Fault Lines

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Laura?” I said tentatively. The fear roared alive like a brush fire.

  “It wasn’t a mistake,” she said tonelessly. “I’m the Dauphine. I’m playing the monster in Arc. I’m both Pring’s and Margolies’s choice. They decided after they saw Glynn’s test. Or so Pring said. I think he always meant me to be the monster. He doesn’t make casting mistakes. Margolies’s tootsie is going to be the older Joan. Interesting idea, isn’t it? To have me seduce my own niece?”

  Glynn looked from me to Laura, and back.

  “Mama?” she said doubtfully. Her face, too, was white, and her eyes huge.

  “There isn’t any question of your doing this movie, so don’t worry about it,” I said as calmly as I could. “I want you to go get your bath and get into bed now. I need to talk to Aunt Laura. We’ll sort it all out in the morning; it’s a mistake and nothing more. Go on, now, Tink.”

  “Please don’t call me that,” she said, but she went. I turned back to Laura.

  “Come and have some coffee, at least, and let’s talk about this,” I said, holding out my hands to her. “There’s got to be some misunderstanding; he wouldn’t put you in that part—”

  “He has. He did. He just told me on the phone. He said there were extenuating circumstances, but that it was a much meatier part than Joan, and it could turn out to be the role of a lifetime for me, and he’d make it all okay this weekend.”

  “Then let’s get some rest and have a lovely, mindless, utterly worthless two or three days just bumming around, and he’ll do just that when he comes,” I said soothingly, not believing it. My head pounded with her pain.

  “I don’t want any dinner,” she said, still not raising her voice. “I’m tired and I want to go to bed. No, Met, I don’t want to talk anymore, can’t you understand that? Just…no more.”

  “At least have a glass of milk. You need to eat now, Laura—”

  “Yeah,” she said, smiling a truly terrible smile. “The monster’s baby needs its nourishment, doesn’t it? Otherwise its daddy won’t love it.”

  And she went into her bedroom and shut the door. A moment later I heard the sound of the lock. I stood listening, but there were no more sounds. Finally I looked in on Glynn, who was fast asleep, and went into the kitchen to put our dinner things into the dishwasher.

  Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow the sun will be shining and everything will look different, and we will find that this whole ugly, awful business is a mistake.

  And when I woke the next morning, after a night of roiling, sweating dreams, so early that only the first sleepy twitters from birds I did not yet know broke the old sea silence, the sun was indeed fingering its way down through the crowns of the great trees, and the little grassy area outside my window, where we had parked, was as clear as if every blade and leaf had been traced in silver. But the red car was gone from it, and when I looked into my sister’s bedroom, she was gone, too.

  8

  There was a note on a Post-it stuck to the refrigerator door. I had been looking for it. From the instant I found her and her car gone, I knew that she had not simply taken a drive or run an errand. There was an emptiness in the house that felt deep and permanent, as though Laura had never been here, loneliness like a scar. Somehow you know when someone close to you is gone and is not coming back. There is no lingering sense of their presence.

  “Gone to L.A. to see Pring,” the note, in Laura’s round script, distorted here by haste and pain, said. “I’ve got to change his mind about this. I’ve got to get things straight. I can’t stand it until I do. Be back with him when he comes in a few days. Caretaker will take you anywhere you want to go; I’ve already been up to ask him. He’s going over toward Palo Alto anyway today so you can take Glynn as planned. And he’ll show you around or let you borrow his Jeep anytime. Sorry, Met. Rest and relax and I’ll have it all worked out when Pring and I come back.”

  It was signed, simply, L.

  I sat down in the kitchen and held the note in my hands, looking blindly out at the morning sun filtering in pools through the great trees overhead. I knew that she would not have it all worked out when she and Caleb Pringle came back in a few days. I would have bet my house on the river back home that she would come back in shattered fragments and he would not come at all. I felt, in that moment, simply defeated. Emptied out and flattened as if I had been run over. All this way, all this time, all this chaos and anger behind me, all the small, frail bonds to Laura that had been painfully reestablished torn loose, all the anguish and damage ahead of her, all the old destructiveness reignited. What was I going to do about her? How could I pick these pieces up; what could I pick these pieces up; what could I do with a near-mortally wounded sister and an unborn baby? I crumpled the note and threw it onto the kitchen table.

