Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

She caught my tone and laughed.

“Stu is my agent. Stuart Feinstein. He has a key. No, he’s not going to ravish Glynn. He’s far more likely to be feeding her something healthy and horrible and regaling her with lifestyles of the rich and famous. He’s a darling, an angel, my best friend; he’s never given up on me. And he’s HIV positive and I think he’s got active AIDS, though he won’t say so, and that’s breaking my heart. He seems awfully frail lately. I think I’m the only client he still does much for. He truly believes I’m an extraordinary actress, and that’s more than I can say for most people around here these days, including, sometimes, me.”

“AIDS—”

“She’s not going to catch it from him, Met. Not unless she’s sleeping with him, and I doubt that. He’s gay as a goose. You’re not going to catch it, either. Doesn’t Pom see HIV at that famous clinic?”

“Of course he does, all the time,” I snapped. I was not accustomed to having my sister treat me like a child.

“And I do, too. I volunteer at Jerusalem House back home; it’s this wonderful place where people with active AIDS go and live out whatever time they have left. Their families won’t have them. The volunteers are incredible; they do literally everything that needs doing. The residents are pretty great too, come to that.”

“Terrific,” she said, climbing out of the car and stretching. “What do you do there?”

“Well, I help out with public relations. In fact, I’m going to take that over full-time when we’ve got Mommee settled, I think. I’d love to put what I know to work for them.”

“PR. Whoopdedoo,” Laura said, and went into the gated back entrance of her condo without looking back. Picking up my tote I followed her. I felt like a Junior Leaguer discussing her provisional work. In fact, I had not wanted to join the League, and was pleased that Glynn did not, either. But still, that’s how Laura made me feel. I tried to run lightly and authoritatively up the little curved staircase, needing to regain my big-sisterhood again. Out here in this vast, glittering desert, without my familiar context, I had the uneasy feeling that I was not at all the woman who had boarded the Delta jet in Atlanta that afternoon. But if not her, then who?

She opened the door and vanished into it, and I stood for a moment simply breathing in the alien sounds and smells, and thinking what I would say to my daughter. Somehow, in all the long afternoon and evening, I had never sensed what would be right. I could not feel my way into the meeting ahead. But then, I had never had a daughter who had run two thousand miles away from home, either. I had no precedent for this.

“…and so I said, well, darling, somebody’s got to tell you, and I might as well be the one, because I really don’t give a happy rat’s ass, see, and the plain truth is, you look like a bratwurst in that dress.”

The voice was a tiny, breathy, beelike drone, and might have come from a petulant child, except that there was a sort of corrupted warmth in it that no child could possess. Over it I heard my daughter’s laugh. It was what I thought of as her real laugh, the one she used when she was flat-out tickled and delighted: a belly laugh, a charming, froggy croak.

The other voice laughed, too, and said, “Yes, well there are distinct advantages to dying. You don’t care what you say to who. I’ll bet nobody ever said anything even remotely like that to her in her life. And you know what? She went back and changed the dress.”

“Really? Was it better?” Glynn said.

“Oh, tons. This time she only looked like a meatloaf.”

I stood still, feeling as if I were eavesdropping on children at play.

“Are you really dying?” Glynn said.

“I really am. Not for a while yet, I don’t think, but yep, I’m definitely buying the farm,” the bee voice said.

“Is it awful?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes it’s pretty awful indeed. And then sometimes it’s almost hypnotic, a nice, dreamy, underwater feeling. I kind of like those times.”

“Which do you feel most of the time?”

“You know, most of the time I really don’t think much about it,” he said. “HIV people learn to live right square in the moment. Like babies.”

He must have seen Laura then, because he cried, “Hello, dollbaby! Look what I found messing about in your miso. Can I keep her? She’s quite the prettiest thing I’ve seen until you walked in.”

“Stuart, you faithless hound,” Laura said, and there was the sound of her air kiss and an answering smack of lips on flesh. “This is my niece, Glynn. She’s running away from home.”

“Well, I know that ,” he said. “In fact, I know just about everything there is to know about this dollbaby, including the fact that her mama is coming to get her and is in fact here, if that long, tall shadow I see on the floor there is to be believed.”

I felt myself flushing and walked into the kitchen.

A tiny man looked at me. He was damply pale and bald as an egg and looked very old. Then I saw that he was not old, but very ill. Illness seeped out of his pores and dragged at the flesh below his eyes so that the whites showed; illness had eaten away at the meat of him until only his bones were left, fragile and somehow very formal and lovely under the translucent, greenish skin. He had deep-shadowed dark eyes and the remnants of a dark beard, spotty and dry now. His smile was one of singular sweetness and mischief. I felt myself smiling back.

“The shadow says hello,” I said. I looked past him. Glynn, still flushed with laughter, stood stiffly against the refrigerator, backed up against it. Her eyes were wide and her silky hair, fresh-washed, hung in them. She wore her Guess jeans and one of her voluminous, knee-length sweatshirts and her Doc Martens. She should have looked ridiculous, but instead she looked beautiful, and so frightened and vulnerable that I felt tears well into my eyes. I loved her and was glad to see her and was even gladder that it had turned out to be as simple as that.

“Hi, baby,” I said, and she began to cry and ran across the floor and buried her head in my neck. The sweet-smelling top of it came up past my ears now. We had known early on that she would be tall.

Laura drew the little man out of the kitchen and I rocked Glynn gently while I held her, and then said, “Such a lot of tears for such a skinny kid. Don’t waste ’em on your ma; save them for when you need them. I’m not going to holler at you. Didn’t you know I wasn’t?”

“Is Daddy terribly mad at me?” she said, her voice muffled with tears and the cloth of my blazer.

“Terribly. But I imagine he’ll be over it by the time we get home. In fact, I’m sure of it. He’s even madder at me, if that’s any comfort. But what he really is, baby, is scared. He’s scared because his mother is sick and crazy and he can’t help her, and he’s scared because he yelled at his only daughter, whom he loves more than anything in the world, and she was so hurt she ran all the way across the country by herself, and he thinks maybe he can’t get her back, and he’s scared because I took off right behind her. Think about that: the three main women in his world and one is crazy and the other two are on the lam. How would you feel?”

I felt her laugh a little and thought that the tears were over. She raised her stained face to me.

“I feel like such a dork,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to hurt him or scare him, or you either. I just…it just seemed like after what he said nothing would ever be the same, and I didn’t think I could stand that. And it wasn’t fair, Mama, it wasn’t fair—”

“Oh, Glynnie,” I said, sighing at how far she had to go, and how little my words could help her. “Almost nothing is, really. There’s what people feel about each other and what they do to each other, but hardly any of it is a matter of fair. I want you to grow up expecting all sorts of wonderful things, but I mustn’t let you grow up expecting fair.”