Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

He winced.

“I’ve seen that tower from the air,” he said. “I’ll tell ’em back at base. You know who he is?”

“His name is T.C. Bridgewater,” I said clearly, “and he has family in Greenville, Mississippi. I don’t know the address. He wasn’t close to them…”

I started to cry and he said, in distress, “I’m sorry, ma’am. We’ll bring him in and find his folks. You don’t worry about it anymore.”

“Can’t you just…leave him there? He’s covered up…”

He looked shocked.

“Can’t do that, ma’am. But we’ll take good care of him. Come on, let’s get you all into that tent. That arm don’t look good.”

I followed him toward the largest of the tents, still crying, and people ran out to meet me with a stretcher. There were two others, for Glynn and Laura. They never did manage to get Glynn on the one that was hers, and when they told her that Curtis would have to stay outside, her face was so terrible that they relented and brought him in, too. When I looked around for the young pilot so that I might thank him, he was gone.

It was late that afternoon before I got a phone line out. They had set my arm—something that I do not, to this day, care to dwell on even with the shot beforehand—and given me a pain pill that had knocked me swiftly and deeply out cold. When I woke, I was lying on a cot under the tent, an olive drab army issue blanket over me, and Laura was beside me on her cot, sitting up eating Jell-O and drinking a Diet Coke. On her other side Glynn slept like a child, on her back, her fists lying loosely beside her head, her mouth slightly open. She was snoring gently, and Curtis, beside her on a blanket of his own, snored, too. All of us had been bathed and dotted with antiseptic and given clean, slightly too large clothes to put on, and fed and watered, and given the pertinent information to kind, harried people who were, I assumed, the proper authorities. By the time my arm was set the tents were filling up, and around me now, in the dimming light, I could see other forms, inert on cots or sitting up, talking with one another.

“There you are,” Laura said. “I thought you never would wake up. Do you feel better? When they set your arm you let out a howl they could hear back in Atlanta.”

“I feel fine,” I said thickly and crossly. I was hot and my mouth tasted terrible, and I needed to go to the bathroom. “Are you okay? What do they say about you?”

“The baby’s okay,” she said, and smiled suddenly, a smile of such simple, heartbreaking sweetness and delight that I felt my eyes tear up again.

“I’m glad,” I said, smiling back. I could feel my mouth waffling.

“I’m going to keep him,” she said, not looking at me. “I can’t…you know. Not after this. If he could hang in there through all this, he ought to have a shot at it, don’t you think? Oh, Met. I want this baby so much. I want to raise him, and love him, and make a good life for him; I want him to know all his people. I want his whole family at his birthday parties. I want to come home, Met. How much of a problem would that be? Not to stay with you, of course, and I’d get a job first thing, but would it be awful on Pom? Or on you, for that matter?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” I said, feeling the stupid, loose tears accelerate. “Of course you’re going to come home. Of course you’re going to stay with us, until he’s born, at least. It’s all settled. It makes me very happy, Pie.”

“Mommee, though—”

“Mommee is not a factor,” I said tranquilly. “Mommee is not a player. As of this minute, we are everyone of us casting our lots on the side of life. Even those of us who don’t know it yet.”

Laura grinned, and then looked over at Glynn, who stirred in her sleep, blew a small bubble, turned her head to the side, and slept on.

“Look at her,” Laura said softly. “She just walked us out of an earthquake and saved our asses for us, and she looks for all the world like a sleeping baby. Except, of course, for that ring in her nose. Such innocence…I don’t think she’ll ever get that back, Met, do you?”

I thought about that.

“No. How could she, after the past week or two? Any one of the things that she’s gone through would have been enough. But you know, it’s funny about innocence, Laura. I thought I wanted to keep her innocent; I thought that was the best thing I could do for her. I think it’s what all parents want for their children, maybe most of all. But we’re wrong. Innocence is a tool; I think innocence—a child’s innocence—is what nature gives them so someone will take care of them as long as they need it. But past a certain point, to condemn that child to innocence is to condemn it to certain harm. It has to be able to take care of itself when the time comes, and innocence just doesn’t cut it for that. I think maybe that’s why all the old cultures had rites of passage into adulthood that hurt children somehow, or frightened them enough to change them. They had to lose the innocence. We don’t have any real rites now, certainly not in our safe little suburban world. We keep our kids babies so long they don’t have an inkling of what to do about the hard choices when they come. They literally don’t know what harm is, until they hit it big time.”

“Well, my innocent little niece has certainly learned all that, and didn’t she come through with flying colors, though?” Laura said. “How did you get so smart all of a sudden, Met? I’d have bet you weren’t ever going to let her go.”

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “It doesn’t feel like smart to me. It just feels like somebody else beside me is thinking it. I guess maybe somebody else is.”

She reached over and put her hand over mine. I looked at our hands together. They were puffy and pale, and dotted with yellow blotches and streaks of iodine where the scratches and cuts were.

“I know what you left up there,” she said. “I hurt for you in my very heart. If you’ll let me, I’ll help you through it.”

I opened my mouth to say something flip, but instead I said, “I’ll need you everyday, Pie. Stay close.”

I turned my head angrily away. I could not simply weep my way through the rest of my life. That was when the nice middle-aged woman who had taken my medical history came to me and said, “We’ve gotten you a line through to Atlanta now, Mrs. Fowler. Better grab it before somebody else does.”

The phone in the house by the river rang for a long time. I did not think anyone would answer it and had the fancy that if someone did it would be the owner of that rich, flowery dark voice that had answered the last time I had dialed the number. But presently someone did. It was a man’s voice, but not a man whom I knew.

“Who is this, please?” I said formally.

There was a long silence, and then I heard, “Merritt? Met? Is that you?”

“Jeff! Yes, darling, it is me. What are you doing there?”

“Oh, Merritt, thank God! We didn’t know where you were; we couldn’t find that stupid goddamned place you said you were staying at; we’ve all been out of our minds, Dad is crazy.…What I’m doing here is waiting for you to call. Dad called me and Chip home the minute he heard about the earthquake. He’s out there somewhere; he commandeered a CDC Lear jet and he and Chip flew out yesterday; they’ve hooked up with the National Guard somewhere around Palo Alto, and they’re flying every inch of those mountains, or trying to. He calls in every two hours to see if you’ve called. I don’t know exactly where they are right now, but Merritt, wherever you are, stay there. Stay there! I’ll tell him when he calls back, and he’ll come get you. Are you all right? What about Glynn? And Laura?”