Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“My baby,” she whispered again, and I looked quickly between her bare, bloodied white legs, but saw no terrible, spreading stain.

“Are you in pain? Do you think you’re bleeding?”

“No…no…”

“All right. Then your baby’s probably fine. They’re a lot tougher than we are. We just need to go slowly now—”

“Where are we going to go?” she said in the breathy whisper that had taken the place of her rich voice.

“I’m going up to T.C.’s,” I said, sure of it in that moment. “I’ll go up there and get him, and he’ll take us out in the Jeep. Listen, this is wonderful; he’s got a complete earthquake kit that he keeps in an old safe on the porch, with first-aid stuff and food and bottled water, and flashlights and blankets and…and everything. I know right where it is. I’m going to walk up there now, and we’ll come back in the Jeep and get you. You all sit down. Glynn, sit your Aunt Laura down and put her head between her knees and keep her still, and if she starts to bleed take off your shirt and press it up there and hold it—”

“I want to go with you,” Glynn began to whimper. Her eyes filled with tears, and they tracked down through the white dust, leaving snail-like trails. “Don’t go off and leave us; what if it comes back; what if Aunt Laura’s not all right; what if something happens to you—”

“No,” I said calmly and firmly. A ringing, faraway peace had fallen over me, now that I knew just what to do, now that I knew where to go.

“You’re perfectly all right but your aunt is in shock, and you cannot leave her. The earthquake is not coming back. If you feel anything else it will be an aftershock and will not hurt you. What on earth could happen to me? I’m just going a quarter mile up the trail—”

“Mama—”

“You are not a child, Glynn,” I said, and she fell silent and looked at me out of her minstrel’s face.

“All right,” she said softly, and I gave her cheek a quick pat and started up the trail.

Beside me, Curtis whined and whined, dancing in place, looking from me up toward the invisible tower, and I said, “Okay, Curtis, you marvelous, darling hero, you. Go home. Carpe diem.”

He was off like a shot, in silence, and I listened until I heard the thudding of his feet in the dust fade, and then began once more to walk. Only then did I realize that my left arm was hanging useless at my side, and that no matter how I tried, I could not lift it. It did not hurt, but when I tried again to move it a sharp, not-unpleasant shock rather like electricity shot up into my shoulder.

“Okay,” I said aloud. “To hell with it. I don’t care. It doesn’t hurt. T.C. will fix it.”

I talked aloud the entire time I was on the trail. It was chatty talk, with a sort of hilarity bubbling just under its surface. The path looked nothing like it had before; trees were down across it, and the spill of a small rockslide blocked it at one point, so that I had to climb over it, and far over to my left, at the edge of the forest, I could see that earth had opened in a great fissure that whipped off into the depths of the woods. Beside it, trees were torn off midway up their trunks. I could not see into the depths of the opened earth. But the long, golden rays of sunlight still fell, incredibly, though now on ruin. Ferns were pulped and most of the small flowers and bushes buried by a rainstorm of needles and thick white dust. I turned my head back and did not look again.

“What a shame,” I said. “It’s such a pretty place. Maybe it will be like those places in the wilderness where there is a wildfire; maybe the flowers and trees will come back even stronger.”

But I knew that it would be far out of my lifetime before these redwoods stood tall again. The knowledge did not seem to pierce the shell of the peace, though.

“Well, so, this is what we’ll do,” I said. “We’ll put a sling on this arm and put Curtis and the kit in the Jeep, and we’ll take some food and water with us in case we can’t get through for a while, and we’ll pick up Laura and Glynn and we’ll get as far as we can today. Maybe we can get all the way through with no trouble. If we don’t, they’ll be looking for us pretty soon, and they’ll probably find us before we get to them. They’ll patch us up and give us something clean to wear, and put us on a place home. Laura will come with us, of course. No more of this silliness about not having the baby. Oh, wait, oh damn…Pring won’t know yet there’s been an earth-quake. Well, then…no, Stuart is dead. How could I have forgotten that? Poor Stuart. But the forest service must know somebody’s been at the lodge; but then, how would they? T.C. hasn’t seen anybody this week that I haven’t seen, and they sure haven’t been the park service. Maybe Marcie’s father and stepmother, then…

“Pom will know. Of course. Pom knows where I am. Pom will tell them, Pom will come…

“Pom will come.

“Won’t he?”

I walked on in the sun, muttering busily to myself. The silence was larger and deeper than I had ever heard it. No birds sang. The great, surflike breathing of the redwoods was still. Nothing rustled in the undergrowth, nothing chirped or buzzed or clicked. It was hot and still and it seemed to me that I walked and walked without making any progress, and that the sun was frozen in its arc overhead, and that it was no time at all. My own chattering voice was the only sound that went with me.

And then there was a sound, and my heart dropped like a stone and froze as solid as black ice in my chest, and I stopped. It was a howl; a terrible, primal animal howl of pain and desolation, and it rose and rose and rose through the heat and swirling dust until I thought that my eardrums would burst with it. And then it stopped.

“Don’t do this, T.C.,” I whispered, breaking into a trot. “This is just too much. This is not fair.”

I came into the clearing on rubbery, leaden legs and stopped. There was no tower, no shed, no Jeep, no surrounding trees. Only a huge, dust-whitened pile of rubble, like that the lodge had disintegrated into; only a swirling cloud of dust; only the stems of maimed redwoods; only their fresh-torn yellow flesh.

Only Curtis, lying at the edge of the rubble pile, his head on his paws, whining and whining.

I went across the clearing to him, stepping over branches and chunks of wood and metal and once a recognizable piece of T.C.’s earthquake machine, the part that had been, I thought, the hi-fi speaker. I knelt down at the edge of the monstrous pile and put my hand on Curtis’s back. He thumped his tail, but did not move.

“T.C.?” I asked experimentally, and the answering silence was so terrible that I did not speak his name again. I did not look around for him, either. I sat down on the earth cross-legged, like a child playing Indian, and laid my hands in my lap.

I want you to come out from there right now, I said prissily in my head. This is not funny.

Then I said, thought, oh, of course, he’s gone for help, to get a truck or a car or something.

But I knew he had not. He would have taken Curtis with him.

I looked down at the dog. It was only then that I noticed that his paws were bloody, and his muzzle, and that he had laid his head on something that he was guarding, for he would not lift his muzzle when I tried to see what it was.

“Are you hurt, sweet dog?” I said, and picked up his paws, one after another. He let me do that. The blood was damp-dry and I could scrape it off, and when I did I saw no torn flesh, no injuries.

“Oh, good,” I said to him. “I couldn’t have stood it if you’d been hurt. Okay. Good. Good.”

He lifted his head then, and laid it on my knee, and I saw that what he had been guarding was a pair of metal-rimmed glasses, mended with tape, whole except for the lenses, which were spiderwebbed with cracks. I looked from them to the rubble pile. I could see then that Curtis had tunneled far into it, but that the debris had slid back down and filled it partly in. I did not move to clear it out.