Fault Lines

He spoke to her, lightly, but cut his eyes toward me.

“Don’t even think it,” I said.

“Mom…” Glynn began, her voice pleading, rising.

“Met, listen…” Laura began.

I got up out of my seat.

“The test is wonderful and Glynn will love having the tape, and you were kind, and that is that,” I said. “There will be no talk now or ever about her doing Joan or any other movie at any time. We are going to the airport now and catch our plane, which is something we should have done a long time ago.”

“Met, don’t you realize what this means? There’s going to be a nationwide talent search; it’s the role of the century for a new actress!” Laura cried. “How can you say no? Let her do it this once; she doesn’t necessarily have to have an acting career, just this one role—there’ll never be another young Joan as good as what you just saw. Pring will tell you that.”

“Laura, what part of no is it you don’t understand?” I said. “Besides, it’s Mr. Margolies’s decision; how can you just assume—”

“Margolies would say yes,” Caleb Pringle said mildly. “Margolies is going to go right through the roof of his Turkish bath-house when he sees this. He thought we had our Joan last night, didn’t you know? You saw how he looked at Glynn. But you have to test; sometimes the camera just kills them. That obviously isn’t the case here.”

“I don’t care what the case here is,” I said. “You can show him the test or not. But Glynn is not doing this movie. Get your things together, Tink; we’ve got to make tracks.”

She did not argue with me, but she did not move from the seat, either. She stared at her hands. Then she looked up.

“Daddy would be so proud,” she said softly.

I felt as though she had hit me in the stomach. Was that it? Something of her own, something that was, without any doubt in the world, on any level you chose to regard it, extraordinary, to show her father? Something he would have no choice but to notice? Either that, or the subtlest form of manipulation, and one of the oldest. The child’s ultimate weapon: Daddy would let me.

“You know good and well Daddy would hate it,” I said tightly. “Now come on. Let’s go.”

“Your mother’s right,” Caleb Pringle said to her. “It’s probably no role for a sixteen-year-old. I thought all along we’d have to use an older girl for Joan, but I just wanted to see…I never meant to cause a family rift. Tell you what. Why don’t you go in my office and call your friends back in Atlanta? Gloat unforgivably. Tell them you were offered the part in the movie but you turned it down. Rub it in six ways to Sunday.”

Glynn broke into a slow smile.

“Can I, Mom?”

“Be my guest,” I said. “Gloat till you drop.”

She followed the cheerful Molly Shumaker out of the room, and I turned to him.

“Thanks for that,” I said. “I’d have ended up as the world’s heaviest heavy.”

“It was my fault,” he said. “I should have run this idea by you before. Frankly, I was hoping the test would convince you. But I don’t push people; it never works out.”

“She’s just too young,” I said, feeling defensive and a little foolish, a lioness who had charged what she thought to be a threat to her cub, and found it a shadow.

“It’s not the kind of world we want for her or that she could handle. Some young women could, with one hand tied behind them, but not Glynn. You must see that we’ve got a fight with anorexia on our hands.”

“Yeah, I noticed,” he said. “We see a lot of it out here. Of course to a filmmaker it usually just means that the victim will film like a dream. You’re right; it’s a dangerous world for some youngsters. She could well be one. I sensed a pretty sound armature under there, though.”

“I hope you’re right,” I said. “Sometimes she just seems so fragile.”

Glynn came back, her slowed steps speaking of disappointment.

“You can’t tell me they weren’t impressed,” Laura said.

“They weren’t there,” Glynn said softly. “They’re out here. Up north somewhere. Marcia’s dad wanted her to come spend some time with him, and she hates his second wife, so her mother let her ask Jess. I think it’s Palo Alto or somewhere; I know it’s a long way away from here. They’re going to stay a month.”

Poor Glynn, I thought miserably. Jess is really gone now. How on earth can she replace a best friend?

“Palo Alto,” Caleb Pringle said. “Really? I have a vacation place not thirty miles from there. Up in the Santa Cruz mountains, in a place called Big Basin. It’s really something, if I do say so myself. Up there in those redwoods, it’s like being right under the eye of God. And the air is so clear you can taste it, and the quiet so deep you can hear it. It saves what’s left of my sanity. Listen, why don’t you all drive up there and spend a little time? Glynn can see her friends and wave the tape in their faces, and you and Laura can kick back and relax, and I’ll come up in a few days and we can hike and sightsee and spend some quality time together. Eat; we’ll eat till we drop. I’m a great cook. I’ve got to recharge before we start Arc or I’ll fall apart in midfilm, and Laura could use some rest before she goes into it, and I’d love to show all of you that part of the country. God, but it’s beautiful.”

“Mom,” Glynn cried. “Please say yes! I could go stay with Marcie and Jess; her dad has a pool, and they belong to this marina club thing, and Marcie says there are some of the coolest guys there, and there are two whole weeks before I have to leave for camp—”

“No,” I said.

“Met,” Laura whispered, a soft, anguished sound.

“We can’t, Laura. How many times can I say it? Don’t tease about it.”

“Well, some other time,” Caleb Pringle said pleasantly. “It’ll be there when you come back.”

“Met,” Laura said carefully and precisely, “I’ve got something in my bra poking me in back. Come see if you can find it for me, will you?”

“If you’re wearing a bra I’m wearing a wet suit,” I said, but I followed her out of the studio toward the ladies’ room. Better the session I knew was awaiting me be conducted in private.

She held the door for me and I went in and turned to face her. She leaned against it, head down, hands clasped over her breast, and then lifted her face to me. I was expecting one of her finer histrionic performances, but I saw instantly that this was to be no performance. Her face was white except for hectic red splotches on her cheekbones, and her mouth trembled uncontrollably, so that for a moment she could not speak. Tears were running down her face.

“Oh, baby,” I began, but she held up her hand and I stopped. I watched as she struggled to control her lips, and then she said, as carefully as she could through her ragged breath, “Met. Please. Please just listen to me until I’m finished. Can you do that?”

“Laura, tell me what’s the matter.…”

She looked at me mutely and I fell silent.

She nodded and took a deep breath and went on.

“You cannot possibly know what it would mean to me for you all to go up to the lodge with me. It’s the rest of my life, Met; it’s no less than that. Last night…last night was the springboard, but the lodge would cement everything; the lodge would give me time…the lodge would mean that I could spend another whole movie with him, and by that time I know that we would be together for good. I know that, Met. He’s never asked me up there before, and I can’t just say, well, my sister and niece have to go home but I’ll come, because it wasn’t just me that he asked.”

“But why not?” I said, honestly baffled. “Why can’t you? It isn’t Glynn and me he’s in love with, God forbid—”

“You have to be there because Glynn has to be there,” she cried softly, chafing her hands in distress.

“Why on earth does Glynn have to be there? I don’t understand any of this, Laura,” I said.

“Oh, God, Met, can’t you see how much he wants her for Joan? He’s hoping that you all will stay around long enough for him to show Margolies the test and convince you to let her do the picture; I know how he thinks. He said as much. I know he wants me to get you to stay. Listen, Met, without Glynn there may well not be any Arc at all, because Margolies was going to pull the plug on it this morning when they had breakfast; Pring was sure of that. He hated the new stuff Pring did on Right Time. And then he saw Glynn.…Met, it’s my only real guarantee, that film. I have to do it; I have to be with Pring through it. I have to know that that’s going to happen. He’ll marry me after Arc; I know he will, if not before. But Arc has to happen and it’s Glynn that Margolies is going to want.…”

I went over and put my hands on her shoulder and looked into her face.

“Baby, you must listen to me now,” I said. “I am not going to let Glynn come out here and do that movie. That is not ever, ever going to happen. If there was any other way I could help this…relationship…happen, I would do it, if you want it this badly. But Glynn will not do Joan and I will not let Caleb Pringle think I’m going to change my mind, because I’m not. And I’m not going to let Glynn think that, either. Or Mr. Margolies. It’s horribly, awfully dishonest; it’s playing games with people’s lives, my daughter’s chief among them. Surely you must see that.”

“I didn’t mean you had to change your mind about it,” she murmured. “But what’s so wrong with letting him think he just might have a chance? Just for this tiny little bit of time, Glynn would never have to know. In fact you’d never even have to mention it again; your going up there would be all he wanted. You could still tell him no after a day or two. Glynn wants to go stay with her friends, anyway—she wouldn’t even be around him. That way we could have a day or two together, you and I and Pring, then I could say well, I’ll stay a little while after Met and Glynn leave, and it would be a natural thing to do, and we’d be alone, and I could…it would work out. If not the movie, then Met, please, please, let me have the time at the lodge.”

She looked at me and saw the refusal in my face and put hers into her hands and began to cry. Her shoulders heaved and her hands shook, but the sobs were silent and terrible. I put my arms around her and held her against me. How many times, I thought dully, her pain seeping into the very core of me, had we stood like this? She impaled on her pain; I trying to absorb it.

“I don’t understand why the lodge is so important to you,” I said against her hair. “Can’t you stay in L.A. and see him? What is it that’s so special about the lodge?”

“Because it’s the place where he’s happiest, the place he loves most in the world. I want him to think of me in it; I want him to see me there and remember how it was, how good, how well I fit. And I have something I have to tell him, and I want it to be there; otherwise I don’t know…”

A coldness settled around my heart.

“What is it you have to tell him, Laura?” I said.

She shook her head against me, and then she looked up at me and it came out.

“I’m pregnant,” she said, beginning to cry again. “It’s his. I want this child, but I want him. I want him and me and the baby to be together, a real family, and I’m afraid.…I have to have some kind of insurance when I tell him. I know he loves kids, but I don’t know just how one will fit into his life now, and I’m scared. I cannot lose him, Met; it would kill me; I would die. That month that he didn’t call…I was already dead and in hell. I can tell him up there, in his place. Especially if he thinks there still might be a chance for Arc. Can you possibly, possibly see?”

I stared at her more in grief and an old, sucking despair than shock. The pregnancy was not a shock. I had always been surprised and grateful that it had not happened before. Or perhaps it had.

“Oh, Pie,” I said, my own tears beginning. “What on earth is going to happen to you?”

“That’s up to you,” she whispered. “That’s entirely up to you. Can’t you trade just one week of your life for the rest of mine? I’d be off your hands then.…Oh, dear God, I need this so much. I want this so much.”

I held her and rocked her, staring over her head at the blank steel door of the studio washroom, not seeing it. I want. I need. Only you, Met. Only you, Mom. Only you, Merritt. Help me. Fix it. Take care of me.…

Suddenly and violently I was sick of it, sick with the weight of all those cries, all those years. I was tired beyond thinking, tired beyond even the effort to speak. To speak, to explain, to say, once again, no. No, it isn’t good for you, no it isn’t good for Glynn, no.

I thought of Caleb Pringle’s words: “Up there in those redwoods it’s like being right under the eye of God…and the silence is so deep you can hear it.”

A week, I thought. A week in that healing silence and solitude. Days alone with my sister, days in which to make her see that a man who needed to be tricked was no man to hang a life on, to entrust a child’s life to. Days in which to find another answer.

And I thought of what we were headed back to, Glynn and I.

“Yes,” I said faintly. “All right. We’ll go. We’ll go and we’ll figure out something about the baby, you and I. But first we’ll sit down and look at the trees and just be very, very quiet, and we’ll do that for a long time.”

The sobs began again, and she hugged me so hard that I lost my breath.

“You’ll never do anything else for me as important as this,” she hiccuped. “I will love you for the rest of my life. I will love you beyond that.”

“Fix your face and come on back,” I said, wrapped close in this new shroud of tiredness and the stupid-simple peace that comes after a decision, any decision, is made.

“I have to go and call Pom. We have to call Marcie’s folks in Palo Alto and see if it’s all right for Glynn to visit.”

She nodded and I left. Through the door she called after me, “Don’t let him beat up on you, Met. Don’t let him punish you for this. When was the last time you had some time just for yourself? Don’t let him talk you out of that.”

I did not reply. I walked steadily back through the still-dim corridors toward the studio, thinking what I might possibly say to my husband. Nothing came. Probably, I thought, it was because I had never, since I married him, made a decision that did not have his best interests, or Glynn’s, at the core of it. I did not know how to explain my own need. And, I realized with amazement, I did not care. Pom had coped this far. He could cope for another week. I did not expect that he would embrace the decision, but perhaps he would begin to see that sometime over the past week one of the primary rules by which we operated our lives had changed, had had to.

And maybe he would not. All I felt at the moment was a simple curiosity to see which it would be and a need to get beyond the phone call that was so great it almost felt like labor, like childbirth.

Amy answered Pom’s private line.

“Oh, Merritt. Well, the prodigal wife at last,” she chortled merrily, or with what passed, with Amy, for merriment. “Was it Doctor you wanted? I’ll take a message, Doctor’s in a meeting until—”

“Get him, Amy,” I said. “Now.”

There was a long pause, and I heard her dialing Pom, and then his voice. “Merritt,” he said.

It was his voice, of course, but it sounded so flat and without affect that for a moment I thought Amy must have connected me with another office.

“Pom?” I said witlessly.

“Yes.”

“I’ve been trying to reach you. I left a number—”

“I got it, Met. I just didn’t call it.”

I knew then that he was still very angry with me, and that this conversation would have no good ending. But there was something else under his voice, a frailty or injury of some sort, that I had never heard before. Alarm flooded me, and pity, and the old, helpless love that Pom in trouble always called out. Could Mommee after all…

“I sincerely hope that you’re calling from the airport, Merritt,” he said, and the pity and love receded, along with most of the alarm. If Mommee had come to serious harm he would not resort to sarcasm.

“No.”

“Ah,” he said, and waited.

“Pom, I wanted to tell you that we’re going to spend another week in California,” I said, speaking rapidly and, I hoped, firmly. “Laura’s friend has offered us his lodge in the Santa Cruz mountains, south of San Francisco, and Glynn’s friends Marcie and Jessica are visiting Marcie’s father over in Palo Alto, and it’s very close to the lodge, and I’ve always wanted Glynn to see the redwood country, and so much has happened that I need to be still and sort it all out—”

“A lot has happened indeed,” he said. His tone was still level.

I could put it off no longer.

“Mommee…is Mommee all right?”

“No, Merritt, Mommee is out of her mind and as of tonight she’s out of the one decent place that would take her on short notice, and since you will be visiting the redwood country for another week I have no idea on God’s earth what will happen to her now. That’s how Mommee is.”

Guilt leaped and anger flared higher. Pity was still there.

“I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it. “I know she isn’t easy. Do you want to tell me?”

“Would it get you home?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, then, no. I don’t think I’ll bother. Oh, hell, Merritt, it’s just that…I went to see her this morning before work and she didn’t know who I was. She didn’t know me, Merritt. She’s been so traumatized by all this bouncing around, and all the unfamiliar people, that she’s gone into this kind of crazy fugue state; nobody can reach her. And they won’t keep her there—”

“Where’s there?”

“Lenox Meadows. That high-rise place in Brookhaven, the one all the Buckhead old people go to. I called Bob Scully, the director, a couple of days ago and as a favor to me they took her right in, and if I do say so myself it’s a nice place. It has everything, even a sunroom that’s been fixed up exactly like the one at the Cloister, you know, where the birdcages are? A lot of the people there are confused, and they think they’re back at Sea Island when they see it, and they settle right down.…Anyway, it seemed like the perfect solution. All sorts of services and frills: a hair styling salon and a pool and sauna and a nice restaurant and a private limo to shopping and the symphony and the arts center, you know…but it upset her so to be away from her family and her room that she just sort of flipped out, and she got into the sunroom and opened the birds’ cages and let them all out, and then at dinner she threw soup at the waitress. So I’ve got to move her by tonight. I was counting on you to bring her home this afternoon, Merritt. Now I don’t know what I’m going to do. My God, she actually thought I was going to hurt her! She didn’t know me—”

“Pom, I’m sorry. But you must see that Mommee’s gone beyond home care now. The sooner you can get her into a place that specializes in Alzheimer’s and senility, the better off she’ll be. Not we’ll be, Pom, she’ll be. You don’t need me to do that. I couldn’t admit her, anyway. You’d have to authorize it—”

“I don’t know any places like that,” he said, sounding lost and querulous.

Annoyance and the old pity warred in me; annoyance, for the moment, won.

“Pom, you’ve got a five-page list of places like that in your office right this minute. The social worker has it; I’ve seen it. Your office sends people there every day of the week; it’s part of the outreach and resources program, or whatever you call it. All you’ve got to do is pick up a phone. You don’t even have to do it; Amy would love to do it for you. You know good and well that if this Lenox Meadows place would take her immediately as a favor to you, any one of those places will. You’ve supported them for ages. You could have her in a nice room by the end of the workday. Amy would pick her up and take her, I’ll bet, if you sent a nurse along. Or maybe the limo could take her…”

There was a long silence. In it I had a picture of Mommee, roaring and careening around in the back of a huge limo, tiny finches darting in an agitated cloud about her head. At the wheel was Jesus. When he decanted her tenderly from the limo he would say, “You tell Orion O’Neill Jesus say ’allo, hah?” I thought for one desperate moment I was going to burst into idiot laughter.

“I’m not going to put my mother in one of those places,” Pom said, and the picture dissolved.

“Only poor people, huh?” I said in exasperation. “Pom, Mommee is way, way past noticing where she is. She isn’t going to know a new place from her old room. She isn’t going to know you from a…a turnip. The reason she doesn’t recognize you isn’t that she’s upset and traumatized or that you’ve hurt her, it’s that she has Alzheimer’s disease and that’s what eventually happens to people who have it. You’re a doctor, you know that. You see it every day. She isn’t going to get better if you bring her back home and we try again to look after her, and suddenly recognize you, and embrace you, and get back to normal. It doesn’t happen like that. You’re putting off the day she gets the kind of care that really can help her, and you’re condemning Glynn and me to another season in hell in the bargain. Without Ina I couldn’t manage it five minutes. Even with Ina, I couldn’t do the Mommee thing anymore. It’s killing our daughter. She’s so much better out here; you’d love seeing how well she is, and oh, Pom, so many wonderful things have happened to her, and she’s so anxious to tell you about them, and good things are coming up for Laura, too—”

“How nice,” he said coldly, “that you’re all having such a good time.”

