Fault Lines

“Yes,” I smiled. “It’s somehow very satisfying to know that. Did you memorize it?”

“I did. I asked him to write it down, and he did. It felt important to know that. It was important to him, too; I keep meaning to look him up again.”

I nodded.

“T.C., can we spend the whole day naked?” I said presently.

“Aren’t you the greedy little minx! Are you this greedy back home?”

Suddenly I could laugh about Atlanta and the house on the river, all of it.

“No. At home I’m…I guess you’d say I’m grateful.”

He whooped with laughter, rolled over and over with it, choked, gulped, breathed hard, laughed some more.

“‘Please, sir, can I have some more?’” T.C. mimicked both me and Oliver Twist. “Shit, Merritt, if you don’t take anything else back with you, take this fine greediness. Demand, by God. Don’t settle!”

“Nossir.”

“To answer your question, sure, we can spend the whole day naked. First we’ll go swimming. I know the perfect place for a hot day. Then we’ll go home and take naps. Then we’ll screw. Then I’ll show you my toys. Then we’ll screw. Then we’ll cook that bouillabaisse, or else throw it out before it poisons us. Then we’ll screw. Then I’ll play my tapes for you, and maybe a little slide guitar, and then we’ll—”

“How both the busy little bee improve each shining hour,” I said contentedly. “Do you think we might be a trifle overextended for one day?”

“Well, we could cut out the swimming and the naps and the bouillabaisse, but not the—”

“Enough. Let’s start off and see how far we get. Can we do it all naked?”

“Why not? Curtis ain’t gon’ tell. Forrest would if he could, but he can’t. You’re right. No hurry. Save some for tomorrow. We’ve got lots of time.”

I looked up at him from where I lay on my back, mutely and with pain.

“We’ve already had more than lots of people ever have,” he said softly, kissing the tip of my nose. “For all you know, it might be days and days before Laura comes back. Don’t count, Merritt. Carpe diem.”

“Carpe diem,” I whispered. Above us the sun finally broke free from the entangling tops of the redwoods, and rode full into the sky.

Ever since college, there has been lodged in my mind a passage from (I think) The Odyssey, chronicling a time on the voyage when Odysseus and his men drifted in perfect peace and harmony through sunny blue seas, before fresh winds, through land and water so beautiful that I cannot recall any details, only a golden wash of honey-sweet sun and warm crystal water where dolphins played and time itself sang lazily in the scented wind, stopped and still. I remember from it only a sense of lazy perfection, but it is such a strong impression that since that time it has been the standard against which I measure perfect days.

“What a perfect summer day,” someone will say, and I will think of that passage, and of course, the day in question pales. How could it not? Or, “This has really been a day to remember,” and that time on Odysseus’s journey will spring to mind, and I will think, “Not bad, for mere mortals.”

The comparison had never spoiled any real days for me, but it has always been there, even though the grownup part of my mind knows full well that such days do not come to human beings.

But that day came close. It came very close. At the end of it I was able to whisper, in the pine-smelling dark of T.C.’s veranda, “Eat your hearts out, you smug Greek bastards,” and mean it. Oh, it was such a day, it really was. A pinnacle day, a ball bearing on which a life turns.

When at last we picked ourselves up from the Butano sandstone and the pine needles and dust, it was close to eleven, and the heat was formidable. But it was dry heat, not the thick, wet heat of home, and instead of draining, it soothed us to sleepiness and indolence. All that day I felt heavy-lidded and sweetly weighted in my limbs, needing to reach out frequently and touch T.C. languidly on whatever part of him was nearest, to lean my head against him, to slouch against him, to feel his weight take mine.

We tied our clothing together and hung it around our necks and, wearing only our shoes, ambled down the dwindling path beyond the lodge, deeper and deeper into the red-woods, winding steadily down. Even in the deepest shadow, where moisture still clung and we walked in a green darkness, it was hot. By the time we reached T.C.’s secret swimming hole, we were both lightly sheened all over with sweat. Only the smallest and most arbitrary breezes reached here, but when they did, they felt so purely sensual and fine on my body that I found myself thinking I really must look into nudism.

I said as much to T.C., who laughed and said he didn’t want anybody else but me looking at him bare-assed.

