Ariel Drum

Quick Facts

Eighteen-year-old Ariel Drum is the radiant eldest sibling of Frank Drum and Jake Drum. A gifted pianist, organist, and composer fresh out of high school, she plans to attend Juilliard. Beloved in her Minnesota town, she plays church services and community events, and her death becomes the catalyst for Frank’s coming of age and loss of innocence. Key relationships include her parents, Ruth Drum and Nathan Drum; her official boyfriend, Karl Brandt; her mentor, Emil Brandt; and Emil’s sister, Lise Brandt.

Who They Are

Ariel is the family’s “golden child”—brilliant, graceful, and seemingly untouched by the town’s pettiness or grief. Even her scar, the remnant of a repaired cleft lip, becomes part of her myth; she reframes it with imaginative poise as an “angel’s touch,” turning imperfection into radiance. That attitude distills the novel’s vision of the nature of grace and forgiveness: beauty is not the absence of scars but the meaning we give them. Yet beneath the poise lies a private life of longing, fear, and adult choices that complicate the halo others place on her.

Physically, she inherits her mother’s auburn hair and blue eyes. The night she disappears she wears a red dress, a gold watch, a mother-of-pearl barrette, and a heart-shaped locket—details that turn her last public image into an unforgettable emblem of youth interrupted.

Personality & Traits

Publicly, Ariel is composure and light; privately, she is decisive and conflicted, pulled between expectation and desire. Music is her first language—she shepherds her community through sorrow with her organ, yet cannot quite orchestrate her own future. As pressures mount, her warmth gives way to volatility, signaling a hidden crisis that intersects the novel’s preoccupation with family secrets and bonds.

• Talented and artistic: Her organ playing at a child’s funeral moves the congregation to tears; her composition “The Freedom Road” crowns the town’s Fourth of July celebration.
• Charming and poised: She disarms strangers’ curiosity about her scar with wit and confidence, redefining vulnerability as grace.
• Loving and protective: To Frank and Jake, she is “confidante,” “coconspirator,” and “defender,” treating their missteps with affection and fierce loyalty.
• Secretive and complex: She slips out at night to meet a lover, hides a pregnancy, and maintains a public relationship with Karl while privately bound to Emil.
• Strong-willed and conflicted: She spars with her mother about Juilliard and bristles at performing, her mood swinging from playful banter to icy silence—evidence of an internal struggle she won’t voice.

Character Journey

Ariel’s arc unfolds almost entirely in retrospect, through revelations that overturn the pristine image she leaves behind. Initially framed as an almost mythic ideal—beauty, brilliance, goodness—she becomes, posthumously, painfully human. The investigation reveals that her courtly romance with Karl masked his sexuality and protected her clandestine relationship with Emil. The pregnancy, her doubts about Juilliard, and her erratic summer moods reveal a young woman trying to govern her own life within the structures of family expectation and small-town surveillance. Her death ruptures that system, forcing the Drums to confront what they didn’t see: that innocence isn’t purity but an untested ideal. In this way, Ariel’s life and loss reframe the story’s moral center—grace arrives not as perfection but as the hard wisdom wrung from love, secrecy, and forgiveness.

Key Relationships

• Frank and Jake Drum: Ariel’s bond with her brothers is intimate and conspiratorial. She protects their small rebellions, gives them the language of admiration and belonging, and, in dying, marks the end of their uncomplicated faith in goodness. Their memory of her becomes the lens through which the novel measures what is lost and what might yet be redeemed.

• Ruth Drum: Loving but tense, this relationship bears the weight of artistic aspiration. Ruth projects her own frustrated ambitions onto Ariel, pressing Juilliard as destiny. Ariel’s flashes of defiance—especially around performing—signal her resistance to being an ideal rather than a person, deepening the mother-daughter rift.

• Nathan Drum: With her father, Ariel’s goodness seems uncomplicated; he reads her music as a sign of order and grace in the world. His devastation at her death—and at the secrets it discloses—tests his pastoral faith, pushing him to practice the forgiveness he preaches.

• Karl Brandt: The town crowns them the perfect couple, but their relationship is a mutual shield: Karl’s cover for his sexuality, Ariel’s veil over her forbidden love. When the truth emerges, the collapse of this facade exposes how appearance can be both kindness and cage.

• Emil Brandt: Teacher, mentor, and secret lover, Emil is the axis of Ariel’s adult life. Their relationship, transgressive and tender, leads to her pregnancy and ties Ariel’s fate to the Brandt family’s fractured loyalties.

• Lise Brandt: Lise’s jealousy casts Ariel as an intruder in a closed sibling world. Isolated and protective of Emil, Lise perceives Ariel’s presence as annihilating, and that fear becomes the fuse that ignites tragedy.

Defining Moments

Ariel’s story is told in scenes that juxtapose public radiance with private crisis. Each moment shown through others’ eyes reveals another facet of the person Ariel was—and the person she was becoming.

• Bobby Cole’s funeral: Her organ performance turns communal grief into order and consolation, establishing her as a vessel of grace for others.
• The porch conversation: Waiting for Karl, she confides that love is “complicated,” and hesitates about Juilliard—an early crack in the golden-girl facade.
• Fourth of July performance (“The Freedom Road”): A triumph of skill and spirit, it is her last public act; its patriotic uplift now reads as elegy.
• The fight with Ruth: “Fuck the performance,” she snaps, a startling rupture that reveals both autonomy and anguish beneath duty.
• Discovery of her body: Found by Frank in the river, the red dress and auburn hair become indelible images through which death and grief enter the family intimately, recasting every earlier scene in shadow.

Essential Quotes

“It’s the mark left by the finger of an angel who touched my face.”

Ariel transforms a childhood scar into a story about blessing. The line crystallizes her gift for reframing pain and anticipates the novel’s ethic: grace is not the erasure of wounds but their transfiguration.

“Thanks, Frankie. With me a compliment’ll get you anywhere.” … “At first it’s lovely. Then it’s scary. Then . . . It’s complicated,” she said.

The playful flirt of the older sister gives way to the sober truth of a young woman already in over her head. Her ellipsis is doing heavy lifting—it marks the boundary between what she can say and what she must keep secret.

“Ariel was my parents’ golden child. She had a quick mind and the gift of easy charm and her fingers possessed magic on the keyboard … But Jake and I adored her. She was our confidante. Our coconspirator. Our defender.”

Frank’s tribute captures both the myth and the girl. The shift from “golden child” to intimate titles—confidante, coconspirator, defender—shows how Ariel’s real power is relational, not merely performative.

“Fuck the performance,” Ariel said and turned and stormed out the door.

Shorn of poise, this outburst is the hinge between public expectation and private need. It is also a refusal of being instrumentalized—Ariel demanding a self larger than applause.