“Pom, do you want your wife and daughter to be miserable? Is that it? How would that help things?” I said. My voice was trembling. Why couldn’t I get through to him? What would it take? Whatever, I obviously was not going to be able to do it over long distance, not when he was still torn with anger at us and terror and pity for his mother.

But I was past helping him there.

“There’s another reason, too,” I said. “Laura’s got sort of a problem. I think it can be settled in a week, and I feel sure I can help her work it out if I have some quiet time alone with her. But she’s not in very good shape right now, and I’m the only one who can—”

“I cannot remember a time in my life since I was acquainted with Laura that she did not have sort of a problem,” Pom broke in coldly. “What is it this time, booze again? Drugs? AIDS? What? What terrible calamity has befallen poor Laura that only you can fix up for her, Merritt? Whatever it is, I’m not going to have it spilling all over Glynn. I don’t know what the hell you’re thinking of. I want Glynn back here today, on that noon plane. I’m still not sure I’m not going to punish her for her attitude toward Mommee; I’m damned if I’m going to finance a grand tour for her right now. If you want to stay I can’t stop you, but I will not have Glynn—”

“I’ll call you from the lodge and give you the number when we get there,” I said over his escalating voice. It was not, now, Pom’s voice. “I’ll leave a message on the machine if you’re not in. We will be back in about a week. I am sorry about Mommee, sorrier than I can say, but you are the only one who can help her now. Sooner or later, Pom, you’ve got to cast your vote with the living. You don’t know how much I pray it’s sooner. I’ve missed you, and so has Glynn. We love you.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I can tell how much even over the phone.”

I let a beat or two go by, and then I said, not knowing until I spoke that I was going to say it, “Pom, did you have an affair with that Jamaican doctor you had on staff a few years ago? I forget her name—”

“I don’t know who you are anymore,” he said, and hung up.

I don’t either, I said to the dead phone, and put it back into its cradle. I went out into the little studio where everyone was waiting for me, bright-faced with anticipation.

“Marcie’s stepmother said for me to come ahead by all means,” Glynn caroled. “And Jess and Marcie are simply having shitfits about the screen test. ’Scuse me. I’m sorry. Did Dad…is it, you know, okay?”

“No problem,” I said. “Redwoods, here we come.”

Laura looked keenly at me and started to speak and then didn’t. Later, I would tell her all about it, and she would say something funny and awful and absolutely right, and put everything back into perspective, and the sly, thick sickness of the fight with Pom would melt out of my heart like rotting old ice. She could always do that. And in turn I would help her sort things out.

Meanwhile, to the north, the great trees waited, and the silence that was as deep and pure and old as the sea, and the sun burning through the morning fog to warm the thin air and touch our faces.…

“Let’s get this show on the road,” I said.

As I was hugging Caleb Pringle good-bye the earth beneath the parking lot gave a fishlike flop and a dolphin’s roll. I froze, clinging to Caleb, waiting. The tremor did not come again.

“Did the earth move for you?” he smiled down at me.

“No, but I’ll bet it would if we did that again,” I said lightly, my heart pounding in slow, dragging beats.

He laughed and hugged me once more, hard.

“What would I have done if Laura’s big sister hadn’t turned out to be a babe?” he said.

“Put her in a horror movie and made a gajillion dollars,” I smiled back. “See? I’m catching on.”

We got to Caleb Pringle’s mountain retreat long past dark, so I really did not see any of the surrounding country until the next day. But all the way through the tangle of suburban streets that stretched from San Jose to Saratoga I could feel the presence of the mountains to our west. Once we began to climb them, threading our way through the bewildering maze of small roads and trails that led up and over their crest and down into the Big Basin area, the unseen spires of the great redwoods seemed to lean so close over us in the little red car that we automatically spoke in near-whispers. Fog or low clouds augmented the darkness; it was like making our way through an endless tunnel whose walls were swirling gray. The silence was so dense and total that it seemed to have its own monolithic shape. Only the close-brushing branches of unfamiliar undergrowth broke the fog wall, and occasionally the red flash of wild watching eyes, or the ghostly shape of an animal whisking across the road in front of us. Twice we saw deer, and once a fox, and once something low and solid and scurrying that none of us could put a name to. By that time we were not speaking much. The darkness and the silence were oppressive, as was the growing sense that we were hopelessly lost in an alien moonscape where only inhuman things and towering, implacable giants tracked us.

We had met the dense June coastal fog just outside San Luis Obispo. It was scarcely past noon; we had left at nine and made remarkably good time up Highway 1, the old coast road. It had been Laura’s plan to drive up that way, taking our time and stopping wherever along the spectacular coast our fancy dictated. It would be, she said, a drive we would never forget: San Simeon, Big Sur, Carmel, Monterey. Perhaps we would break the trip for the night at Carmel, where a friend of hers had, she knew, an empty guest house, and then cut inland at Santa Cruz and follow Highways 9 and 236 up into the Big Basin area. Caleb Pringle’s private road snaked off there, up near the Santa Cruz County border.

I was as eager as a child to be on the road, sun and wind in my face and the cold blue sea always to our left. I thought of the magical flight through the desert and expected more of that, but somehow it did not happen. The sea, from Santa Monica on up, was wild and beautiful, and the low, empty hills to our right were sharp and clear and still green with the spring rains, and often blanketed so thickly with wildflowers that they looked like a pointillistic landscape, but somehow they failed to call out the wings in my heart as the desert had done. We made the first three hours in a jittering miasma born of something I could not put a name to. Occasionally I thought I could catch the shape of it, out of the corner of my eye, but it always eluded me. Gradually we stopped our forced chatter and singing and Laura found a faltering classical station on the radio, and we sank into it, taking our demons with us. My thoughts were as circular as a hamster’s treadmill: Pregnant. Laura is pregnant. Pregnant and in love with a man who is not going to marry her; I don’t know how I know that, but I do. Pregnant. What are we going to do about the baby? What is going to happen to her? How can I help her? Glynn: How can I help her keep some of this new fire and surety and not fall into all that phony movie stuff? I know I should get her away from here now, but how can I take her home while Pom is…the way he is? While there’s still Mommee hovering over us?

Pom: What can I say to Pom? How can I get him to change his mind about all this? How can I tell him how I’ve changed? How have I changed?

What is going to happen to Pom and me?

I did not know precisely what treadmills Laura and Glynn rode, but they were sufficient to silence them for long stretches of time. When we hit the fog and stopped for lunch, Laura called the local television station and found that the fog was solid up to San Francisco and not apt to lift for another twenty-four hours. “Let’s cut over to 101 and blitz it up to San Jose and on over from there.” she said. “There’s no fog inland. We can make it tonight easily; it might be after dark, but Pring gave me a good map and we can ask if we need to. I don’t know about you all, but I just want to be there.”

Glynn and I cried, “Let’s do it,” almost in unison, and we all three laughed in something like relief. I realized then that the old trees were calling them, too, with a voice that was as strong as a beat in the blood. We finished our abalone salad in haste and got back into the car. Laura put the top up against the damp chill of the fog and we were off again. Oddly, bowling inland along the flat, empty Carmel valley behind the coast range, the giddiness and hilarity came back, and the singing began again.

But now, bumping along the minimal little mountain roads, with me trying to read Caleb’s map by the dash light and Laura tight-lipped with concentration and Glynn silent as a stone in the backseat, hilarity had long since fled.

Finally, after we had inched along Highway 9 through the blackness for so long that I could not remember when we had last made a turn or seen a light, I said, “Maybe we should go back and ask somebody. If we’ve missed Caleb’s road and we run out of gas or something, we could never walk back to civilization.”

Laura turned her head to answer me and from the back-seat Glynn said, “There it is.”

And there it was, the upended log with the battered mail-box atop it that said “Pringle.” If Glynn had not seen it I doubt if we would have; the road was merely a narrow dirt track snaking off into the thick undergrowth. It might have been an old logging road, or no road at all.

“Good girl,” I said, relief flooding me. “You get the first shower.”

“We can all take showers at the same time,” Laura laughed, too. “There are four baths and a hot tub. This ain’t Green Acres, I don’t think.”

For a long time the track bumped along through under-growth and fog, climbing and dropping, climbing and dropping. There was no break at all in the wall of green and gray on either side of us. Then we passed a clearing on the right, and I could just make out the base of some sort of rough tower, rearing itself up into the fog, with a clutter of small lean-tos and a rough veranda at its base. The shape of some sort of big vehicle emerged from the swirling whiteness and then was lost again, and it seemed to me that there was a lot of equipment of some sort littered about the tower’s base. Far up in the fog a lone light burned yellow, as if it might have been cast by a lantern.

“The lair of the hermit,” Laura said. “The lodge ought to be on down the trail here.”

“The hall of the Mountain King,” Glynn said dreamily from the backseat.

“It could be, couldn’t it?” I said. “I think I like the lair of the hermit even better than I’m going to like the lodge. Can you just imagine what you’d see from the top there?”

“Can you just imagine climbing up those steps with a load of groceries or every time you had to go to the bathroom?” Laura said.

“Why would you do that?” Glynn said curiously. “I’d just pee in the woods. Who’d know?”

“I’ve been in the city way too long,” Laura laughed. “I need to pee in the woods. We all do. We’ll pee in the woods every chance we get. Give the hermit a thrill or two.”

The road dropped rapidly from the crest where the tower stood, and made a sharp turn, and we saw the lodge ahead, clinging to the side of a hill so steep that it looked like a cliff. Lights blazed through the fog, and I could see that it was large and rambling and fell down the cliff as if it had spilled there, or grown. In front of it was only a sea of drifting gray-white, but I sensed, rather than saw, immense space.

“Oh, Lord,” I said. “I take it back about the tower.”

No one spoke when we opened the door and walked into Caleb Pringle’s lodge. But I felt my breath stop in my throat and my heart rise up in the kind of joy I remember feeling on Christmas mornings, in those good years before my mother died. All around us light leaped and poured and ran as if melted down log walls and off great beams high in the cathedral ceiling and spread over the stones of a hearth as large as many motel rooms I had seen. It seemed to have many sources: the fire that roared in the hearth with a whispering bellow like a great wind; the immense copper hanging lamps; the old, smoky gold of the wood and log walls themselves; outsized leather sofas and chairs the color of maple syrup; the glowing Indian rugs that hung from the railing of a gallery that ringed the top floor, leaving the entire bottom floor one vast, open space. More jeweled rugs lay on the wide burnished boards of the floor, and the walls were hung midway up with a forest of antlers and the massive bleached skeletons of who-knew-what. One side of the big room was lined with furniture and paintings and bookcases and doors obviously leading to other rooms. The other was one sweep of small-paned glass in which all the light swarmed and pooled and danced. Curtains were drawn back so that you would see the entire panorama of whatever lay outside, but tonight, beyond the light, only fog lay there.

Then Glynn said, in a small voice, “Cool,” and Laura gave a whoop of sheer delight, and I laughed aloud with the radiance and energy and sheer, joyous excess of it.

“Welcome to hard times,” I said, and we flopped down into the lustrous swamp of the leather sofas and laughed and laughed and laughed.

We were still laughing when a man came out of one of the doors on the opposite wall of the room. We all stopped laughing as one and drew in a great collective breath. I pulled Glynn against me reflexively and prepared to thrust her behind me if he made so much as a move toward us. Laura made a small sound deep in her throat.

He was an apparition, a grotesque, something out of a pagan legend older than the earth of this young mountain range. He seemed, in the flickering firelight and reflected radiance of the window wall, taller than any normal being could possibly be, and darker, and as impassively inhuman as if he had been carved out of basalt. His skin was the color of old rawhide and he had thick black hair hanging over heavy brows and an enormous bush of black beard, and features so attenuated they might have been done by a medieval limner: long chin, long nose, high-ridged cheekbones, sharp brows. He looked like an El Greco painting of an American Indian, and he was literally covered in flowers.

Then he smiled, and white teeth split the black beard, and everything changed. I saw that he wore crooked wire-rimmed glasses on his nose, mended with what looked to be friction tape, and had small black coal-chips of eyes that danced with light when he smiled, and the beard was not a wild bush, after all, but a neatly trimmed felting that covered his jutting jaw like sleek fur. I smiled back, involuntarily. The white grin in all that darkness was utterly disarming.

“Hey,” he said.

“You must be Caleb’s hermit,” I said.

“You got it,” he said, and his voice had so much of the thick Mississippi River delta in it that my grin turned into a giggle. How could you not be safe in the presence of that voice? It was the very music of home.

“God, you scared us to death,” Laura snapped. “Couldn’t you have called out? Do you always just let yourself into Pring’s house whenever you want to? For all we knew you might be a murderer or a rapist or something—”

“I’m both flattered and sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know when you all would be getting in, and these posies came for you by way of the pissedest FedEx driver I have ever seen, and I thought I’d bring ’em on down here and put ’em in water for you, and then I heard your car and thought, well, I’ll light the fire and turn on the lights for them, welcome them, you know. I really am sorry. Caleb told me to take especially good care of you, too.”

“Well…okay. Thanks. That was nice of you,” Laura said, and walked toward him, holding out her arms for the flowers. Before she reached them she gave a short, sharp scream and backed up hastily.

“Jesus Christ, is that a rat on your shoulder?” she squeaked.

I looked, harder. It was. From a perch on his shoulder, leering foolishly from among the masses of larkspur and stock and baby’s breath, was…

“Rattus rattus!” I yelled. “I’d know that face anywhere! Excuse me, Mr.…whoever you are, but did you know you had a European black rat on your shoulder?”

He reached up and felt, and the rat ran up to his neck and nestled there, peering now from directly under his ear. It was not a small rat, either; this Rattus rattus had, as my beloved Felicia back in Baton Rouge used to say, undoubtedly, seen the elephant and heard the owl. He was big, fat, sleek, and obviously as comfortably at home on this man’s shoulder as he would have been in my woods at home.

“Goddamn, Forrest, I thought you were bedded down for the night,” the man said mildly, and shrugged his shoulder, and the rat disappeared from his shoulder. Through the flowers I saw it wriggle into his shirt pocket and settle there.

“Pardon us both, ladies. Again,” he said. “I’m used to him, but I know most people don’t like them. It’s not like they were cute little mice or ground squirrels. He’ll stay put now, and I’ve got to get on back. I’ll see he stays home from now on. I’m T.C. Bridgewater, by the way, Caleb’s hermit, as this lady has already noted.”

His smile widened, and I gave way to the laughter that was tickling at my mouth.

“Rattus rattus,” I gasped. “I feel absolutely at home. Do you know, I go swimming with them almost every day of my life? I live in a house by the river back home, and I’m supposed to take them down there and drown them, but instead I let them go, and they make for the water like Labrador retrievers, and there we all are, skinny-dipping in the Chattahoochee.”

I stopped laughing and blushed. Glynn and Laura and T. C. Bridgewater were all staring at me.

“Mom, do you really? I never knew that,” breathed Glynn. Laura said nothing, just stared from me to T. C. Bridgewater, who began to laugh. It was an infectious sound, deep and flat-out and young. It sounded younger than I thought he was: He looked, in the firelight, to be about Laura’s age. Maybe forty.

“Swim with the rats,” he said. “Forget the goddamn dolphins; go South and swim with the rats.”

All of a sudden he and I both were laughing so hard that we could not get our breath, gasping and bending at the waist, holding ourselves. Stopping and wiping our eyes and starting again. The sloped, distinctly untrustworthy head of Rattus rattus appeared over the flowers, nose quivering, and bobbed back down again. His pocket nest must be bouncing uncontrollably. I dissolved into a fresh gust of laughter.

When we finally stopped, Laura said sourly, “Well, now that the floor show is over, perhaps we can collect our flowers and let you and your rat be on your way, Mr.…Bridgewater, I think you said? We’ve had a long, long day.”

“Of course. Are you Ms. Mason? Laura Mason? There’s a package for you in the kitchen, too, and one for Miss Glynn Fowler.”

“I am,” Laura said. “The young, beautiful one is my niece, Glynn, and this crazy woman is my big sister, Merritt Fowler. The ratwoman of Atlanta. Thank you for the delivery and the fire and the welcome, and good night.”

He handed her the flowers and nodded to all of us and said, “I brought you down a pot of chili in case you didn’t stop for groceries. I can pick up whatever you need in the morning; I’ve got to go into town. Just bring me up a list before nine. And you know there’s a phone up at my place, too. Good night and once again, we apologize, Forrest and I. If you hear a dog barking don’t worry, it’s my Lab, Curtis. Good watchdog…”

“Good night, Mr. Bridgewater,” Laura said.

He opened the door and disappeared into the swirling fog. I heard him laughing all the way up to where, I thought, the trail turned. Then night and fog swallowed the sound.

“I hope he isn’t going to be the man who came to dinner,” Laura said. “God, these are gorgeous. Look, they’re to all of us, from Pring. What a darling.”

She smiled and buried her face in the blossoms.

“I never got any flowers before,” Glynn said. “They’re neat. So is the rat. And a dog…I’m glad there’s a dog.”

“Me, too. Maybe he’ll come sleep with you,” I said, hugging her, delight at nothing at all bubbling along my veins like champagne. The joy I had missed on the trip had lain up here all along, waiting for me.

Laura went into the kitchen and came back with two parcels wrapped in silver paper and tied with silver stretch cord. She was still smiling, a misty, tender smile. She looked very young. She handed one of the packages to Glynn and began to open the other.

“Pring does it in style when he does it,” she said.

“It’s not from Caleb,” Glynn said. She had ripped her package open and stood staring at the contents of the flat box. “It’s from Mr. Margolies. Mom; oh, Mom, look!”

I looked into her box. The cross that she had worn that morning in the screen test lay nested in cotton, with a card that said, “For the only Joan who should ever wear it. I hope she will. Regards, Leonard Margolies.”

“Mom, does he mean…” she lifted a radiant face to me.

“He only means that he thought you were very good,” I said. “But what a nice thing to do. It looked just right with your tunic. You can wear it with that.”

