Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

And it was good. We sat at a candlelit corner table in a little walled patio, under the branches of a huge, low-spreading tree, and ate sublime pasta and drank red wine and looked as Laura pointed out this industry notable and that one, and laughed when she told stories about them only slightly less scurrilous than Billy Poythress’s had been. We did not mention him, and she did not mention Caleb Pringle again, but both men were as surely present at the table as if they sat across from us. We finished early and left, and it was scarcely ten when we went to bed.

Glynn fell asleep almost instantly, but I lay awake for a long time in the outrageous bed of Stuart Feinstein’s, which turned out to be a waterbed and sloshed disconcertingly whenever one of us moved. There would be no question of feeling an earthquake in this bed, I thought, but tonight, unlike the last one, the idea brought me no alarm. The damage tonight was inside Laura and not the earth.

Sometime deep in the night I thought I heard her crying softly on the living-room couch, but when I slid out of bed to go to her the sound stopped, and I stood for a while at the closed door and then got back into the waterbed beside Glynn. The last thing I remembered as I slid into thin, restless sleep was that I had not, after all, called Pom.

6

Icalled him first thing the next morning, though. Somehow his weight and presence were palpable to me even all these miles away. I had what felt uncomfortably like a child’s simple need to check in with him, to see if I was doing okay far away from home all by myself. I disliked the feeling so much that I almost did not call, but then I thought, it’s not that I’m asking permission to be here. I already know he doesn’t want me to be here. It’s that I’m telling him where we are and when we’ll be home. Anyone has a right to know where his child is, even if he’s angry at the one who took her there. An adult would make this call.

So I did. I called the clinic. A voice I did not know said that Dr. Fowler was in a meeting across town and not expected back until late afternoon. No, he hadn’t said where. No, Miss Crittenden would not be in, either; she was taking a few days of her vacation time.

“I’m a temp,” she said cheerfully. “They called me in on short notice. I don’t know where Miss Crittenden went. Maybe one of the nurses knows; shall I ask?”

“No, if you’d just take a message for Dr. Fowler,” I said. “Tell him his wife called from Los Angeles and said that she and his daughter plan to come home tomorrow on the midday Delta flight. Please ask him to call me at this number around eight your time. We’ll be away after that.”

I gave her Stuart Feinstein’s number.

“Oh, yes, Mrs. Fowler,” burbled the temp. “I saw both your pictures on the doctor’s desk just a few minutes ago. So pretty, both of you. I’ll be sure to give him your message.”

“You don’t happen to know if Dr. Fowler’s mother is in the office, do you?” I said.

“His mother? No, I don’t believe so. I can find out for you, though—”

“Never mind,” I said. “You’d know if she was.”

After I hung up I dialed the house. Could it be possible that poor Amy Crittenden was baby-sitting Mommee for Pom? But no one answered, and presently I heard my own voice, the one Pom calls my playing-grownup voice, say, “You’ve reached the Fowler residence. We can’t come to the phone right now, but if you’ll leave a message we’ll return your call as soon as possible. If you’re trying to reach Dr. Fowler, call the clinic at 555-3004, or his answering service at 555-0006. Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it,” I muttered, faintly troubled. Could something really have happened to Mommee, some accident or illness? Guilt poked its head into my mind, and I booted it out. Pom was a doctor, after all. What better hands for her to be in if calamity had struck? I would only have called him anyway.

But the guilt skulked behind me as I went out into the living room, where laughter and the smell of coffee beckoned me. Glynn and Laura must have woken early, I thought, but looking at my watch I saw that instead I had slept late. It was nearly ten.

They were out on the balcony. Below them Sunset swam in a white-bronze haze, and the tall buildings of downtown were barely visible. The mountains behind us were totally invisible. You could feel the heat’s promise and taste the air already. It was dry, but as enervating to me as Atlanta’s thick summer humidity. I thought of clean, sharp sea air, of pines and Canadian cold fronts. Pom and Glynn and I had planned to take an August vacation at a cottage we sometimes rented on Penobscot Bay. I felt a sudden shiver of fierce longing for it.

Laura looked up when she heard me. If she had been crying the night before there was no evidence of it now. Her face was loose and lazy, softly beautiful as it had been when she was very young, all the hard dry lines gone, and her eyes seemed brimful of liquid light. She was licking jam off her fingers, her legs propped up on the iron railing. A grease-spotted white paper bag lay on the little wrought iron table beside her, and the buttery remains of croissants were scattered about. A carafe of coffee sat beside it, and pots of jams and jellies. A half-smoked cigarette lay in an ashtray on the arm of her chair. Across from her Glynn sat cross-legged on a rickety aluminum chaise, wolfing the last of a croissant. Both of them grinned up at me.

“Morning, Glory,” Laura said in a lazy, sated voice. “Hi, Mom,” Glynn said. There was a sort of stifled hilarity in her voice, as if I had caught them doing something forbidden. Then it spilled over into a giggle.

I smiled.

“You two look like the cats just finishing up the canary,” I said, and poked at the paper sack. “Are there any of those left? Don’t tell me you’ve scarfed them all up.”

“All gone,” Laura hummed, giggling, too. “Vanished down the gullets of three voracious Mason women. Or do I mean rapacious? I know I mean Mason-Fowler women…”

I looked more closely at her. She sounded almost like she had when she had come in tipsy, when she was at Georgia State. But I smelled nothing, and besides, I knew that if she had resumed drinking it would not be in the morning, and not around Glynn.

It dawned on me then, and I looked more closely at the cigarette. It was clumsy and homemade, not a commercial brand.

“You’re smoking pot,” I said in disbelief. “And Glynn, you are, too. Laura, what in the name of God has gotten into you? You know Glynn doesn’t smoke that stuff—”

“Neither do I, normally, but it’s the drug of choice for nausea, and boy was I nauseated this morning,” Laura said, stretching mightily.

“You should have heard her hurling,” Glynn said. “It was gross. I’m surprised it didn’t wake you. It did me.”

I gave her a later-for-you-young-lady look and said, “Why were you sick? Surely there’s something else that works as well as this. If you really are sick, you shouldn’t be smoking this stuff.”

“I get sick before I see myself on film,” she said. “I always have. It’s some kind of stage fright, I guess. And there’s nothing better than pot. Nothing has ever stopped the heaving but that. I’ve tried everything. I can’t barf in the middle of the screening tonight, obviously. Lighten up, Met. I don’t do it except then.”

“Well, Glynn doesn’t do it, period,” I said, furious at her. Things were going along so well among the three of us and now this. It was as if she simply could not go for long without provoking me back into the authoritarian role. She had always done it.

“I just had a couple of puffs, Mom,” Glynn said. “Just to see what it was like. It didn’t do anything for me except make me hungry. I ate three croissants and nearly a whole pot of jam.”