“Why not?” I said. “You have a wonderful body. I do, too. I wonder why I never thought I did before. Right now I don’t care who sees this magnificent body, and I don’t know why you do, either.”

“Have you ever seen an old movie called The Enchanted Cottage?” he said, tracing the line of my hipbone with a fingertip. “Where those two supposedly ugly people look perfect and beautiful to each other, as long as they stay in the cottage? I think that’s happened to us. Anybody else seeing us would point and laugh and holler, and then call the cops. We’re a walking pair of skeletons, two long, bony middle-aged loonies flitting buck naked through the redwoods, patting each other. Don’t kid yourself. Life is real and life is earnest.”

“Bull. You no more believe that than I do. Life is perfect. You want to stop a minute and jump dese bones with dem bones?”

“Wait a while. We’re here. Look, right through those laurels. Let’s see what happens to dese dry bones in water.”

It was a deep little pool of dark water, cupped in rock and thick with giant ferns, green and swaying as a tropical kelp bed, where a small silver creek fell from a ridge and paused before running on. The embracing rocks were huge and flattened and gray, and the tops of them lay in sun, but the lichened sides lay in shadow, and where they cradled the pool was far down and bearded with the ferns. Over them the great trees leaned close, so that only the peculiar shafts of thick golden light reached the forest floor and the water. The silence and stillness was so complete that only when we parted the curtaining laurels and stood on the rocks did we hear the sturdy chuckle of the creek and the little falls.

“Oh, Lord. Oh, how magical. What is this place? Does it have a name?” I breathed.

“I think it has some pedestrian name like Smith’s Creek, or something. I did know, but I forgot. It’s not on the park maps, I don’t think; I’ve never seen anybody else down here. I hereby name it Merritt’s Creek. You want to go in?”

I did a foolhardy thing; I scrambled down a rock, found a level place, and dove into the dark water. Only later did I think that I might have broken my neck. An older, deeper part of me knew the pool would take me gently.

“I’m in,” I gasped against the breath-stealing cold. “What’s keeping you?”

He dove in, a long flash of brown in a sun shaft, and when his seal-sleek black head bobbed up beside me, he gasped, “That was stupid. I don’t ever want you to do anything like that again.”

“You did the same thing.”

“I knew it was deep and free of rocks and logs. You didn’t.”

“Well, somehow I did. Maybe water talks to me like the stupid fault does to you. Don’t preach at me, T.C. I’m not a child.”

He spat water and grinned.

“Today you are. Are we having our first fight?”

The water felt wonderful all of a sudden, the deep, aching cold gone, the lingering soft chill effervescent against my body. Looking down, I saw that he and I both were outlined with tiny, silvery bubbles.

“No,” I said. “I feel too good for that. Look at the bubbles. It’s like swimming in champagne, isn’t it?”

I swam up against him, backing him against a submerged rock. I pressed my body against his, feeling the water take it away, pressing it back. There were subterranean currents, though from where I could not tell. The slight resistance was profoundly sensual.

“Have you ever done it in champagne?” I said against his chest.

“I’m good, but I’m not that good,” he said ruefully. “Ask me again sometime when I’m not neck deep in ice water.”

“You may be sure that I will.”

We swam until the cold began to make our arms and legs rubbery, and then we crawled out and lay on the sun-heated rocks, breathing in the silence and the smell of the woods, feeling the sun’s red weight on our eyelids. We lay there until the water’s chill dried to silky coolness and that turned to heat and then to the slight stickiness of sweat.

“Lunchtime,” he said finally, and we got up and stretched and looked at each other.

“Better put our clothes on,” he said. “People still drive down this road occasionally, as far as the lodge, just to see where it goes. Unless you want to shock the Kleinfelder family of Ottumwa, Iowa, out of their leisure suits.”

“Nah, I’m for your eyes only. The Kleinfelders will never know what they missed.”

Back at the tower the sun smote the earth where the trees had been thinned out, and I heard for the first time that old master sound of summer, the lazy hum of cicadas in the encircling forest. I closed my eyes and for an instant was home beside the river. Then I opened them and shook my head. That was for later. That was for another lifetime, or a past one.

We ate lunch on the shabby veranda, under the canvas awning T.C. had rigged up. He brought bread and Brie and some leftover grapes back when he returned from checking the answering machine, and a couple of bottles of cold white wine.