“Mama—”

“I’m not going to discuss this movie business anymore, now or ever, Glynn,” I said, and she saw in my face that I was not. She walked over and sank down into the sofa, fingering the cross, her eyes faraway. But she did not pursue it.

Damn that man, I thought fervently. Damn him and Caleb Pringle, too. I should take her home.

I looked over at Laura. “So what did he give you, Pie?” I said.

She did not answer. She sat holding something in her hands, her face still and blank. Then she looked up.

“He thinks I’m playing the Dauphine,” she said in a low, stricken voice. “He’s sent me this silver crown pin from Cartier, and a note that says ‘Vive la’dauphine and vive Arc!’ He’s got it all wrong; I’m sure Pring’s told him I’m doing the adult Joan. Oh, I’ve got to set this straight right now! I can’t let him think I’m playing that monster; not even for one more night.”

She scrambled to her feet.

“Where are you going?” I said. “It doesn’t matter, Pie; you know it’s just a misunderstanding. It can wait until morning. You can call him then or call Caleb. I don’t want you scrambling up that trail in this fog and dark, and climbing all the way to the top of that tower, it’s not safe—”

“I’m going,” she said in a tight, thin voice, and she grabbed up a leather jacket that hung on a peg beside the great front door and went out into the fog, the door banging behind her. Glynn and I sat and stared at each other, listening until her sliding, scrambling footsteps faded away completely. She still wore the soft, soleless driving moccasins she had slipped on that morning. I was afraid that she would fall on the treacherous path.

I was afraid of something else, too, but I would not let it into my mind, or put a name to it. I got up and helped Glynn bring our bags in, and stowed them into the bedrooms we chose off the main room—low-ceilinged, beamed, dark, intimate, places to nest in all the wilderness…and then we went into the kitchen and I heated up the chili and made coffee and cocoa for Glynn. We waited and waited, and finally we ate, sitting at the huge, scrubbed trestle table. Food, I thought mindlessly, and then a long, hot shower, and then bed.

I did not hear the front door open, and only when she stood there did I look up suddenly and notice Laura. She was misted all over with droplets of fog; they stood in her hair and on the scarred, buttery old leather of the jacket she wore. Her feet were wet with black mud and there were smears on both hands and the knee of her jeans, as if she had slipped on the path and caught herself on her palms. There was a thin scratch across her cheek, shockingly red against the pallor. I knew that a branch had whipped her face. Her eyes looked like the eyes of someone who had just been taken from deep, cold water after a long time: black-pupiled, blind.

“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 said, 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.

“I hate to make you do it,” he said over his shoulder, “but you’ll have to climb the tower to use the phone. I keep thinking I’ll get one of those cellular things, but I forget…watch your step. It’s better than a ladder, but only just.”

He was right. I grasped the stout railings and began to climb the steep, long staircase behind him, feeling dizzily that I was climbing into nothing. After a moment or so I lost sight of his legs and feet in the fog. Behind me I could hear the scratch of Curtis’s toenails on the weathered wood, and his panting. Even with a landing, the climb seemed endless. I wondered if Curtis often bothered.

Just as I was beginning to tire, my head and shoulders broke through the fog and I gasped. We were only a step or two from the top of the tower, and as far as I could see on every side, the fog rolled away in billows and waves, a silent silver-white sea, pricked with the ghostly tops of the redwoods. The sunlight here was fresh and strong and struck such light off the fog that I slitted my eyes involuntarily against it. It was spectacular. We were literally bathed in strange, radiant, sun-and-fog light, and the air was many degrees warmer than on the ground and smelled of pine with the sun on it.

I followed him into the single small, square room and Curtis heaved himself in behind me and flopped gratefully on the floor. The room was perhaps fifteen by fifteen feet, and all its walls were windows. A skylight opened the flat roof to the sky, and the whole thing seemed to sway slightly with the unseen, unceasing wind. It was strange to hear the voice of the wind coming from below us, but on this ridgetop there were few of the huge redwoods, and the other trees did not reach us. The tower sat in a clearing, and I remembered that its original use was that of a fire tower. I thought that from here, when the fog had lifted, you could see a fire a hundred miles away in any direction. Now we saw only the endless floor of fog and the tops of the redwoods, rising and falling on their ridges until they met the hidden sea.

I stood looking, turning around in a circle.

“I think I might never leave it,” I said.

“I don’t, much,” he said. “So you like it?”

“Yes. Well…I don’t know. I live in the woods at home, but they’re so much tamer. Lower, and more open. I live on a river bank, but it’s a gentle river. I don’t know.…I’m so used to having hidey holes and little nooks and crannies around me, places you can go and feel snug and hidden; safe places. Up here you couldn’t hide from anything, ever. It’s beautiful, but I don’t know if I’d ever get used to it.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “When I first came up here I was like a cat trying to make a home on a roof. I couldn’t settle down and get comfortable. I put up curtains to shut everything out, and built the deck down there just so I could get down on ground level once in a while. I spent a lot of time in bed with the covers pulled up over my head. It was winter then; I thought I’d made an awful mistake. But by the time spring came I couldn’t stand walls around me anymore, and got antsy when I was shut up in rooms, and so I took down the curtains and put in the skylight. It gets to you. You get so you can’t live with anything between you and the wildness.”

He walked over to a tile counter where a coffeemaker stood, next to a small microwave oven and a neat little convection oven. There was a miniature sink, too, and a tiny refrigerator sat underneath the counter. It all occupied only one of the walls, a model of compactness and planning. But it was wildly, baroquely messy. On the other walls were waist-high wooden counters with bookshelves under them or drawers. An open space with a chair in it made a desk. A double bed was placed at an angle to one corner, piled high with colored pillows and draped with what looked to be a beautiful old Chief Joseph blanket. A tall, skinny armoire stood opposite it in the other corner. A big, black cast iron stove occupied the middle of the room, vented out the skylight, and there were big floor pillows and a wooden box of firewood ranged around it. The bed looked directly at the glass door where the flames would dance, and I thought that even on the coldest winter night, with the Pacific gales howling and sleet and snow spitting against the windows and the skylight, that bed and indeed this whole room must be as warm as a small animal’s burrow. The room was, somehow, an enchantment. It had the charm of a child’s playhouse, but the particular and intimate air of someone’s real home, an adult one. There were books literally everywhere, and in front of one of the windows a big telescope was drawn up.

“What a perfect aerie,” I said, taking a cup of coffee from him. I sat down on the edge of his bed. There was nowhere else to sit. He had sunk cross-legged to one of the big pillows, and Curtis lay sprawled on the other, giving occasional little groans of contentment. He promptly went to sleep.

The coffee was hot and strong. I sipped it gratefully. The stove was not lit, and the room still held the chill of the thin air and the fog.

“I could light a fire,” T.C. said. “But I figured you’d want to call and then get on the road over to Palo Alto. By the time things warmed up we’d be gone again. Wrap that blanket around you. I’ll hand the phone over to you; one advantage of this place is that the phone reaches anywhere in it. I’ll go on back down if you need privacy.”

“No. I don’t,” I said, though I would have liked it. If Pom were in the same mood as yesterday, it would not be an easy call.

He brought me the phone and turned away to the counter where the sink was, clattering ostentatiously as he cleared away some of the mess. I dialed Pom’s office. Only when Amy answered in her DAR chirrup did I realize how much I had hoped the chatty temp would be the one to answer. I sighed, not caring if Amy heard it.

“Well, well, Merritt,” Amy said. “Where are we today? Hollywood? Disneyland?”

They were, I thought in annoyance, the only places Amy knew in California.

“We’re up in redwood country,” I said. “It’s very beautiful. We’re in a lodge owned by a friend of Laura’s. Ah…is Pom in?”

“I’m afraid not. Doctor has been out of the office for the past day or two. There’s a visiting team of UN doctors he’s been showing around; from Zaire or somewhere. The CDC asked him to do it. It’s quite an honor. They’re staying over the weekend so he’ll probably be tied up. I’ll be glad to take a message, though.”

I’ll just bet you will, I thought.

“Just tell him the lodge where we’re staying is in the Big Basin State Park below San Francisco. It’s about thirty minutes from Palo Alto, I think, in the Santa Cruz mountains. If he needs to reach us he can call this number. It’s the caretaker’s phone. There’s not a phone in the lodge, but we’ll get the message. We should be home in a few days. I’ll know for sure in a day or two, and I’ll call him.”

I read her out the number and heard the scratching of her pen as she wrote it down.

“You’d probably better call me,” she said creamily. “Doctor is entertaining the team in the evenings. One of them used to work here; do you remember that stunning Jamaican doctor we had for a year or two a while back? She’s the team chief. We were all glad to see her again. Everyone thought the world of her.”

“I remember,” I said. My heart began to pound. “How nice for you all. Well, if you’ll tell Pom—”

“Oh, I will. Don’t you worry about Doctor. We’ve got things well in hand now. He’s feeling much better.”

I hope you come down with jungle rot, I wanted to tell her, but instead I hung up smartly. I had not, I realized, asked about Mommee, and had a crazy mental image of her presiding over a Mad Hatter’s tea party for the beloved black doctor and her team. I sat staring at the phone for a moment, and then turned to T. C. Bridgewater with a tight smile. He had his back to me, splashing in the sink.

“All set,” I said brightly.

He turned, studying me for a moment.

“Everything okay?” he said.

“Just fine.”

“Then why don’t you go on back down and get whatever you need and I’ll come collect you and your daughter in about half an hour. We can pick up anything else you need in Palo Alto and maybe have some lunch. The fog will be burned off by noon. It should be a good day; we’ve had a long string of them. You’re lucky. Usually there’s nonstop fog this time of year.”

“Fog’s pretty much all I’ve seen since we got here.”

“This is nothing. Morning stuff. I’ve never seen spring weather like we’ve been having, not this warm and dry. It’s been a strange spring all over.”

I remembered the maverick climatologist who had stirred up all the earthquake madness. I had not heard a radio or seen a TV or newspaper in days; I wondered if the media was still full of him. Uneasiness stirred in my stomach like a little snake.

“Have you been hearing all the earthquake talk?” I asked. “That guy who’s predicting the big one? Most people I talk to pooh-pooh it, but you have to wonder.…Wasn’t that bad one a few years ago that collapsed the freeway bridge in San Francisco around here somewhere?”

“Loma Prieta,” he said. “Yeah. Not too far. The epicenter was in a place called the Forest of Nicene Marks, about twelve miles from here. But the conventional wisdom says that the seismic gap up here was filled by that one and there won’t be another in these parts for a long, long time.”

Something in his voice made me look sharply at him.

“Is that what you think?”

“No. But then I’m a long way from being a real earthquake scientist. I’m more an obsessed dilettante. The big guys all say you’re probably safer up here than you would be anywhere else in California.”

“Somehow I don’t think you believe that, either.”

“Well, I do believe you’re safe for the length of time you’ll be here. Caleb said just a few days, didn’t he? There’s no indication anything’s that near blowing.”

“You study earthquakes, don’t you?”

“Well, I do, but I’m an amateur and my equipment’s not very sophisticated. Some of it I made myself. All I’ve got is a theory and some back-of-the-neck feelings. No seismologist worth his salt would give me the time of day. Really, don’t worry about earthquakes. If I thought you all were in immediate danger I’d get you out of here.”

“Then I won’t,” I said. “Thanks for the coffee and the phone. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

He walked me to the door, and when he opened it the fog swirled in. It was still as thick as whipped cream.

“I’m going to send Curtis back with you,” he said. “He knows the way as well as I do. He’s good company and a good guard dog. When you get there, just send him home. Say, ‘Curtis, go home. Carpe diem.’ He’ll come straight home. But you have to say ‘carpe diem.’”

“What is this ‘carpe diem’ business?” I said, smiling at Curtis, who thumped his feathery tail on the floor. He was mostly Lab, I thought, a big, chunky brown dog with a thick coat that curled a little in the dampness, and sweet yellow-brown eyes. He seemed to smile at me.

“I taught him that as a kind of code,” T.C. said. “He’s such a big old pussycat that I was afraid he’d go off with literally anybody who whistled for him, so I taught him never to obey anybody unless they said ‘carpe diem’ to him. He’ll obey me without it, but I’m the only one.”

“But why ‘carpe diem’? Is he a fan of Horace’s?”

“It’s kind of my slogan. A statement of philosophy, I guess. Forget the past; let tomorrow happen. Seize the day.”

“Not a bad philosophy.”

“It’s the only way to live. Okay, you try it. Say, ‘Curtis, come. Carpe diem.’”

“Curtis, come. Carpe diem,” I said obediently, feeling silly. But the big dog got up lazily and padded over to me and stood beside me, looking up expectantly. I gave the silky ears a tickle and he grinned, his red tongue lolling.

“You’re in business,” T.C. said, and I went out into the fog, the dog padding beside me. All the way down the white-shrouded path he stayed just at my knee, bumping me softly when I strayed close to the verge, panting slightly as if he were breathing with me, telling me, “I am here and it’s all right.” It was ridiculously comforting, like having a trusted person with you in an unknown place.

“Curtis, you are A-okay in my book,” I said, when he had delivered me to the back door of the lodge.

Glynn was waiting in the kitchen and saw him, and came running out with her arms outstretched.

“Is it Curtis?” she cried in rapture. “It must be Curtis! Oh, you wonderful, wonky old guy! Hello, Curtis! Oh, good boy!”

Curtis gave a soft woof of happiness and started toward her, but then sat down and looked anxiously up at me.

“Go ahead, Curtis,” I said. “Carpe diem.”

And he flew into Glynn’s arms as if they were magnetized for large dogs. It was as pure a case of mutual love at first sight as I have ever seen. When I said, presently, “Okay, Curtis, go home now. Home. Carpe diem,” he looked at me so miserably, and whined so softly and plaintively, that I relented.

“Okay, you can stay. Your daddy will think we kidnapped you, but you can stay till he comes to pick us up. Stay, Curtis. Carpe diem.”

He followed Glynn into her bedroom when she went to finish packing. When I looked in on them he was curled up on her bed and she lay beside him, one arm around the great neck. She grinned up at me.

“I even knew what he would feel like in bed,” she said. “He’s just the big old bed-dog I always wanted.”

“Don’t fall hopelessly in love with him; it’ll break your heart when we have to go home,” I said. “We’ll look at Lab puppies when we get back.”

“Really, really?”

“Really, really,” I said recklessly. Mommee could like it or lump it. So could Pom.

Oh, Pom…

The trip to Palo Alto was as carefree as a vacation drive. I suspected, from the delight T.C. Bridgewater took in showing us the giant trees and the strange fauna and flora along the way, that he didn’t leave the tower often, and almost never in the presence of people. He was as excited as we were at the strange, wonderful sights and sounds and smells of the Big Basin, almost like a small boy, and when he was not tour-guiding he was regaling us with legends and stories of the Santa Cruz mountains, and told scurrilous and improbable stories about the old mountain men who had once lived here, along with the very rich men from the cities who had built the great lodges and houses and about their present owners. Glynn, in the backseat with her arm around Curtis, laughed her froggy, infectious belly laugh so often that both T.C. and I were often helpless with laughter along with her. I still don’t remember if his stories were that funny, but I do remember that for the thirty or so minutes that it took us to wind down through the wet green mountains into Palo Alto, we were mostly laughing.

When we reached Marcie’s father’s house, a rambling old yellow Victorian on a tree-shaded street bordering the Stanford golf course, I felt that I had known this drawling, loose-jointed man all my life. Glynn was calling him T.C. and telling him about our stay in Los Angeles, and Arc, and the screen test, and how Marcie and Jessica were going to simply die when they saw her tape. She was just launching into her father’s objections to our odyssey when I turned around and gave her a level look. I did not like to discourage her obvious liking for Caleb Pringle’s hermit, but I did not want her to say anything to him that she would regret later, either. When Glynn’s shyness broke, it was such a rare and apparently comforting phenomenon that she talked nonstop. I had not seen it happen often. Sometimes, afterward, she sat cringing far into the night, embarrassed at her own loquacity. I did not want that to happen with T.C. I wanted her to remember him with the simple, unvarnished liking that I was feeling for him myself. And besides, I was oddly loathe to talk about Pom. He had no place yet in this journey. I wanted, suddenly, to keep it all for myself. Glynn caught my look and flushed and fell silent. But then she saw Marcie and Jess standing on the ornate old porch, already jumping up and down and squealing, and the flush faded, and she was out of the Jeep and running and squealing before T.C. brought it to a stop.

In the seat behind us Curtis whined.

“Sorry, old boy,” T.C. said, “it’s the way they are. Genetic, probably. They just can’t help it. Love you and leave you. She’ll be back. Meanwhile, here’s another pretty lady up here waiting to comfort you. Take your pleasures where you find them, my man.”

I reached over and scratched Curtis’s ears and he broke into the contented panting again. I started to get out of the Jeep and go to meet Marcie’s stepmother, who had come out onto the porch, and then stopped.

“Aren’t you coming?” I said to T.C.

“What on earth for? So those somewhat overexcited young things can go back to Atlanta and tell all their parents that you were consorting with the caretaker just like he was your husband? It ain’t fittin’, ma’am.”

He grinned his sudden white grin at me and I blushed furiously. I realized that I had been treating him like…well, not like the hired caretaker of the estate where I was visiting, who was accommodating me at the bidding of his employer.

I got out of the Jeep and started up the flower-bordered stone walk and looked back at him. He was leaning his black head back on the seat, eyes closed, whistling to himself, but at that moment he opened his eyes and looked squarely at me and lifted an imaginary hat and leered evilly. I went the rest of the way up the path to meet my daughter’s hostess, laughing.

