Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“I’m sorry if I was a pompous ass last night,” he said. “I shouldn’t have lost my temper, but we had a bad thing at the clinic; I think we’re going to lose a kid. And then the fire—”

“I’m sorry about the child,” I said. “Is it the meningitis case?”

“Yeah. Listen, I think I’ll make some pancakes. I’ll take some in to Glynn. I should probably apologize to her, too. I guess I was pretty heavy with her last night—”

“Yeah, you were,” I said.

He went out of the room, and I heard him rooting around in the pots and pans drawer and knew he was looking for the skillet he liked to use for pancakes. Presently I heard the spatter and sizzle of the batter. I finished my coffee, and stretched, and got up to dress. I was just padding downstairs barefoot when I met him on the stairs coming up. His face was still and empty, and the white ring that I had not seen in a long time was around his blue eyes. My breath caught in my throat.

“What?”

He cleared his own throat, and then he said, “She’s run away. Glynn. I went to her room and there was no answer and I went in, and she was gone and the bed didn’t look slept in, and there was this note—”

I took it out of his hand. My own hand trembled so that the note fluttered crazily.

“Going out to Aunt Laura’s for a while,” it said in Glynn’s round backhand. “She said I could come. I can’t stay here anymore and things will be better for everybody without me. Don’t worry. I have my birthday money and Aunt Laura charged the ticket to her American Express card. I’d say I’m sorry but I’m not.”

I put my hand up to my mouth. I could not make any words come out. How had she done it? How did she know what to do? But in my mind I could see my child I could see my child dialing Palm Springs; hear the low, anguished conversation; watch her creep silently up the stairs to her ruined bedroom to get some clothes and her small stash of money; see the lights of the Buckhead cab as it waited up on the road.

“What in God’s name got into her?” Pom exploded. “How could she do such a stupid thing? Of all the irresponsible, childish—”

“Hush,” I said, and went into the kitchen and dialed Laura in Palm Springs.

The phone rang and rang, and then Laura picked up.

“I thought it would be you,” she said almost gaily. “Yeah, she’s coming. I’m picking her up at Ontario a little after ten. Don’t fuss, Merritt; I’m really looking forward to having her, and apparently you all have one too many children around the house at present. Cut her some slack. She’s old enough to visit her aunt if she wants to. We’re going to take off and just drive; I’ve got this incredible rebuilt Mustang convertible, a sixty-five, a classic, and we’re going to take it on an inaugural journey. I thought up the coast, to L.A. and Malibu and maybe even up to San Francisco. Top down, radio on. Sunshine all the way. I know people we can stay with along the way; she won’t need any money. And besides, I’ve got plenty now. My new barracuda of a lawyer just parted Sonny with a wad. This is going to be my victory tour—”

“Laura,” I interrupted, “You put her on a plane back home the minute you can get a reservation. I mean that. I can’t have her tearing up and down the California coast in a convertible—”

“With a loose woman?” she laughed. “Why is that worse than a crazy woman who sets her clothes on fire? Or someone who locks her in her room when she protests? Jesus, what a circus. Lighten up, Sis. Haven’t you ever heard of the age of consent?”

“Laura, for God’s sake—”

Pom tore the phone away from me and yelled into it: “Laura, don’t screw around with something you don’t understand. Get her back here. I’ll pay you back. But do it.”

Her low, liquid laugh spilled out into the room, like a little baroque quartet.

“Fuck you, Pom,” she said, and hung up.

He turned to me, his face near purple, the blue eyes burning like embers in a dying fire.

“I always knew she was going to do something dangerous, to herself or somebody else,” he said. “If I could get my hands on her I’d strangle her. She ought to be committed; she should have been put away years ago—”

“So what are you going to do?” I said through lips numb and stiff with shock and fear.

“Keep calling until Glynn gets there and tell her to get herself on back here or she’s going to be in the kind of trouble she never knew existed. For starters,” he said, “she’ll be lucky if I don’t slam her in a convent.”

I turned without a word and ran up the stairs.

“Where are you going?” he shouted after me.

“I’m going to go get her,” I said over my shoulder.

“Don’t be a goddamned fool, Merritt,” he yelled. “You can’t do that! Who’ll look after Mommee? I can’t take any time off from the clinic—”

“Fuck the clinic,” I said furiously, “and fuck you if you don’t like it.”

From behind her closed door Mommee began to howl dismally.

“Fuck you, too,” I said to her and slammed my door.

Three hours later I was on a plane west, feeling virtually nothing but the giddy, not unpleasant sensation that I had leaped off the very edge of the world and was falling free in clean, blue space.

4

Laura met me at the Los Angeles airport at two o’clock that afternoon. Glynn was not with her. Our meeting felt strange and disconnected from reality, like something you would see in a film. I knew that I was tired from the long trip and the near sleepless night before; in Atlanta it would be late afternoon now. And I had not managed to eat much of my plastic-encased airline lunch. But it was more than that; more, even, than the simple incredibility of what I had just done. It was Laura. She was the Laura I had always known, and yet she was not.

It had been six years since I had seen her, though we had talked a few times on the phone before this morning, and I wrote once in a while and received a scribbled reply now and then. It stood to reason that she would have changed. She had been through three hectic marriages and three hard-fought divorces, and I knew her career was not flourishing. If she had been a real success in films we would have known. I did not hear much about the plays she was in, and the TV commercials that were the bones of her income were apparently local and regional ones. And the stylist’s job, and the jewelry and poetry and talk of becoming an agent all spoke eloquently, though not of success. Of course she would not be the Laura who had breezed through Atlanta those six years past, on her way to the Caribbean to do a film starring Mel Gibson. “Susan Sarandon gets him, but I get the best sex scenes.” She was thirty-two then, at the very apogee of her looks and talent, fully bloomed and ripe, seeming to shine. She was still happily married to her third husband, whose carrier had not yet vanished up his nose, and her own career seemed poised at last to careen skyward.

She was thirty-eight now. The Mel Gibson movie had not, after all, gotten off the ground, and the marriage had crashed into it. I don’t know what I was expecting.

She was leaning against a pillar just beyond the arrival area, wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt and cowboy boots. For a moment I was not sure it was her, though the posture and the tilt of the head were all Laura. She was deeply tanned, something I had never seen before, and her hair was a yellowish platinum, sleeked straight back behind her ears. Her teeth flashed white in her dark face when she smiled at me, and for a moment she was purely a creature of celluloid, none of my own and nothing to me. But then the sherry eyes crinkled, and she moved toward me with the old hip-shot Laura prowl, and I knew her once again.