“I can count on the fingers of one hand the days that have been too hot to stay up there, but this is one of them,” he said. “Today we spend right here.”

Curtis had staked out a cool spot under the water spigot where the earth was splotched with dampness, and thumped his tail in welcome, but did not indulge in any unnecessary welcoming frolicking. He went back to panting his doggy grin. T.C. pointed, and I saw Forrest’s shifty jet eyes glittering from a terra-cotta pot with a lush crop of thyme in it. T.C. held out his arm and snapped his fingers, but Forrest preferred the damp earth and the sheltering thyme, and only twinkled his snout slightly.

“Did you know that in New Guinea they eat your cousins, you dirty rat?” T.C. told Forrest. “God-awful big things called Capas, or something. You’re lucky there are no New Guineans around. You’re already seasoned with thyme.”

“Do I have to keep these clothes on?” I said. “I miss the sight of your naked magnificence, and I’m hot as if it were August in Atlanta.”

“Shuck right out,” he said. “Just let me set up the screen here. If the Kleinfelders come by, it’ll give us time to get dressed. I go around without clothes a lot in hot weather, and once a park ranger caught me naked as a jaybird, lying down here reading The Prince of Tides.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. He asked me how it was going and I said pretty good, and he drove on down the road. Don’t ever try to wear The Prince of Tides as a loincloth, though.”

He unfolded a tattered burlap screen that leaned against the tower base and set it up around the sofa and chairs and upended cable spool that served as a coffee table. I was out of my clothes in an instant, tossing them into one of the rump-sprung chairs. He sat back on his heels, smiling at me.

“Come here,” he said, holding out his arms, and I walked over and into them. His face came just to my waist. He buried it in the space between my ribs, and took a deep breath and let it out again.

“You smell like clean water and woods dirt,” he said, and I could feel his mouth against my skin when he spoke. He kissed my stomach, and my navel, and moved his lips down and down, and I felt my legs go boneless once more, and warmth bloom in the pit of my stomach.

“Care for a nooner?” I murmured.

“Don’t mind if I do,” he said, and got up and pulled me with him onto the deep old couch. Slow: Once again it was all slow, all delicacy and tasting and teasing, all slow-spreading like spilled honey. Then the plunging dark. When I had found my way back, T.C. was laughing and Curtis was whining and barking and nosing at us with a cold, frantic black muzzle.

T.C. reached over and patted him, and gradually he stopped his fussing, looked at us reproachfully, and went back to his spot under the spigot. He lay there with his nose on his paws, gazing at us unblinkingly.

“Curtis is as good as saltpeter in college mashed potatoes,” I said ruefully. “I’d rather do it in front of a nursery school class.”

“Curtis never saw people carrying on like that before. I guess he thought I was killing you, or vice versa.”

“You can’t tell me you’ve never done this with anybody else,” I said. “If you try to tell me I’m the first one I’m going to pour cold wine on your not-so-private parts.”

“I’ve never done it here,” he said, not smiling. “Of course you’re not the first; I’ve been up here a long time, and celibacy is not my thing. But every time before I’ve taken…whoever it was…down there. To the lodge. Impresses the hell out of them and spares me the business of waking up beside somebody I don’t know and having to make small talk and all that. You’re the first for up here. You’ll be the only one.”

“I thought you didn’t like the lodge, and didn’t go down there,” I said. I said. I was absurdly pleased, pleased almost to tears.

“I don’t, and I don’t go down there except to screw. I’ve never had any qualms about that. That’s what the place is meant for, screwing. And it’s easy to get them to leave down there. That’s the other thing it was meant for. Leaving.”

“Why is it different with me?” I said, running my hand over his body from his collarbone to his knees. I felt him stir again and smiled sleepily at him.

“Because I love you,” he said matter-of-factly. “You know that. Don’t fish. Because I love you, and I haven’t any of them. And I won’t, anybody else. This place is only for you, besides me.”

I put my face down into his neck and shut my eyes and lay there, fitted to him from face to feet. I felt him sigh, and then only the soft rise and fall of his breathing. I blinked and let the tears that had gathered on my lower lashes run onto his chest. If he felt them, he gave no indication.