I exchanged polite pleasantries with Marcie’s stepmother, a tanned young woman who looked as if she spent a lot of time on sailboats or tennis courts. I smiled hello to Marcie and Jess, who were wedged into a porch swing with Glynn, listening eagerly as she talked, no doubt, of Arc and the screen test. And then it was time to go. I felt a sudden sharp wrench at the prospect of leaving my daughter. The fact that I would now be alone in the huge, silent old woods, in the strange, rambling house of a man I scarcely knew, without a link to any world I knew except a telephone in a fairy-tale tower occupied by a skinny Paul Bunyan of a man I did not know at all, suddenly dawned on me. I had looked forward to unlimited time and silence and solitude, but now they seemed endless, engulfing, unfriendly. I could not imagine what I would do in all that empty space for all those empty hours. I glanced back at T.C. Bridgewater, suddenly as shy and wary of his presence as if I had come upon him in a dark back street in the city. I looked at him, suddenly, with city eyes. Tall, black-bearded and browed, dark-eyed, dark-skinned—a dark man who walked more easily in the wild than on pavement, a slow-talking, Indian-faced man whose soft speech hid who knew what? A man said by others to be eccentric, who said of himself that he was obsessed. I did not know this man at all. Not at all.

As if she had caught my feeling, Glynn came over to me and hugged me suddenly and fiercely. She walked me to the Jeep, her arm still around my waist.

“Tell Dad all about everything,” she said loudly. “I know you’ll be talking to him every day. I’ll bet he’ll call tonight. Tell him about the trees and the mountains and Curtis and…everything. Tell him maybe I’ll call him in a day or two. Will you tell him?”

“I’ll tell him,” I said, hugging her and feeling the edge of her bones, that were perhaps just a shade less sharp than they had been.

We drove away in silence and bounced over old cobbles toward the waterfront and an outdoor restaurant T.C. knew. He looked over at me and grinned, and said, “I think I’ve just been warned to keep my distance or her daddy will beat me up.”

“What a silly thing to say; not at all,” I said prissily, heard myself, and smiled unwillingly.

“Maybe a little,” I said. “She’s never seen me around any man but her father for any length of time. I think it never occurred to her that I would be, you know, up there alone with you, until this minute. That unsubtle little message was for me, not for you.”

“I wouldn’t think you were in the habit of making eyes at strange men,” he said.

“Well, of course I’m not. I didn’t mean she thought that. I just meant…Oh, Lord, I don’t know what I meant and I don’t feel like analyzing it. I’m not about to put the move on you and I don’t imagine for a moment that you will on me. In fact, I plan to leave you strictly alone to pursue your earthquakes. I am going to sleep prodigiously, and read enormously, and eat disgracefully, and by the time I have filled my quota of all three Laura will be back and we’ll be gone.”

“And I’ll be sorry,” he said equably. “You’re good company, you and Glynn, and I’ve enjoyed this morning with both of you. And Curtis is as lovesick as a puppy. Like I said, conquer and run. You’re all alike. Did your sister say when she’d be back, by the way?”

“No. She said she’d let me know. I don’t imagine it will be long—”

“I don’t think I’d count on that.”

I looked at him.

“The tone speaks louder than the words,” I said. “You want to tell me what you meant by that?”

“Nothing unkind. Really. I just…I’ve seen more than a few other pretty women leave that lodge like bats out of torment early in the mornings. Mostly they don’t come back. Your sister is a pretty woman and a nice one, and I don’t want you to worry about her, and I expect you do a lot of that. I think you’ve got enough on your plate right now. I want you to be able just to kick back and let the woods do what they do.”

It was an extraordinary little speech to make to a stranger, especially since much of it was uncannily accurate, and it annoyed me both in its familiarity and its accuracy.

“Do you dabble in dysfunctional family therapy too?” I said sourly.

“No, but I’m a member of a family that gives new luster to the word dysfunctional. I know the signs. I’m sorry. I spoke out of turn. Comes from being a hermit. Us hermits are the world’s worst blabbermouths if you give us a chance. Never start a conversation with a hermit or you’ll be stuck for the millennium.”

“No need to apologize. But I’d be interested to know how you knew about us—or thought you did. Us Southern women are raised never to show our true feelings in public.”

“Don’t I know that,” he said. “Well, if you really want to know, I’ll tell you over a Bloody Mary and cold crab. But not until then. I’m too faint with hunger to poke around in psyches, mine or yours.”

“If I show you my psyche, you’ve got to show me yours,” I said, feeling the morning’s easy familiarity slide back. I could, after all, I thought, tell this man anything. I could feel no harm anywhere in him. The very fact that he was a stranger and would remain one was both license and armor. I realized suddenly how very liberating anonymity was. It’s the reason, I thought, that you can talk about things to people on airplanes that you’d never tell another soul at home. There’s no context between you. Anything goes in a vacuum; the very lack of any history between you is like a shot of Demerol.

The restaurant sat hard by the south end of San Francisco Bay, next to the yacht club and marina where, Glynn had said, Marcie’s father had a membership and there was a plethora of cool boys. I tried to imagine my daughter into the scene, splashing in the azure pool that was visible over a jacaranda hedge; climbing aboard one of the sleek, white sailboats bobbing at their moorings; running in a group of wet, seal-brown adolescents toward the snack bar. I could see the Glynn I had found in California, but not the one I had left home seeking. I shook my head. I wasn’t much for Bloody Marys, and the one I was sipping was my second.

It seemed to me to be quite late. We had not gotten a table until after one, and we had drunk and talked, or sat in comfortable silence watching the very white sails on the very blue bay and the green mountains above them, for what felt like a long time. I had a nagging sense of something left undone, somewhere I had to be, but the sun was warm on my head and shoulders and the breeze was cool and soft on my face, and the flowering vines and tubs of blooms on the outdoor deck where we sat were hypnotic, and gradually the feeling faded. The vodka helped too, undoubtedly. By the time the crabs came, huge and rosy and served with lime wedges and a wonderful thyme-flavored sauce, I was almost totally a creature of indolence and sensation. I had shucked off my heavy shirt and sat in Stuart Feinstein’s “Eat Your Breakfast” tee, feeling the sun running in my veins out to the tips of my toes and fingers. I kept wanting to yawn and stretch until all my joints popped. I did a fair amount of it.

T.C. half-sat, half-slouched across from me, his feet in huge, scuffed hiking boots, propped in an empty chair, eating lime wedges. He had taken off his jacket, too, and wore a handsome, heavy Oxford cloth shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway up his brown forearms. It was faded blue and became him. I knew that it was Brooks Brothers; Pom had dozens of them. For some reason that surprised me. A hermit in a Brooks Brothers button-down? He had removed the mended wire-rimmed glasses and replaced them with a pair of dark yellow aviator’s glasses, also bent and mended, that gave his coal-chip eyes the inhuman glitter of a wild animal’s. The white teeth and the black beard and hair, with red highlights glistening now in the sun, added to the impression of a predator. But his hawk’s face was slack with sun and liquor and good humor, and his smile had a singular sweetness, like a sleepy child’s. There was a scattering of tiny black freckles across the bridge of his nose; I had not noticed them before. Celt freckles; Pom had a few of them, too.

“Are you Scottish or Irish?” I asked, breaking the long, sun-humming silence.

“English as far back as the Domesday Book, or so I’m told. With some Yamacraw Indian thrown in, though nobody in my family will admit to it. I think it was one reason nobody made much of a fuss when I took off West. Sooner or later they probably would have paid me to stay away so nobody could see the Yamacraw in my face. Nobody else in the clan has it.”

He said it so mildly that I wondered if he were joking.

“Why do you ask?” he said, leaning his head so far back that it hung over the back of the Adirondack chair, leaving his throat bare. I saw that it was pale. He was not naturally dark, then, but brown with sun and wind. Again like Pom. I was obscurely glad that his eyes were black-brown and not Pom’s spotlight blue.

“My husband has those freckles and he’s a Celt,” I said, and then blushed hotly and was angry with myself for the blush. Lord, what a ninny, I thought fiercely. This is not prom night.

But he only said, “Ah,” and went on lolling his head back, eyes closed against the slanting sun. He looked as boneless and inert as a ventriloquist’s dummy that had been tossed across the chair. I sat up straighter and looked at my watch, shaking my head to clear the sweet lassitude from it. Three forty-five.

“Do you realize that we’ve sat here guzzling vodka and stuffing our faces for almost three hours?” I said.

He snapped his head back down.

“You need to get back?” he said, yawning.

“I thought I’d call Glynn—”

“Why?”

“Well…just to see that she’s settled in. Let her know where I’ve been, in case she’s tried to call—”

“I’ve got an answering machine,” he said. “Pringle won’t have a phone, but he still doesn’t want to miss the four hundred calls he gets every day. He put in the machine before I even moved in. You can call her back if she’s called.”

“It’s just that it’s the first time she’s been away from me for this long in a strange place, besides camp, and she knows everybody there.”

“She’s not going into the heart of darkness, only the heart of Palo Alto. Though they may be one and the same, at that. How old is she, anyway? Sometimes she looks twelve, and others you can see the woman she’s going to be. Some woman, too.”

“She’s sixteen,” I said curtly. Put that way, it did sound ridiculous, my fussing about my daughter.

“So why do you hover? Has she been sick? She’s awfully thin, you know. Well, of course you do. Anorexia, isn’t it?”

“Not anymore,” I said, biting my words off short and staring at him levelly. “She’s gained a good bit since she’s been out here. And yes, we’ve had treatment and therapy for her; the best. It’s working, and I wasn’t aware that I hover. How do you know so much about anorexia, anyway?”

“Oldest daughter had it. It was during the time her mother and I were going through our divorce. A bad time all the way around. She was fourteen then; she didn’t have any other weapons. We should have seen it before we did.”

“How is she now?” I said, my annoyance vanishing. So he had walked that bad road, too. Glynn’s thinness must hurt him to see. He couldn’t know how much better she was.

“She’s dead,” he said, looking down into his glass, where melting ice turned the remnants of the Bloody Mary pink.

“Oh, my God—”

“No, no. Not from the anorexia. I think we’d mostly licked that. That’s what made it so—awful. It was an automobile accident. She was with some kids driving up the Delta to a Christmas party in a town upriver, and they went straight into a semi. It was late, and the kid driving had been drinking. We should have been on top of that, too, but we were so glad she was beginning to date and go to parties that we didn’t…we should have talked to her, of course; we should have called the kid’s parents before they ever left, or something—”

He broke off and sucked the pink water through his straw, making a rattling, blatting sound. His face was shuttered and his eyes were blank. I felt tears spring to my eyes and a lump form in my throat, and reached over and put my hand over his.

“I’m so awfully sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to pry. It must be…terrible.”

“Yes. It is.”

And then he looked up and smiled.

“I’ve got two other kids. A girl named Katie and a boy named Tom. After me. The T.C. is for Thomas Carlyle. Family names, both of them; the old man never read a book in his life. But it used to embarrass me at school, so I started using the initials. Tom’s starting to do it, too. Drives the whole family nuts. They’re good kids. I’ll be seeing them in the fall.”

“I gather they’re back home…where?”

“Greenville, Mississippi. Heart of the Delta. From your accent I’d say you were no stranger to that country.”

“No. Louisiana for me; Baton Rouge. I went to LSU, and then to Atlanta to work, and that’s where I’ve been ever since. I’ve never been out of the South except traveling. I knew you were from the Delta. There’s no other accent quite like it.”

“And no other place. Thank God. Yep, they’re in Greenville with their mama, and likely to stay there till they’re planted in the family plot. Tom’s starting the university at Oxford this fall, and Katie is knee-deep in cotillions and debuts and all that retro stuff we do so well on the Delta. They’re like their mother; they’re absolutely certain-sure of their place, their world. I’m glad for them. They won’t spend their lives wandering around looking for the place they’re meant to be. But I miss them. It’s all I do miss of that territory back there, those kids. I wish I could see them in my place, up there”—and he gestured toward the mountains—“but that’s not going to happen, I don’t think.”

“They don’t like it up there?”

“They don’t know it up there. Annabelle won’t let them come, and they can’t do it on their own until they’re eighteen. She thinks I deserted them for the West, and she doesn’t think the life of a hermit is a proper example. She’s probably right. God knows what they tell their friends I do. I see them back home when I see them. Of course, it’s not really me they see there, so I guess they’ll never really get to know me. But it’s better than nothing.”

“I don’t think I like this Annabelle,” I said.

“Me either, much, now,” he said. “But God, I was so crazy about her when I first met her that I practically went trotting around after her baying like a hound. She was a cheerleader at Ole Miss and I was a professional fraternity boy devoting myself to drinking and screwing and making just good enough grades to stay in school and keep on doing both. Not that you could screw Miss Annabelle Pritchard of Oak Grove Plantation. Her daddy would bite your ass off. So I married her about two hours after her graduation. It was a garden wedding at Oak Grove. I would have married her in a Buddhist ceremony to get in her pants. And I have to say, in those early years she was something. The perfect wife for a good old Delta boy living off his daddy while he decided what to do with himself. It was only when I started to change that she did. Or rather, didn’t. I realize now that I asked a literal impossibility of her, but then we shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place. We just should have screwed till we got it out of our system. She was on the pill from the time she was sixteen, no matter what her daddy thinks.”

“You don’t like your family much.” It was not a question.

He laughed.

“Not worth shit. It’s entirely mutual.”

“Why?”

He raised the black eyebrows.

“For a proper Southern lady you sure do ask a lot of questions.”

“Oh, Lord, that was rude, wasn’t it? I don’t know what got into me. I’d absolutely never do that at home—”

“Precisely. You’re a different person out here. Like I am. Don’t apologize; it’s just what I hoped would happen to you. Well. My family. What to say about my family that Faulkner didn’t say better? My family has always had land and money and pale skin and blond hair and bluer blood than anybody else in the entire Delta, or so the conventional wisdom goes. And not a brain in the lot of them. My grandfather owned a bank in a little town near Greenville called Pennington, and by the time he died he all but owned the town, too. My father took over both in his time, and now my brother, Cleve, is running things. I was supposed to; I was the oldest son. But I hated that damned bank like poison ivy; there was no way anybody was going to get me into the bank or the life that went with it. And tell you the truth, I don’t think my father minded too much; here was this dour black cuckoo in that shiny isinglass family nest; it just wasn’t seemly. Old Cleve looked the part and wanted the bank worse than hell, so when I cut out Daddy just moved him right on in there. It was the right thing to do. Cleve is the best bank president in Pennington, Mississippi, which is to say the only one.”

“So what did you do? How did you get out here?”

“First I thought I wanted to be a newspaperman, so Daddy got me a job on the Greenville paper. He owned a chunk of that. I was a good writer; still am. Freelance writing is how I earn my living. But I hated the reporting part. I had to go interview the families of murder victims, of people who’d drowned in the river or gotten squashed on the highway, or of little kids who’d died of just plain being poor; black families who’d been tornadoed out of their shacks and trailer parks—I couldn’t do it. I quit after a year. Then I worked in the research library at Ole Miss. I liked that pretty much, but by that time the sense that I wasn’t in the right place was starting to eat at me. And things were starting to sour with Annabelle. I brought a couple of black coworkers home to dinner once or twice, and she just couldn’t make the jump. I didn’t like being told who I could have in my house and who I couldn’t, so I started staying away a lot.

“About that time I got offered a job in a big PR firm in Jackson, and she didn’t want to move, and I couldn’t stay around Greenville and Pennington anymore, with my whole family nipping at my heels like hounds at a coon.…I don’t know, I just picked up and moved to Jackson. I thought for a while I could come home on weekends and eventually persuade Annabelle to move, but you’d do better trying to get a penguin to move to the equator. She just couldn’t do it. All her…her self was tied up in the town and the house and her clubs and the kids and her mama and daddy, and mine, and the plantation—and none of mine was. Then I got sent to a convention in Berkeley, and came up to those mountains with a guy I met who was a great hiker, and we got up there into the redwood country, and something in the ground just ran up out of it and through the soles of my feet and up into me, and I knew that that was it; there it was. That was my place, and that would be where I found out who I really was. So I started coming back whenever I could, and after the divorce and my daughter…after that, I just went up there one time and stayed. By that time Daddy had died and left me enough money to live on for a long time if I’m careful. I think he always meant me to clear out of the Delta, because he left property and stock to Cleve and my sister and cash to me. I found a place in Palo Alto and got a job in the Stanford library, just filing and sorting at first, but I didn’t care; it wasn’t a career I wanted. And every weekend I went up into the Santa Cruz’s. And one weekend I found the fire tower and followed the trail down to the lodge, and old Caleb baby was there with a toots, and I knocked on the door and told him I’d look after his property in exchange for living in his fire tower. He asked me about money, and I thought he meant for me to pay rent, so I said I thought I could manage a little bit every month, and he laughed and said that what he’d meant was how much I wanted. I said I didn’t want any, just the tower, and I meant it; I didn’t want to be too beholden to him. So he said sure. I never did like him, but I came as close as I ever did then. And I’ve been here ever since.”

He paused and took a breath and said, “Also, I’m clumsy except on the dance floor; I can do a mean shag. And I’m cranky and bone-lazy and absentminded and I play a good blues guitar and have one of the best collections of blues tapes in the Western world, and I read constantly and unselectively and take in stray animals and play a little tennis every now and then but no golf, and I’m a terrific cook, and I am prone to have a snort more often than not. I have no significant other, but I do, as we say in the South, entertain friends once in a while. I am clean, disloyal, not at all brave, and trustworthy to a limited degree. You, for instance, could trust me with your life, but not many other Southerners can, or do. They’re right not to. I am not, as has been pointed out to me on many occasions by my family and in-laws, a responsible provider. There. Anything else you want to know you’ll have to ask me yourself.”

“Wow,” I said, grinning a little ruefully.

“Didn’t I tell you never to ask a hermit a question?”

“Do you really think of yourself like that? As a hermit?”

He frowned slightly, and the brown forehead furrowed under the flag of black hair that fell over it.

“I think of myself as someone who has to live like this,” he said slowly. “Or maybe it’s that I have to live up there. I’m not quite the same person even down here in town. I’m certainly not the same one back there in the Delta. And it’s that mountain person I need to be, not those others. So…I guess in a way I am a hermit. I don’t know what else you’d call it, and in any case it doesn’t matter.”

“I can sort of see what you mean,” I said. “About not being the same up there. There’s…something…isn’t there?”

