Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

I lay down on the earth beside Curtis, carefully, because my electric shoulder and arm spat and crackled at me. No pain followed, though. I stretched myself full out and laid my injured arm at my side and put the other one around Curtis. He wriggled until he had fit himself into my side, and we lay there together, silent and still. I worked my good fingers under his chin and picked up the shattered glasses and cupped them loosely in my palm.

At first, even in the pounding sun, my body was cold. The earth itself and the rubble and dust upon it were warm, but they gave no heat to my body. I was as cold and stiff as if it had been a long, terrible arctic cold that felled me. Only Curtis, in the curve of my arm, was warm. He did not move.

Very gradually though, so gradually that I was only aware of it after it had happened, warmth seeped up from the earth and into my body. It seeped into my stomach and flattened breasts, out to the end of my fingers and toes, into my cheek where it lay pressed into the dust. The cold and stiffness drained away, and my body seemed to melt into the very earth. I shifted to feel it even closer, and then lay still. Curtis still did not move.

Far below me the earth spasmed again as the great snake, sated, flexed itself voluptuously. Rage flooded back, but it was a dull rage, abstract.

“You fucking bitch,” I whispered to her. “You seduced him. You talked to him and you sang to him and you made love to him, and then you never told him. You didn’t tell him. He loved you, and you didn’t tell him…”

But she had. Told him just far enough in advance so he could send his emissary flying to us: Get out now .

I closed my eyes again, and waited, and the rage gradually slunk away and the warmth came stealing back. It was as if his body lay beneath me, giving me its warmth through the broken earth.

“Hey,” I whispered. “You there?”

Always, I heard, though not with my ears.

“You got your wishes, you know,” I said into the earth. “All three of them. And now you won’t ever have to leave. Only I have to do that. Don’t worry, though. I’m not going for a while. Not for a long time.”

Stay .

Maybe I will. Maybe I will.

And I lay there, not moving, joined to him through the earth as I had been above it, only a day ago. I closed my eyes and drifted in silence and time, Curtis heavy and warm against me, the earth softening below. This is not bad, I thought. This is good. Presently I felt the stiff, bloodied white mask on my face split with a smile, and I wondered if, when it happened, he had been dancing.

12

It was Glynn who led us out. Glynn and Curtis, walking side by side, she with a stout branch she used for a walking stick, Curtis padding steadily beside her, head and tail down, wearing the harness she had fashioned that carried some of our supplies. Forever after when I thought of valor, I thought of my tall daughter going before me, the dog like a patient wolf by her side.

I don’t know when it was that she came to me at the ruin of the tower. I know I heard her calling me up the trail before I saw her, heard the anxiety and the last remnants of the child in her voice, and heard her cry of fear when she saw me lying on my stomach with the dog beside me, motionless. It seemed that the sun was higher, directly overhead perhaps, but the thick, sullen heat of the past few days was gone. It was as if the snake had loosed her grip on the very skies when she was sated, and let the winds blow free again.

Glynn knelt beside me, beginning to cry, and I made an effort far larger than I thought I was capable of and sat up. Curtis, who had lifted his head at her voice, hauled himself to a sitting position, too, and thumped his tail faintly.

“I’m all right, baby. Just resting,” I said, my voice thick and cracked in my dry throat. It was as if I had not spoken for months, years.

“Oh, Mama! It’s all gone! Oh, God…Curtis! Mama, he’s got blood all over—”

“It’s not his blood, baby. He’s not hurt. I looked.”

She was silent. Then she said, “Is he…under there?”

I nodded. I was afraid to look at her. If the frail, shining shell around me cracked I did not think I could survive what rushed in.

Another silence, and then: “We have to dig. Mama, we have to dig for him. Lots of people survive earthquakes; you hear about them being found later perfectly okay—”

“No.”

“Mama—”

“ No , Glynn.”

“I’m so sorry.”

I heard her begin to cry again, softly, and I touched her dust-whitened knee and said, “You can’t cry, baby. I’m sorry too, but that’s one thing that we just can’t afford right now. Later, but not now. Now we have to think what to do.”

But I could not think. I wanted only to sit in the sun beside the great, obscene mound of rubble and be very quiet and still.

Presently she reached down and took hold of my arm to pull me up. A great shaft of electricity shot up to my shoulder. I cried out.

“Oh, Mama, you’re hurt!”

“It doesn’t really hurt. It just sort of buzzes. But I can’t move it. I think it may be broken. It’s my left one, though. I can use my right one just fine.”

She sat back on her heels, her arm around the big dog, who leaned against her, his eyes closed. She scratched his chin in silence. Then she said, “Okay. We’re going to have to walk out of here. We’ll need some things to take with us. Let me poke around in this stuff and see if there’s anything.…”

It was not a voice I had heard before. I looked at her mutely. She looked back at me levelly, as if daring me to contradict her.

“I think we should stay here,” I said dreamily. “It’s warm right here in the sun, and the…wreckage makes a shelter from the wind. We’re close to the road. Someone will come before long. Your dad will come.…”

She looked at me, hope flaming in her eyes.

“Does Daddy know where we are?”

“Sort of. He knows we were up in these mountains; I think I told him Big Basin.”

She shook her head.

“That’s not good enough. You’re hurt. Aunt Laura is…I don’t know. She just sits there holding her stomach and staring. I don’t think we can wait for anybody to remember we’re up here. They may not even be able to get to us. We don’t know what the road is like—”

“Glynn,” I said, “how are we going to get a shocked, pregnant woman and a one-armed one out of here? What will we do if we don’t find our way to a town or something before it gets dark? We don’t even know what’s still standing; I have no idea how bad that thing was.”

Her chin lifted. She looked like she had when she had been a four-year-old, haughtily offended when someone told her she was too young to do something she wished to do. In spite of myself, I smiled. I felt the mask crack again.

“I’m going to get us out,” she said. “I’ve had eight years of scouting. I took that emergency course at school last semester. All I need is a few things for us to take along; didn’t you say there was an earthquake kit here somewhere? In an old safe? I don’t think I can get into where the lodge kitchen used to be, and the car trunk is…gone. But maybe a safe would hold.”

I drew a breath to argue with her, and then let it out. I was simply too tired to talk. Come to that, I was too tired to walk. Let her find that out for herself, later; activity and planning would be good for her now. In a moment we would see about Laura. In a moment.

“Here,” she said, “hold on to Curtis. I’m going to poke around in this stuff. There’s all kinds of things sticking up out of it.”

“Be careful,” I murmured, and put my arm around Curtis. He moved against me and tucked his head under my arm. He was warm and solid, and I clung to him, smelling the dusty smell of still-hot dog hair.