Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“You two look like an old married couple,” I said, with what normalcy I could muster, and she looked at me. Her swollen eyes filled with tears and she began to cry again. Curtis stirred and looked up at her and sat up and began to lick her face.

I sat down on the bed beside her.

“Don’t cry, love,” I said. “No matter how either one of us has behaved, nothing calamitous is going to happen.”

“Oh, Mama!” she wailed, and threw her arms around me, and I held her very tightly while she cried. I had been right last night; the ribs were not so sharp. She had washed the excelsiorlike frizz out of her hair, too; it was still damp under my fingers and smelled of apple shampoo and stood up at the back of her head like a rooster’s comb. It was still thick and silky, and beneath it her neck felt so vulnerable and young that I wanted to wrap it swiftly in something to protect it, like a thick muffler. The nose ring cut into my shoulder.

Curtis jumped down from the bed and looked at us, and whined.

“I think you better dismiss your roomie,” I said into the damp hair. “He hasn’t been outside since last night, and he must have to go awfully bad. He’s just too shy to tell you. He probably wants to go home to breakfast, too. And you need some yourself.”

“Oh, poor Curtis,” she gulped, still sobbing. “Go on, Curtis. Go home. Carpe diem. I love you.”

Curtis woofed softly and trotted to the back door, looking back at her. I got up and went to let him out. Behind me I heard her sniff loudly and go into the bathroom and turn on the water. Curtis put his nose into my hand and then loped out into the morning. It was just like the last two: white-bled and hot and still. Only inside the lodge did the chill of night linger. Curtis stopped still and sniffed and looked back at me and then toward the trail that led to the tower. He held himself rigidly, as if he might come to a point.

“It’s okay. I’ll take care of her. Go home, Curtis. Carpe diem, dearest dog.”

He trotted away springily, still stiff-legged, looking into the woods on either side of him as though he smelled something in them. Perhaps he did. T.C. had said there were deer often, and once in a while bear… T.C. Curtis .

I closed my eyes and stood very still against the sickening wash of pain, and then it receded and I went back into the lodge and started breakfast for my daughter.

She came into the kitchen a little later, red from scrubbing, mouth still quivering. She looked so strange to me for a moment that I simply stood staring, and she began to cry again.

“I know it looks awful. I don’t know why I let Marcie and Jess talk me into it.”

“For the same reason I dyed my hair red when I was a sophomore,” I said. “It turned out fuchsia. I thought my father was going to kill me. Yours is different, but it’s not bad, sweetie. The color can be toned down with a rinse, and the length is becoming, very smart. You have the features for it. You might even want to keep it short. As for the ring, well, if you get tired of it, Dr. Pierson can take it out in a second. Nothing’s broken that can’t be fixed.”

She came to me and put her arms around me and laid her head on my shoulder. Once again I held her.

“Really, really?”

“Really, really. I told you that.”

“I was awful to you. I said terrible things. Aunt Laura is furious with me. How can that not change things?”

I took a deep breath into her hair.

“I did things you thought were awful, too. I did sleep with T.C., and more than once. And I can’t ever be sorry for that, Glynn. But it ended last night, and it won’t happen again. We’re going home this afternoon, and unless you want it to, the way we live at home will not change.”

“You aren’t going to leave Daddy?”

“No. Not because of this. Things between daddy and me probably will change some, but that doesn’t have anything to do with what happened up here. And they won’t change between you and Daddy, or us as a family. At least, I don’t think so. To be very honest with you, no, I would not leave your father, but I am going to have to insist on things he may not be able to do, and he may not be able to stay. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but I can’t say for sure. I do know that we both love you more than anything in the world. And that will never change.”

“Do you? Do you really?”

“I wouldn’t be going home if I didn’t,” I said simply.

She pulled back and looked at me blearily. The nose ring jarred, but the scrubbed, shiny face was Glynn’s. I had told her the truth; the short, soft hair around her face was striking. It was just the cut they probably would have given her for Arc , without the unspeakable curls.

“You love him, then.” She jerked her head toward the tower.

I nodded.

“I do. I can’t tell you I don’t. But I can tell you that it doesn’t mean I can’t love your father, too. It’s a totally different kind of love.”

“Sex, you mean.”

“No. Much, much more than that. But that, too, yes.”

She shut her eyes.

“I hate all of this,” she said. “I don’t see how you can love two people. I just don’t see how you can do those things with two people at the same time. I don’t see how it can not change things.”

“Glynn, you can love a great many people at the same time, for a great many different reasons. I don’t know how to explain this, because it’s new to me, too. But I think love makes more love. To love, to love anything or anybody, is to start some kind of engine that makes more. The only thing is, you do have to choose what you will do about the loving; in the last analysis, I think you have to do that. I chose to have this time with T.C. for as long as I could, as deeply as it was possible to go. But I never meant to try and take it home, and he agreed with that. In fact, he’s the one who made me see it. It is quite apart from what I have always had with your father, and will not spill over into that. But you should know that I will always keep this time up here in my heart, and I will always treasure it. As far as I am concerned, it will not change our family life, but it will probably change me some, and I will need to act on those changes. I know this is hard. I don’t understand it yet, either. But I’m not going to lie to you, and I’m going to try very hard not to hover over you anymore. You are your own person, and I’m going to try to see you that way, and it is going to be hard because you have been my little girl for all of your life. I will ask you to try and see me as my own person. That will probably be hard, too.”

“I want…I want you just to be my mother,” she said, beginning to sniffle again.

“I won’t stop being that. I couldn’t. It’s just that you get a woman friend along with the mother. Two for the price of one. At least, I hope you’ll let her be a friend to you.”

“Will you tell Daddy?”

“I don’t think so. Will you?”

“What if I did? What would happen? Would it matter?”

“Probably, to him. I don’t know what would happen. Do it if you have to. I’m not going to let you hold me hostage with it. I can’t do that.”

“I can’t promise I won’t get so mad at you sometime that I’ll just blurt it out.”

“Yes, you can. You very well can promise that. You can and will get angry with me; I think we’ve just started with that. But you can decide not to blurt it out. That’s your call. Like I said, it’s up to you. You stopped being a child up here, much as I regret that. You’re accountable to yourself now.”

“I won’t tell him. I never would have done that.”

“I think it’s good that you won’t. But that’s probably more for his sake than mine. We’ll renegotiate things as we go along.”