“Yeah. I thought you’d see. You’re different up there, too. I’d bet the farm on that. Not the same person as you are back home. It doesn’t mean you’re better or worse, just different. Somebody else. You don’t need or want the same things as that other person.”

I did not reply. How could one person suddenly become two? I hated the thought, and said as much.

“God, how could you not be two people?” he said. “You can be fifty people, or a hundred, if you need to. Lots of people are, but they never know it. They try to bring the person they were in one place to another completely different one, and nothing fits, and they’re restless and unhappy, and likely to be that way all their lives. You’re lucky you felt the difference. You’re at least able to realize that there is one. Whether or not you can be who you need to be up here, is another matter. But I’ll tell you one thing: If you try to force the person you were back there to live up there in those woods for long, you’ll end up hating them and yourself, too. If I went back home I’d turn back into the person that was of that place, and nothing about it would work. Poor Annabelle, it was that person she married. But that person couldn’t stay in the Delta or in his own skin. Just could not. Up there, I’m finally me—but she hates this me. I can’t go back there and she couldn’t come out here with me. I’m making a real hash of this. I think I mean that you need to go with who you are wherever and whenever you find yourself. That’s what I mean by carpe diem. I think.”

“Carpe diem…”

“Yeah. Live like you need to wherever you are, every day. How could you be unhappy then?”

“How could you be with anybody else, living that way?” I said in real distress, wanting to understand.

He shrugged.

“Maybe you can’t. Maybe people like that aren’t meant to live with anybody else. It turned out that I couldn’t. Maybe I could with somebody who was…of my place. But so far, nobody else has been—”

“It sounds like Joseph Campbell,” I said. “You know, follow your bliss? I never really liked that idea. It seems so self-obsessed. But maybe it’s the only honest way to live—”

“Yeah, well, it’s why I don’t talk about this to people,” he said. “It does sound like New Age shit, and it’s as self-absorbed as hell.”

We were both silent for a while. I thought about what he had said. It would not fall into a neat pattern.

In a moment he said, in a different voice, “I’m glad it wasn’t you who’s Pringle’s lady. At first I thought it was.”

“Why on earth would you think that?” I said.

He stared at me.

“Are you kidding? You’re so pretty. You must know you are; I thought when I saw you, ‘Damn, it’s got to be her, and she’s such a classy woman, so much better than his usual ones.’ When your sister said it was her I almost cheered.”

I felt the hot color run up my neck and into my face.

“You must be kidding,” I said. “I wish you wouldn’t. I hate that kind of stuff—”

“I’m not kidding,” he said, and I saw that he was not.

“But…Lord, you saw Laura. I mean, she’s a movie star; she’s always been the beauty, a real one. People stop her on the street and in malls—”

“And here you are, a tall, skinny lady with freckles and a mop of curly hair like Brillo and a smile that could smelt ore. Who on earth would find you pretty? Beautiful? Only about a million people like me, Miz Merritt Fowler. Don’t sell yourself short. You are one terrific-looking woman, and, I think, a nice one, too. So what’s eating you? Your daughter? Your airhead little sister? You got troubles back home? Fighting with your husband, are you?”

“No,” I said coldly. “I am not. Why did you think I was?”

“Heard you on the phone.”

“I don’t remember saying anything that sounded even remotely like I was fighting with my husband. I did not even speak with my husband. That was his secretary—”

“Look, babe, I know the tone. It’s one thing I do know, the tone of a woman’s hurt and anger. I’ll shut up about it; it’s none of my business, of course. But I do know the tone.”

Abruptly the cold anger left me. I looked down at my hands. They were clasped whitely on my empty glass.

“It’s not a fight,” I said. “It’s more of a misunderstanding. They happen in all marriages. I’ll get things straightened out when I get home.”

“You’ll get,” T.C. said. “You’ll do. You’ll fix. Who does all those things for you?”

Incredibly, I began to cry. I sat in the waning sun and cried silently and for a while I could not stop. He wet a napkin in his water glass and mopped my face with it, and in a little while the ridiculous tears slowed and stopped, and I looked blearily up at him. He looked back mildly concerned, but mainly serene and focused and very interested.

“Tell me,” he said, and I did. I sat there, alternately sniffling and hiccuping and laughing, and I told him all of it. It seemed to take a very long time. I left out little, from my mother’s death up to the present, except that I did not mention the beautiful, selfless, saintly black UN doctor who was perhaps moving even now by Pom’s side through places where he and I once went as a unit. Somehow I could not manage that. To name it is to make it real, to make it yours.

When I finished, I said, “Well, that’s it. The world according to Merritt Fowler. I’m sorry I cried. Hearing it out loud, it all sounds pretty trivial. I’ve had a charmed life, really.”

He snorted. “Yeah, right. Just like I had. Listen, Merritt, don’t let all that stuff ruin this for you. This right now, that up there…it’s too good, too special to spoil. Leave that woman back home. Be here now; be all the way here. Let’s see who you turn out to be up there. Let me show you the woods.”

I was suddenly embarrassed and tentative. We had shown each other too much, talked too much. It was too soon.

“Show me the way to go home, instead,” I said lightly. “I’m asleep in this chair. If I don’t get out of here I’ll be comatose.”

He laughed and accepted the change of tone. He paid the check and we went back to the Jeep in the slanting light of late afternoon. We talked lightly, of light things. I was comfortable again, soothed. It had been, after all, I thought, a perfectly wonderful afternoon. On the way home we stopped for groceries. When we were back up in the mountains, just turning off onto Caleb’s road by the mailbox, I said, “Tell me about the earthquakes. I know they’re important to you, but I don’t know how they fit.”

He said nothing, and I looked over at him. His face was closed. He still did not speak, and I said, feeling myself redden again, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”

“No. I’m sorry. I was rude. You’re right; the earthquakes are important. I’ll tell you about them one of these days.”

But he did not speak of them anymore, and I was silent until we reached the fire tower. Some of the shine had gone off the dying day. I realized that I really was tired, terribly so. I wanted only to sleep. Only that.

“Come on up and I’ll see if there are any calls for you,” he said, parking the Jeep. “And I’ll feed you. You don’t want to eat alone on your first night on your own. I make a terrific pasta and mussel thing.”

“Really, T.C., I think I just want to go to bed,” I said, and blushed again, and he grinned. But he did not pick up on it.

“I can’t hold my eyes open,” I added hastily. “It’s been a fast three days.”

“The air up here does it to you,” he said. “Let me just run up and check the machine, and then I’ll drive you on down. Curtis, stay.”

He disappeared from the car and went past the tarp-covered shapes of his mysterious machinery, up the stairs of the tower. I laid my head back against the seat and thought nothing at all. Curtis, asleep on the backseat, groaned in a doggy dream and fell silent again. When T.C. got back into the Jeep I was dozing, too.

At the door of the lodge he stopped, a bag of my groceries in each arm. Twilight was falling fast down here on the ferny earth, but up in the tops of the redwoods day still rode, golden and glorious. The old silence was back.

“I’m sorry about the earthquakes,” he said. “I really was rude. I’m used to sort of guarding all that from people. But you’ll understand about them, I think. Let me take you on a tour of earthquake country tomorrow, and tell you about what I do up here and why I do it, and show you my toys. I haven’t really done that with anybody else. Caleb thinks I’ve got tinker toys or something up there.”

“I’d like that,” I said.

“Besides, you haven’t finished telling me about you. I want to hear the rest tomorrow.”

I smiled. “You know all there is to know about me now,” I said.

He looked at me for what felt like a long time. His face was attentive and serious; it was a considering look.

“No, I don’t,” he said softly. “I don’t know all about you. I don’t know nearly all about you.”

He shifted one bag into the crook of his left arm with the other one and with the right pulled me toward him and kissed me. He had to bend far down, even with my height. It felt, after Pom’s compactness, strange, exotic, like embracing another species. It was not a passionate kiss, but it was a long one, and soft, and seemed to search my mouth for some essence, find there some truth about me. I felt the long bones of my arms and legs turn to water, and the tears start again in my eyes. But it was not me who finally pulled away. Propped against my leg, Curtis groaned happily.

T.C. put my bags down on the door step and looked owlishly at me over the glasses, which had slipped down his nose.

“Put that in your pipe and smoke it, little lady,” he drawled. I watched him wordlessly as he shambled off up the trail, Curtis at his side. At the hairpin bend in the trail he suddenly leaped into the air and clopped his heels together. He looked like a puppet dangling loosely in midair. When he thumped back to earth he did not look back. Curtis barked and gave a desultory prance, and fell to following T.C. sedately again, as if he had never broken stride. Then they were gone around the bend.

I began to laugh helplessly. I took the groceries in, still laughing, and dumped them on the kitchen table, and went into my bedroom and simply fell full-length onto the bed. I did not remember my head hitting the pillow. Deep in the night we had a short fusillade of thunder and lightning, and a hard, straight rain, and it woke me enough to shuck off my clothes and crawl under the covers, and as I did, I began once more to laugh. When I awoke, many hours later, my mouth was as dry and stiff as if I had smiled all night in my sleep.

9

What woke me was a soft scratching noise at the front door. I sensed it more than heard it; all my senses were sharp and open, even before my eyes were. I got up blindly and pulled on the red-and-black checked shirt. It fell to my knees, and made a fairly proper robe. By the time I got to the door my feet were freezing, and I was awake enough to realize that I hoped my caller was T.C.

But it was Curtis who stood there, framed in fog, panting happily and wearing a red bandanna around his neck. I usually hate that when it is done to dogs at home, but up here the bandanna seemed as apt and proper as if a mountain man wore it; a useful object, utilitarian. There was a note rolled and thrust into it.

“Come in, Curtis. Carpe diem,” I said, and he came inside and sat down in front of me and looked up, waiting. I took the note and scratched his ears and he went over and flopped down in front of the cold fireplace. A log fire was laid, and I touched a match to it before I unrolled the note. Curtis sighed in contentment and stretched out full-length before the snapping flames.

“It was the least I could do,” I told him, and read the note.

“I’ll pick you up at nine,” it said. “We’ll be gone most of the day, so bring a warm shirt and a poncho. There’s one hanging behind the kitchen door. Tell Curtis he can stay till I get there. Hope you slept well.”

Instead of a signature he had drawn one of those detestable smiley faces, only this one wore an unmistakable leer. I laughed aloud, a backwash of last night’s glee flooding me.

“There’s absolutely nothing as irresistible as wit,” I told Curtis. “Even if it’s the dumbass kind that puts bandannas on dogs and draws smiley faces. See that you remember that, dog. Stay funny and cute and you’ll have lady dogs falling all over you.”

Curtis thumped his tail without opening his eyes, and I went to dress warmly and get the poncho from behind the kitchen door.

Just past ten we were on the Golden Gate Bridge rattling toward Marin County and Point Reyes, where T.C. wanted to start my earthquake tour. At that time of morning the traffic was light and the fog lay out at the mouth of San Francisco Bay, piled up like whipped cream. Below us the steel-blue water heaved and rolled, and a brisk wind played the bridge like an instrument, making it sway slightly, but palpably. T.C. had unsnapped the plastic side curtains of the Jeep and the wind and cold blue air poured in on us, and I held fast to the bottom of my seat. I had thought the mountains and the red-woods would seem inimical to humans, but somehow it was here, on this consummate iron-red handwork of man, hung between two great and beautiful human habitats, that I felt the animus. I felt light-headed and uneasy, as if, should I let go, the wind would take me and eddy me out and down like a feather into that cold sea, or toss me so high into sunshot nothingness that I would never come back.

“No wonder so many people jump,” I said, shutting my eyes to it for a moment. “It makes you feel like it’s going to get you anyway, so why put it off?”

“I’ve always thought people jump because it’s such a San Francisco kind of thing to do,” T.C. said. “Eccentric and showy and probably very beautiful all the way down. Nothing mundane about it. No dull overdoses. No tacky guns. Laid back, kind of, but effective.”

“Why do I get the feeling you don’t like San Francisco a whole lot?”

“I don’t not like it, exactly,” he said slowly, looking over at the spectacular headlands where Sausalito and, beyond it, Tiburon lay gleaming in the sun like toy villages flung down by a giant’s child. He wore a faded red anorak this morning, mottled with what looked to be bleach spots and ripped on one pocket. The red was wonderful with the dark skin and the beard and hair, I thought; the latter so recently washed that it still had damp comb tracks in it. I even liked the bleach spots and the tear; anything newer or better cared for would have seemed effete. I liked everything about T. C. Bridgewater this morning. Somehow he seemed to own the bridge and the wind and the vast emptiness as surely and comfortably as he owned the old Jeep. I wished suddenly that he would stop the Jeep in the middle of the bridge and kiss me again. The thought was so clear and shapely and so alien to me that I felt myself redden and hastily sought out things about him to dislike.

He’s as self-absorbed as a child, I thought, and if you put him down anywhere else but those mountains he’d be as clumsy and ludicrous as an aborigine in Paris. I can just see him at the Driving Club.

It didn’t work, of course; I could see him at the Driving Club. After all, he had been more surely born to that world than either Pom or I. And the self-absorption fit him like an animal’s unconscious sense of itself.

“Shit,” I said under my breath, and moved closer to the door of the Jeep.

“But?” I said aloud.

“But it just seems…I don’t know. Extraneous. Like a stage set, or a perfect architect’s model. I know people live and work here, and get married and have children and are happy and sad and die and all that, but I can’t seem to picture it. It’s a tinker-toy town.”

“Don’t let Tony Bennett hear you say that.”

“Are you kidding? That poor son of a bitch probably hates San Francisco like he does the IRS. Probably goes back-stage and throws up every time he has to sing that song.”

I laughed and he looked over at me and squeezed my hand and said, “You look nice this morning,” and we bowled off the bridge and into Martin county, my hand tingling.

“It’s probably some of the most gorgeous countryside I’ll ever see,” I said chattily, as he cut over to Highway 1 toward Muir Beach and the Golden Gate Recreational Area. “I wonder why I don’t feel about it like I do the redwoods? You’re right about the city; somehow it doesn’t have much to do with the way I feel about this part of the country. I mean, I’d love to spend some time in it, and I know I’d like a lot of the people, but somehow I just want to get back into the wild stuff.”

I knew that I was babbling. I knew that he knew it. I took a deep breath.

“T.C.,” I said, “I think you’d better kiss me one more time and get it over with so I can stop waiting to see if you’re going to do it. I’m not behaving at all like myself.”

He laughed aloud and drew me to him with one arm and kissed me long and hard, without stopping the Jeep or even swerving it. When he let me go my mouth felt warm and numb, and I could feel my whole body melt into relaxation. The silly, stilted tension went out of the morning. Another sort entirely crept in.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re very welcome,” he said. “I was going to do that, but I thought I’d wait till we were standing on firm ground, so if you slapped me I wouldn’t wreck us. If you like it I could stop now and do it some more—”

“Drive, fool,” I said. “I’m not even going to ask how you can do that at fifty miles an hour and not even swerve.”

“First thing you learn on the Delta. Whatever you’re going to do, you learn to do it in a car, because that’s where we spend half our lives. I didn’t know how to kiss a woman standing still till I got to college.”

“I can imagine it was a considerable handicap,” I said. I did not want to dwell on whom he kissed in college, or how, and so I changed the subject.

“If you’re going to show me earthquake country, shouldn’t you start in San Francisco?” I said. “Laura said there was still a lot of damage down around the marina, and where that bridge collapsed.”

“I will if you really want to see it,” he said. “But I’ve never thought that that stuff really belonged to the earthquake. I mean, it had more to do with people and where and how they build their structure than it did with anything the earthquake did. See, the Loma Prieta hit way up in the Santa Cruzes; only it happened so deep down that there’s nothing much to see up there except some sheared-off redwoods. It’s the deepest earthquake ever recorded in this part of the country. The shock waves traveled out from the epicenter and took out whatever they hit while they were still active. There are three kinds, the compressional waves that make the first big thump when the quake hits; we call them P waves because they’re the primary ones. The second one is the S wave, and it comes in a rolling, side-to-side motion; it’s the secondary wave. It’s called a shear wave, too. The last is the surface wave. It travels slower, along the surface of the earth, and it’s the largest. It finishes up what the first two don’t get. In the Loma Prieta, there wasn’t anything much in the way of human habitation, relatively speaking, until the waves got to Santa Cruz and then San Francisco. If there hadn’t been cities there, nobody much would have noticed the quake. Do you see what I mean? The quake is its own entity. It’s not San Francisco’s quake or L.A.’s. Damage in a city is arbitrary, because if there was no city there wouldn’t be the damage.…I don’t think I’m making much sense. But see, it’s like, the land under the marina is fill. It was literally filled with dirt and stuff to create usable land. Lots of the debris Loma Prieta uncovered turned out to be debris from the big one in 1906. That kind of land is porous and when the waves hit it, it acts just like gelatin. It’s like…we did that, not the quake. The city did itself in, so to speak. A quake is a wild thing, and it’s born in elemental wildness, in the crust of the very earth. What sits on that crust is us, not it. It’s not a popular point of view, as you might imagine. I’ll take you by the worst of it when we come back, if you still want to see it.”

I thought of the awful images from the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, of the fires in the night and the collapsed buildings, like folded accordions, and the terrible flattened bridge. I thought of dry land turning to rolling Jell-O, of the terror that must engender.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think I want to see what a quake can do to a city. But I can see why it’s not a popular point of view. Lord, T.C., you sound like you’re in love with them—the earthquakes. Like you’re rooting for them, somehow.”

He looked briefly at me, and then back at the road and the heaving sea beside it.

“I guess I am,” he said. “I know there’s something in an earthquake that speaks to me like nothing else ever has. Maybe it’s not that I’m in love with them, exactly; it’s just that I need to know what all that is about.”

“And you don’t yet?”

“No. Not yet.”

“You weren’t in the Loma Prieta, then?”

“No, I was back home at my son’s first big-time football game. I missed the Northridge, too. I was up in the mountains when that hit. I’ve never been in one, not a big one.”

We drove in silence for a while, and then I said, “T.C.?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you camped up there waiting to be in an earth-quake?”

“Yeah. I guess that’s about it.”

