Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

But on this morning its archaic beauty was benign, and a ray of sun shifted and found me on the deck, and I sat in it and drank coffee and emptied my mind. When Glynn got up, then I would get hold of myself and see what could be done and prod myself into action. I might go after Laura or get hold of Stuart Feinstein and ask him to do it, or Glynn and I might simply ask T. C. Bridgewater to take us to the San Francisco airport, where we would get on the next available flight home. There were lots of options. I would address them soon. When Glynn got up.

It was almost an hour later when she did. By then the woods had done their work. When Glynn came shuffling barefoot out onto the deck, rubbing at her eyes and dragging her blanket, and said, “I read Aunt Laura’s note. What are we going to do?” I said, not moving my eyes from the still surf of the trees, “I don’t know.”

She stared at me, and I realized that she did not know how to respond. I was not, in that moment, Mama, or even Mom. Either of those women would be planning, bustling, readying for action. But here I sat with my hands folded in my lap and my eyes drowned in woods and silence.

“Mom?” she ventured, trying anyway.

“Come, sit,” I said, and patted the redwood chaise beside me. I did not send her back to put on her shoes and sweater, or get up to fix her breakfast.

“Sit still and just look,” I smiled at her. “Don’t talk. Just let it fill you up. We’ll never see anything like this again. It’s worth the trip just to sit on this deck for an hour.”

She looked, dutifully, but presently she began to shiver, and that brought me back a little way.

“Put some clothes on and we’ll talk about it,” I said. “Are you hungry?”

“Yeah,” she said, sounding surprised. “I think I am.”

Inside, the enchantment of the place lessened, and by the time she came back in pants and a heavy ski sweater similar to mine, I had made toast and scrambled eggs and fried bacon from the cache T.C. Bridgewater had brought. She ate a helping of everything and had a second piece of toast. It had been so long since she had eaten like that, in my presence at least, that I could only watch her in silence, not wanting to break the spell with words.

Finally she grinned at me and said, “Not even a Jewish mother could complain about that.”

“You’ll hear no complaints from me,” I said. “What, besides toast and eggs, has gotten into you?”

“Well, I guess it’s the air or something. And then Caleb said I needed to gain a few pounds, that Joan was a sturdy, blooming peasant girl, not a starved, watery waif. He said nobody would want to put the move on me with all my bones sticking out, especially not the Dauphine of France.”

I flinched, hating the casual perversion of the words, angry at Caleb Pringle for dangling the role over my daughter when I had told him she would not be playing it.

“You know what we said about Joan,” I said. “It’s out of the question, Glynn.”

“Oh, I know. But he made me see how I must look to other people. A watery waif? Yecchh. And you know, food does taste good up here. I was afraid I’d throw up, but it really tastes good.”

I dropped it, thankful to whatever detoxified the thought of food for her, but still meaning to get her out of Caleb Pringle’s orbit as soon as possible.

“I thought we’d leave for Palo Alto as soon as I do the dishes and you pack some things,” I said. “Mr. Bridgewater is going to take us over to Marcie’s dad’s house. Aunt Laura asked him before she left.”

“You mean I can still go?” Joy lit her face. “I thought sure we’d be going home today, or back to L.A. after Aunt Laura. Can I stay as long as we said?”

“You can stay until Aunt Laura gets back. I can’t leave until I know what’s going on with her. I’m sure she’ll call before long, at least. We’ll decide then.”

“She said she’d be back with Caleb when he came—”

“I wouldn’t count on Caleb,” I said.

She dropped her eyes. “I know he can explain all this,” she said softly. “I know he didn’t mean to hurt her. He’s a good person, Mom. They’ll work it all out.”

Dear Lord, she does have a crush on him, I thought bleakly. Maybe I’ll put her on a plane in a day or two and wait here for Laura. Ina could look after Glynn.

But then I remembered that Ina did not work for us anymore. Pom and Mommee came flooding back into my head, along with all of the strife boiling around them; how could I have forgotten? The trees; somehow the green trees had sucked them from my mind along with all the other effluvia of home. I was not ready to go back to things the way they were, I thought clearly, and I did not want Glynn to go back to them, either.

“There are some women’s clothes in my bureau,” she said. “Really cool things. Some of them look like they’d fit me. Do you think Caleb would mind if I took some of them to Palo Alto? I’d get them cleaned. I don’t really have much—”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t,” I said dryly. “I doubt if their owners will be back for them.”

She looked at me, but vanished to her packing without speaking. I was not surprised that Caleb Pringle’s house would be full of the clothes of cast-off women, but it annoyed me. If he cared for Laura he would put them away. But maybe it was not one of the things that mattered to Laura, or to a man like Caleb Pringle. And it was none of my affair. I would wear the clothes in my bureau gratefully; I had nothing with me for the chill morning breath of these mountains.

I remembered then that I had promised to call and tell Pom where we were, so I put on a red-and-black plaid wool shirt I found hanging on a peg behind the door and called out to Glynn where I was going and went out again into the chill, soft morning. The white fog was thickening and drifting higher into the trees, and by the time I reached the turn in the gravel road the sun had vanished altogether.

It was like walking through a Japanese watercolor. The edges of everything were faded and blurred, but a few details—the feathery lower branches of the redwoods, the dry-brush tips of the great ferns, here and there a stump or a boulder with its base wreathed in flowers and more fern fronds—swam into focus now and then, as sharp and clear as if they were emerging from developing fluid. The fog stilled the sound of the rustling undergrowth and the calls of the morning birds, even my footsteps in the gravel. I saw only the close-pressing walls of a shifting green tunnel, heard only the ever-present sighing of the silence. I could not see anything off to my left that resembled the tower and its outbuildings, and it seemed to me that I had walked much further than we had driven last night. Could I have missed a turn? How? I had seen no other path or road turning off this one.

But a cold emptiness crept in around my heart, the viscerally remembered feeling of the first awful lostness when one is a child. Something heavy thumped in the dense stand of wet black trunks not too far from the path, and then began crashing through undergrowth. I froze on the path, hardly breathing, unable to tell if the sound was coming closer or retreating. What had Caleb said about the wild things here? Bear? Mountain lions? Some sort of elk? Deer, foxes, porcupines, skunks, raccoons? Rattus rattus , of course. I was certainly not eager to meet a bear or a mountain lion alone on this fog-haunted trail from nowhere to nowhere, and not particularly eager to meet any of the others, no matter how benign. Who knew how these spectral woods changed living things? Look what they had done to me.

The crashing stopped abruptly, and I began to run, stumbling and sliding.

I heard the barking before I saw the dog. It rang out through the fog like the Hound of the Baskervilles’ cry, and I stopped dead, too frightened to run. It was a hollow, terrible sound. Almost instantly the dog was out of the fog and upon me, huge and slavering and smelling rankly of wildness and wet dog. Before I could cry out it had jumped up on me with its huge paws and I stumbled and fell backward, and it bent over me, snuffling and nosing for my throat. I was just taking a deep breath to scream when I heard a man’s sharp command: “Curtis! Carpe diem!” The dog stopped his business with my throat, which I realized only then had been a wet, energetic mopping of my face with a huge tongue. Carpe diem? I had surely gone mad with the sheer, inhuman strangeness of this place.