“I love you, too,” I whispered. “I do love you. I don’t know what that makes me. I don’t know where I can go from here with that.”

“You don’t have to go anywhere,” he said into the side of my face. “It doesn’t make you anything, except Merritt who loves T.C. right here and now. Feel it all, be it all, do it all, and then leave that lady here with me. That lady can’t breathe in any other air but this air. I’ll take care of her; I’ll keep her for you. When you go back you’ll know she’s always here, up here in the redwoods with me. Always with me, Merritt.”

“Oh, God, why can’t I just stay? Why can’t I—”

“I’ll make a deal with you. You can think precisely one day ahead. You can plan tomorrow right down to the nanosecond; we can do anything on earth you want; there’s nothing we can get to in a day that we can’t see; nothing we can’t do. But after that you have to cut it off. No planning any further ahead. No looking any further ahead. And then when tomorrow’s done, we’ll take another day and you can plan that one. Who knows how far we’ll get? You’ve only been here three days. Not even that. We could have…who knows how long? Enough to last a lifetime, enough to love a love. But I won’t waste any of it worrying about the length of it. Is that a deal?”

“It’s a deal.”

“Fine. Then what do you want to do tomorrow? There’s a lot I’d love to show you, a lot I know you’d love to see—”

“Tomorrow…let’s screw a whole lot tomorrow,” I said. “And between times let’s go get you some proper glasses frames. There must be an oculist in Palo Alto. That tape is driving me crazy.”

“They’re just drugstore glasses. There’s a drugstore down in Boulder Creek. Anything else we need to get? You aren’t going to get pregnant or anything, are you?”

“I wish I could,” I said fiercely. “I wish I could. But no. I’m on the pill; I’ve got plenty left.”

“Well, you don’t need to worry that you’ll catch anything from me. I’m fine that way. I’ve had all the tests.”

“It never even occurred to me that you wouldn’t have,” I said.

The sun moved around to the west so that its burning fingers found us, and we moved the sofa around until the shade swallowed it. Then we set the food out on the spool-top table and ate until there were no crumbs left, not a swallow of wine. Curtis had a morsel of Brie and Forrest nibbled a grape, and then all four of us lay back in the dim heat and slept like forest creatures.

When we woke the shadows of the trees across the space that the tower occupied were longer and going blue. The heat still clung to the earth, but some of the red fever had gone out of it. I woke with sweat in the creases of my chin and elbows, my hair loose and sticking to my neck, feeling stunned and cross and gummy. I lay there thinking longingly of a shower, and only then noticed that T.C. was not beside me on the sofa. Curtis was gone, too, and Forrest’s eyes no longer glittered in the thyme pot. I sat up and scrubbed my eyes with my fists and looked around.

T.C., dressed only in the khaki shorts and barefoot, knelt under the shake-roofed shed across the yard, peering intently at what I supposed to be his earthquake equipment. His toys. Curtis lay supine beside him, eyes closed. I got up, stretching and smacking my lips around the stale taste in my mouth, and wandered over to look over his shoulder. There was a small cylindrical affair fixed to a board, with paper around it and a pen clipped to a small rod over the cylinder, and beside it a larger device, or perhaps it was two of them. One was a round black object set into a terra-cotta saucer and sunk flush into the earth. Over this, a kind of tripod held a large, square sheet of metal onto which was affixed a coil of some sort. T.C. was looking at some squiggles on the paper apparently made by the pen. I had no earthly idea what any of it was, but I could tell that the cylinder that held the paper was a cardboard Quaker Oats canister. The whole affair had a kind of endearing boy’s treehouse look to it, ingenious but hard to take very seriously. Beside it, T.C., with his hair hanging in his eyes and the mended wire spectacles riding on the tip of his nose, looked so like an overgrown preteen that I laughed and reached over and ruffled his hair, loving him simply and wholly.

“Can T.C. come out and play?” I said.

He looked up at me and grinned.

“Want to see my stuff? I made it myself. Works pretty good, if I do say so.”

“It’s going to be lost on me, but sure. Tell me about it. What’s that thingummy you’re looking at?”