  I could think of nothing and felt little but the great, smothering white fatigue, and so I made coffee and put on my jeans and found a heavy sweater in the bureau and pulled that on, and took my coffee and went out into the morning.

  The clearing the lodge sat in was an old one, I thought; there were no stumps, no new-turned earth or fresh-planted grass, no sign that the redwoods that leaned over it had ever been disturbed. The back of the house faced up the mountain. There was the gravel driveway we had come in on last night, and a turnaround, and a three-car garage beyond it. All of the spaces were empty. The house itself sat on the crest of a long ridge below the major crest that spined the area; that was where, if I remembered correctly, the old fire tower and the scattered machinery had been. T.C. Bridgewater’s lair.

  The front of the house looked out over space. I had not seen, because of last night’s fog, what might lie below the great bank of windows. Now, walking out onto the long deck off the kitchen and the window wall, I did. Trees. Shafts of pale sunlight through fog and trees. Ridge after forested ridge, dropping away toward the unseen coast, an undulating surf of green. I thought that I had never seen so much green, not even in the Georgia river bottoms in a damp spring. This place might be the very heart of all the earth’s wild places; the master tree for all the others in the world might well be one of these redwoods.

  I had never seen anything living so tall. My head tipped back to look and my eyes went up, and up, and up. At the tops, where open evergreen crowns let the morning sunlight through, the sky seemed infinitely far away, a pale, distant blue, like the surface of the sea seen from its bottom. Layers of fog drifted through the trees, giving them the look of something seen through stage scrim, unreal, haunted, primal. Other trees huddled under their shoulders; I recognized fir, alders, and oak. There were great tangles of rhododendron and laurel crowding the nearer trees at ground level, and huge ferns, and tiny, starlike flowers ranging from delicate pink to purple. The fog and mist hugged the ground and blew in skeins and scarves; the top of the trees were in constant slight motion. I felt no wind, but I heard it, last night’s ancient soughing, the breathing of the trees, the sound of this vast sea of silence. I realized I was holding my breath only when I let it out. In all the world I had never seen anything so strangely, inhumanly beautiful. In this place, man would soon seem simply extraneous. I shivered. I did not think I would feel welcome for long in this world where the very earth spasmed and the great trees would not acknowledge my presence. In the storms of winter, I thought, it must be a profoundly hostile place to be.

  But on this morning its archaic beauty was benign, and a ray of sun shifted and found me on the deck, and I sat in it and drank coffee and emptied my mind. When Glynn got up, then I would get hold of myself and see what could be done and prod myself into action. I might go after Laura or get hold of Stuart Feinstein and ask him to do it, or Glynn and I might simply ask T. C. Bridgewater to take us to the San Francisco airport, where we would get on the next available flight home. There were lots of options. I would address them soon. When Glynn got up.

  It was almost an hour later when she did. By then the woods had done their work. When Glynn came shuffling barefoot out onto the deck,
rubbing at her eyes and dragging her blanket, and said, “I read Aunt Laura’s note. What are we going to do?” I said, not moving my eyes from the still surf of the trees, “I don’t know.”

  She stared at me, and I realized that she did not know how to respond. I was not, in that moment, Mama, or even Mom. Either of those women would be planning, bustling, readying for action. But here I sat with my hands folded in my lap and my eyes drowned in woods and silence.

  “Mom?” she ventured, trying anyway.

  “Come, sit,” I said, and patted the redwood chaise beside me. I did not send her back to put on her shoes and sweater, or get up to fix her breakfast.

  “Sit still and just look,” I smiled at her. “Don’t talk. Just let it fill you up. We’ll never see anything like this again. It’s worth the trip just to sit on this deck for an hour.”

  She looked, dutifully, but presently she began to shiver, and that brought me back a little way.

  “Put some clothes on and we’ll talk about it,” I said. “Are you hungry?”

  “Yeah,” she said, sounding surprised. “I think I am.”

