Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“Okay, you can stay. Your daddy will think we kidnapped you, but you can stay till he comes to pick us up. Stay, Curtis. Carpe diem.”

He followed Glynn into her bedroom when she went to finish packing. When I looked in on them he was curled up on her bed and she lay beside him, one arm around the great neck. She grinned up at me.

“I even knew what he would feel like in bed,” she said. “He’s just the big old bed-dog I always wanted.”

“Don’t fall hopelessly in love with him; it’ll break your heart when we have to go home,” I said. “We’ll look at Lab puppies when we get back.”

“Really, really?”

“Really, really,” I said recklessly. Mommee could like it or lump it. So could Pom.

Oh, Pom…

The trip to Palo Alto was as carefree as a vacation drive. I suspected, from the delight T.C. Bridgewater took in showing us the giant trees and the strange fauna and flora along the way, that he didn’t leave the tower often, and almost never in the presence of people. He was as excited as we were at the strange, wonderful sights and sounds and smells of the Big Basin, almost like a small boy, and when he was not tour-guiding he was regaling us with legends and stories of the Santa Cruz mountains, and told scurrilous and improbable stories about the old mountain men who had once lived here, along with the very rich men from the cities who had built the great lodges and houses and about their present owners. Glynn, in the backseat with her arm around Curtis, laughed her froggy, infectious belly laugh so often that both T.C. and I were often helpless with laughter along with her. I still don’t remember if his stories were that funny, but I do remember that for the thirty or so minutes that it took us to wind down through the wet green mountains into Palo Alto, we were mostly laughing.

When we reached Marcie’s father’s house, a rambling old yellow Victorian on a tree-shaded street bordering the Stanford golf course, I felt that I had known this drawling, loose-jointed man all my life. Glynn was calling him T.C. and telling him about our stay in Los Angeles, and Arc , and the screen test, and how Marcie and Jessica were going to simply die when they saw her tape. She was just launching into her father’s objections to our odyssey when I turned around and gave her a level look. I did not like to discourage her obvious liking for Caleb Pringle’s hermit, but I did not want her to say anything to him that she would regret later, either. When Glynn’s shyness broke, it was such a rare and apparently comforting phenomenon that she talked nonstop. I had not seen it happen often. Sometimes, afterward, she sat cringing far into the night, embarrassed at her own loquacity. I did not want that to happen with T.C. I wanted her to remember him with the simple, unvarnished liking that I was feeling for him myself. And besides, I was oddly loathe to talk about Pom. He had no place yet in this journey. I wanted, suddenly, to keep it all for myself. Glynn caught my look and flushed and fell silent. But then she saw Marcie and Jess standing on the ornate old porch, already jumping up and down and squealing, and the flush faded, and she was out of the Jeep and running and squealing before T.C. brought it to a stop.

In the seat behind us Curtis whined.

“Sorry, old boy,” T.C. said, “it’s the way they are. Genetic, probably. They just can’t help it. Love you and leave you. She’ll be back. Meanwhile, here’s another pretty lady up here waiting to comfort you. Take your pleasures where you find them, my man.”

I reached over and scratched Curtis’s ears and he broke into the contented panting again. I started to get out of the Jeep and go to meet Marcie’s stepmother, who had come out onto the porch, and then stopped.

“Aren’t you coming?” I said to T.C.

“What on earth for? So those somewhat overexcited young things can go back to Atlanta and tell all their parents that you were consorting with the caretaker just like he was your husband? It ain’t fittin’, ma’am.”

He grinned his sudden white grin at me and I blushed furiously. I realized that I had been treating him like…well, not like the hired caretaker of the estate where I was visiting, who was accommodating me at the bidding of his employer.

I got out of the Jeep and started up the flower-bordered stone walk and looked back at him. He was leaning his black head back on the seat, eyes closed, whistling to himself, but at that moment he opened his eyes and looked squarely at me and lifted an imaginary hat and leered evilly. I went the rest of the way up the path to meet my daughter’s hostess, laughing.

I exchanged polite pleasantries with Marcie’s stepmother, a tanned young woman who looked as if she spent a lot of time on sailboats or tennis courts. I smiled hello to Marcie and Jess, who were wedged into a porch swing with Glynn, listening eagerly as she talked, no doubt, of Arc and the screen test. And then it was time to go. I felt a sudden sharp wrench at the prospect of leaving my daughter. The fact that I would now be alone in the huge, silent old woods, in the strange, rambling house of a man I scarcely knew, without a link to any world I knew except a telephone in a fairy-tale tower occupied by a skinny Paul Bunyan of a man I did not know at all, suddenly dawned on me. I had looked forward to unlimited time and silence and solitude, but now they seemed endless, engulfing, unfriendly. I could not imagine what I would do in all that empty space for all those empty hours. I glanced back at T.C. Bridgewater, suddenly as shy and wary of his presence as if I had come upon him in a dark back street in the city. I looked at him, suddenly, with city eyes. Tall, black-bearded and browed, dark-eyed, dark-skinned—a dark man who walked more easily in the wild than on pavement, a slow-talking, Indian-faced man whose soft speech hid who knew what? A man said by others to be eccentric, who said of himself that he was obsessed. I did not know this man at all. Not at all.

As if she had caught my feeling, Glynn came over to me and hugged me suddenly and fiercely. She walked me to the Jeep, her arm still around my waist.

“Tell Dad all about everything,” she said loudly. “I know you’ll be talking to him every day. I’ll bet he’ll call tonight. Tell him about the trees and the mountains and Curtis and…everything. Tell him maybe I’ll call him in a day or two. Will you tell him?”

“I’ll tell him,” I said, hugging her and feeling the edge of her bones, that were perhaps just a shade less sharp than they had been.

We drove away in silence and bounced over old cobbles toward the waterfront and an outdoor restaurant T.C. knew. He looked over at me and grinned, and said, “I think I’ve just been warned to keep my distance or her daddy will beat me up.”

“What a silly thing to say; not at all,” I said prissily, heard myself, and smiled unwillingly.

“Maybe a little,” I said. “She’s never seen me around any man but her father for any length of time. I think it never occurred to her that I would be, you know, up there alone with you, until this minute. That unsubtle little message was for me, not for you.”

“I wouldn’t think you were in the habit of making eyes at strange men,” he said.

“Well, of course I’m not. I didn’t mean she thought that. I just meant…Oh, Lord, I don’t know what I meant and I don’t feel like analyzing it. I’m not about to put the move on you and I don’t imagine for a moment that you will on me. In fact, I plan to leave you strictly alone to pursue your earthquakes. I am going to sleep prodigiously, and read enormously, and eat disgracefully, and by the time I have filled my quota of all three Laura will be back and we’ll be gone.”