it, dear,” Ariel babbled. “We won't think about it. We'll just—"
"But where's Sir Aarfie?"
"Gone."
"Gone where?" Amber was backing toward the door.
"Amber, don't go out yet."
"Why not?"
"We're not done talking."
"I want to look for Sir Aarfie." And she called the animal's name in her child's clarion voice. It was still ringing painfully in the boxlike studio by the time she was out the door, her pure cries for the dog stabbing through the house.
Ariel struggled to the window, afraid she had lost the apparition that only a few minutes ago she had been afraid to discover. But no, her real flesh-and-blood daughter was there, circling the basswood tree.
"Dad … Daddy, is this from you?" Ariel asked huskily, the first prayer she had ever addressed to her father.
She hobbled to her workbench and snatched up one of the bottles of paint. It looked the same, smelled the same. It lapped viscously when she twirled the bottle, just like any other mix. But the red dust was in there as invisible as the hand of God. And then it occurred to her that if her father's ashes had really empowered her as a painter, perhaps she could have painted anyone with the red dust. Perhaps still could. Any mortal flesh. There was plenty of paint —
Don't even think about bringing them back!
They were dead. Dead, buried, corrupted. The people of her life. It couldn't happen again. What had taken place was something unique and specific. Amber. Flesh of her flesh. A gift back from God … or her father. But why? To make up for abandoning Ariel? Was it something to do with her own intensity? No question she came from a long line of impulsive, willful, even—shall we say—ruthless people. And then another little shock set in. If Amber was here, and nine years old, where was the forty-four-year-old daughter who still existed in a wheelchair?
Cue the ringing phone. For an instant she sensed the swelling of air that anticipates a clamoring phone with dire news. Someone was going to call. Someone was going to say they had found Amber in her wheelchair and – But the instrument remained dead in its cradle. Instead what she heard was a joyful noise, a wonderful, significant lament from her nine-year-old daughter, searching below: "Aaaaar-fie!"
Dear God, what a staggering resurrection had taken place. What a staggering potential for reclaiming her past. Red dust, red dust.
She couldn't get away from the thought. Stumping downstairs, seeing the photos of the people who had stunted her life and then died out of it, looking at the dull stain on the antimacassar where her husband's head had rested for most of half a century as he hawked his throat and browbeat her—red dust. What if they could come back? Where would they go? How would they fit back into society?
>
All afternoon she watched her daughter. Amber in the yard drawing with sticks. Amber in the kitchen searching for cookies. It wasn't so different having her back again. The child seemed more enthused with discovery than traumatized by change. Even when Ariel fed her the truth, as she understood it—which was, at best, lame—even then, it didn't seem to register on Amber. She was more interested in the VCR and television. Ariel could barely keep up with her questions. Nineteen sixty-five, that was the year Amber was nine—1965. Twenty-first-century ads and movies must look like science fiction to her. And then again, growing up was like that, wasn't it? Mundane miracles that you accepted without question. There were some troubling details, but this was going to work. At least some of Ariel's life was going to get relived. It wasn't too late.
Red dust.
One of those troubling details was taken care of that evening. The inevitable phone call she had feared and feared hoping for came just after seven o'clock. Amber was dead. That Amber. The one in the wheelchair. Apparently she had died just about the hour when nine-year-old Amber returned. Ariel didn't know what to feel. How could she mourn? Even though she knew, for a certainty, that she had killed her adult daughter. Caused her death anyway. Perhaps not even inadvertently. Perhaps she had wished for it and it was implicit in her last painting. Last painting? Hardly her last.
Red dust, red dust, red dust …
She told herself it was for Amber that she did the next one. Amber needed her father, and Ariel had his photo. Though she never even glanced at it as she painted. Cheerfully, breathlessly, she did it. Did it in the same rapid-fire technique with which she had painted Amber – using the alla prima of which she was a master – as if the thin and delicate coats rendered quickly were required to breathe life into the image. It took longer to dry than to paint, but even that was merely hours. And in this way, Ariel Leppa brought Thomas Leppa back from the dead.
Unlike Amber, he came back knowing how his story had ended, because there was no killing off to do this time, inadvertent or otherwise. He had died naturally. Finis. Therefore, he remembered everything from his life, and perhaps everything thereafter. This last was a matter of great interest to Ariel: where had he been since the funeral? He wouldn't tell her what it was like. Of course, he was angry, and that might have had something to do with his obstinacy. Angry and afraid. Because Ariel made one slight alteration in the circumstances to which he returned, one little addition (subtraction, technically) to ensure that life—Ariel's life—would be better this time around. Some might have seen some irony in it, almost a cruel joke. Because Amber had come back standing tall and freed from a wheelchair. But Thomas Leppa returned sitting down in one.
Denny & Martin
"Happy Y2K," Denny Bryce told his father on New Year's Day, 2000.
"Happy Y2K," Denny Bryce told his father on New Year's Day, 2001.
He used the very same words, because you couldn't be sure exactly when the new millennium started—what with everyone arguing about the year zero and all that—and because it didn't matter to his father anyway. Even if his father were capable of remembering that Denny had said the same thing, it wouldn't have mattered. Martin Bryce didn't know which millennium it was, or even which century. He didn't know the year or the month or the day, or what Y2K meant. His father had heard all of these things on the periphery of the chair he sat in, but he didn't remember them, didn't care—though he kept asking the time, like a man waiting for a train. He had given up trying to hang on to the thread of a television show through the commercials, and doing his quarterly taxes, and driving (thank God he had stopped asking where the car keys were!).