  Inside, the enchantment of the place lessened, and by the time she came back in pants and a heavy ski sweater similar to mine, I had made toast and scrambled eggs and fried bacon from the cache T.C. Bridgewater had brought. She ate a helping of everything and had a second piece of toast. It had been so long since she had eaten like that, in my presence at least, that I could only watch her in silence, not wanting to break the spell with words.

  Finally she grinned at me and said, “Not even a Jewish mother could complain about that.”

  “You’ll hear no complaints from me,” I said. “What, besides toast and eggs, has gotten into you?”

  “Well, I guess it’s the air or something. And then Caleb said I needed to gain a few pounds, that Joan was a sturdy, blooming peasant girl, not a starved, watery waif. He said nobody would want to put the move on me with all my bones sticking out, especially not the Dauphine of France.”

  I flinched, hating the casual perversion of the words, angry at Caleb Pringle for dangling the role over my daughter when I had told him she would not be playing it.

  “You know what we said about Joan,” I said. “It’s out of the question, Glynn.”

  “Oh, I know. But he made me see how I must look to other people. A watery waif? Yecchh. And you know, food does taste good up here. I was afraid I’d throw up, but it really tastes good.”

  I dropped it, thankful to whatever detoxified the thought of food for her, but still meaning to get her out of Caleb Pringle’s orbit as soon as possible.

  “I thought we’d leave for Palo Alto as soon as I do the dishes and you pack some things,” I said. “Mr. Bridgewater is going to take us over to Marcie’s dad’s house. Aunt Laura asked him before she left.”

  “You mean I can still go?” Joy lit her face. “I thought sure we’d be going home today, or back to L.A. after Aunt Laura. Can I stay as long as we said?”

  “You can stay until Aunt Laura gets back. I can’t leave until I know what’s going on with her. I’m sure she’ll call before long, at least. We’ll decide then.”

  “She said she’d be back with Caleb when he came—”

  “I wouldn’t count on Caleb,” I said.

  She dropped her eyes. “I know he can explain all this,” she said softly. “I know he didn’t mean to hurt her. He’s a good person, Mom. They’ll work it all out.”

  Dear Lord, she does have a crush on him, I thought bleakly. Maybe I’ll put her on a plane in a day or two and wait here for Laura. Ina could look after Glynn.

  But then I remembered that Ina did not work for us anymore. Pom and Mommee came flooding back into my head, along with all of the strife boiling around them; how could I have forgotten? The trees; somehow the green trees had sucked them from my mind along with all the other effluvia of home. I was not ready to go back to things the way they were, I thought clearly, and I did not want Glynn to go back to them, either.

  “There are some women’s clothes in my bureau,” she said. “Really cool things. Some of them look like they’d fit me. Do you think Caleb would mind if I took some of them to Palo Alto? I’d get them cleaned. I don’t really have much—”

  “I’m sure he wouldn’t,” I said dryly. “I doubt if their owners will be back for them.”

  She looked at me, but vanished to her packing without speaking. I was not surprised that Caleb Pringle’s house would be full of the clothes of cast-off women, but it annoyed me. If he cared for Laura he would put them away. But maybe it was not one of the things that mattered to Laura, or to a man like Caleb Pringle. And it was none of my affair. I would wear the clothes in my bureau gratefully; I had nothing with me for the chill morning breath of these mountains.

  I remembered then that I had promised to call and tell Pom where we were, so I put on a red-and-black plaid wool shirt I found hanging on a peg behind the door and called out to Glynn where I was going and went out again into the chill, soft morning. The white fog was thickening and drifting higher into the trees, and by the time I reached the turn in the gravel road the sun had vanished altogether.

  It was like walking through a Japanese watercolor. The edges of everything were faded and blurred, but a few details—the feathery lower branches of the redwoods, the dry-brush tips of the great ferns, here and there a stump or a boulder with its base wreathed in flowers and more fern fronds—swam into focus now and then, as sharp and clear as if they were emerging from developing fluid. The fog stilled the sound of the rustling undergrowth and the calls of the morning birds, even my footsteps in the gravel. I saw only the close-pressing walls of a shifting green tunnel, heard only the ever-present sighing of the silence. I could not see anything off to my left that resembled the tower and its outbuildings, and it seemed to me that I had walked much further than we had driven last night. Could I have missed a turn? How? I had seen no other path or road turning off this one.

