Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

It seemed a long time later when I heard her cry out, “Here it is! Hot shit! Part of the steps held the rubble off it! Oh, thank God, it’s busted open, and there’s all kinds of stuff in it.”

Thank you, I said in my head to him. You’re going to get us out after all, aren’t you?

Told you , he said.

Glynn had her things together in about an hour. From the battered safe she took two Mylar blankets, so thin they folded to washcloth size, and a first-aid kit and packets of freeze-dried food and coffee and trail mix, and a flashlight and compass and spare batteries. She found a map and folded it into the pocket of her jeans, along with matches and a folding water cup. There were plastic bottles of water, too, but they were too bulky for us to carry many of them, so she set aside only four. She made a sling for my arm out of an ace bandage and snugged it tight. Then she fashioned a kind of harness that fit around Curtis’s chest and neck and tucked the blankets and freeze-dried packets and trail mix into it. Curtis sat passively, but whenever she passed he thumped his tail, and she stroked his head. He had not moved from his position at the edge of the rubble pile, though.

Curtis and I sat together while she went back down to the lodge for Laura.

I’m so proud of her, I told T.C.

Kid’s got good genes , he said.

The only thing left to say then was good-bye, and I could not say that, so we sat placidly in the sun, Curtis and I, in the same companionable silence that the three of us had often shared in the last days.

When Glynn brought Laura up I felt a bolt of pure fear go through me. She walked like a little old woman, bent far over, her arms crossed over her stomach, staring straight ahead of her. She was whitened and bloodied and her clothes, like mine, were shredded by the whipping branches. Glynn lowered her to the ground beside me and I reached out and touched her arm with my good one, and she put her hand over it, but she did not speak or look at me. Her flesh was as cold as death.

I patted her in silence. Surely Glynn would see that we must stay here now. This woman could not walk.

But Glynn shook out one of the blankets and tucked it around Laura, and started a small, wavering wood fire in a spot of clear ground, and opened one of the bottles of water and washed Laura’s face and arms and hands gently with moistened gauze from the kit, and when she had cleaned most of the blood and dust and grit away, she put salve all over the scratches, and made instant coffee in the folding cup and held it to Laura’s mouth while she sipped it, and then gave her more water and with it two aspirin. Then she did the same to me. When her own face and arms were cleaned and salved, and we had all had heavily sugared hot coffee and aspirin, she stamped out the fire and scattered the ashes, and tied two of the bottles of water to her belt and made a belt for me out of the twine from the kit and hung the other two from my waist.

She stopped and considered her handiwork, hands on hips, and then went back to the safe and took out a heavy Swiss army knife and dropped it into her pocket. Then she came back.

“We have to go now,” she said. “It’s the middle of the afternoon. According to the map, if we turned right on the road instead of left like we usually do, we’d come to a little town called Boulder Creek that’s a lot closer than anything else. It’s south, I think. That’s where we’ll head. If the road’s clear we could maybe walk it by tonight. Or I could, and could bring people back for you, but we have to get on the main road. Nobody can see us in here.”

Laura said nothing, and I didn’t either.

“Get up, Mom,” my daughter said and held out her hand, and I pulled myself up with my right arm. I swayed dizzily, unreality boiling over me, but in a moment I was steadier.

“Help me,” she said, and together we got Laura to her feet. The coffee and aspirin seemed to have helped some; her eyes made contact with ours, and she smiled, the bleached ghost of her old smile.

“Merritt and Laura and Glynn’s excellent adventure,” she whispered. “Wouldn’t this make a movie, though?”

“How do you feel?” I said.

“Queer. Okay. Nothing seems real. The baby feels all right. Have I bled any?”

“No,” Glynn said. “I’ve kept checking. I think you’ll be all right if we take it slow, and we’ll rest real often.”

Above me the trees sighed, the first time in days I had heard that great, elemental breathing. The wind touched my face and ruffled my hair.

Whenever you hear wind in the tops of trees, that’s me, he had said.

Well, I have to go now, I said to him. I’ve stayed as long as I could. We have to take care of everybody now.

It’s time , he agreed.

You mustn’t worry about Curtis; Glynn will love him forever and ever. So will I.

I know .

I think I will die from losing you.

Who said you were losing me? Don’t you remember anything ?

I remember. About the pine and spruce, and the redwoods in National Geographic , and the crab and the wine and the cold shower and the wet dog and the day-old socks and the Rattus ratti . I remember…

Then…Carpe diem, Merritt .

Carpe diem, T.C.

“Come on, Curtis,” Glynn said, snapping her fingers lightly. “Carpe diem.”

Slowly the big brown dog got up from his place on the earth. He looked back and whined softly, and then came to stand beside her. She put her fingers lightly on his head, and picked up her staff, and we began to walk. No one but Curtis looked back.

We walked for about an hour before we stopped the first time. We soon found our natural order: Glynn and Curtis in front, Laura and me behind. We had started out single file, with me behind Laura so I could catch her if she wavered and swayed, but she looked around so often to see if I was there that I soon moved up beside her. She trudged along, her hand on my right arm, looking down at her feet. After a time I looked down, too. Not only was the going slow and treacherous, with fallen trees and tossed boulders to pick our way around, but the sight of the blasted redwoods and the litter of bark and needles and dust was simply too terrible. By the time we reached the place where the lodge trail cut off Highway 9, we were sweating and I was shivering and rubber-legged. So was Laura.

It was time to stop, and we would have in any case, but what really stopped us was that the road was no longer there.

T.C.’s fire tower sat on the very top of the ridge that defined the spine of the mountains. The road was cut into the side of it, about a hundred feet down the opposite side. That hundred feet of blasted earth was all that was visible now. The earth had simply let go and flowed over the patched, bumpy old road, obliterating it as certainly as if there had always only been raw, clawed earth and shattered trees and rocks. We looked straight out into a sea of devastation that swept down to meet the next ridge before it rose again in a series of corrugations that stretched toward the suburban sprawl around San Jose. We could not see the suburbs there for the sea of diminishing ridges, and I was profoundly thankful. I could not even imagine what the human places must be like. This was awful enough, this casual, bomblike devastation of the wild places.

As far south as we could see there was no road, only landslide rubble and the great, hovering cloud of dust. I sat slowly down on the earth beside the twisted sign that said “Pringle,” which had somehow survived the slide, and drew Laura down with me. She leaned her head on my good shoulder and closed her eyes.

“Okay, let’s take a break,” Glynn said matter-of-factly, as if we did not stand in the middle of devastation and the very textbook definition of lostness.