Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“Sure. Just call if you’re going to be late.”

“I will. Thanks, Mom. For the day and the clothes and everything.”

“It was entirely my pleasure,” I said.

She grabbed up her summer straw hobo bag and went out to wait for Marcia and the apparently restored Jessica by the mailbox. I got the portable intercom speaker that let me check on Mommee and went out onto the terrace by the still blue pool and stretched out on a chaise. I had a sheaf of bills with me, intending to go over them, but instead I laid them on the flagstones and put my head back and shaded my face with my arm and listened to the drone of the too early cicadas and the sulky wallow and slap of the river at its banks. The heat today was thick and wet and heavy, and unlike yesterday there was no wind. I meant to move into the shade of the umbrella table and tackle the bills, but instead I fell heavily asleep and dreamed a boring, long dream about taking a shower. It seemed endless, and did indeed last, I figured later, over two hours.

I heard the screams before I smelled the smoke.

I came floundering up out of my sweaty sleep, trying for a moment to work the screams into the dream of showering, but they would not fit, and even as I sat on the edge of the chaise shaking my head, I knew in a deeper part of me that they belonged outside me, upstairs in my house. I was halfway up the stairs before I realized that they were not Mommee’s screams, but Glynn’s. My heart dropped like a stone and I took a great gulp of air, and thick, sour smoke cut into my lungs. I could see it then, lying in white, roiling strata in the upstairs hallway, billowing from Glynn’s room. I stumbled, caught the banister, and hauled myself the rest of the way up, shouting my daughter’s name: “Glynn! Glynn!” At that moment the smoke detector came on.

“Mama!” came Glynn’s voice, muffled and high with fear. At the same time I heard the thin, henlike squawk that meant Mommee was alarmed, and she shot out of Glynn’s room and scuttled, head down, into her own room at the end of the hall. The door slammed shut behind her.

I followed the smoke and Glynn’s cries into and through her room and into her bathroom. It was so thick with smoke I could hardly see, but I made out her figure bending over the bathtub, flapping at the smoky white mess piled there with a towel. She had stopped screaming, but she was choking and coughing.

“Get out of here!” I screamed at her and began to cough, too. The thick smoke smelled and tasted of fabric.

I grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her out of the bathroom and dashed back in and groped for her shower handle. I turned it and water sprayed down onto the burning cloth. It hissed and spat; the smoke turned gray and the smell became that of charred, wet cloth. I slammed the bathroom door and ran, eyes streaming, lungs bursting, out into the hallway. Glynn leaned against the wall, face in hands, sobbing.

“Go downstairs and wait on the patio,” I shouted. “And call the fire department from the kitchen on your way! I’ll get Mommee.”

“Let her burn,” my daughter shrilled in fury. “Let the old witch burn! Do you know what that is in there? That’s my new clothes! All of them! She put them in the bathtub and lit them with the fireplace starter! I came upstairs just as she was doing it!”

“Go!” I screamed, and she went.

It seemed to me that the smoke was already clearing, but I dashed to Mommee’s room. The door was locked. I pounded on it.

“Come out of there, Mommee,” I shouted. “The house is on fire! You’ve got to go downstairs!”

“I want Pom,” came the fretful wail. “I want Pom!”

“Well, he’s not here! Mommee, open this door now ! You’ll burn to death if you don’t!”

“I’m going to tell Pom you yelled at me!”

“Get out here right now or there’ll be no more TV for a month!”

She opened the door a fraction and peeped around it, grinning.

“I made a big fire,” she said.

I grabbed her shoulders roughly and pulled her, whining and wriggling, down the stairs and outside onto the patio, where Glynn was talking urgently on the cellular phone.

“Watch her,” I said. “I think it’s going out, but I have to check. Are they on the way?”

“Yeah, they got the alarm before I called.”

I started into the house again and Mommee started for the river. Glynn sprang after her and jerked her back.

“You sit down and shut up,” she said coldly. “You’re lucky you aren’t ashes along with us and the whole house. I mean it. Don’t you move.”

Mommee began to wail. Glynn sat her smartly down on the chaise and stood behind her, holding her down by her shoulders. Glynn’s face was mottled white and red with out-rage, and tears still ran down her face.

The first fire truck came wailing in then.

The fire was out when they got upstairs, but they doused the bathroom and Glynn’s bedroom with water from their hoses anyway. The hoses were big as boa constrictors; the mess they left was incredible. The clothes were a sopping char, and the walls and mirrors of Glynn’s pretty bathroom were velvety with half-inch-thick soot. The bedroom was not too bad, smoke-wise, but the carpet and curtains and upholstered pieces were sodden. I thanked the firemen and they left and I stood in the doorway, mindless with relief and with anger at Mommee. Shock made my arms and legs weak.

Mommee streaked by me and into the bathroom, with Glynn in pounding pursuit. The old woman stumbled on a wet bath mat and I caught her just as she was about to tumble into the bathtub with her handiwork.

“Look at the fire! Look at the fire!” she crowed with glee, reaching down to pat the blackened mess. Wet soot came away and smeared her arms and hands and streaked her face and matted her hair. She peered sideways at me. She looked like a crazy toddler caught in its mischief—her eyes gleamed and her color was high—and she babbled and laughed and clapped her hands.

“I’m sorry, she got away from me,” Glynn gasped. Turning to Mommee, who was wriggling in my grasp, she shouted: “You like it? Is it fun? You like what you did to my new clothes?”

“Fun!” Mommee shrieked. “I had fun!”

“You old bitch! I hate you!” Glynn screamed into Mommee’s face and burst into tears again, then turned and ran downstairs.

Mommee began to cry too, grizzling and whining like a child. She looked up at me out of the corner of her eye, and dropped her lashes, and turned the crying up a notch. She could always get around Pom this way.

“Come on,” I said angrily. “You can damned well stay in your room while I try to clean this mess up. And you can cry till this time tomorrow, as far as I’m concerned. Pom isn’t here to soothe your butt now.”

I dragged her, kicking and yelling, out of Glynn’s bathroom and down the hall and locked her in her room. She began to kick the door and howl in earnest. I knew that she would go on doing both until hoarseness made her stop. I did not care. I went downstairs, found Glynn in the kitchen sobbing, and hugged her hard.

“We’ll replace the clothes, of course,” I said. “And I promise you we’ll do something about Mommee. This is way, way too much.”

“Daddy won’t let us,” she hiccuped.

“Don’t bet on it,” I said. “Why don’t you call Marcia or Jess and see if you can spend the night over there tonight? I’m going to have to dry your room out before I can clean it.”

“Can I? I don’t think I can go up there again right now.”

“Of course you can. Go on and call and I’ll take a swipe or two at the bathroom. It may not be as bad as it looks.”

“I could help.”

“You can help later. This time’s on me.”