Trinity Fields by Bradford Morrow Read Free Book Online

hoax?”
    â€œLook, he got himself involved with some strange characters over there.”
    â€œWishful thinking, Jess.”
    â€œYou can’t just up and go out there because you got some letter in the mail telling you to.”
    â€œIt’s his handwriting.”
    She paused before saying, “I think what you do is you put the letter away and forget about it.”
    â€œI don’t really see what choice I’ve got.”
    â€œYou always do what Kip tells you to do?”
    â€œThat’s cruel,” I said, with a half-smile. “But you admit it might be him.”
    â€œI don’t get you, Brice.”
    â€œWhat’s there to get?”
    Jessica slid out from where she was seated across from me in the kitchen and took a small silver box down from the top shelf of one of the cupboards. Inside the box were some cigarettes she kept for occasions such as this. She lit the cigarette on the ring of flame at one of the gas burners on the stove, and said, “Of course you’ve got a choice. You simply ignore it.”
    I asked her, wasn’t she at least curious?
    â€œHasn’t the time come and gone when either of us can afford to be curious about Kip?”
    Cigarette smoke ribboned upward, my eye followed its wavering. The next morning I made hasty arrangements, told my partners at the office that I had to go away for a couple of days. During the night before I left, Jessica whispered to me, “I’m scared.”
    Neither of us had slept.
    â€œStop being scared. There’s nothing to be scared about.”
    â€œYou know what there is to be scared about.”
    â€œLet’s don’t talk about it anymore, Jess.”
    â€œBut we haven’t talked about it at all.”
    She was right. My diffidence had cooled my interest in looking too much harder at the possible reasons my oldest friend had like a Lazarus come forth from the quiet, and wanted now to speak.
    â€œWell, maybe this is a blessing in disguise. Maybe the time has come.”
    â€œHe can’t have Ariel. Isn’t that what they all do, runaway fathers? See the light and try to worm their way back into other people’s lives?”
    Her adamancy came as a surprise. “Ariel’s all her own now. He can’t have her any more than you and I can have her at this point.”
    â€œHe can turn us into liars in her eyes.”
    â€œNothing can change how Ariel feels about you, Jess. You know that.”
    â€œWhat about how she feels about you?”
    We slept. And when I said goodbye, her fear was replaced by a different kind of seriousness. “You’re going to come home, aren’t you?”
    All my fellow passengers in the turboprop are asleep. The young girl in the seat opposite mine closes and opens her hand as she dreams. Dark-haired and dark-skinned, a pale blue dress and ivory sweater. Her small mouth, pink as the corolla of a locust flower, is open, and the light catches her lower lip and tongue. Wonder what her dream is. The updrafts over the mountains buffet us, and I watch as her doll—horrid scrunched witchlike face and a long shock of purple hair, a troll I guess—comes loose from her embrace and tumbles into the aisle. I reach down to retrieve it and, having glanced around to assure myself that no one would see, lift the doll, scented with the odor of childhood, to my face. Ariel, I think. Her rag dolls and teddy bears smelled just the same when she was this girl’s age, maybe four or five, back when it became clear her “uncle” Kip had permanently disappeared. I lay the doll back on the sleeping girl’s lap, and marvel how she could feel maternal affection toward an ugly lump of molded gum.
    Once we are over New Mexico there is less snow, and the same rumpled pale brown desert is studded with green-black points, piñons I would think, and there is a miles-long mesa off to our right, due west, and a fire in the lower