There was only one thing Martin Bryce did care about, his son knew. Something as fundamental as his own identity. His once and forever wife Beth. Beth & Martin. For sixty inviolate years they had been married.
To the best of Denny's knowledge, his father fell in love with his mother after he retired. Real and true love, that is. Denny wasn't sure what had preceded that. Lust, loyalty, friendship. Something practical and durable, passionate perhaps, but not the absolute and total love that had followed. Not the kind of altruistic love that almost no one ever gets. No. Not gets. Gives. Because you don't get it without being worthy of it, and you aren't worthy of it until you stop trying to get it and just give. It isn't "give until it hurts"; it's give until it stops hurting. Funny that Denny knew that, because at age fifty-one he had never experienced it live and in person. But he still thought he would. If he could just meet the right woman.
"Beth?" his father still called at all hours with expectation in his voice, as if she would come smiling from the next room. And Denny would remind him, often with aggravation: "Mom's dead, Dad. She died in the car accident two years ago, remember?"
Then the stoic old man would hang his head and swallow dryly and the mask would tighten over his eyes—waterproofing. "I forgot," he sometimes apologized in an airy whisper that didn't risk a tremble in his voice. Then, in that brief instant of shock and recovery, Denny would see all of his father, all of the emotional accumulation of the past he kept hidden. Because his father was a walking X-File: trust no one. Denny knew that his grandmother had been murdered when his father was six, and that his mother had tried to fill that void belatedly. There was more to it than he could fathom, but he didn't know how to compensate for his mother's role, and that was why it just killed him when the old man forgot—Beth? … Mom's dead, Dad. And the more he hated his father resurrecting his mother in this way, the more the old man did it, remembering what she had done that morning, it seemed, and how he was going to take her to Olive Garden that Sunday, and announcing that she was the best thing that had ever happened to him. And when the illusions collapsed in stark moments of lucidity, together Martin and Denny would have to bury her all over again.
So Denny Bryce knew the drill. And he knew his father was transferring trust to him. And he knew that he was about to betray that trust.
He had hung on as long as he could. The toileting, and the logistics of survival, and the endless business envelopes containing bills and statements that were beginning to rain down on him like tombstones. But now his father was wandering, turning up lost at a bank or a supermarket, or coming home in the back of a police car. When Martin Bryce answered the phone and set down the receiver, he never came back; and he left the stove on and water running and doors unlocked. Last week he had melted bacon fat in a Teflon pan, as if it were an old iron skillet, and then forgotten that he was going to fry eggs. The scorch marks from the resulting fire were still on the ceiling. But the most painful part of it was that the old man knew he was slipping and was ashamed and diminished by it. Denny didn't know how to deal with that.
And it was bad enough to hear meek apologies and hateful self-denigrations from his normally taciturn parent, but it was the thing with the mail that really brought his father's humiliation home to Denny.
"I've won a million dollars," Martin insisted after studying the contest advisory notice he had received.
Denny had to read it twice to see all the loopholes and deceptions. Then he made the mistake of laughing. He was laughing at the rhetorical frauds, but his father grew defensive and obstinate about having won, and they argued until the son took the letter apart line by line, resulting in the old man at last waving it off with a declaration of his own worthlessness. If Martin's memory hadn't been hemorrhaging, the tiff might have lingered. As it was, he lapsed into a kind of obedience that seemed to reflect his decreased self-esteem.
When had the freckle-faced little boy with the pale eyelashes become his father's keeper? Denny didn't like his old man becoming subservient. He wished he had congratulated him for winning the million dollars and just played it out until it was forgotten or they had blown money for the commercial toll call that was part of the scam. The next delusion was even more groundless, and Denny handled it better.
"The doctors say I need an operation," Martin told him solemnly one morning, and he waved in a general
way toward his torso.
They talked it out, and Denny gently relieved him of the notion, but he could tell by the way his father closed his eyes and sat tight-lipped pretending to sleep that it was another blow.
And then there was the garage. That was the galvanizing event, the thing that doomed the status quo.
When Denny came home that afternoon from the school where he worked as a counselor, Martin was gone. He saw that the side door was open, and after a quick check inside, he drove all over the neighborhood before it occurred to him that his father never used the side door except when he was going to the garage. Fearful that he had taken the old Buick Century out, Denny raced back. But when he hit the door opener, the cantilevered panel swung up, revealing first his father's ratty slippers and mismatched socks, and then the rest of him sitting in a dusty lawn chair next to the car. The old man pretended he was just resting there in the hermetic gloom of the cluttered garage, but it was clear what had happened. He had raised the door from the button in the house, had gone in and somehow closed it, and then couldn't remember how to open it again.
Denny disarmed the thing, but he couldn't disarm the world that threatened his father.
How could he protect him without abetting the irony of being alive but not really living? He had to do something for this man who had fathered him, who had gone to work each day to provide for him and sacrificed without limit for his family's well-being. He had to care for him. No question about that. Only how could he do it when he himself had to go to work each day? How could he stand guard through the nights when his father, having slept most of the day, suddenly got up? So he did something a Bryce male never did. He reached out to others. He reached out to everyone. The parade included a volunteer elder aide, Meals on Wheels, then Medicare, an agency and a visiting nurse, who assigned a visiting caregiver. But it was all stopgap, and then one day after school had ended for the semester and the counselors had finished their year-end record keeping, Denny Bryce found himself driving around to the assisted-living complexes and nursing homes whose mailings he had steadfastly thrown away over the past decade. Enlightenment was ghastly.