“And you think that’s where the next big one will be? Even when everybody’s saying that the…what, the seismic gap there was filled by the Loma Prieta?”

“That’s what I think, Merritt.”

“Why?”

He sighed a long, soft sigh, and said, “Because I can feel it coming. I can feel a big quake waiting to happen right through the soles of my feet. I can feel it getting stronger. I felt it the first time I went up there, when I was in Berkeley that time. That quake down in that earth talks to me like a giant that’s been buried alive. I know I’m not wrong about that. What I don’t know is when. Nobody knows that, not with any precision. But I know that it isn’t going to be long.”

I felt the hair prickle along the back of my neck.

“You said you’d get us out before it happened—”

“It’s not going to be that soon. I really would know that. None of my instruments indicate that. Neither do the bottoms of my feet. I’d get you out, Merritt.”

I sat looking at the empty sea and the cliffs. I felt something bleak inside me, like grief, an old, deep, tidal pull. I realized that I had been talking to him, responding to him, as if he made perfect sense. But the clear, cool top part of my mind told me that he didn’t; that what he spoke was not science or even casual knowledge, but obsession. Maybe more than that.

“T.C., I don’t think I can bear it if you turn out to be crazy,” I said in a low voice, meaning it, and he laughed so hard that he had to slow the Jeep.

“What you need more than anything in your life is to make out with a crazy man,” he said, when he finally stopped laughing. “You have not lived until you’ve been loved by a loony. I can promise you that, should you accept the advances I am most certainly going to make before this day is over, you will never forget the experience. I will growl; I will froth; I will snuffle. I will roar. It will ruin you for suits and the Junior League for the rest of your life.”

Once again I laughed, unwillingly but helplessly. T. C. Bridgewater simply delighted me. The laugher was healing. I did not think a truly mad man could be a funny one. If he had an earthquake madness in him, well, I was unlikely to be dis-accommodated by that. The rest of him was as whole and strong and as open as the earth and air of his mountains. That part drew me to it as if he had a powerful magnet deep in the center of him, and I a core of warm iron.

“Growling is okay,” I said. “Froth is definitely out. Snuffling—maybe. Roaring—I don’t know yet. We’ll see.”

His face grew serious in that mild, interested way that it sometimes did.

“Who is this talking?” he said.

“I don’t know her,” I said. “She just followed me out here. Should I keep her?”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah, you should definitely do that,” he said slowly and softly, and the warm ore in my middle gave a leap.

“You’d better tell me some more about earthquakes, and be quick about it,” I said. “Why do y’all have them out here, and we don’t at home?”

“You do have them back home. There’ve been really destructive ones in Charleston and Missouri. There’s an active fault under New York City. There are faults all over the place that we don’t know about and won’t till they blow; Northridge was on a fault nobody knew was there. But California is the meeting place for two of the tectonic plates that make up the crust of the earth. There are seven major ones and some other, smaller ones. The ones that give California all the trouble are the Pacific plate, that’s mainly under the Pacific Ocean, and the North American. That one underlies the earth out here. They kind of slide past each other, with the Pacific going northwest, and the North American vice versa, and where they bump together is the San Andreas Fault. The San Andreas is a transform fault—the plates don’t destroy old material or create new. The places where the boundaries spread apart underwater and let new molten mantle rock rise are called spreading centers, and the big ocean trenches where the cold, dense oceanic plates are forced underneath the continental plates are called subduction centers. Most of the seismic activity in the world occurs within narrow areas along those plate boundaries. There’s a phenomenal amount of activity in a line that runs along the western coast of North and South America, up across the Aleutian Islands, and down through the waters off Asia. It fetches up off New Zealand. It’s called the Ring of Fire, because there’s so much earthquake and volcano activity going on. There’s nothing near to that off the East Coast. The nearest subduction center is way, way out to sea. Y’all just have to make do with hurricanes and tornadoes.”

“So there’s earthquake activity going on all the time, but maybe not strong enough to feel it?” I said, hating the thought. It was like suddenly finding that you had been standing on a nest of squirming small snakes all along, but never noticed until a big one bit you.

“About ten thousand a day, in California alone,” he said proudly. “Only the most sophisticated equipment can pick up most of them. You start feeling them about two point seven or three. They’re using a network of receivers now, for instance, that pick up signals from the army’s Global Positioning System satellites and tell you where and how much the earth is moving within a fraction of an inch—and it’s moving all the time. Over the ages most of the earth has moved around dramatically. You ought to read John McPhee’s Assembling California, to see how California, and the whole earth for that matter, is made up of chunks of rock that were carried from somewhere else by earthquake action. That’s over a period of millions of years, of course. Or read Kenneth Brown’s Cycles of Rock and Water at the Pacific Edge. Fascinating; really fascinating. Somewhere in one of them is the statement that the top of Mount Everest is made from marine sandstone. That just plain fries the roots of my hair.”

I looked at him. His face was rapt and his eyes were farfocused, as if they could actually see the gargantuan, millennial creep of the earth; see the ancient spasms that flung up coastal mountains and corrugated deserts, that moved future continents and countries around like building blocks. Through his dark, blind eyes I too could see, for just a moment, that vast old cyclopean tumbling. It made my breath shallow and thin and the space around my heart cold.

“It makes me feel like throwing up,” I said. “If I thought about it I’d be so dizzy I couldn’t walk upright on the earth again.”

“Ah, well,” he said. “You don’t have to love it. You just have to see why I do. That’s important to me, that you see that.”

“I see that it’s important to you,” I said. “You’ll just have to make do with that. Have you ever thought about teaching this stuff, or becoming a seismologist or a geologist or something? With your…passion for it, I think you’d make a wonderful teacher—”

“I don’t want to do anything about earthquakes,” he said. “I don’t want to teach people about them. I just want to know about them.”

“But when you do that—when you know—what then? What will you have?”

We were heading up the Olema Valley. On either side of us sharp-boned mountains rose abruptly, a thousand feet or more. The fog that had held off so far was drifting along the road, and he slowed the Jeep to accommodate it.

“What I’ll have,” he said, turning again to look at it, “is a real sense of them, and if I’m lucky, a sense of where I fit in with them. A context. If I’m very, very lucky, maybe I’ll know what it is they’re saying to me. That would be worth anything. Why does there have to be a ‘then what’? There’s not going to be an end to the knowing about them; there’s no ‘then what’ on the horizon, because there’s not going to be a then, in the sense that I ever know enough about them. Does that disappoint you?”

“No, it doesn’t. Knowledge for its own sake—it’s a very pure concept. I think we all get too caught up in doing instead of just being, sometimes,” I said, but deep down a small part of me was disappointed, and I knew that he knew it. I suppose I thought that once he satisfied his passion for them, he would take his knowledge of earthquakes and do something with it to benefit mankind. Predict, warn, mitigate…

I looked at him helplessly.

“It’s just that all I’ve ever known about, really, is helping,” I said. “I don’t know how to let go and just…be. I’m sorry. I know that disappoints you. I think I could learn.…”

He reached over and pushed the blown hair off my face, very gently.

“I think you can, too. That’s why we’re up here. You don’t disappoint me, Merritt. There’s a joy to being with you for me. Watching you up here is like watching a kid learn to play for the first time in its life. One thing we’re going to teach you is how to play. I don’t give a shit whether you learn to love earthquakes or not. It’s enough that I do.”

Tears stung my eyes. When had play left my life? When Crisscross and I had stopped our weekend jaunts together? When Glynn had grown past babyhood?

When had Pom and I stopped playing? Had we ever really done it?

“I play,” I said, trying for lightness. “I swim with the Rattus ratti, remember?”

“Oh, Merritt,” he said.

“Don’t,” I said fiercely, blinking hard. “Don’t or I’ll cry, and I just goddamned well do not want to do that.”

“Well, we’ll start with Forrest, maybe,” he said, accommodating me. “Y’all can gambol in the glades, play a little Nerf ball, maybe take a shower together. See what happens. Work right on up from there to some serious playing.”

“Speaking of Forrest, where has he been?” I said. “I miss his bright eyes and sweet smile.”

“Forrest takes off sometimes,” T.C. said. “I don’t know if there’s a great sadness in him, or if he’s got a lady friend somewhere, or what. I used to think it meant an earthquake was on the way. Animals, especially cats and rats, will leave an area where one is about to hit, or so the saying goes. But he’s done it the whole time he’s been with me, and it hasn’t meant a quake yet. I thought when I found him he’d make a great canary—you know, an early warning system—but he’s a dud at that.”

“Where did you find him?”

“Curtis brought him to me, in his mouth, like he was holding an egg,” he said. “Something killed his mama, apparently; he was just getting hair on him. Not the most attractive time in a rat’s life. But Curtis was so proud of him that I just had to take him in. I fed him with an eyedropper and made him a nest out of my old socks. I think it was my socks he bonded with. Curtis has been jealous ever since. I named him Forrest because he looked so much like my father when he started to go bald. His name was Bedford Forrest, after…well, you know. Curtis I named after my cousin in Jackson, because he never could resist a good-looking woman, and neither can my Curtis. I like to keep the names in the family.”

“Why did you leave Curtis at home?”

“Curtis once came damned close to taking a header off Point Reyes after a cormorant, and that’s a four-hundred-foot drop straight into the Pacific. I had to tackle him and practically sit on him. He knows he’s supposed to retrieve, but he doesn’t have an ounce of sense about where to do it. Just like Cousin Curtis again. Look at those ridges over there, Merritt. See how they knock the whole landscape off-kilter? That’s from past quakes. They call them shutter ridges. There are creeks here that are less than half a mile apart, but they run in opposite directions. The quakes have done that, too. And there are about fifty small ponds in this valley that have absolutely no reason to be up here because of the low rainfall, but here they are. They sit on the tops of those ridges; you can see one or two from here. Sag ponds. All from the fault.”

“Are we close to the fault here?”

“I’ll show you in about five minutes,” T.C. said.

A few minutes later he stopped the Jeep. Just ahead of us in the road was a strip of darker asphalt, as if workmen had patched the place where a pipe of some sort had gone through it. T.C. swung down and held out a hand to me, and I scrambled out behind him. The wind had picked up here and was blowing sheets of fog out toward Tomales Bay.

“Step over the patch with one foot,” T.C. said, and I did. “No, leave the other one where it is. Now. You’re straddling the top of the San Andreas fault. Half of you is on the North American continent, and the other half is off the continent entirely, on the Pacific plate.”

Instinctively I pulled my errant foot back onto the continent. He laughed. “You’re right to be careful,” he said. “In a few million years that half of you could be in Alaska, and the other half would still be here.”

“It’s not much of a fault, is it?” I said. “I guess I expected a huge fissure with smoke pouring out of it or something. But you’d never know it was down there if it weren’t for that patch.”

“I’d know,” he said, studying the earth where, deep below, the great snake slept. “It’s like a monster organ playing down in the earth to me. It always surprises me when nobody else hears it.”

I looked at him nervously.

“Metaphorically speaking, of course,” he said, and took my arm and guided me back to the Jeep.

“The fault hasn’t moved here since the 1906 quake,” T.C. said. “The folks who know think it’s due. Earthquakes sometimes come in pairs, and some of the hoohaws think that Loma Prieta might be the first of a pair up here. Which means, I guess, that the fault right here could go anytime. But I don’t think so.”

“The soles of your feet are telling you it won’t be here?” I said lightly.

“No. They’re not telling me anything. Nothing but the singing I hear everywhere along a fault. It’s in the mountains further south that my feet and the earthquake get together.”

“What does that feel like?” I said seriously. I wanted to know. At that moment I cast my lot with T.C.’s obsession, or whatever it was.

“Like electricity, I guess,” he said. “It runs right up your legs to the middle of you; sometimes it makes your arms and hands weak. It’s like…sex in reverse. If you take my meaning.”

“I take it,” I said, and felt myself redden. This is perfect, just perfect, I thought furiously. I have been with him a little over a day and already I have cried twice and blushed about forty times. The only thing left is to swoon or get the vapors. I’m glad Glynn can’t see me.

The thought of Glynn whipped my face like cold, wind-driven water. I sat up straighter and smoothed my hair with both hands. What in the name of God did I think I was doing? Bouncing along in a Jeep at the edge of the world with a madman who had already announced that he was going to take me to bed and howl like a wolf when he did it; batting my eyes and talking half-dirty to the same madman and loving every minute of it; asking him to kiss me, for God’s sake. I am somebody’s mother. She is not at all far away from me now.

I am somebody’s wife. And he is more than a world away.

“You’re allowed second thoughts about all this, you know,” T.C. said, seeming to catch my thought. “Even third and fourths. All you have to do is call time out and things can stop right here. I would never frighten or hurt you.”

“Then I guess…time-out,” I said. I felt flat and depleted, oddly bereft, and on top of it all was a cold, seeping guilt, a stain. It seemed to reach across the continent from the house by the river to this rutted, alien road in a stunted forest of pine, live oak, and madrone: the very burrow of the snake. I missed the delight and silliness of the morning and the night before like you miss warmth and food, like you miss light in sudden darkness. The shame I felt was a very poor substitute, but it was a strong one.

“What’s the matter?” he said sympathetically. “Flashback? Little blast from the past?”

“How did you know?” I said dully.

“I used to get ’em, too. Right in the middle of something transcendent—and I don’t mean sex; I haven’t really had any of the transcendent kind out here—I’d feel this cold, wet tentacle reaching out from home, reminding me that I was a sorry, self-indulgent hound who had run off and left his responsibilities and didn’t deserve to feel so damned good. Mostly it happened out of the redwoods. What we need to do is get you back up there.”

“No, I want to see all this,” I said dutifully, though I didn’t. I just wanted to snatch up my daughter and my sister and get on a plane home, where, even if things weren’t so great, they were my things. Total unfamiliarity is only exhilarating for so long. After that it becomes like a dreadful amnesia of all the senses.

I looked over at T.C. He gave me back a half-smile, waiting.

“So how did you handle it?” I said, for obviously he had settled the flashback problem long before.

“Decided I didn’t want to be a sorry, guilty hound any longer. I wanted to be the new guy, the one who felt fresh joy and aliveness every morning, who went to sleep smiling, hardly able to wait for the next day. I wasn’t going back, anyway; I knew that. Why keep the old sad sack around? It’s like any policy; it gets very real after you practice it for a while.”

“Carpe diem, huh?”

“Yeah. I wasn’t kidding when I said it was the only valid way to live. For me, anyway. Probably for you, too, if the last day or two have been any example. You’ve bloomed like a flower. You know that’s true.”

“And while I’ve been blooming like a flower my husband has been back home working his fanny off for the sick and the poor, and my daughter’s been seduced by a Jacuzzi-brained film director to do a porno flick—”

“Would any of that have changed if you’d sat around up here racked with guilt and hating the redwoods? How would it have changed? Look, Merritt, the lady you are back home is the one who deals with that stuff, and better than anybody involved deserves, as far as I’m concerned. The one who’s out here…she’s the one I’m getting to know and coming to care about a whole, whole lot. That was then, as the kids put it so inelegantly. This is now. This is here. The Merritt Fowler I kissed last night and hope to kiss again very soon is not the one who plays altar to her husband’s saint and puts diapers on his mother and worries herself sick about an anorectic teenager. The one I kissed last night and hope to kiss again soon loves my woods and my dog and looks like a gypsy and laughs like a loon and eats like a longshoreman, and kisses me back like it feels fantastic. That’s not to say the first one isn’t valuable. It’s just that the second one is so much more—complete. I think. Am I wrong?”

“No…”

“Then stop worrying about it. Enjoy the day and the Point and whatever you feel like enjoying. If it’s not me, that’s okay. The time-out still stands till you call it off.”

The cold tentacle from home let go its grip abruptly and well-being flooded back. I did not have to take this any further than I wanted to. He was right. There was an enormous lot to savor about this day, to taste and explore and wriggle my toes in. It did not have to include touching him again unless I wanted to. I did not know yet whether I did or not. If I did…well, there was a lot of day left.

“Next thing I know you’ll be handing me an apple and telling me to take a bite; what could it hurt?” I said.

“No. Next thing you know you’ll be standing at the edge of the earth looking off it and, if I’m not wrong, seeing something you’ll never forget. And the next thing after that is lunch. I brought it with me. I know just the place for it.”

“And…after that?”

I could not seem to stop flirting with him. Was that the name for it? Whatever you called it, it was something that came from a part of me I had not known I had. I could not recall flirting with anyone in my life. Pom and I had been beyond that from the beginning, beyond the giddiness of discovery and into the urgent business of assuaging need almost before we knew each other. I wondered suddenly if I had ever known much more than the feel of his body and the shape of his need. I wondered if he had known more of me than the shape of my body and my ability to fill his gaps.

But it has sustained us, I said to myself. Many, many marriages have run on thinner fuel than that. It has fulfilled us. It has been what we both needed.

But not anymore.

The thought was as clear as if someone had spoken it aloud to me. And I knew it was true. If I went on with this day as it had started out, if I went on with this man, then an entirely different sustenance would be required. Forever after I would need other things.

Then find them. Go home and renegotiate. Redefine. Or simply stay here, the voice said. Isn’t that what’s at the bottom of all this? The thought that you might just stay? Or the thought that you might not?

We had been walking as I had been listening to the voice. Now we were back at the Jeep. T.C. opened my door and handed me up into the front seat.

“Anything after lunch is then instead of now and will be dealt with when we come to it,” he said. “And you’ll call the shots. Are you flirting with me, Miss Scarlett?”

And again I laughed, because he had so accurately read me.

“Why Captain Butler,” I drawled, “I do believe that I am.”

We drove out of the forest and onto a vast, undulating prairie. Yellow, red, and purple wildflowers blew in the steadily increasing wind like the pennants of miniature armies. The wind increased, gusting so that it rocked the Jeep and moaned around the plastic side curtains. Soon we parked and headed down a cypress-bordered footpath. The fog flew before us, revealing wind-battered dairies and huddling herds and not much else. Near the tip of the cape the wind was so strong that we struggled to walk against it. I would have fallen before it if T.C. had not kept an arm around me. the fresh, cold air was heavy with droplets, whether from the vanishing fog or spray I did not know. But I tasted salt and knew that they were born of the sea. When we broke through the cypress windbreak that guarded the path out to the tip of the cape, it was to meet the sun as it finally vanquished the fog and lit what looked like the entire western sea to sparkling foil blue. I felt the breath go out of my lungs in a gasp.

