Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“Oh, baby,” I began, but she held up her hand and I stopped. I watched as she struggled to control her lips, and then she said, as carefully as she could through her ragged breath, “Met. Please. Please just listen to me until I’m finished. Can you do that?”

“Laura, tell me what’s the matter.…”

She looked at me mutely and I fell silent.

She nodded and took a deep breath and went on.

“You cannot possibly know what it would mean to me for you all to go up to the lodge with me. It’s the rest of my life, Met; it’s no less than that. Last night…last night was the springboard, but the lodge would cement everything; the lodge would give me time…the lodge would mean that I could spend another whole movie with him, and by that time I know that we would be together for good. I know that, Met. He’s never asked me up there before, and I can’t just say, well, my sister and niece have to go home but I’ll come, because it wasn’t just me that he asked.”

“But why not?” I said, honestly baffled. “Why can’t you? It isn’t Glynn and me he’s in love with, God forbid—”

“You have to be there because Glynn has to be there,” she cried softly, chafing her hands in distress.

“Why on earth does Glynn have to be there? I don’t understand any of this, Laura,” I said.

“Oh, God, Met, can’t you see how much he wants her for Joan? He’s hoping that you all will stay around long enough for him to show Margolies the test and convince you to let her do the picture; I know how he thinks. He said as much. I know he wants me to get you to stay. Listen, Met, without Glynn there may well not be any Arc at all, because Margolies was going to pull the plug on it this morning when they had breakfast; Pring was sure of that. He hated the new stuff Pring did on Right Time . And then he saw Glynn.…Met, it’s my only real guarantee, that film. I have to do it; I have to be with Pring through it. I have to know that that’s going to happen. He’ll marry me after Arc ; I know he will, if not before. But Arc has to happen and it’s Glynn that Margolies is going to want.…”

I went over and put my hands on her shoulder and looked into her face.

“Baby, you must listen to me now,” I said. “I am not going to let Glynn come out here and do that movie. That is not ever, ever going to happen. If there was any other way I could help this…relationship…happen, I would do it, if you want it this badly. But Glynn will not do Joan and I will not let Caleb Pringle think I’m going to change my mind, because I’m not. And I’m not going to let Glynn think that, either. Or Mr. Margolies. It’s horribly, awfully dishonest; it’s playing games with people’s lives, my daughter’s chief among them. Surely you must see that.”

“I didn’t mean you had to change your mind about it,” she murmured. “But what’s so wrong with letting him think he just might have a chance? Just for this tiny little bit of time, Glynn would never have to know. In fact you’d never even have to mention it again; your going up there would be all he wanted. You could still tell him no after a day or two. Glynn wants to go stay with her friends, anyway—she wouldn’t even be around him. That way we could have a day or two together, you and I and Pring, then I could say well, I’ll stay a little while after Met and Glynn leave, and it would be a natural thing to do, and we’d be alone, and I could…it would work out. If not the movie, then Met, please, please, let me have the time at the lodge.”

She looked at me and saw the refusal in my face and put hers into her hands and began to cry. Her shoulders heaved and her hands shook, but the sobs were silent and terrible. I put my arms around her and held her against me. How many times, I thought dully, her pain seeping into the very core of me, had we stood like this? She impaled on her pain; I trying to absorb it.

“I don’t understand why the lodge is so important to you,” I said against her hair. “Can’t you stay in L.A. and see him? What is it that’s so special about the lodge?”

“Because it’s the place where he’s happiest, the place he loves most in the world. I want him to think of me in it; I want him to see me there and remember how it was, how good, how well I fit. And I have something I have to tell him, and I want it to be there; otherwise I don’t know…”

A coldness settled around my heart.

“What is it you have to tell him, Laura?” I said.

She shook her head against me, and then she looked up at me and it came out.

“I’m pregnant,” she said, beginning to cry again. “It’s his. I want this child, but I want him. I want him and me and the baby to be together, a real family, and I’m afraid.…I have to have some kind of insurance when I tell him. I know he loves kids, but I don’t know just how one will fit into his life now, and I’m scared. I cannot lose him, Met; it would kill me; I would die. That month that he didn’t call…I was already dead and in hell. I can tell him up there, in his place. Especially if he thinks there still might be a chance for Arc . Can you possibly, possibly see?”

I stared at her more in grief and an old, sucking despair than shock. The pregnancy was not a shock. I had always been surprised and grateful that it had not happened before. Or perhaps it had.

“Oh, Pie,” I said, my own tears beginning. “What on earth is going to happen to you?”

“That’s up to you,” she whispered. “That’s entirely up to you. Can’t you trade just one week of your life for the rest of mine? I’d be off your hands then.…Oh, dear God, I need this so much. I want this so much.”

I held her and rocked her, staring over her head at the blank steel door of the studio washroom, not seeing it. I want. I need. Only you, Met. Only you, Mom. Only you, Merritt. Help me. Fix it. Take care of me.…

Suddenly and violently I was sick of it, sick with the weight of all those cries, all those years. I was tired beyond thinking, tired beyond even the effort to speak. To speak, to explain, to say, once again, no. No, it isn’t good for you, no it isn’t good for Glynn, no.

I thought of Caleb Pringle’s words: “Up there in those redwoods it’s like being right under the eye of God…and the silence is so deep you can hear it.”

A week, I thought. A week in that healing silence and solitude. Days alone with my sister, days in which to make her see that a man who needed to be tricked was no man to hang a life on, to entrust a child’s life to. Days in which to find another answer.

And I thought of what we were headed back to, Glynn and I.

“Yes,” I said faintly. “All right. We’ll go. We’ll go and we’ll figure out something about the baby, you and I. But first we’ll sit down and look at the trees and just be very, very quiet, and we’ll do that for a long time.”

The sobs began again, and she hugged me so hard that I lost my breath.

“You’ll never do anything else for me as important as this,” she hiccuped. “I will love you for the rest of my life. I will love you beyond that.”

“Fix your face and come on back,” I said, wrapped close in this new shroud of tiredness and the stupid-simple peace that comes after a decision, any decision, is made.

“I have to go and call Pom. We have to call Marcie’s folks in Palo Alto and see if it’s all right for Glynn to visit.”

She nodded and I left. Through the door she called after me, “Don’t let him beat up on you, Met. Don’t let him punish you for this. When was the last time you had some time just for yourself? Don’t let him talk you out of that.”

I did not reply. I walked steadily back through the still-dim corridors toward the studio, thinking what I might possibly say to my husband. Nothing came. Probably, I thought, it was because I had never, since I married him, made a decision that did not have his best interests, or Glynn’s, at the core of it. I did not know how to explain my own need. And, I realized with amazement, I did not care. Pom had coped this far. He could cope for another week. I did not expect that he would embrace the decision, but perhaps he would begin to see that sometime over the past week one of the primary rules by which we operated our lives had changed, had had to.