  But a cold emptiness crept in around my heart, the viscerally remembered feeling of the first awful lostness when one is a child. Something heavy thumped in the dense stand of wet black trunks not too far from the path, and then began crashing through undergrowth. I froze on the path, hardly breathing, unable to tell if the sound was coming closer or retreating. What had Caleb said about the wild things here? Bear? Mountain lions? Some sort of elk? Deer, foxes, porcupines, skunks, raccoons? Rattus rattus, of course. I was certainly not eager to meet a bear or a mountain lion alone on this fog-haunted trail from nowhere to nowhere, and not particularly eager to meet any of the others, no matter how benign. Who knew how these spectral woods changed living things? Look what they had done to me.

  The crashing stopped abruptly, and I began to run, stumbling and sliding.

  I heard the barking before I saw the dog. It rang out through the fog like the Hound of the Baskervilles’ cry, and I stopped dead, too frightened to run. It was a hollow, terrible sound. Almost instantly the dog was out of the fog and upon me, huge and slavering and smelling rankly of wildness and wet dog. Before I could cry out it had jumped up on me with its huge paws and I stumbled and fell backward, and it bent over me, snuffling and nosing for my throat. I was just taking a deep breath to scream when I heard a man’s sharp command: “Curtis! Carpe diem!” The dog stopped his business with my throat, which I realized only then had been a wet, energetic mopping of my face with a huge tongue. Carpe diem? I had surely gone mad with the sheer, inhuman strangeness of this place.

  T. C. Bridgewater was suddenly beside me, looming up out of the fog like Paul Bunyan in his black beard and lank-hanging hair and checked shirt. He knelt and peered at me, one arm around the dog’s neck. The dog sat leaning against him, red tongue lolling, grinning the lupine grin of a canine in perfect harmony with his world. When I sat up he gave a soft woof, sending a warm gust of meaty breath into my face. It was the smell of home: Alpo. I fed it to Samson and Delilah.

  “Are you okay?” T. C. Bridgewater sai
d, clumsily brushing at the dirt on my jacket and pants. “He heard you before I did and was out of there before I could catch him. Sorry if he scared you. He wouldn’t hurt you. Curtis loves to have visitors.”

  “I can see that he does,” I said, too grateful for the presence of Caleb’s hermit to be angry. Fear usually does that to me, but not this fey white morning.

  “I was expecting you,” he said, taking my hand and pulling me to my feet. “Your sister said you needed to make some phone calls and then you’d be wanting to take your daughter over to Palo Alto a little later on. Come on up; I made another pot of coffee.”

  “I don’t want to put you out,” I said formally. My knees were stiff from the fall, and there were gravel abrasions on the heels of my hands that were beginning to sting. “I know you don’t go out often. After this I promise I won’t bother you.”

  “It’s no bother. I welcome any excuse to get out and about. It’s hard work, being a hermit,” he said, striding ahead of me. The dog Curtis brought up the rear, panting companionably. Every now and then he nosed my thigh gently as if to tell me that he was behind me and all was well.

  A formless group of shapes loomed out of the fog as we climbed the trail, and I remembered the anonymous machinery from last night, and the bulky vehicle. We stepped up to a near invisible wooden deck, low and broad, and I saw that there were deck chairs and a couple of worn chaises there, and an umbrella table, and dishes and bowls sitting under a rusty water tap. Curtis’s dining room. The deck circled the base of the tower, and at one end a canvas overhang had been rigged, and a hammock and a table spilling over with books sat under it, along with a spindly-legged black steel grill and a sagging old sofa, also spilling its cargo of books. The sofa had an untidy nest of blankets on it. It was plain that T. C. Bridgewater did much of his living here. Perhaps it was his summer home. The little house atop the tower had seemed very small last night. I would, I thought, want a place in which to drink in the wildness clear of walls and a ceiling, too.