Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“I can’t stand this,” I said. “I think I’ll never…T.C., how can you ever go to bed with anybody else again? I don’t think I ever can—”

“Sure you can. It’s just the woman you leave up here that can’t. And that woman won’t, not ever with anybody else but me. Don’t worry about me, baby love. If it gets too bad I’ll just haul out my board with the bearskin—”

“Don’t! I love you! I love you! I can’t leave you! There’s no way I can leave you.”

“There’s no way you can stay,” he said, and stood up, pulling me up with him. He held me against him for a long moment, so hard that I could not breathe, did not want ever again to breathe.…

He stood back and looked at me in the mean light of the flinty stars.

“Get out of here, Merritt,” he said, and his face twisted and tears sprang into his eyes and ran down to meet the black pirate’s beard. But he did not turn away.

I turned and ran. I ran out of the yard and past the boy’s earthquake inventions under the shed, and past the dusty Jeep, and started down the gravel path toward the lodge. I needed no flashlight tonight; the very path seemed to glow with pale, tired heat. I ran and ran. Above me, off to my left over the lower ridges of still redwoods, Arcturus slid down the sky, going home. It looked fake, a painted star, a burned-out star in a cardboard firmament. Dead, as dead and cold as the space around my heart where, for the past small lifetime, T.C. Bridgewater had lived.

“Be my same stars, T.C.…”

“I will. I always will.…”

I stopped on the path and turned and cupped my hands.

“Carpe diem,” I shouted.

“Carpe diem,” came his voice, a small flag in the vast, dead night.

I turned back and jogged on down the path. I did not cry for him again until much, much later.

11

Iwas given a gift that night, one that you often receive in childhood but seldom later. It was as if a good fairy had realized she missed her appointment with me when the gifts were being passed out around my cradle and came bustling back to make up the oversight. It was the gift of sleep. Sleep as panacea, sleep as opiate, sleep as oblivion. Forever after, I have been able, when pain becomes overwhelming, simply to sleep. It has rarely failed me.

When I got back to the lodge the night before I walked straight past Glynn’s slightly opened door, saw the still mounds of girl and dog, went into my bedroom, and went to sleep. I would have said, in that dull red mindlessness of loss, that I would never sleep again, but instead it was as if I would never wake. I slept without moving until the pale first light of morning fell on my face and finally brought me back.

I lay there like someone who has wakened after a bad accident, a collision. Every muscle in my body hurt, and my limbs felt as heavy as cast iron. The thought of even moving them made me sick with exhaustion. For what seemed a very long time I lay there immobile, trying to assemble the thoughts I would need to get us through this day: this day of great distances, of tearing endings, and dreaded beginnings. My mind flailed tiredly in all directions: Laura. What should I do about Laura? T.C. had said he would keep trying to trace her after we had gone and would let me know when he heard something, but I did not want that. I did not think I could pick up a telephone and hear his voice speaking neutrally of my sister from under the great, lost-to-me trees. I simply wanted Laura out of my heart and off my hands.

Glynn. About Glynn I could only feel detached anger and pain, and a kind of abstract shame. I did not feel like coping with this hurtful and hurt new daughter, either. There was nothing left in me that could meet this dangerous complexity. If I could have gotten home without exchanging another word with her, I would have done it with alacrity. These two creatures, both of my blood and both so much of my making—at that moment I loved them not.

Pom. I did not even know how to think about Pom. I did not, in that bled-out moment, know who Pom was or what he was to me. What he might be from now on was simply unimaginable. There wasn’t any from now on. There was scarcely a now. Carpe diem , T.C.’s voice said in my head, and I felt agony rush at me, pecking. Oh, T.C., you seize it. I don’t want this day.

T.C. For a long, still moment I lay there so filled with the reality of T.C., of the actuality of him, that it was as if he had entered my body and lived under my skin. My heartbeat felt like his; my fingers touched the cloth of the coverlet and knew how it would feel to T.C. It was as if a conduit, a major vessel, ran from his body on the veranda sofa down through the earth to the lodge and into my own.

I can’t do this day, T.C., I said to him in my mind, and his answer came clear and true: Yes, you can. Get up. I go with you.

At that moment I heard the sound of china clinking in the kitchen and the gurgle of coffee being poured into a mug. I sprang up. It was him; he had come for me after all, he would heal this awful day somehow; he was waiting for me.

I flew into the kitchen, still in my underpants and bra. Laura sat on a stool at the kitchen table, a steaming cup beside her, her head in her hands as if she slept sitting there. The disappointment was so profound that I closed my eyes against it. Then I took a deep breath and opened them. Here is Laura, I thought witlessly. What does this mean? I don’t know how to think about this.

She raised her head and looked at me. She looked terrible. Her tan had faded and was flaking off the miraculous cheekbones in mustardy patches, and there were deep, incised blue circles under the slanted amber eyes. Her gilt hair was lank and lifeless, and she had simply jerked it back seemingly without combing it and pulled it tight with a rubber band. Somehow that rubber band spoke more vividly of damage to me than anything else about her desiccated face. She had often scolded me for using rubber bands in my hair.

“It breaks the hairs off and makes them thin and scraggly,” she would say. “I would no more do that to my hair than I would pour tar over it.”

“You’re going to ruin your hair with that thing,” I said stupidly, and she smiled, and then laughed. It was a spectral, shadowless little laugh, but it lit her face a little. She did not look dead anymore.

“Can’t have that, can we? Hello, Met. You look like shit.”

“It runs in the family,” I said, and went and hugged her. Her ribs felt like separate ridges under my hands, almost like Glynn’s. Not at all like the warm solidity of T. C. Bridgewater. Never again, I would never feel that again.

“I wish our family ran to fat,” I whispered against her shoulder. “I get so tired of hugging bones.”

She put both her arms around me and rocked me against her, and we stayed that way for a bit, both needing each other’s body warmth simply to live. I could not ever remember needing Laura’s arms. Wanting them, but never needing them.

“Go put on some clothes; you must be freezing,” she said. “I’ll pour you some coffee. Then I’m going to sleep for twenty-four hours. You look like you could use some more sleep, too. Then we’ll talk. I’m glad to see you, Met.”

“We can’t sleep anymore,” I said wearily. “We have to talk now. I have to take Glynn home in…what time is it? Eight? We have a noon flight. I can’t leave without knowing what’s going on with you.”

She leaned her head far back and closed her eyes.

“Nothing, not anymore,” she said. “I don’t know. I can’t seem to make my mind work. I thought you might help me. You could always see so much more clearly than I could see myself.”

I can’t see anything but the shape of my own pain, my mind wailed peevishly. Go away and take all your pretty fragments with you. The one thing I’ve got to do in this world is leave here and take my daughter with me, and right now I don’t see how I’m going to do that.