“That’s a drum recorder. First things first. This thing here”—and he touched the square sheet of metal and set it swinging slightly on its spring—“is part of a geophone. A geophone is the actual sensor that converts ground motion into a weak electric signal. Taken together, the whole business adds up to a rudimentary seismograph. See, I took a big hi-fi speaker and took the coil and magnet out, and fastened the magnet to the ground. It’s fixed; it moves with the earth. Then I attached the coil to that sheet of metal, for mass, and hung it by the right kind of spring over the magnet. When the ground moves, the magnet will move with it, but the mass will stay still where it is for a second because it has some inertia. The relative motion that occurs then generates a weak electric current that can be amplified and recorded, and that shows that waves from an earthquake are being recorded. See?”

I nodded, though I didn’t.

“Okay, now the drum recorder. As you can see, I made this one out of an oatmeal box. I’ve mounted it on a central shaft there, and I use that little motor to make the cylinder rotate every fifteen minutes. Then I hooked up that amplifier there to amplify the signal from the seismometer and connected that up to a pen-motor that converts the signal and rotates the pen. See there? It draws a line mounted on the paper. That tracks earth movement nearby. In the old days they used to darken the paper with soot from a kerosene lantern turned way up high, and the pen would scratch a line in the soot, and they’d roll the drum in thin shellac to fix the soot on the paper. The pen isn’t all that much improvement, but this way I don’t burn up my toys.”

“Lord, hasn’t it all come further than this?” I said, looking around the shed.

“Oh, sure. For one thing you can just get a PC that has an a-two board. That means analog-to-digital computer. You connect the seismometer to that. I’ve got one upstairs; I just ran the line out the window and down the leg of the tower and buried it underground till I got it out here. This stuff here is just because I wanted to, just because I could. I could have bought a geophone and saved myself a lot of tinkering; you can order them from several weird electronic catalogs in Texas. They use them there to look for trapped oil. Come to that, I could have just bought myself a seismograph, I guess. I haven’t spent much of the old man’s dough. But I got a kick out of doing it this way. Are you impressed?”

“I’m stunned. You mean you could really predict an earthquake with this stuff?”

“Not predict, exactly, but record action in the area, which helps to predict. Two years before the Loma Prieta a Stanford researcher set up a very sensitive instrument to measure low-frequency electromagnetic waves in the Santa Cruzes. He put it up near where the epicenter was, later. He was actually tracking submarines. For two years there was no big change, but then, a few months before the quake, he noticed a moderate change, and then hours before a really big jump. Of course he only noticed that after the quake, but it shows you that movement and waves can be monitored. What we can’t do, even with the best and newest stuff, is predict just when, or precisely where. I depend on my feet to do that. I don’t wear shoes much up here.”

“What else do you have?”

“You are hard to impress, aren’t you? Nothing, really, except some books and magazines. I’ve got Elementary Seismology, by the grand old man himself, Charles Richter. He published it in nineteen fifty-eight, and it’s still the bible for the profession. I’ve practically memorized chapter fifteen, Seismograph. Theory and Practice. I still read it for fun. I’ve got Peace of Mind in Earthquake Country. It mainly covers how to build structures to withstand quake motions. Most of the pros have it. Of course, Kobe showed us how much use that was. And I take a bunch of magazines that the U.S. Geological Survey puts out, and some other stuff. Want to curl up with one of them while I shower and change?”

“No,” I said. “I want to shower with you. I guess you mean that showerhead sticking out of the tower leg just above Curtis’s water bowl, don’t you? I want to take a long, no doubt bone-chilling shower with you, and then I want to go up and fix that damned bouillabaisse at last and put it on to simmer, and then I want”—and I reached over and pulled the band of his shorts away from his back and reached in and squeezed both his muscular buttocks—“then I want to see how many times in one day you can do it. Get cracking, T.C. We’ve miles to go before we sleep.”

“Merritt, I do believe I have created an insatiable sex monster. When are you going to get enough of it?”

