Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

We hugged, and she gave me a little sucking air kiss on either side of my face. She smelled of Opium, as she always did, and of something else; was it whiskey? Had she been drinking? Laura had never drunk much after her last disastrous foray into alcohol and pills, and that was years ago. I did not think she used anything now, despite Pom’s words about cocaine. But I did not know what the smell might be. Medicine of some sort, maybe. When I pulled back from her, still holding her hands, to look at her, I saw that her face was much thinner, and sharper of cheekbone and brow, and there were delicate taupe shadows under the extraordinary eyes. She wore no makeup that I could see, and her lips were slightly chafed. Around her eyes was a faint webbing of tiny white lines. And she was definitely thinner. I could see sharp ridges of hipbones through the tight, white-faded blue jeans, and even the bones in her hands were sharper, more fragile.

“Wow,” I said. “Look at you. You are a bona fide glamour puss.”

“God, Met, glamour puss? Who’s writing your material? It’s for a film I just finished; I’m letting it grow out now. Well. You look good yourself. Not at all like a middle-aged lady who just ran away from home.”

She used her old toddler’s nickname for me; she had not been able, at first, to manage Merritt.

“I didn’t run away, as you well know. Where’s Glynn? Is she okay?”

“Oh, yeah, she’s fine. Aghast at what she’s done and scared shitless that you’re going to snatch her home to Daddy and he’s going to kill her, but basically she’s fine. We thought it would be better if I came by myself, to sort of see how the ground lay. Neither of us wanted her to get spanked in the middle of LAX.”

“Nobody has ever spanked Glynn in her entire life,” I said. “Did she say we had?”

“No. Lighten up. She just acts like you do. Come on, I’m parked at the curb and they’re going to tow me for sure. You have luggage?”

“Just this,” I hefted my carry-on.

“Not planning to linger, are you?”

“No. This is not a social call. You know I just came to take her home. We’re not going to argue about that, Laura.”

She held up a propitiating hand, and walked ahead of me down the concourse toward the baggage claim. I followed her, the duffle slapping against my leg. Fatigue and strangeness hovered around me like a miasma. I felt as though I was walking and walking, and not getting anywhere. But presently we were through the thonged claim area and out into the strange bronze sunlight of early afternoon. We did not speak until then.

A red Mustang convertible, top down, was pulled up to the curb in the no parking zone, and an airport cop was just walking around behind it to get the tag number. It was an old model, but it gleamed as if it had just come, newly molten, from the factory.

“Oh, Lord,” Laura said huskily. The southern accent she had lost in high school drama class crept back. “I guess that’s nonnegotiable, huh?”

“Afraid so,” the cop said, staring at her. Even in the Los Angeles airport, where half the women who walked through were blond and wore the jeans-T-shirt uniform and were probably Somebody, Laura stood out. The indefinable, old electric charge smote the air around her. I saw the cop register the fact that here indeed was Somebody and hesitate very slightly. I knew then he was lost. Laura did, too.

“You see, officer, my big sister has come all the way from Atlanta to see me for the first time ever, and my radiator started acting funny in the desert, and I just got the car and I don’t know anything about it yet, and I wanted to surprise her, and I was running so late…” Laura let her voice trail off and crinkled her nose. She grinned, managing somehow to make the grin both repentant and imploring. He grinned, too, slightly.

“Well, seeing as how it’s your big sister—”

“That’s very decent of you,” Laura said, and made that sound as if it were an invitation into her bed.

I tossed my bag into the backseat and Laura climbed into the driver’s. As she started the ignition the cop appeared at her side.

“I wondered if you’d mind,” he said, handing her in a blank ticket pad. “I’ve got this kid—”

“Of course .”

Laura took the ticket pad and scribbled on it with his proffered ballpoint and handed it back with a flourish. He examined it, and broke into a broad grin.

“This’ll kill him,” he said. “ Batman was his all-time favorite. Seen it four times.”

“Hope he likes it,” Laura said, and gunned the car, and we were out of the shade of the overhang, into the strange pewter air.

“You didn’t,” I said, laughing helplessly.

“Why not? He saved me a fine,” she said. “Some people do think we look alike.”

Not anymore, I thought, and felt a rush of sadness for her, and the old, fierce, protective love.

“You’ve got her beat a country mile,” I said, and she smiled, and it was the old, sweet, enchanting Laura smile, without salt or shadows in it.

“I’m glad you’re here, for whatever reason,” she said. “I was afraid you were going to be furious with me.”

“I should be, I guess. At you and Glynn. But right now I’m madder at Pom and maddest at Mommee, and neither one of them can help it, really.”

“He can’t help screaming at Glynn and grounding her for the rest of her life? And yelling at you? The old lady can’t help setting Glynn’s clothes on fire and then squalling for her sonnyboy?”

“She has Alzheimer’s, Laura. She doesn’t know what she’s doing most of the time. And he…well, command is sort of what he does. It’s what a doctor is all about; it’s got to be that way or he can’t function. Pom runs a charity clinic down in the projects. Can you imagine what that would be like if he couldn’t control it? Sometimes he forgets where he is; it’s hard to turn a lifetime of habit on and off. And he’s crazy about his mother, and this illness just devastates him. I think it frightens him, too. To get outside help, or put her in a home…that means that he can’t take care of her, that it can’t be fixed. He just can’t handle that yet.”

“Poor baby,” Laura said. I was too tired to keep the discussion going, and did not answer. She was silent for a while, too.

She wove the car in and out of the heavy traffic on what the signs said was the San Diego Freeway. It could have been any large artery in any commercial-industrial area of any large city in the world. The air was noxious, foul and tasting of metal and sulfur and asphalt and gasoline. It stung my nose and eyes and throat. I felt tears start, and a scum of stinging stickiness film my face and arms. The heat was monstrous. Every few minutes we would come to a halt in a frozen river of traffic and the air would eddy and sway, cobralike, above the glacier of cars, and horns would begin to shriek. Before we had gone five miles I surrendered.

“Could we put the top up?” I said. “Maybe you’re used to breathing this stuff, but it’s stripping my throat out.”

“Yeah, Atlanta has such pure air,” she grinned, and I smiled reluctantly, because Atlanta’s air is frequently just as awful a stew of assorted fumes and stinks, only with the addition of killer humidity.

She pressed a button and the top rose and glided silently into its groove. She raised the windows and turned on the air conditioner and the immediacy of the devouring air shrank back, leaving us sealed in a capsule of quiet and stale cool, rushing air. The Mustang’s windows were tinted gray-green and gave the landscape outside the sinister air of a futuristic movie set on some alien, metallic planet where a thin no-color ether took the place of air. The strangeness I had brought with me bloomed into fullness, and I gave myself up to it.