Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“I cannot remember a time in my life since I was acquainted with Laura that she did not have sort of a problem,” Pom broke in coldly. “What is it this time, booze again? Drugs? AIDS? What? What terrible calamity has befallen poor Laura that only you can fix up for her, Merritt? Whatever it is, I’m not going to have it spilling all over Glynn. I don’t know what the hell you’re thinking of. I want Glynn back here today, on that noon plane. I’m still not sure I’m not going to punish her for her attitude toward Mommee; I’m damned if I’m going to finance a grand tour for her right now. If you want to stay I can’t stop you, but I will not have Glynn—”

“I’ll call you from the lodge and give you the number when we get there,” I said over his escalating voice. It was not, now, Pom’s voice. “I’ll leave a message on the machine if you’re not in. We will be back in about a week. I am sorry about Mommee, sorrier than I can say, but you are the only one who can help her now. Sooner or later, Pom, you’ve got to cast your vote with the living. You don’t know how much I pray it’s sooner. I’ve missed you, and so has Glynn. We love you.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I can tell how much even over the phone.”

I let a beat or two go by, and then I said, not knowing until I spoke that I was going to say it, “Pom, did you have an affair with that Jamaican doctor you had on staff a few years ago? I forget her name—”

“I don’t know who you are anymore,” he said, and hung up.

I don’t either, I said to the dead phone, and put it back into its cradle. I went out into the little studio where everyone was waiting for me, bright-faced with anticipation.

“Marcie’s stepmother said for me to come ahead by all means,” Glynn caroled. “And Jess and Marcie are simply having shitfits about the screen test. ’Scuse me. I’m sorry. Did Dad…is it, you know, okay?”

“No problem,” I said. “Redwoods, here we come.”

Laura looked keenly at me and started to speak and then didn’t. Later, I would tell her all about it, and she would say something funny and awful and absolutely right, and put everything back into perspective, and the sly, thick sickness of the fight with Pom would melt out of my heart like rotting old ice. She could always do that. And in turn I would help her sort things out.

Meanwhile, to the north, the great trees waited, and the silence that was as deep and pure and old as the sea, and the sun burning through the morning fog to warm the thin air and touch our faces.…

“Let’s get this show on the road,” I said.

As I was hugging Caleb Pringle good-bye the earth beneath the parking lot gave a fishlike flop and a dolphin’s roll. I froze, clinging to Caleb, waiting. The tremor did not come again.

“Did the earth move for you?” he smiled down at me.

“No, but I’ll bet it would if we did that again,” I said lightly, my heart pounding in slow, dragging beats.

He laughed and hugged me once more, hard.

“What would I have done if Laura’s big sister hadn’t turned out to be a babe?” he said.

“Put her in a horror movie and made a gajillion dollars,” I smiled back. “See? I’m catching on.”

We got to Caleb Pringle’s mountain retreat long past dark, so I really did not see any of the surrounding country until the next day. But all the way through the tangle of suburban streets that stretched from San Jose to Saratoga I could feel the presence of the mountains to our west. Once we began to climb them, threading our way through the bewildering maze of small roads and trails that led up and over their crest and down into the Big Basin area, the unseen spires of the great redwoods seemed to lean so close over us in the little red car that we automatically spoke in near-whispers. Fog or low clouds augmented the darkness; it was like making our way through an endless tunnel whose walls were swirling gray. The silence was so dense and total that it seemed to have its own monolithic shape. Only the close-brushing branches of unfamiliar undergrowth broke the fog wall, and occasionally the red flash of wild watching eyes, or the ghostly shape of an animal whisking across the road in front of us. Twice we saw deer, and once a fox, and once something low and solid and scurrying that none of us could put a name to. By that time we were not speaking much. The darkness and the silence were oppressive, as was the growing sense that we were hopelessly lost in an alien moonscape where only inhuman things and towering, implacable giants tracked us.

We had met the dense June coastal fog just outside San Luis Obispo. It was scarcely past noon; we had left at nine and made remarkably good time up Highway 1, the old coast road. It had been Laura’s plan to drive up that way, taking our time and stopping wherever along the spectacular coast our fancy dictated. It would be, she said, a drive we would never forget: San Simeon, Big Sur, Carmel, Monterey. Perhaps we would break the trip for the night at Carmel, where a friend of hers had, she knew, an empty guest house, and then cut inland at Santa Cruz and follow Highways 9 and 236 up into the Big Basin area. Caleb Pringle’s private road snaked off there, up near the Santa Cruz County border.

I was as eager as a child to be on the road, sun and wind in my face and the cold blue sea always to our left. I thought of the magical flight through the desert and expected more of that, but somehow it did not happen. The sea, from Santa Monica on up, was wild and beautiful, and the low, empty hills to our right were sharp and clear and still green with the spring rains, and often blanketed so thickly with wildflowers that they looked like a pointillistic landscape, but somehow they failed to call out the wings in my heart as the desert had done. We made the first three hours in a jittering miasma born of something I could not put a name to. Occasionally I thought I could catch the shape of it, out of the corner of my eye, but it always eluded me. Gradually we stopped our forced chatter and singing and Laura found a faltering classical station on the radio, and we sank into it, taking our demons with us. My thoughts were as circular as a hamster’s treadmill: Pregnant. Laura is pregnant. Pregnant and in love with a man who is not going to marry her; I don’t know how I know that, but I do. Pregnant. What are we going to do about the baby? What is going to happen to her? How can I help her? Glynn: How can I help her keep some of this new fire and surety and not fall into all that phony movie stuff? I know I should get her away from here now, but how can I take her home while Pom is…the way he is? While there’s still Mommee hovering over us?

Pom: What can I say to Pom? How can I get him to change his mind about all this? How can I tell him how I’ve changed? How have I changed?

What is going to happen to Pom and me?

I did not know precisely what treadmills Laura and Glynn rode, but they were sufficient to silence them for long stretches of time. When we hit the fog and stopped for lunch, Laura called the local television station and found that the fog was solid up to San Francisco and not apt to lift for another twenty-four hours. “Let’s cut over to 101 and blitz it up to San Jose and on over from there.” she said. “There’s no fog inland. We can make it tonight easily; it might be after dark, but Pring gave me a good map and we can ask if we need to. I don’t know about you all, but I just want to be there.”

Glynn and I cried, “Let’s do it,” almost in unison, and we all three laughed in something like relief. I realized then that the old trees were calling them, too, with a voice that was as strong as a beat in the blood. We finished our abalone salad in haste and got back into the car. Laura put the top up against the damp chill of the fog and we were off again. Oddly, bowling inland along the flat, empty Carmel valley behind the coast range, the giddiness and hilarity came back, and the singing began again.