There was virtually no limit to the tossing water, or the sky that swept down to meet it, or the rushing blue air around it, or the sun riding overhead. There was land behind us and beneath our feet, but everywhere else we were drowned in a world of water and space. Steps led tortuously down to a lighthouse that rode a ledge below us, seeming to be borne up by the hollow boom of the surf far, far below. Gulls and cormorants wheeled and banked in the thermals over the water, and far down the cliff two specks soared.

“Eagles,” T.C. said. “There’s a nest not far down the coast, in a dead tree. I don’t know why those guys always hang out over open water here; they couldn’t dive into that stuff down there, and there are no fish in heavy surf, anyway. I’ve always thought they were playing. There are about a million nesting seabirds in the cliffs, too, and a colony of sea lions down there. When the wind’s right you can hear all of it; it’s bedlam. Like a tenement. Want to walk down to the lighthouse?”

“No,” I said, leaning back against him, letting the wind pound me, letting it pour past my face like a tide. “No. I want to stay here. Oh, T.C. It’s a glorious place, isn’t it? But somehow you feel you shouldn’t make yourself at home here. It’s like a church; it’s not a place to just hang out in.”

“You couldn’t, anyway,” he said. “There’s usually fog, and the wind today is as mild as I’ve felt it. A bad one would blow you over, literally. Look, Merritt. Straight out, about three hundred yards offshore. See those black shapes? There are four of them, right there where I’m pointing.”

I could not see anything in the dazzle of light off the water, and then I could. As I found the shapes and tracked them, twin spouts rose from the sea.

“Whales!” I cried. “Oh, my God, T.C.! They are, aren’t they? I’ve never seen them.”

I felt him nod. His chin rested on the top of my head; he stood behind me, literally holding me up against the wind. I did not want to move.

“Grays. They’re on their way back to the Bering Sea way up north, from Baja. They go down there every winter to breed and calve in the lagoons, where it’s shallow and warm. The entire population of the Pacific Gray whales does it, sixteen thousand strong. They start heading back in the spring; the whole trip is six thousand miles, and will take them three months. For some reason there’s always four or six off Point Reyes into June; I’ve seen them several times before. Usually it’s mothers with calves, like those out there. See how there are two large ones and two small? The mothers only have one calf at a time, and they suckle them like humans do. They hug the shore all the way down and back, to avoid the killer whales, and the mothers will close ranks around the calves if they spot a pod of killers, like a wagon train circling. I’ve seen them do it. It makes you want to cry, somehow. Brave, classy broads, aren’t they?”

I stood in the circle of T.C.’s arms in the tearing wind and thought about the great mothers and their calves, braving all this, braving everything, to take their children home.…

The wind dried tears on my face as they came, and I did not think that he saw them. But his arms tightened around me, and he said into my hair, “I thought you’d like them.”

“So brave,” I whispered. “Such good mothers. Never losing sight of what’s important. They make me feel ashamed of the kind of mother I’ve been—”

“Yeah, well, they’re a lot less complicated than us, remember that. They don’t have the hard choices to make. Classy broads, but strictly limited. Don’t worry. You’ve got nothing to apologize for in the mothering department. I should have known they’d make you cry, though.”

“It doesn’t take much, does it?” I said. “I always seem to be weeping up here. I don’t cry much back home.”

“I’m not criticizing you. I’d hate it if you didn’t. The first time I saw them I stood out here by myself and bawled like a baby.”

Suddenly I wanted to be done with wind and tumult and water and the dangers that swam in all of them. I wanted quiet, and the sun falling in shafts through the great trees as in a cathedral, and the smell of sun-warmed pine and madrone. I wanted to hear nothing but the breath of the great silence.

“I want to go home,” I said. “Can we eat lunch there as well as where you’d planned?”

“I’d planned it for around there,” T.C. said, and we walked back to the Jeep hand in hand, saying nothing.

We sat locked in our separate thoughts until we were back across the Golden Gate Bridge and through the city and heading back up into the Santa Cruz Mountains. It was a comfortable silence. I steeped in the peace of the warm, sun-filled Jeep after the great shouting wind and cold of Point Reyes, listening to the soft jazz T.C. found on the old radio and, below that, the hum of the big, battered wheels on asphalt. We did not go back down Highway 1; it was as if we had both had our fill of the bellowing sea. Instead, we took 280 down the spine of the mountains, and cut over to Skyline Drive, and entered the domain of the redwoods as gratefully as if we had gained a fortress after a battle. Without meaning to I fell asleep against the window and only woke, neck cramped and mouth tasting of old salt, when I felt the motion of the Jeep stop.

“Are we there?” I said thickly.

“We’re here. Or where I wanted to eat lunch, anyway. You hungry?”

“Starved. How long have I been sleeping?”

“A while. We’re a good bit south of home, in a place called Mount Madonna County Park.”

“What, they gave her her own mountain and park? Not bad for a material girl.”

“I think they meant the other one, the one with the halo,” he said. “Grab the wine and I’ll take the basket. We’re going to walk a little way.”

We climbed into a thinning forest of redwoods and presently came upon a flight of stairs that led up into nowhere. Beyond the last stair I could see the slumped, vine-tangled shape of ruins, and a fallen chimney. A house. Here in this sunny glade among the whispering giants, its bones softened by shrouding ferns and baby evergreens and the wild white heaps of rhododendron and laurel, a house had sheltered someone and then watched them go, and fallen to the wilderness. The little pink flowers I had noticed around the base of the lodge’s redwoods teemed around the steps and at the base of these great trees, and the undergrowth was dense with what T.C. said were elderberry and thimbleberry bushes. It was very quiet; the voice of the silence only murmured. The sun fell in straight, near-palpable shafts. The smell of sun-warmed evergreen was hypnotic. There was a peculiar enchantment about the stairs and the ruins, as if something very old and elemental had made it appear for us, and could make it disappear in an instant if it wished.

“I’d never have left it,” I said, aware that I was nearly whispering. “I wonder who did.”

“Henry Miller,” T.C. said, putting the basket down on the steps and plopping down beside it. “You know, the writer. Or at least, I think he’s the one. It’s a summerhouse or was. I know that he had a place around Big Sur, and a lot of the artists and writers of his time hung out there with him. I’ve always thought this was where he came to get away from all those egos and all that talk.”

I thought of the great minds and names that must have clustered around Miller, and most probably followed him up here into the redwoods. I could almost see candles and Japanese lanterns on a stone terrace, and a great fire of madrone in a stone fireplace, and hear the atonal skittering of music yet unknown in the East, and the tinkle of ice in glasses, and late-day laughter, and voices raised in argument and dalliance far into the cold, still nights.

“I wonder why he left it? I wonder who let it go like this?”

“Who knows? From what I know of writers’ egos, they can’t survive long in a vacuum. He probably went back down to Big Sur where the faithful could worship and adore him.”

“You don’t like Miller?”

“Not especially. I think he really is a dirty writer. Consciously dirty, in a way the other so-called dirty writers never were. D. H. Lawrence was never dirty to me, but the old woman who lay down in the Tottenham Road and pulled up her skirt and masturbated bothers me. It’s like the sound of one hand clapping: self-aggrandizing instead of transcendent.”

“You don’t hold with masturbation either?”

“Au contraire. It’s the opiate of the solitary. I just don’t hold with it in the middle of the road. Me and Mrs. Patrick Campbell.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “I loved the naturalness of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but Tropic of Cancer seemed awfully self-absorbed to me.”

“I should have known you’d go for the lady and the gamekeeper,” T.C. grinned. “Do any similarities to present circumstances present themselves? I’ve been practicing a Northumbrian accent, but so far it has eluded me—”

“Yeah, right,” I said, grinning at him drowsily. The sun and quiet were doing their work and I was powerfully, indolently sleepy as well as hungry. “Nevertheless, I love it that this was Henry Miller’s hidey hole. I like him better for knowing he needed one. Are you going to open that basket or should I just wrest it from you?”

We sat on the sun-warmed steps until the shafts of light leaned to the west and the warmth began to steal out of the air. He had made sandwiches of a delicious, chewy focaccia bread and crab and avocado, and brought grapes and chèvre that he said was made in a valley near the Big Basin. We ate them and drank the cool white wine and presently there was nothing left of any of it. I could barely hold my heavy eyes open.

“Okay. We’ve had lunch and it is now now,” T.C. said. “I await your pleasure.”

He sat opposite me, his long legs sprawled down the stairs, the leaning sun glinting off the mended glasses. He had not touched me since Point Reyes and did not move to do so now. I knew that he would honor my time-out. It made me feel safe and comfortable with him, sun-and food-stunned, boneless and caught fast in this moment. That there was a tight, fine wire of tension between us, somewhere far down, did not bother me. I had time to explore that or not, all the time in the world.

“I have to sleep,” I said. “Later…later I’ll make dinner for you, if you’ll let me; I got some stuff in Palo Alto yesterday, and it doesn’t seem like Laura’s going to come back anytime soon to eat it. Just let me go home and take a nap and then we’ll have a long dinner and then it will be now again, and who knows about that? But I need a bath, and I ought to call Glynn, and I really have got to sleep. Will you come to dinner?”

“I don’t go down there,” he said. “Not much; only when I have to. But I’ll take you up on dinner if you’ll cook it at my place. I’ve got the essentials for that. I’ll play my blues for you, and if you’re really respectful and ask me nicely I’ll show you some of my equipment. Earthquake equipment, I mean; get that look of panic off your face.”

“That was not panic. That was awe and wonderment. Okay for dinner, if you’ll come help me tote the stuff up to your place. It’s the makings for a kind of bouillabaisse.”

“Done,” he said, and reached down to me and pulled me up, and we walked back to the Jeep, brushing the dust and grit of Henry Miller’s staircase off our rumps.

When he came to help me carry the food up, it was just past six, and I had slept hard and showered and felt cool and clean and preternaturally clear-headed. The golden haze of the past twenty-four hours was gone.

“I need to tell you now that I’ve decided that the time-out has got to be permanent,” I said, not looking at him beside me on the path. He said nothing, merely grunted amiably, and shifted the Styrofoam cooler in his arms. Behind us Curtis capered and nosed wetly at the backs of our knees, puppyish in his relief that his person had, after all, come back.

“I mean, I thought about it hard, and it isn’t fair to you or me,” I went on, as if he had argued with me. “And it would be terribly unfair to Glynn, and to Pom, too. He’s done nothing but good for people all his life; I can’t just…lie out here in bed with you while he’s down at the clinic until all hours, or slogging through another boring dinner to try to get some more funds—”

“I can see your point,” T.C. said affably.

“I mean, think about Glynn,” I continued, as if he had not spoken. “She needs a mother, not a…an—”

“Don’t do that, Merritt,” he said rather sharply. “Don’t call yourself names, don’t categorize yourself. You were going to say adulteress, weren’t you? I’m not going to listen to that. Maybe, just maybe Glynn needs to know what a full, whole, real woman is; maybe she needs to know what joy is; but that’s neither here nor there. If you say time-out, time-out it will be. I’m not going to argue with you. It’s enough that you want to. And I know that you do, even if you don’t.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t want to,” I said rather sullenly. “I couldn’t say that after the way I’ve behaved, could I?”

“If you’re determined to be Hester Prynne I can’t stop you,” he said with what sounded close to laughter under his voice. “But you haven’t even earned your A yet, so why don’t you let up on yourself? Speaking of Glynn, she called while you were asleep. I almost forgot.”

“What did she say? Is anything wrong?”

“Absolutely nothing, unless you consider a trip to the mall for a movie and some shopping a calamity. I myself would. Relax. Her friend’s father is taking them. She’s having a great time. She said cool four separate times. There was much giggling and squealing in the background. I gather she isn’t starving; her mouth was definitely full of something.”

“Did she…did she ask about Laura? Or about me, what I was doing?”

“Nope. She was fully as concerned about her elders as any sixteen-year-old on her way to the mall would be. She did, however, ask about Curtis.”

I let my breath out in a long, slow sigh.

“It sounds okay,” I said. “I should be glad she’s having such a good time. But I feel guilty, too; I’ve hardly thought about her in twenty-four hours—”

“For shame. What a terrible mother you are. You’re right to deny yourself the pleasures of the flesh. But I draw the line at mortifying it. If we can’t screw, at least we can eat. Are you a good cook?”

I didn’t answer. I was aware, suddenly, of how prim and presumptuous my little speech had sounded.

“T.C., listen, I’m sorry if I sounded like the church lady,” I said. “I can be awfully stuffy sometimes. It’s just that when I woke up from my nap I needed some…context or something, needed to know where I fit, and where I fit is back there. If you think that means that I don’t want to, you know, do that with you, you’re wrong. I want that very much, but I’m not going to do it. I’ll try not to be all over you for the rest of the night. And yeah, I am a good cook. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

He stopped on the trail and turned, and traced the line of my mouth with his free hand, looking serious and sleepy-eyed. My mouth flamed with heat, and I swallowed hard and turned my head away.

“I understand,” he said softly. “It’s okay. The pull of home is one of the strongest in the world. E.T., phone home. Shit. I almost forgot about this, too. A guy called you this morning before I came to pick you up, but I don’t know who it was. I was downstairs, and the machine got it. The storm last night fried the machine again, so all I could make out was ‘just tell her I called.’”

“What kind of voice? What kind of accent?” I said, more sharply than I meant.

“Couldn’t tell for the static. I’m sorry. I really did forget. You can call when we get up to the tower. It would be your husband, wouldn’t it?”

“Probably. I ought to check in; you know, I told you his mother has been very ill.”

“You don’t have to justify calling your husband to me, baby,” he said gently.

I loved him in that moment, tenderly and without tension.

“Your wife is a damned fool, T.C.,” I said, and this time he did not answer me.

When we reached the tower, he carried the cooler up for me and then whistled to Curtis.

“You need to be left alone now,” he said at the door. “And I need to check the equipment. I think we’ll eat outside; it’s going to be a terrific night. Probably cold later on, with so little wind. The stars will be phenomenal. I’ll make us a fire then, and play you some Earl Hooker. I’ve got one of the very few albums he ever made. Slide guitar; there’s nothing like it. I’ve been trying to learn it, but I can’t even come close. Go on, Merritt, and tend to your business. You’re as jumpy as a flea on a griddle. Pity to waste good bouillabaisse on a nervous woman.”

I smiled at him, my heart hammering with confusion and a kind of gathering anticipation, as though some interior engine had revved up a notch, moving me closer to an inevitable conclusion that I could not name.

“I won’t be long,” I said. “Mommee has probably burnt down the clinic. Fix me a drink and I’ll be right down.”

He and Curtis left, and I approached the telephone and sat down on the edge of his bed, looking at it. I knew, without knowing how, that this call would forever after divide time for me, but I did not know how that might happen. I did not want to pick up the receiver, to dial the house on the river—my house; why could I not think of it as that?—and wait for the fragile lines between it and this tower to solidify, to reshape reality.

“I could just forget it,” I said to myself. “If T.C. had, I’d never know about this call. I don’t strictly have to do this; if it had been an emergency he would have called back.”

But I did have to do it, and so I pulled the phone toward me and looked out over the sweep of trees undulating away toward the sea, their tops going pink in the darkening sky now, and dialed my house, and sat back to wait, stretching my legs out before me on the bed.

The phone rang and rang, with the hollowness that always means no one is at the other end. I looked at my watch; after nine now, back home. Was he at the clinic this late? Out with the African team and their charismatic leader? Despite my nervousness, the burring phone annoyed me; I had been primed for this connection. I started to hang up, and then the phone was lifted, and a voice said, “The Doctor is in,” and laughed.

It was a rich, low voice with, somehow, the dark of loamy earth and the scent of sunny grass in it: a woman’s voice. I knew who it was, even though I knew also that I had never heard her speak when she was at the clinic before, much less seen her. I did not move or breathe. I could not seem to think of any words. I could not hang up, either.

“Terry?” she said finally, “I’m sorry we’re running late. Pom’s in the shower now. You all go on and we’ll meet you in twenty minutes max.”

I said nothing. I still did not breathe.

“Is that you, Ter?” she said, and very slowly and gently I put the receiver back in its cradle. For a long while I simply sat there on T.C. Bridge water’s bed, watching the pink fade from the sky and the silhouettes of the redwoods darken against it, their needles like brush strokes of India ink. I thought how easy it would be simply to crawl under the Chief Joseph blanket and slide into sleep. To sleep, and sleep, and speel.

When I finally stood up, it was just a few minutes before full dark. The tender shaving of a new moon, almost transparent, rode above the trees and a great star bloomed above it, the first I could see. My ears rang and I could feel my pulse beating in my throat and wrists, but there was a tickle of senseless laughter at the corners of my mouth, too, and down deep and low in my stomach, the slow heating of the iron core. I took a deep breath and ran my fingers through my hair. I could see no mirror in the room, but my hair felt wild, and my cheeks, when I laid my cold hands on them, flamed as if with fever. I was suddenly conscious of the vast loneliness around me, of the amplitude of space and the relentless coming on of unbroken night, and felt a flutter of the cold, old fear I had felt on the bridge this morning. Had it really only been this morning? Suddenly I wanted light and sound and the smell and touch of T.C., just those things and nothing else. I ran down the long, steep steps in one swoop, without seeming to touch the railing. My entire body was light with the fear. It was only when I reached the boards of the veranda that I realized that I still clutched the blanket, trailing it after me.

He was drowsing on the sofa, covered with a pile of blankets and a sleeping Curtis, one hand laid against his bearded cheek, one brushing the floor beside him. He had good hands, long and brown and strong. Warm hands. I wanted to feel them on me as I wanted air to breathe. I stood, trying to get my breath, looking at him. He woke as though he felt the look. Curtis lifted his head, too.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I didn’t talk to him. A woman answered. I know who she is. It was probably nothing. I couldn’t say a word; finally I just hung up. I feel like such a fool…”

I slowed and stopped.

