RAIN PELTED the kitchen windows, and wind shook them in their frames. Ariane was glad to be in the warm kitchen, where she was beginning to feel at home. When she cleaned she recognized in herself the proprietary thoroughness that, as a girl, she had found so ridiculous in her mother, who had gotten onto her hands and knees when she scrubbed the floor of her own shabby kitchen, and hummed a song while she worked. Ariane knew where things were in my grandparents’ kitchen now, and she moved around the space with the ease of familiarity, gathering the pots and utensils she needed, like a person choosing the day’s outfit from a closet full of comfortable old clothes.
Dr. Roberts had come to see Grandmother. He came in a sou’wester, since he was supposed to be a traveler aboard the boat. Ariane had made chowder, as her mother did, but with a little saffron, the way my grandfather preferred it, and she had expected that Dr. Roberts would have a bowl, so she had set the table. When he came downstairs, though, she heard him speaking with Grandfather for a while in the foyer, in hushed, tense voices, and then she heard him slip out through the front door. She was preparing Grandmother’s supper tray. Though her back was to the doorway that led to the dining room, she knew when my grandfather appeared there.
“It’s a terrible night,” she said, without turning around. “This soup will warm her up. It’s—”
She stopped. Grandfather hadn’t made a sound. She turned. He was standing in the doorway, silent, looking utterly defeated.
“Oh!” she said. All the strength drained from her. She meant to go to him, willed herself to go to him and comfort him, but her legs wouldn’t hold her. She took a step and felt herself sink, and then she was on the floor, and then he was there with her, and she had her head against his chest, against the flannel of his shirt, and she was sobbing, and he was saying, “Shhhh, stop now, stop now. Ariane, you have to be quiet. Hush.”
“What?” she said.
“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s all right, but hush now.”
“You mean—oh. I thought—”
“I know. I know what you thought. No. Not yet.”
“The way you looked—you looked so—”
“Finished. That’s the way I feel. Just about finished.”
“Well, forget it,” she said, shaking herself. She gripped his arm and pulled herself to her feet. She began to chatter, in an urgent whisper, trying to inject some life into the air: “I’ve got some soup ready. Do you think she’d like something a little more substantial? I could put some rice into it. Or some cream. Or maybe some crackers. I like to break crackers into my soup. I always have, ever since I was a kid.”
Flickering somewhere in the back of her mind, like the tiniest flickering light on the surface of the water at night that tells you, even though you can’t hear it, that a boat is passing out there, somewhere in the dark, was something like a dream, the insubstantial reflection of a wish that John had the time and the peace of mind and the inclination to stop and smile at her for breaking crackers into her soup. She would have liked to tell him, in a girlish voice with an edge of self-mockery, how she liked to watch the broken bits of cracker droop as they absorbed the soup, surrender their crispness to it, go limp in its embrace, swell as they filled with it, and how she liked to eat the spongy crackers from the top before she ate the soup itself. She would have liked to see him smile at her for that.
“Do you think she’d like some crackers?” she asked, without elaborating.
“I doubt that she’ll eat any of it at all,” said Grandfather.
“Well, maybe something else, or—”
“I think that I—I think she should go to the hospital.”
“You do?”
“I think so. I don’t know. I—uh—just think that—”
“Did you ask Dr. Roberts?”
“Yes. I asked him.”
“And?”
Grandfather leaned on the counter, sank onto the stool beside it.
“He said it wasn’t necessary.”
“Well, then, I think you should let her stay—”
Ariane heard herself brightening, and she realized why: here was hope that the voyage wouldn’t have to end.
“You do?” asked Grandfather.
If Grandmother moved into the hospital in Hargrove the trip would be over for Ariane, just as surely as if she had died. She would have to disembark. She realized that ever since she had started helping Grandfather, she had been trying to avoid the thought that one day it would all have to end, one day the story would have to be over, and Eleanor would have to be dead. She was ashamed of herself for feeling this way, but she recognized that she honestly did feel this way. She wanted to travel on. When we’re in transit, with ordinary business happily suspended, ordinary cares blissfully disregarded, we become, sometimes, reluctant to arrive, to find, perhaps, that where we’re going resembles where we’ve been, that our destination is our destiny. Ariane felt selfish for wanting to continue on my grandmother’s voyage, but it was what she wanted, and she recognized that it was what she wanted.
“Well,” she said, “if it’s what she wants.”
Grandfather went upstairs with the soup, and Ariane followed so closely behind that he could have heard her footsteps if he’d been listening for them. She sat on the stairs, listening. He tried to feed Grandmother some soup, and Ariane heard the spoon against the tray and knew that she had refused it. He walked to the window and halfheartedly rehearsed the day’s progress. Then he came back to the bed.
“Eleanor,” he said. “I’ve been thinking of changing course, putting into port somewhere in the Marquesas. Somewhere with a hospital.”
In a voice so soft that Ariane couldn’t at first decide what she had said, Grandmother asked, “What did Wendell say?”
Grandfather said, “He said that it wasn’t—necessary. But if you would like to—if you’d be more comfortable—”
“Sail on, then,” said Grandmother. “To Rarotonga.”
Ariane stood and tiptoed down the stairs and through the living room and across the foyer and through the dining room to the kitchen, where her soup was ready, the crackers on top soft and puffy, just the way she liked them.
[to be continued]
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