Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

She sat down and patted the earth beside her and Curtis flopped down panting, and she set about ministering to us once more. Water, and more aspirin, and a cup of water for Curtis, and spread out blankets for us to lie back on.

“Everybody put their feet up,” she said. “I need to think a minute.”

“Darling, I’m going to have to insist—” I began, but she shushed me impatiently.

“This can be figured out,” she said, pulling out the map and spreading it out on the ground. “I just need to concentrate. You take care of Aunt Laura.”

I was silent. On my shoulder Laura slept heavily. My other arm and shoulder throbbed savagely. I could not even remember when the pain had begun. I was somehow grateful for it. It focused me solidly in the now, kept at bay the river of grief and loss that waited up on the mountaintop to pour down over me. I refused Glynn’s offer of aspirin for that reason. I needed this pain as I needed air to breathe. If whatever conclusion my daughter reached about what we should do next seemed unreasonable to me, I would simply refuse to get up from the earth. There was little she could do about that.

It was only much later, looking cautiously back at that time under the wing of therapy, that I could see how close to passive, inert madness I had been.

“I think this is what we can do,” Glynn said later; I did not know how much later. “I think that if we walk along the ridge right where the landslide started, always keeping next to the edge of it, we’d be following the road, or paralleling it. You can tell where the edge is; it’s where the trees have fallen and the rocks have come out of the ground, where the ground is torn up. It’s as plain as if it had been marked. It may take us longer because we’ll be going through underbrush and rubble, but it’s just not that far to Boulder Creek. If we have to spend the night out, well, we’ve got all the stuff for it. We’ll get there tomorrow for sure.”

“If Boulder Creek is still there,” I said lazily. The lassitude that had taken Laura was nibbling at the edge of my consciousness, too.

“It’ll be there,” Glynn snapped. “Earthquakes don’t wipe out whole towns. What’s the matter with you, Mama?”

I simply looked at her, and she colored and turned away, tears coming into her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

And so we set off across the broken, strewn earth beside the invisible road, and Glynn was right: the going was much slower. And it was much rougher. It was as if we were struggling through utter, trackless wilderness, over rubble piles and around the tops of fallen trees and through ruined undergrowth and around boulders taller by far than we were. Even with the stout sticks that Glynn found for Laura and me, we only accomplished a few hundred feet before we had to stop and rest again, and we were soon footsore and striped with dozens of new branch slashes that bled down our faces and on our hands. Our shoes were tearing apart, too. Only Glynn wore stout running shoes; Laura had put on her smart, pointed-toe boots that morning and was limping badly, and my own much-maligned Ferragamos were simply ribbons of leather by now, as useless as stocking feet. My feet hurt viciously in a hundred places, and my face burned from branch whips, and I gloried savagely in each new pain. It meant that I was alive. There seemed, by then, no other way to tell.

When Curtis began to limp Glynn stopped us for the night. It did not seem to me that we had come any distance at all, only struggled in place in a malevolent, blasted forest, but she showed me on the map.

“See that high place, where the brown color is?” she said happily. “I think that’s the highest point on the road; it looks over Boulder Creek, both the creek and the town, I mean. We could see whatever was there for miles and miles from there, and we should be able to see the town. I think we’re only a mile or two from there. We can do that easy in the morning. Right now it’s nearly six and the fog is coming in and we can’t go anywhere in that, anyway. We’ll find a spot and make a fire and eat supper and sleep, and then, when we wake up, everything will be okay.”

She looked up from the map at me, and it was as if I was seeing her, suddenly, for the first time after a long absence. She was Glynn again, my beautiful, good child, who had done something she knew would please me and make me proud, and was looking into my face for the signs of my approval.

I reached out and brushed the dusty hair off her face, and spit on my fingers and wiped a dried runnel of blood off her cheekbone. Then I drew her head down to mine and kissed her, tasting dust.

“I am very, very proud of you,” I said, my voice shaking. “You have done something today that your mother and your aunt could not do, and I doubt that many adults could have. You are a real hero, Glynn. I not only love you, I need you. It may be a long time before I say that to you again, but I can’t not say it today. And I say it with shame, because I’m the one who’s supposed to take care of you, and here it is the other way around. But I say it with more pride than you will ever know, too. Your father is going to feel the same way.”

She laid her head down on my shoulder and let me hold her for a while, and I could feel the fine, birdlike trembling in her body and hear her breath coming in short, shallow little gasps.

“I can be as brave as it takes if you’re with me,” she whispered. “I don’t think I could have come a step by myself.”

We were quiet for a little while, and then we both said, together, “I love you,” and laughed and pulled apart. She went a little ahead to find a campsite for us, and I went back to Laura.

We finally settled in a small hollow in the lee of a huge boulder, with dense encircling brush for a windbreak and a little level stretch of earth in which to make a fire. The fog was coming in fast, in scarves and billows, filling the world up to the tops of the standing trees with wet white cotton batting, and once again, as I had before, I tasted the salt of the sea. I had tasted it, I remembered, on Point Reyes, too. I realized then that I was crying silently, and could no longer tell the taste of my tears from the taste of sea fog, and swallowed hard. Later. The tears were for later; the tears must not start now. There would be time for them; there would be a whole lifetime for them.

Because we were in a small depression the fog did not sink completely down around us, and we could see what we were about fairly clearly, though as if through stage scrim. Glynn and I dragged dry twigs and limbs from the undersides of the fallen trees, and she lit the little fire with T.C.’s matches. It flamed up cheerfully, its rosy light dancing off the solid white blanket of the fog. Curtis lay down close to it and put his head on his crossed paws and sighed deeply. I went over and sat down next to him, drawing comfort from the small spot of warmth and the dog’s solid body.

“It may not be the fire you want, but it will keep you warm through this night, and me too, and we will take care of each other. That’s not nothing, dearest dog,” I said. He thumped his tail a little harder this time and sighed again, leaning in against me. But his eyes followed Glynn as she moved about in the firelight. Behind me, Laura stretched and sighed and said, “That feels good. Are we stopping for the night?”

“Yep. Supper and coffee in a minute, and then we’ll sleep. Do you think you can?”

“I don’t think the united forces of hell could stop me,” she said drowsily, and it was true. By the time Glynn and I had water boiling and food packets laid out, she was sleeping heavily on the spread Mylar blanket, her breath as deep and regular as the surf of the sea. It sounded so normal to me, so healing, that I hated to wake her, but I did, nevertheless. She needed food and water, and I thought another two aspirin might take her through the night. I took more, too. My arm was a column of pure pain. Laura was asleep again almost before she lay back down on the blanket.