Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

She looked startled, and then grinned. Some of the old Glynn was in it. Someone new and rather fine was, too.

“Can you do that? Is that allowed?”

“It better be,” I said. “How on earth would people live together if it wasn’t?”

“Do you and Dad do that?”

“We will now.”

“He’s not going to like that.”

“Probably not, at first. But I think he’ll come to see that it’s necessary. Things just can’t go on being all one person’s way. I need some things for myself that I don’t have yet. So do you. That’s what I’ll start with.”

“Like Mommee.”

“Like Mommee. God love her, I hope you’ll be able to remember her the way she really was. All that life, and spirit…She can’t help what she’s become, Glynn. But she needs to be in a place where they can concentrate just on her and help her, and we need a place just for ourselves. That’s one of the first things Daddy needs to see.”

“Will he?”

“I have no idea.”

“What about…you know, you said we could look at Lab puppies.”

“You’ll get your dog. Even if it and I have to sleep in the doghouse. That I can promise.”

She fell silent, and I put my chin down on the top of her head and we stood like that for a while.

“I’m sorry about Arc ,” I said. “I know that was hard to give up.”

“Yeah. But Aunt Laura made me see a lot of things about that. It’s not a good life, is it? She told me about Pring. I wouldn’t have believed it. Mama, she told me about the baby, too. Isn’t there something we can do about that? I don’t think she ought to just…kill it.”

I felt her wince at her own words. I flinched away from them, too.

“Me either. But only she can make that decision. That’s very much her own to make, any woman’s own. That’s one thing we don’t butt into.”

“She could have it and we could take care of it.”

“Who? You? You want to raise a baby instead of finishing school and going to college and making your own life? Or do you want me to do it?”

“Well, you’ve done it before. Twice. Once with Aunt Laura, and once with me. You know how. We could get a nurse—”

“No. As you say, I’ve done that. I have other things I need to do now. The baby is Aunt Laura’s responsibility.”

“She isn’t going to take it.”

“No.”

“That’s awful.”

“Don’t judge, Glynn. You just don’t know enough yet. It will be a while before you do.”

“You said we’re going home—”

“Yes. In about an hour. So let’s get you fed and packed up. Aunt Laura’s going to take us to the airport.”

“Are you…are we going to stop by at the tower?”

“No.”

“So I won’t see Curtis again?”

“You can walk up and say good-bye, and we’ll pick you up on the way out,” I said. “And I’ll bet T.C. will send you a picture of Curtis. Why don’t you ask him?”

“I don’t see how I can talk to him.”

“It’s easy. Just open your mouth and let ’er rip.”

“What should I say?”

“How about, ‘Good-bye, T.C.’?” I said, and felt the tears again, and turned quickly to the refrigerator to get out the eggs and bacon.

She came close behind me and touched my shoulder.

“Mama, I’m so sorry. About what I said, and about…T.C.,” she said, and vanished into her room.

“Me, too, my little girl, who never will be that again,” I whispered.

She had finished her breakfast and gone to repack her duffel when Laura came back. I had put on the blue traveling suit from a faraway life, stacked my bags at the back door, and was putting our bed linens into the washing machine. Laura had said she would come back to the lodge and spend the night and make sure all traces of us were gone before she started for Palm Springs.

“I can’t stand the thought that his next…whatever…might find something I left behind and put it on,” she said. “On second thought, maybe I should hide my dirty underwear where he’ll never find it. Make him smell me every time he turns around.”

Now she came and stood in the sun beside me and leaned comfortably against me. We stood that way for a bit.

“If I were you I would never leave him,” she said presently, and I turned to look into her face. Tears stood in her eyes.

“He’s so torn up over you he can barely talk. But we did, a little bit. About you. I would give a whole lot for a man I loved to say the things he did.”

I could not speak. I hoped desperately she was not going to tell me what he had said. She didn’t. There did not seem to be anything at all to say, so I said nothing, either. We leaned together in the mounting heat, smelling the scent of sunburned pine, feeling our shoulders press together. I thought that I could easily sleep standing there.

“But then,” she said briskly, “I’m not you and he’s not Pring, and if anybody did say those things to me I’d probably smart off at him and ruin it. Y’all packed? I guess we ought to get this show on the road.”

The trunk of the Mustang was up, and the top was down, and we were ready for the road, and the wind, and the sun. But I did not think that this time we would sing.

Glynn came out with her duffel and slung it into the trunk. I put my bags in and Laura slammed it shut.

“Well,” she said.

“Did you see Curtis?” Glynn asked Laura, and Laura nodded.

“He’s up there with his daddy, helping him fiddle around with that junk under the shed. He said to tell you he’s waiting for you to come say good-bye.”

“Then I think I will,” Glynn said, and looked at me, waiting. I nodded.

“Pick you up in a minute,” Laura said.

Glynn started up the trail, and then came running back and hugged us both, hard. She looked cool and pure and young again, with her clean, shining skin and the palomino hair falling in a soft bang over her forehead. I could smell the soap and shampoo; she had showered again, I thought. Her cheek was still damp, and cool.

“We really are a family, aren’t we?” she said, muffled in my hair. “We went through all this whole crappy week and we came out still a family. I’m so glad.”

“Me, too,” I whispered, and Laura hugged her hard and said, “Cain’t nothin’ bust this act up, pardner,” and Glynn laughed and turned to the trail again.

As on the first morning when I had started up the trail toward the tower, lost in fog, we heard Curtis before we saw him. He was barking, sharp, steady, peremptory barks I had never heard before. He barked steadily and did not stop, and as he came nearer, the barking got louder, and we could hear the thudding of his feet before he exploded around the bend and shot toward us like an arrow.

“Oh, you old dog,” Glynn cried, stretching out her arms. “You couldn’t wait!”

But he did not run into her arms. He danced before us, staring hard into our faces, barking, barking. When we did not, for a moment, respond, he jumped up and put his feet on Glynn’s shoulders and barked into her face.

“What?” she said helplessly.

I saw the note in his collar then. No bandanna this morning, just a scrap of torn paper stuck under his worn red leather collar. It was perforated, and there were words scrawled across it in red. The paper from T.C.’s homemade seismograph, the pen from it.

I took it from Curtis’s collar.

Get out now , it said. The red pen skidded off the paper in a scrawl. I stared at the note, and then at Glynn and Laura. Curtis barked and barked.

It smote me then like a great wave, cold and numbing.

“There’s an earthquake coming,” I said, forcing the words through shaking lips. “We’ve got to go now .”

Laura gave a small scream and instinctively crouched in the doorway with her arms crossed over her stomach. Glynn, white-faced, turned and headed for the house.