Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

It was already hot. The birds had started up, but only sporadically, and sounded muffled, as if through fog. But there was no fog. Still, the tops of the huge trees were indistinct. The day was cloudless, but it was not clear. I had scarcely gotten past the empty garage before I felt sweat start under my arms and at the edges of my hair. In the heat and scuzziness, the redwoods that had soothed and solaced and enchanted me looked flat and bleached, as if they were paper cutouts left too long in the sun. Home, it was time to go home.…By the time I had reached the big turn in the road, I was trotting fast.

I met him there. I stopped abruptly, simply staring at him. I had not heard him coming down the road, and I don’t think he had heard me, either. His eyes widened in the darkness around them, and he stood still, too. For a long moment neither of us spoke. I could not hear any other sounds except my own quick, light breathing.

He wore faded khaki hiking shorts and a blue Oxford shirt, and he too had scrubbed himself; droplets clung to his beard and hair. His legs were long and brown and muscled; I remembered the feel of them, their strength and their warmth, and felt the red start in my neck. He stood with his hands straight down beside him, looking at me. Then, tentatively, he raised one of them toward me and said, “Merritt. I missed you. I woke up and found you gone and thought you had…left.”

“I can’t do that with you anymore, T.C.,” I said, and stopped because my voice simply faded out. I stood there, staring, the separate parts of his face burning themselves into my brain, but not, somehow, adding up to a face. His eyes, his hawk’s nose, his mouth…

With dizzying speed the eyes and nose and mouth assembled themselves and it was T.C.’s face and his body and I ran straight into his arms, throwing my own around his with more strength than I thought I had. He made a soft, choked noise into my hair, but he did not speak. I rubbed my head back and forth into the hollow of his neck; I pressed myself against him, scrubbing my body against his; I all but climbed him as I would a tree.

“Yes, I can,” I cried fiercely, “and I have to, and I will, right here. Right here, T.C.! In the daylight, on this road, in this gravel, under these trees, right now, please, please—”

“God,” I heard him whisper, “God. I was so scared you’d left me—”

“ Now !” I said, and bit his bottom lip and jerked my arms loose from his and tore at the buttons of his shirt, at the fly of the shorts. “Goddamn it, T. C. Bridgewater, now !”

And we did it there on the hot, dusty path with our shorts caught around our ankles and the cross, startled jeers of a pair of jays overhead, and our own words and cries rising up into the still trees as if to set them whispering, swaying. Last night’s dizzy plummet into heat and red darkness took me again, and I lost myself again, and felt the exact, precise moment when he lost himself, too. Just at that instant, just then, the earth moved beneath us and seemed to wheel over our heads and into the sky. By the time it had stopped rolling and shivering, we were loose and tangled and emptied out, still joined, beginning to laugh crazily.

“By God, how did you like that?” he said breathlessly. “Can I say it? Did the earth move for you?”

“Damn Hemingway for making that a cliché,” I whispered, trying to get my voice to work, aware that I had ridden another earthquake like a wild horse and was not, this time, in the least afraid. I wished, even, that the earth would move again. But it did not, and gradually the birdsong came back, and the trees came into focus, and still we lay there, neither of us wanting to loosen ourself from the other.

Finally, though, I moved, and lay myself along the length of him, feeling his long body pressing itself into the earth beneath me.

“Was that a big one? It wasn’t, was it?” I said.

“Nope. Same as we’ve been getting for a couple of weeks now. There wasn’t anything unusual on my stuff this morning, except a little more recorded action. Curtis and Forrest both present and snoring. Nope, that was just a reminder. Sort of a ‘ that’s nothing; look what I can do.’ It really adds a hell of a fillip, though, doesn’t it? Were you scared?”

“No,” I said dreamily, resting my cheek against his damp chest. I could feel his heart slowing. “This time I wasn’t scared. Maybe what people should do in earthquakes is…that.”

“I’ll call the U.S. Geological Survey right now and get them on it,” he said. “Wow. Now I’ve only got two wishes left.”

“What wish were you granted? What are the other two?”

“The one that was granted was to make love to you in an earthquake,” he said. “That’s a new wish. The other two are to be in a really big one and never to leave this place. But if I had to pick one, I’d pick the one I just got.”

“Did it feel like you thought it would?”

“It felt like…yeah. What I thought it would. Actually, I’ve felt something like it before. It’s the reason I’m up here, the reason behind everything.”

“Will you tell me? Can you?”

“I’ll try. I want you to understand it. It’s the why of me, I guess,” he said, but for a while he did not go on. I lay there, warmth from him and seemingly from the very earth beneath him seeping into my arms and legs, making them heavy and boneless and at the same time weightless. I did not think I had ever felt so totally, perfectly in harmony with the world around me, strange though it was. The frantic, fractured woman of the early morning was gone.

“I told you I’d never been in a big one, but I’ve been in a sort of big one,” he said slowly. “Big enough to do more than rattle a few dishes. Two or three people died in Oakland when a parking deck collapsed. It was while I was at Berkeley that time; you remember, I told you about the convention, and how I came to find the tower and all? Well, the day before that there was a quake centered on the Hayward, up around Rogers Creek. I was walking across the campus when it hit. I’ve never felt anything even remotely like that before. It was as if…I came alive for the first time in my life. Really alive, in every cell and atom and follicle—there was a totality about it that just eclipsed everything else I’d ever known or dreamed of knowing. It was like, for the first time in my life, I was whole. There was a whole me there and I’d never even really known I was incomplete. I remember reading somewhere that when the Loma Prieta hit, some kids on the campus at USC Santa Cruz just spontaneously jumped up and started dancing in a circle. I did that, too. Before it stopped I was capering and whooping like a crazy man, like I was possessed. And I was. When it stopped, and I knew I wouldn’t feel it anymore, I understood for the first time how ol’ Ronnie Reagan must have felt in that god-awful movie when he said, ‘Where’s the rest of me?’ I knew that after that, until I felt it again, there’d only be part of me walking around. It was then that I knew I’d have to come out here. When I got up into the Big Basin the next day I found exactly where. It’s just a matter of waiting now.”

He stopped and looked up at me keenly, waiting for me to speak. I could not find anything to say. Finally I said, “I wish you could find something that would…complete you, make you whole…that didn’t mean death and misery to other people.”

For the first time since I had known him I saw real anger in his eyes, and a quick, dark grief, and he became, for that instant, someone I did not know. I pulled away reflexively and he pressed me back again, hard.

“Don’t take this away from me, Merritt,” he whispered fiercely against the side of my face. “I’m going to lose the only other thing that ever did it for me.”