“When the fat lady sings,” I leered, and ran back across the yard and turned the spitting, rusty stream of the shower on, and ducked under it. I was right. It was as cold as glacier water. We stayed under it only long enough to lather up with T.C.’s desiccated soap-on-a-rope, and then dried ourselves off vigorously and gratefully on the thin Fairmont towel that hung on a peg beside the soap. My skin was tingling as I ran up the ladder to the top of the tower, and the trapped heat in the glassed-in aerie felt good. Behind me, T.C. checked the answering machine again, found it still empty, and fetched a bottle of Glenlivet from a cubbyhole under his counter. He poured two healthy shots into the squat, heavy glasses of cloudy old crystal, and handed me one. He plopped himself on the bed with his, crossed his legs at the ankle, and propped his head on the piled pillows. He had not dressed after his shower, and except for the strip of white where his shorts usually were, he was red-brown all over, felted with glistening black hair, and, to me, a very beautiful and serviceable man.

“Cook, woman,” he said, sipping single malt. “Your reward will be lavish and long.”

“In hours or inches?” I said, dragging the bouillabaisse ingredients out of the crowded under-counter refrigerator. They still smelled sweet and briny. I thought we were safe.

“However you want it,” he said.

“Just like you said. Lavish and long. Real long.”

“How about an incentive, instead of a reward?” he said, and I turned to look at him, and saw that despite the cold shower, he was erect once more. I laughed with pure, greedy joy, deep in my throat.

“If I don’t get this stew on we’ll have to throw it out and order in. But by all means, hold that thought.”

“Do you know the one about the old earl whose manservant came in and found him with a hard-on for the first time in years, and said, ‘Do you want me to call her ladyship, m’lord?’ Well, the old earl said, ‘Her ladyship be blowed; ring for the car. I’m going to smuggle this one up to London.’ Tarry too long with that stuff and I’m going to take this one into Palo Alto.”

“What’s a few minutes to a bunch of fish?” I said, and went over to him and fitted myself down upon him, looking down at his brown face in the last of the sun.

“Mmmm,” I said, moving slightly, leaning back. “I’m powerfully empty without this. What would you think of a life cast?”

“About what I’d think of a board with a bearskin nailed to it and a hole punched through it,” he said, beginning to rock with me.

“What’s that?” I laughed, gasping through the laughter.

“The traditional refuge of the Hudson Bay trapper after months in the Arctic without a woman,” T.C. said, closing his eyes. “Slow, Merritt. Take it slow, my love…”

We ended up eating Brie omelettes, much later. The bouillabaisse boiled itself dry, and we did not notice until the reek of scorching metal filled the tower room.

The fat lady sang at 8:30 P.M.

We were lying together on the bed, propped up on pillows, loosely touching at shoulder and hip, and he was playing his guitar. Actually, he was accompanying Sunnyland Slim, who was rolling out Do Nothin’ Till You Hear From Me on a plinky old piano. It was one of T.C.’s oldest records, and he handled it as a knight errant might the Grail. He had been instructing me on the movement of the blues from Mississippi to Chicago, and we had gone through Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, and Walter Horton. I was absurdly happy. I loved the rich, wailing music; I loved the tall man who loved it too, and played it. I thought we might listen to it until the black mirror of the skylight grew pale, and then we would sleep. And tomorrow…tomorrow there would be more. Of everything.

When the phone rang I did not know what it was. T.C. stopped playing and sat very still. Sunnyland Slim went on plinking. Then T.C. got up and went slowly across the room to pick up the phone. On the way he pulled on his red-and-black checked shirt. It was that gesture that cut through my heart and down into my stomach. Only then did I realize that the phone had rung.

He stood with his back to me, leaning on one knuckled fist on the desk as he held the phone to his ear in the other.

“No need for that,” he said pleasantly. “She’s right here.”

I knew then that the days of gold were over. Whoever it was who sought me—Glynn, Laura, Pom, even Amy—it was that other woman who must answer.

“No,” I whispered aloud, tears of pure grief filling my eyes. “I’m not ready.”

He held the phone out, not looking at me, and I got up and pulled on my shorts and T-shirt and went slowly across the floor. I understood then his gesture with the shirt. Eden had been breached and we must now cover our nakedness.

I took the phone and tried to speak, could not, and cleared my throat.

“Hello?”

“What are you doing up there?”

It was Glynn’s voice, fussy and querulous. I had not heard that tone since she left childhood.

“I’m listening to Sunnyland Slim and fixing to wash dishes,” I said, trying for lightness. My voice sounded like dull old sandpaper in my ears.

“What’s up with you? You having a good time?”