He said nothing, only lay propped on one elbow, looking steadily at me.

“I want to rescind the time-out, T.C.,” I said. “Can I do that?”

After a long moment, he said, “This is my cue to tell you that I don’t take advantage of ladies whose husbands have just shit on them. But I can’t do that, because I’ll take you any way I can get you and be grateful for whatever changed your mind. I’m not going to have one iota of regret afterward, but if you think you are, you’d better tell me now.”

“No regrets,” I said. “I mean that, T.C. No regrets.”

“Then,” he said, sitting up and holding out his arms to me, “come here to me. Come here and let me love you. It’s time somebody did it right.”

And, shivering and beginning, without knowing it, to cry, I let the blanket fall to the deck and went into his arms.

Much, much later we lay in his bed upstairs with the stove throwing dancing red shadows around the room and only the incredible silver starlight pouring down on us from the skylight, a cold, old radiance. We had not eaten the bouillabaisse; I had not, after all, cooked it. We had not listened to Earl Hooker. He had not shown me his earthquake equipment.

There is a popular song: “I want a man with a slow hand.” Lying in the crook of his arm, letting my breathing slow, finally, to normal, I thought of that song and felt my body flush all over at the words. A slow hand. Yes. T.C. Bridgewater had, among other things, a slow hand. Our coming together had been as soft and slow and without urgency as the warm, deliberate ripples in a tide pool. Only at the last had the urgency come crashing in, a scalding, red-black tide from the open sea that took me down with it, far, far down, so that I could only hear the sounds I was making, and that he was, as if from the bottom of an ocean. When I swam at last to the surface, he was laughing. I began to laugh, too. In all the times that I had made love with Pom, I could never remember laughing. Pom’s love was like Pom: intense, focused, very, very direct. T.C.’s was utterly different, and like T.C. himself. Indolent. Inventive. Teasing to the point of near madness.

Slow.

I loved it. My whole body glowed with it, as if I had been scrubbed all over inside and out with hot water and warm oil. I laughed in it, cried out in it, opened all of myself to take it and give it back; tasted it on my tongue and breathed it in as deeply as if it had been pure oxygen. As soon as it was ended I begged for more and got it. By the time we had stumbled upstairs into the bed, I was so sated with it that I could not lift my head from his arm.

“Don’t open the skylight,” I said to T.C. when we had managed to crawl under the Chief Joseph blanket. “I’ll go right out it on a breath of cold air.”

“No more?” he said, running the tips of his fingers from my breasts down my stomach and into the warm pit of me.

“Please, sir, can I have some more?” I said, moving slowly against his fingers.

He rolled over me and held himself above me, looking down. His hair fell into his eyes, and his teeth flashed in the black beard. Starlight poured down over his head and shoulders, melted silver ore.

“If you want a repeat performance, you have to assure me you do C.P.R.,” he said.

“I do anything,” I said, reaching up to pull him down. “Anything at all. You cannot conceive of anything I don’t do.”

Deep into the night we lay on our backs and watched the stars through the skylight. They burned with such chill brilliance that they seemed to pulse slowly against the black velvet sky. I have never again seen stars like those. They were, in that moment, fully as alive and sentient as we were.

“What am I looking at?” I said. “What are the stars out here?”

“It’s kind of hard to tell, with just a slice of sky showing. Let’s see. Arcturus, going down. See, the orange one? Vega was the first one you saw at nightfall. Deneb just overhead. It’s almost impossible to tell about the constellations from here. If we were outside you could probably see Perseus over in the northeast, but Pegasus is too far southeast, and the Dipper has gone down by now. You’d see them at home, though. And you’d still see the Summer Triangle. Maybe you can see a little of that here. Back home you could see the rising of the Boat and what they call the wet constellations, water carrier, fishes, and southern fish. They mean fall’s coming. We can’t see them out here yet.”

“Same stars, then. But different sky.”

“Right,” he said drowsily. “You know, I think that the most awful, the loneliest thing in the world, would be to see different stars in a different sky. There’d be nothing of what you knew then. Total alienation, total newness. I wonder if the human spirit could stand it long. The bravest people in the world have always seemed to me the ones who sailed out so far that they were following different stars in a different sky. Like the ancient the Bora Borans did, when they sailed all that hideous long way across the ocean in outriggers, guided by a strange star they knew only from their folklore and the old songs. God, think of it—different stars in a different sky. It makes my blood run cold. This is better; this you can bear. The same stars in a different sky, I mean.”

I turned my face into his neck, hiding there, shutting out the presence of that different sky.

“Be my same stars, T.C.,” I whispered, salt in my eyes and throat. “Be my same stars, because I have most surely come a terrible long way under a different sky.”

“I will,” he said back, into my tangled hair. I felt his tongue touch my eyelids, and knew that he tasted the salt.

“I will, always.”

10

If you have been married a long time to the same person, the most profoundly disorienting thing that can happen to you is to wake beside someone else. No matter what you have done in the night with the new person, no matter how you felt about that, those first moments beside another body are an earthquake in the soul. It’s because sleep is the deepest place we go besides death, I thought, lying immobile beside T.C.’s long, still body in the cold room. You come up out of the deepest place totally vulnerable. In those free-floating moments a familiar body beside you is your only anchor to life. I lay very still, listening to T.C.’s even breathing, afraid to move, afraid of what might flood over me and sweep me away. The deepest I have ever gone and the nearest I have ever been before to lost is in sleep, until last night, I thought. I was that deep and that lost last night. I don’t feel like I can ever get myself back.

I was paralyzed with pure, fresh guilt, the awful and total guilt of the child certain of his irredeemability, and with the loss of anyone who could conceivably be Merritt Fowler of Atlanta, Georgia, wife of Pom, mother of Glynn. I wanted those familiar definitions back so simply and terribly that I scrambled silently out of the disheveled bed and pulled on my scattered clothes and ran on tiptoe to the door, still holding my shoes and socks. I did not look back at T.C., and when Curtis came to the door of the tower room and whined anxiously at me, I whispered through stiff lips, “I can find my own way this morning. Stay Curtis. Carpe diem.” And with that I was out and gone, slipping hastily on the dew-slick steps, my feet and heart numb, racing through the cool, pearly dawn for the lodge and a shower. Hot water; hot water will bring her back, I said over and over under my breath, witlessly. I’ve got to get her back. But then, stopping still on the gravel path down to the lodge, I cried aloud, “Oh, T.C.!” I doubled over as if in pain, and then ran on, toward the woman I had lost somewhere in the air between Atlanta and this place. Better her than no one; better anyone than that.

There was no fog this morning, and the great trees were still at their tops, and the silence was thick. If birds sang I could not hear them. The air at ground level was much warmer than the tower room had been, and when I gained the dark, stale lodge my feet were no longer numb. I ran through the rooms flipping light switches, stopping only to put on coffee, and then tore through my airless bedroom and into the shower.

I stood there for a long time, near scalding water beating down on my body, running down my face, sluicing through my hair, scouring my mouth and nose and ears and closed eyes. I scrubbed; I washed every part of me in the French pine soap Caleb Pringle had put out. I brushed my nails and the bottoms of my feet with a little, wooden-handled brush, and opened my mouth to let the hot stream run down my throat. It felt warm and clean down to my stomach, but it stopped there. The cleansing heat did not reach the dark place in my groin where this new woman lived. I could not wash her away and wept in the water like a child because of that, my tears swirling away down the drain to meet some creek or river hidden among the redwoods. When I finally got out of the shower I was as red all over as a boiled lobster, and except for the secret cave where last night had been born, the old Merritt was back.

My busybody mind moved fast to boot out the sick, sticky guilt, and I realized only later that I was talking aloud.

“Okay. It happened and it felt fantastic and it’s over. I’m not going to beat up on myself, because I loved it. There’s no sense pretending I didn’t. But now I’m going home. I’m going to go get Glynn and get T.C. to take us to the airport in San Francisco and we’ll just wait there until we can get a plane. I’ll try once more to get Laura through Stuart, and then she’s on her own. I can’t wait for her. I’ll make T.C. understand about this, and I’m not even going to call Pom. Whatever he’s got going back there with what’s-her-name, he can do it someplace other than my house. If Mommee’s not out of there, I’ll take her someplace myself. I’ll tell Amy to go fuck a duck. I’ll get Ina back. Maybe Glynn and I will go to a spa or something, or take a cruise, or maybe I’ll see if Crisscross can find me some freelance work, or better than that, a real job. I’ll bring the dogs in the house and let the rats take over if they want to. All of that; whatever. But I’m going to do it now.”

I sensed that if I stopped I was lost, and so I put on shorts and a clean T-shirt I found in my dresser drawer, and combed my wild, wet hair severely back and knotted it on my neck. I had not worn it this way since Los Angeles, I remembered; since then it had flown free. I looked briefly into the mirror and saw a thin, white woman with prominent copper freckles and ridged cheekbones and blank eyes, and looked hastily away. I did not look again. I drank a quick cup of coffee and slipped into sneakers and went out into the brightening morning, banging the door behind me.

It was already hot. The birds had started up, but only sporadically, and sounded muffled, as if through fog. But there was no fog. Still, the tops of the huge trees were indistinct. The day was cloudless, but it was not clear. I had scarcely gotten past the empty garage before I felt sweat start under my arms and at the edges of my hair. In the heat and scuzziness, the redwoods that had soothed and solaced and enchanted me looked flat and bleached, as if they were paper cutouts left too long in the sun. Home, it was time to go home.…By the time I had reached the big turn in the road, I was trotting fast.

I met him there. I stopped abruptly, simply staring at him. I had not heard him coming down the road, and I don’t think he had heard me, either. His eyes widened in the darkness around them, and he stood still, too. For a long moment neither of us spoke. I could not hear any other sounds except my own quick, light breathing.

He wore faded khaki hiking shorts and a blue Oxford shirt, and he too had scrubbed himself; droplets clung to his beard and hair. His legs were long and brown and muscled; I remembered the feel of them, their strength and their warmth, and felt the red start in my neck. He stood with his hands straight down beside him, looking at me. Then, tentatively, he raised one of them toward me and said, “Merritt. I missed you. I woke up and found you gone and thought you had…left.”

“I can’t do that with you anymore, T.C.,” I said, and stopped because my voice simply faded out. I stood there, staring, the separate parts of his face burning themselves into my brain, but not, somehow, adding up to a face. His eyes, his hawk’s nose, his mouth…

With dizzying speed the eyes and nose and mouth assembled themselves and it was T.C.’s face and his body and I ran straight into his arms, throwing my own around his with more strength than I thought I had. He made a soft, choked noise into my hair, but he did not speak. I rubbed my head back and forth into the hollow of his neck; I pressed myself against him, scrubbing my body against his; I all but climbed him as I would a tree.

“Yes, I can,” I cried fiercely, “and I have to, and I will, right here. Right here, T.C.! In the daylight, on this road, in this gravel, under these trees, right now, please, please—”

“God,” I heard him whisper, “God. I was so scared you’d left me—”

“Now!” I said, and bit his bottom lip and jerked my arms loose from his and tore at the buttons of his shirt, at the fly of the shorts. “Goddamn it, T. C. Bridgewater, now!”

And we did it there on the hot, dusty path with our shorts caught around our ankles and the cross, startled jeers of a pair of jays overhead, and our own words and cries rising up into the still trees as if to set them whispering, swaying. Last night’s dizzy plummet into heat and red darkness took me again, and I lost myself again, and felt the exact, precise moment when he lost himself, too. Just at that instant, just then, the earth moved beneath us and seemed to wheel over our heads and into the sky. By the time it had stopped rolling and shivering, we were loose and tangled and emptied out, still joined, beginning to laugh crazily.

“By God, how did you like that?” he said breathlessly. “Can I say it? Did the earth move for you?”

“Damn Hemingway for making that a cliché,” I whispered, trying to get my voice to work, aware that I had ridden another earthquake like a wild horse and was not, this time, in the least afraid. I wished, even, that the earth would move again. But it did not, and gradually the birdsong came back, and the trees came into focus, and still we lay there, neither of us wanting to loosen ourself from the other.

Finally, though, I moved, and lay myself along the length of him, feeling his long body pressing itself into the earth beneath me.

“Was that a big one? It wasn’t, was it?” I said.

“Nope. Same as we’ve been getting for a couple of weeks now. There wasn’t anything unusual on my stuff this morning, except a little more recorded action. Curtis and Forrest both present and snoring. Nope, that was just a reminder. Sort of a ‘that’s nothing; look what I can do.’ It really adds a hell of a fillip, though, doesn’t it? Were you scared?”

“No,” I said dreamily, resting my cheek against his damp chest. I could feel his heart slowing. “This time I wasn’t scared. Maybe what people should do in earthquakes is…that.”

“I’ll call the U.S. Geological Survey right now and get them on it,” he said. “Wow. Now I’ve only got two wishes left.”

“What wish were you granted? What are the other two?”

“The one that was granted was to make love to you in an earthquake,” he said. “That’s a new wish. The other two are to be in a really big one and never to leave this place. But if I had to pick one, I’d pick the one I just got.”

“Did it feel like you thought it would?”

“It felt like…yeah. What I thought it would. Actually, I’ve felt something like it before. It’s the reason I’m up here, the reason behind everything.”

“Will you tell me? Can you?”

“I’ll try. I want you to understand it. It’s the why of me, I guess,” he said, but for a while he did not go on. I lay there, warmth from him and seemingly from the very earth beneath him seeping into my arms and legs, making them heavy and boneless and at the same time weightless. I did not think I had ever felt so totally, perfectly in harmony with the world around me, strange though it was. The frantic, fractured woman of the early morning was gone.

“I told you I’d never been in a big one, but I’ve been in a sort of big one,” he said slowly. “Big enough to do more than rattle a few dishes. Two or three people died in Oakland when a parking deck collapsed. It was while I was at Berkeley that time; you remember, I told you about the convention, and how I came to find the tower and all? Well, the day before that there was a quake centered on the Hayward, up around Rogers Creek. I was walking across the campus when it hit. I’ve never felt anything even remotely like that before. It was as if…I came alive for the first time in my life. Really alive, in every cell and atom and follicle—there was a totality about it that just eclipsed everything else I’d ever known or dreamed of knowing. It was like, for the first time in my life, I was whole. There was a whole me there and I’d never even really known I was incomplete. I remember reading somewhere that when the Loma Prieta hit, some kids on the campus at USC Santa Cruz just spontaneously jumped up and started dancing in a circle. I did that, too. Before it stopped I was capering and whooping like a crazy man, like I was possessed. And I was. When it stopped, and I knew I wouldn’t feel it anymore, I understood for the first time how ol’ Ronnie Reagan must have felt in that god-awful movie when he said, ‘Where’s the rest of me?’ I knew that after that, until I felt it again, there’d only be part of me walking around. It was then that I knew I’d have to come out here. When I got up into the Big Basin the next day I found exactly where. It’s just a matter of waiting now.”

He stopped and looked up at me keenly, waiting for me to speak. I could not find anything to say. Finally I said, “I wish you could find something that would…complete you, make you whole…that didn’t mean death and misery to other people.”

For the first time since I had known him I saw real anger in his eyes, and a quick, dark grief, and he became, for that instant, someone I did not know. I pulled away reflexively and he pressed me back again, hard.

“Don’t take this away from me, Merritt,” he whispered fiercely against the side of my face. “I’m going to lose the only other thing that ever did it for me.”

“What was that?” I whispered back, licking the crackling of dried sweat at his temple. It tasted of him.

“You know it was last night, and just now,” he said. “You know it was you. You know you aren’t going to stay. And I can’t go. Don’t make me say that again, either.”

I lay against him, sadness like a glacier around my heart. I tried for lightness.

“T.C., you’re going to have to find some more accessible stars to hitch your wagon to,” I said.

“Not after that day, not after last night, not after this morning. You can’t go back, even when you can’t go on, either. Don’t settle, Merritt. Don’t ever settle. Life’s too short.”

I was silent against him. Around us the heat shimmered, the day hummed. Presently I said, “T.C., what are we lying on?”

He moved his buttocks experimentally.

“Just offhand I’d say I’m lying on pinecones and maybe a dried squirrel turd. If you don’t know by now what you’re lying on, all has been for naught.”

I laughed, suddenly happy. With T.C. it was always going to be the laughter that made me whole, set me free.

“No, I mean what is the earth? What kind of rock?”

“What are the stars? What is the earth? What are you doing, running your sun lines? Finding your boundaries?”

“I need to know all the way where I am, down to the core of the earth, up to the edge of the universe. I need to fix you in this firmament. I need to fix me in it.”

He eased out from under me and pulled up his shorts.

“I hope some rosy-cheeked scoutmaster with an overbite hasn’t got the field glasses of his entire troop trained on us,” he said wryly. “They’ll grow up never screwing at all. Okay. These are almost exactly the words of a U.S. Geological Survey guy I met up here and asked the same question, almost the only person besides you who’s never laughed at me about this earthquake stuff. ‘The primary rock in the Big Basin area is Butano sandstone. It was formed in the lower to middle Eocene, forty-three to fifty-seven million years ago. It’s light-gray to buff, very fine-to-coarse-grained arkosic sandstone in thin to very thick beds, interbedded with dark gray to brown mudstone and shale. The amount of this mudstone and shale varies from ten to forty percent. This particular formation is about three thousand meters thick and typically dips ten to thirty degrees toward the southwest. Arkosic sandstone is a feldspar-rich, coarse-grained sandstone typically derived from granite. Most of the Sierra Nevada range in California is formed of granite older than eighty million years. This rock, our rock, would have been formed when the Farallon oceanic plate was diving northwestward toward Japan. That is to say, these sediments would have eroded off an arc of volcanoes like those found today in Japan, and the Aleutians, even the Cascades. To the southwest of Big Basin, the dominant rock is the Santa Cruz mudstone, which was formed in the Miocene, five to twenty-four million years ago, and is brown and gray to light-gray, buff, and light yellow shale and mudstone with minor amounts of sandstone.’ Will that do?”