Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“Laura?” I said tentatively. The fear roared alive like a brush fire.

“It wasn’t a mistake,” she said tonelessly. “I’m the Dauphine. I’m playing the monster in Arc . I’m both Pring’s and Margolies’s choice. They decided after they saw Glynn’s test. Or so Pring said. I think he always meant me to be the monster. He doesn’t make casting mistakes. Margolies’s tootsie is going to be the older Joan. Interesting idea, isn’t it? To have me seduce my own niece?”

Glynn looked from me to Laura, and back.

“Mama?” she said doubtfully. Her face, too, was white, and her eyes huge.

“There isn’t any question of your doing this movie, so don’t worry about it,” I said as calmly as I could. “I want you to go get your bath and get into bed now. I need to talk to Aunt Laura. We’ll sort it all out in the morning; it’s a mistake and nothing more. Go on, now, Tink.”

“Please don’t call me that,” she said, but she went. I turned back to Laura.

“Come and have some coffee, at least, and let’s talk about this,” I said, holding out my hands to her. “There’s got to be some misunderstanding; he wouldn’t put you in that part—”

“He has. He did. He just told me on the phone. He said there were extenuating circumstances, but that it was a much meatier part than Joan, and it could turn out to be the role of a lifetime for me, and he’d make it all okay this weekend.”

“Then let’s get some rest and have a lovely, mindless, utterly worthless two or three days just bumming around, and he’ll do just that when he comes,” I said soothingly, not believing it. My head pounded with her pain.

“I don’t want any dinner,” she said, still not raising her voice. “I’m tired and I want to go to bed. No, Met, I don’t want to talk anymore, can’t you understand that? Just…no more.”

“At least have a glass of milk. You need to eat now, Laura—”

“Yeah,” she said, smiling a truly terrible smile. “The monster’s baby needs its nourishment, doesn’t it? Otherwise its daddy won’t love it.”

And she went into her bedroom and shut the door. A moment later I heard the sound of the lock. I stood listening, but there were no more sounds. Finally I looked in on Glynn, who was fast asleep, and went into the kitchen to put our dinner things into the dishwasher.

Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow the sun will be shining and everything will look different, and we will find that this whole ugly, awful business is a mistake.

And when I woke the next morning, after a night of roiling, sweating dreams, so early that only the first sleepy twitters from birds I did not yet know broke the old sea silence, the sun was indeed fingering its way down through the crowns of the great trees, and the little grassy area outside my window, where we had parked, was as clear as if every blade and leaf had been traced in silver. But the red car was gone from it, and when I looked into my sister’s bedroom, she was gone, too.

8

There was a note on a Post-it stuck to the refrigerator door. I had been looking for it. From the instant I found her and her car gone, I knew that she had not simply taken a drive or run an errand. There was an emptiness in the house that felt deep and permanent, as though Laura had never been here, loneliness like a scar. Somehow you know when someone close to you is gone and is not coming back. There is no lingering sense of their presence.

“Gone to L.A. to see Pring,” the note, in Laura’s round script, distorted here by haste and pain, said. “I’ve got to change his mind about this. I’ve got to get things straight. I can’t stand it until I do. Be back with him when he comes in a few days. Caretaker will take you anywhere you want to go; I’ve already been up to ask him. He’s going over toward Palo Alto anyway today so you can take Glynn as planned. And he’ll show you around or let you borrow his Jeep anytime. Sorry, Met. Rest and relax and I’ll have it all worked out when Pring and I come back.”

It was signed, simply, L.

I sat down in the kitchen and held the note in my hands, looking blindly out at the morning sun filtering in pools through the great trees overhead. I knew that she would not have it all worked out when she and Caleb Pringle came back in a few days. I would have bet my house on the river back home that she would come back in shattered fragments and he would not come at all. I felt, in that moment, simply defeated. Emptied out and flattened as if I had been run over. All this way, all this time, all this chaos and anger behind me, all the small, frail bonds to Laura that had been painfully reestablished torn loose, all the anguish and damage ahead of her, all the old destructiveness reignited. What was I going to do about her? How could I pick these pieces up; what could I pick these pieces up; what could I do with a near-mortally wounded sister and an unborn baby? I crumpled the note and threw it onto the kitchen table.

I could think of nothing and felt little but the great, smothering white fatigue, and so I made coffee and put on my jeans and found a heavy sweater in the bureau and pulled that on, and took my coffee and went out into the morning.

The clearing the lodge sat in was an old one, I thought; there were no stumps, no new-turned earth or fresh-planted grass, no sign that the redwoods that leaned over it had ever been disturbed. The back of the house faced up the mountain. There was the gravel driveway we had come in on last night, and a turnaround, and a three-car garage beyond it. All of the spaces were empty. The house itself sat on the crest of a long ridge below the major crest that spined the area; that was where, if I remembered correctly, the old fire tower and the scattered machinery had been. T.C. Bridgewater’s lair.

The front of the house looked out over space. I had not seen, because of last night’s fog, what might lie below the great bank of windows. Now, walking out onto the long deck off the kitchen and the window wall, I did. Trees. Shafts of pale sunlight through fog and trees. Ridge after forested ridge, dropping away toward the unseen coast, an undulating surf of green. I thought that I had never seen so much green, not even in the Georgia river bottoms in a damp spring. This place might be the very heart of all the earth’s wild places; the master tree for all the others in the world might well be one of these redwoods.

I had never seen anything living so tall. My head tipped back to look and my eyes went up, and up, and up. At the tops, where open evergreen crowns let the morning sunlight through, the sky seemed infinitely far away, a pale, distant blue, like the surface of the sea seen from its bottom. Layers of fog drifted through the trees, giving them the look of something seen through stage scrim, unreal, haunted, primal. Other trees huddled under their shoulders; I recognized fir, alders, and oak. There were great tangles of rhododendron and laurel crowding the nearer trees at ground level, and huge ferns, and tiny, starlike flowers ranging from delicate pink to purple. The fog and mist hugged the ground and blew in skeins and scarves; the top of the trees were in constant slight motion. I felt no wind, but I heard it, last night’s ancient soughing, the breathing of the trees, the sound of this vast sea of silence. I realized I was holding my breath only when I let it out. In all the world I had never seen anything so strangely, inhumanly beautiful. In this place, man would soon seem simply extraneous. I shivered. I did not think I would feel welcome for long in this world where the very earth spasmed and the great trees would not acknowledge my presence. In the storms of winter, I thought, it must be a profoundly hostile place to be.