“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.
After we had eaten and Curtis had had reconstituted beef stew and water, Glynn said, “I want to stay awake to keep the fire going. I’m going to stretch out for just a little while; do you think you can stay awake long enough to wake me in a couple of hours?”
“You bet,” I said. “You and Curtis roll up in that blanket and lie down beside the fire. It’s going to get cold before morning. I’ll poke you in a little while.”
“No longer than two hours,” she said, and called Curtis to her and rolled the Mylar blanket around them both, and stretched out before the fire.
“Night,” she mumbled sleepily, and I smiled in the darkness. I had no intention of waking her before dawn. I did not intend to let myself sleep. Now, now was the time to let go and sink down into it; to see how far I could go before I had to pull back before the howling pain and emptiness. Now, when no one else would have to bear the cost of it.
“Night, darling,” I said to her. She did not reply.
I pulled the blanket more closely around Laura and put the trailing end of it around my shoulders. We lay close together, she breathing slowly, I staring into the fire and trying to unclench the frozen fist inside me. I was not cold; the fire warmed my body, but the space around my heart was cold once more as it had been when I had first lain down on the earth above T.C.
I don’t know if I can let it go, I said to him. I don’t know if I’ll still have you if I do.
I said you would, didn’t I? Didn’t I tell you that?
It doesn’t feel like it.
Then take it on faith.
T.C., you said I’d always have you and you’d have me as long as you lived. So now what? Damn it, have I…has—what did you call her? The Merritt of Merritt’s Creek—is she with only you now? Do I still have any of her?
I said you still have me, didn’t I? Well, if you have me, you have her. As long as you still have me, she’ll be with you.
What am I going to do with her back in Atlanta, T.C.? Nobody there even knows who she is. Do I have to hide her; will she ambush me; what if I can’t find her after all? Or suppose if I can. I don’t think Pom would know what to do with her. I don’t think she would know what to do with Pom. Not with an
ybody but you.
If you’re smart you’ll let her out and sic her on ol’ Pom and let her just flat turn him inside out. You’d be a fool to waste that woman, Merritt.
He may not be able to accept her.
Then he’s a fool too, a worse one than I think he is. Don’t go hunting tomorrow’s trouble. Carpe Diem. How many times do I have to say it.
I turned over restlessly, and Laura stirred.
“Who you talkin’ to?” she said thickly.
“T.C.,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”
“Oh,” she said, and did.
The thing is, you don’t need to settle, Merritt. Use everything you were up here. Use it to get what you want back there.
What do I do with all that leftover love? That was yours.
Didn’t I hear you say that love made more love? Didn’t I hear you tell Glynn that yesterday morning?
Yes…
Well, then.
I must have slept after all, because presently the little fire fell in on itself and sent a shower of sputtering sparks up into the night like fireflies, and I started up. It was cold, but drier. Beyond me, wrapped in silver, Glynn slept on. But Curtis had lifted his head and was staring off into the black space beyond the wavering fire. As I watched, the hackles rose at the base of his powerful neck, and I saw his lips go back, and caught the gleam of his long white teeth, and heard his low, menacing growl. It was soft and sibilant, and went on and on, and in that moment there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that something purely and simply evil waited just outside the circle of the dying light.
My heart pounding queerly, I rose to my knees and reached out very slowly and picked up the knife that Glynn had taken out of her pocket and laid on the earth beside her, so that she would not roll on it. I unfolded its blade, still staring at the place where Curtis looked. The growling went on and on, soft and low and utterly terrible. I felt my own hair prickle at the back of my neck, and felt the little puckering of the fine hairs on my arms. I waited there on my knees, not breathing.
Then it ebbed. Whatever it had been was simply not there anymore. After an endless moment, Curtis looked around at me, gave me a toothy, embarrassed grin and thumped his tail, and laid his head back on his paws. He closed his eyes. I felt sweat break out at my hairline and under my arms, and then I got up silently and built the fire back up and sank down again beside Laura. I don’t know how long I had slept before the falling of the little logs waked me, but when I looked up at the sky the fog had gone, and the stars burned huge and silver and gaudy in the sky.
Didn’t I say I’d always be your same stars? If you get to missing me, just look up.
I take your point, I said, and pulled the silver blanket back around me and slept without moving until dawn. When I woke, it was to the huge, clattering sound of a helicopter that seemed to hover directly over us, filling the cold morning world with noise and wind and confusion, and we had been found.
I wouldn’t have believed you could set a copter down anywhere in that scrambled wilderness, but the young National Guard pilot did, and quite neatly. Soon we were spinning low over the line of the landslide, heading south. From the air you could see where the snake had thrashed and convulsed; in the mountains there was devastation, but it ended with the far edge of the landslide that had obliterated the road. On the far side, the trees stretched away unbroken and unvanquished, and the small towns and suburbs that I could see beyond them looked fairly whole. There were many fires in them, though; I could see their smoke. Gas fires, the pilot said, from where the heaving earth had broken the mains and the winds had whipped the fires alive. Further north whole sections of San Francisco were burning.
“Looked like the start of Desert Storm from the air last night,” the pilot said.
“How bad was it? The quake?”
“Don’t know yet. Big as Loma Prieta at least,” he said. “Hardly any towns and cities for about two hundred miles around that haven’t taken a hit. Don’t have any casualty counts yet. I been in the air since last night.”
“Have you found many people?”
“Just you all. It’s you I been hunting. Somebody said in Boulder Creek that they’d seen a fire up in the Santa Cruz’s around Big Basin. I didn’t see nothing, though, till the sun came up. Saw it reflecting off them blankets then. Don’t know if we ever would’ve found you if it had been foggy.”
He followed the now intact road down to Boulder Creek and set us down on a football field behind the high school. A welter of tents, large and small, had been set up, and from the air the big red crosses told us who would be succoring us. There were trees down on the earth here, too, and the school itself sat strangely askew, but it stood. I did not see much of the rubble that would have marked completely destroyed houses and buildings, but everything I did see leaned or canted slightly and horribly. The whole scene looked like a child with little coordination had drawn it, just awry enough to be unsettling.
“There’s bigger aid stations around, but they’re jammed,” the pilot said. “You’ll be better off here. They got a full medical staff just waiting. It’ll be a while before the folks from the mountains start coming in. There anybody else you know of up there?”
“Yes,” I said. “Up at the very top of the ridge, where an old fire tower used to stand. You don’t have to hurry, though.”
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 lookin
g 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.”
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