Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“Don’t open the skylight,” I said to T.C. when we had managed to crawl under the Chief Joseph blanket. “I’ll go right out it on a breath of cold air.”

“No more?” he said, running the tips of his fingers from my breasts down my stomach and into the warm pit of me.

“Please, sir, can I have some more?” I said, moving slowly against his fingers.

He rolled over me and held himself above me, looking down. His hair fell into his eyes, and his teeth flashed in the black beard. Starlight poured down over his head and shoulders, melted silver ore.

“If you want a repeat performance, you have to assure me you do C.P.R.,” he said.

“I do anything,” I said, reaching up to pull him down. “Anything at all. You cannot conceive of anything I don’t do.”

Deep into the night we lay on our backs and watched the stars through the skylight. They burned with such chill brilliance that they seemed to pulse slowly against the black velvet sky. I have never again seen stars like those. They were, in that moment, fully as alive and sentient as we were.

“What am I looking at?” I said. “What are the stars out here?”

“It’s kind of hard to tell, with just a slice of sky showing. Let’s see. Arcturus, going down. See, the orange one? Vega was the first one you saw at nightfall. Deneb just overhead. It’s almost impossible to tell about the constellations from here. If we were outside you could probably see Perseus over in the northeast, but Pegasus is too far southeast, and the Dipper has gone down by now. You’d see them at home, though. And you’d still see the Summer Triangle. Maybe you can see a little of that here. Back home you could see the rising of the Boat and what they call the wet constellations, water carrier, fishes, and southern fish. They mean fall’s coming. We can’t see them out here yet.”

“Same stars, then. But different sky.”

“Right,” he said drowsily. “You know, I think that the most awful, the loneliest thing in the world, would be to see different stars in a different sky. There’d be nothing of what you knew then. Total alienation, total newness. I wonder if the human spirit could stand it long. The bravest people in the world have always seemed to me the ones who sailed out so far that they were following different stars in a different sky. Like the ancient the Bora Borans did, when they sailed all that hideous long way across the ocean in outriggers, guided by a strange star they knew only from their folklore and the old songs. God, think of it—different stars in a different sky. It makes my blood run cold. This is better; this you can bear. The same stars in a different sky, I mean.”

I turned my face into his neck, hiding there, shutting out the presence of that different sky.

“Be my same stars, T.C.,” I whispered, salt in my eyes and throat. “Be my same stars, because I have most surely come a terrible long way under a different sky.”

“I will,” he said back, into my tangled hair. I felt his tongue touch my eyelids, and knew that he tasted the salt.

“I will, always.”

10

If you have been married a long time to the same person, the most profoundly disorienting thing that can happen to you is to wake beside someone else. No matter what you have done in the night with the new person, no matter how you felt about that, those first moments beside another body are an earthquake in the soul. It’s because sleep is the deepest place we go besides death, I thought, lying immobile beside T.C.’s long, still body in the cold room. You come up out of the deepest place totally vulnerable. In those free-floating moments a familiar body beside you is your only anchor to life. I lay very still, listening to T.C.’s even breathing, afraid to move, afraid of what might flood over me and sweep me away. The deepest I have ever gone and the nearest I have ever been before to lost is in sleep, until last night, I thought. I was that deep and that lost last night. I don’t feel like I can ever get myself back.

I was paralyzed with pure, fresh guilt, the awful and total guilt of the child certain of his irredeemability, and with the loss of anyone who could conceivably be Merritt Fowler of Atlanta, Georgia, wife of Pom, mother of Glynn. I wanted those familiar definitions back so simply and terribly that I scrambled silently out of the disheveled bed and pulled on my scattered clothes and ran on tiptoe to the door, still holding my shoes and socks. I did not look back at T.C., and when Curtis came to the door of the tower room and whined anxiously at me, I whispered through stiff lips, “I can find my own way this morning. Stay Curtis. Carpe diem.” And with that I was out and gone, slipping hastily on the dew-slick steps, my feet and heart numb, racing through the cool, pearly dawn for the lodge and a shower. Hot water; hot water will bring her back, I said over and over under my breath, witlessly. I’ve got to get her back. But then, stopping still on the gravel path down to the lodge, I cried aloud, “Oh, T.C.!” I doubled over as if in pain, and then ran on, toward the woman I had lost somewhere in the air between Atlanta and this place. Better her than no one; better anyone than that.

There was no fog this morning, and the great trees were still at their tops, and the silence was thick. If birds sang I could not hear them. The air at ground level was much warmer than the tower room had been, and when I gained the dark, stale lodge my feet were no longer numb. I ran through the rooms flipping light switches, stopping only to put on coffee, and then tore through my airless bedroom and into the shower.

I stood there for a long time, near scalding water beating down on my body, running down my face, sluicing through my hair, scouring my mouth and nose and ears and closed eyes. I scrubbed; I washed every part of me in the French pine soap Caleb Pringle had put out. I brushed my nails and the bottoms of my feet with a little, wooden-handled brush, and opened my mouth to let the hot stream run down my throat. It felt warm and clean down to my stomach, but it stopped there. The cleansing heat did not reach the dark place in my groin where this new woman lived. I could not wash her away and wept in the water like a child because of that, my tears swirling away down the drain to meet some creek or river hidden among the redwoods. When I finally got out of the shower I was as red all over as a boiled lobster, and except for the secret cave where last night had been born, the old Merritt was back.

My busybody mind moved fast to boot out the sick, sticky guilt, and I realized only later that I was talking aloud.

“Okay. It happened and it felt fantastic and it’s over. I’m not going to beat up on myself, because I loved it. There’s no sense pretending I didn’t. But now I’m going home. I’m going to go get Glynn and get T.C. to take us to the airport in San Francisco and we’ll just wait there until we can get a plane. I’ll try once more to get Laura through Stuart, and then she’s on her own. I can’t wait for her. I’ll make T.C. understand about this, and I’m not even going to call Pom. Whatever he’s got going back there with what’s-her-name, he can do it someplace other than my house. If Mommee’s not out of there, I’ll take her someplace myself. I’ll tell Amy to go fuck a duck. I’ll get Ina back. Maybe Glynn and I will go to a spa or something, or take a cruise, or maybe I’ll see if Crisscross can find me some freelance work, or better than that, a real job. I’ll bring the dogs in the house and let the rats take over if they want to. All of that; whatever. But I’m going to do it now .”

I sensed that if I stopped I was lost, and so I put on shorts and a clean T-shirt I found in my dresser drawer, and combed my wild, wet hair severely back and knotted it on my neck. I had not worn it this way since Los Angeles, I remembered; since then it had flown free. I looked briefly into the mirror and saw a thin, white woman with prominent copper freckles and ridged cheekbones and blank eyes, and looked hastily away. I did not look again. I drank a quick cup of coffee and slipped into sneakers and went out into the brightening morning, banging the door behind me.