She closed her eyes again, counted fifty breaths, and opened them. She closed them a third time, and when she opened them again it was morning. She’d slept after all, and had lived through it, and she felt a little sheepish and greatly relieved.
After that she didn’t have any further worries about Bed Death.
The second week after Caleb’s funeral Ariel stopped at a Meeting Street drugstore on the way home from school and bought a spiral composition notebook. When she got home Roberta’s car was gone and the house was empty. She let herself in and hurried up the steep staircase and down the hall to her room at the rear of the house.
Her tin flute was disassembled on her desk. She fitted the pieces together and put the instrument to her lips, holding the pose for a moment before beginning to play. Then she let herself drift into a melody, improvising, letting the flute lead her fingers to the notes it wanted to sound. She played with her eyes closed, and, as the music caught her up, a remarkably serene expression transformed her face.
She played for perhaps ten minutes. Then she put down the flute and took the new spiral notebook from her bookbag. She uncapped a green felt-tipped pen and began writing on the first page, forming the letters in a neat angular hand. The words flowed as effortlessly as the notes had poured forth from the flute.
I am Ariel, the Adopted.
“I am the beautiful stranger.” I liked that book. I didn’t finish it, though. I don’t know why. I do that a lot, start a book and get interested in it and enjoy it and then not finish it.
Anyway, I am not the beautiful stranger. It’s the beautiful part that doesn’t fit. I don’t hate my looks but I would never stop traffic, not unless I flung myself in front of a car and maybe not even then.
I can just about picture that, like a cartoon. Me lying dead under the wheels of a car and a crowd of fools all standing around gawking and one of them saying, “Well, poor child, she just wasn’t pretty enough to stop traffic.”
Sometimes it scares me, the kind of thoughts I have. All the wrong things make me laugh and none of the right ones.
I just looked in the mirror to see what it is about me that isn’t beautiful. I can’t exactly say because beautiful is how things all add together or how they don’t. But my whole head is long and narrow and my chin comes to a point and that doesn’t help a great deal. I remember one Halloween when I was young enough for that sort of thing I was got up like a witch and it could chill you how much I looked the part. It’s the shape of my head that does it, and what are you going to do about that? If I were one of those Jewish girls with big noses in all those books I start but don’t finish it would be simple enough. But where is the plastic surgeon that will change the shape of your head?
Plus my eyes are too small. Correction: the eyes are big enough but the irises are too small. There was an expert on the Chinese art of face-reading on Merv Griffin who said eyes like mine are a sign of a small and insignificant character. I got mad and turned the set off. Like it would teach the fool a lesson.
Roberta used to tell me I was pretty. She used to talk to me a lot even if I was never much at paying attention to her.
She hardly talks to me at all now. I don’t know when it was that she decided she didn’t like me anymore. Maybe she never liked me but I used to be too dumb to know the difference, and maybe as I grew up she got tired of pretending, plus I began to notice things.
She was through liking me by the time Caleb was born and now that he’s dead she hates me. For being alive, I guess.
For a while I thought things were going to change. When she came into my room the night of the funeral, I thought she would say how she couldn’t sleep either, and we’d wind up having one of those mother-daughter talks.
I tend to expect too much.
I never really believed her when she told me I was pretty. I knew she didn’t mean it. It’s something you do, you tell your little girl she’s pretty. David told me the same, and when he tells me I believe it. Not that I am pretty but that he thinks I am.
I wonder who I look like. My mother or my father.
No way on earth I’m ever going to know.
I think about this a lot. When I think about my mother sometimes I’ll just stand staring into the mirror over my dresser and try imagining my face the way it’ll be when I’m older. Of course I don’t know how old my mother was when she had me, but what I usually decide on is that she was seventeen or thereabouts, because that seems a usual age for having a baby and putting it up for adoption. This is just guessing because she could have been forty for all I know but I usually settle on seventeen. Well, I am almost thirteen now. That is just four years shy of seventeen, so the face in the mirror isn’t all that different from hers when she had me.
I can just hold that thought in my head and fool with it for hours.
That’s if I look like her. I could just as easy look like my father, and I don’t even know where to start when I try thinking about him. He could be anyone at all, anyone in the whole world. He could be old or young or dead or alive, and no way in the world for me to know anything about it.
That gets to me sometimes. It really does. I could pass either of them on the street and never know it.
Twice in recent months Ariel had seen women on the street with faces that seemed to remind her of her own. Each time she found herself following the woman, hurrying along on the opposite side of the street trying to sneak quick peeks at her. She began working out in her mind an elaborate sequence in which she and her mother recognized one another and had a whole joyous family reunion.
Then in each case she had seen that there was really no strong resemblance after all. And if there were, what would she do about it? Just tag along until she was noticed, she supposed, and then slink off like a whipped dog.
Oh, I am not beautiful, but I am the stranger.
Well, that is obvious. I would not be writing in this book if I had anyone in the world to talk to. It isn’t even a real diary. I looked in Woolworth’s the day before yesterday and they had diaries but I didn’t have any money with me. Then yesterday Erskine walked me home and I couldn’t exactly say, “Let’s stop in Woolworth’s so I can buy a book to write secrets in.” And by this afternoon I decided I couldn’t see myself buying one of those books that say things like My Secret Thoughts in gold on the fake leather cover.
They have locks a baby could open with a toothpick, if a baby happened to have a toothpick, and all Roberta has to do is find a locked book called My Secret Thoughts. That would be like writing Be Calm and Relaxed on a red flag and showing it to a bull. Plus it wouldn’t matter where I hid it. I could bury it six feet deep in the flower bed and she would “just happen” to dig up that particular bed and come across my diary.
Plus I’d probably just lose the key my own self.
So instead of a diary I have this notebook, and so instead of hiding it where I’d never find it but Roberta would, I’ll keep it in my schoolbag with my other notebooks. Yes, like The Purloined Letter, which I actually read all the way through, short as it was. Roberta could never resist a diary, but who on earth would want to read a kid’s dumb notebook?
My name is Ariel, the Adopted.
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings.” Names, names, names. Sometimes I think ninety percent of school is learning the names of things, whether they’re cities or presidents or parts of the body or whatever they are. I wonder if it makes any difference whether you know something’s name or not. Say a bird flies by and you say, “Hark, there goes a Great Crested Flycatcher.” Now what have you actually said? You’ve only proved that you just happen to know what other people have decided to call that bird. It’s not as if the bird knows he’s a Great Crested Flycatcher. He just hangs in there catching Great Crested Flies, or whatever he does for a living.