“No. I’m having a shitty time. I have to leave, tonight, right now. You have to come get me. When can you be here? I have to tell Marcie’s stepmother—”

“What on earth? What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong is Marcie’s horrible, shitty mother,” my daughter snapped. “She just called and said Marcie and Jess have to come home first thing in the morning, on the eight o’clock plane. She didn’t get her child support check and Marcie’s dad promised it would be there by now and he says he sent it and she says he’s lying and if he doesn’t put them on that plane she’s calling the sheriff. Of course I can’t stay. So when will you get here? I want to tell them—”

I could not think. My ears were ringing and my mouth was numb. The other Merritt had gone far away indeed; I could not seem to find her. Finally I said, “Let me ask T.C.”

“Why do you have to ask him, for God’s sake? He’s not your keeper. Why can’t you just come yourself and let’s get this over with? I don’t want to have to talk to him and laugh at his stupid jokes.”

Pure, red rage swept me like wildfire.

“Your tone stinks, Glynn,” I said, trying not to shout at her, “and I will ask T.C. because it’s his Jeep and because he has been extraordinarily nice to both of us, and because I do not want to drive down the mountains in the dark by myself. Not that it’s any of yours business. We can start…”

I looked over at him. He sat slumped bonelessly on his spine on the desk, studying me, his face closed and calm. He held up five fingers.

“We can start in five minutes,” I said. “We’ll be there when we get there. Have your things out on the porch ready to go. And get your act straightened out. Neither one of us wants to cope with you in that mood.”

“Well, that’s just too bad about neither one of you,” she said nastily. I could hear the tears under her voice, and my anger abated, but only somewhat. But then she added, “What would please either one of you? For me just to vanish and let you keep on doing…whatever it is you’ve been doing up there?”

The red anger soared.

“You are way out of line,” I said coldly. “Be ready.”

And I slammed the phone down, and stood there, thinking that I had no idea what move to make next.

He came over and stood in front of me, but he did not touch me.

“I’m sorry, Merritt,” he said softly. “I wasn’t ready, either. I thought there would be more time.…”

I began to cry, dully and hopelessly, the tears running down my cheeks and dripping off my chin.

“T.C.,” I sobbed. “T.C.…I wanted to know what your second-grade teacher was like. I wanted to know where your folks went on vacation every year. I wanted to know if you hate boiled okra—”

“We knew from the beginning that it wasn’t going to be one of those loves, didn’t we? That kind of context, that kind of resonance—that’s for the long loves, baby. That’s for the loves that raise children and pay income taxes and look after old people and cuss the lawn service. We couldn’t have had that. You already have one of those, a perfectly good one, and I already had one. This one is separate and different, and apart from that other kind. This one makes up in depth what it lacked in width. But I’ll tell you this. Whenever you feel like you need to know something about me, stop and think a minute. Whatever comes into your mind will probably be right. Because I’ll be there telling you, always, and all you have to do is listen.”

I put my arms around him and scrubbed my face into his shirt and cried and cried. It was a soundless, wrenching sort of crying, endless, uncathartic. He held me very close, but softly, and kissed my hair and my wet face.

“You’ll have to stop crying now, Merritt, because I simply can’t stand it anymore,” he said presently.

So I did. I still don’t know why it was so easy. I suppose that there just has to be an end to tears sometimes, even when there is no end to pain. I looked up at him, and his dark eyes glistened wetly, and he let me go and turned away. I think it was then that my heart truly broke. After that there was mainly dullness and loss, and that was better than the raw grief. But only just.

We put Curtis in the backseat of the Jeep and went down the winding, dark mountain road in silence. It was still very hot and thick; Curtis panted restlessly in the backseat, and kept turning around and resettling himself, as if he caught the sense of pain. Once or twice he whined, and touched his nose to the back of T.C.’s neck. I felt the tears prickle again both times, but knew that I would not cry anymore. We did not speak until the lights of Palo Alto lay below us.

“We could meet,” I said. “You’re coming East in October, aren’t you? To see your boy in his season opener? We could meet somewhere in the middle; I could come over to…where? Birmingham, maybe.”

He was silent so long that I looked over at him, and saw that the white ghost of a grin flashed in his dark beard.

“A night in the Birmingham Days Inn? Dinner and a drink and a song or two around the piano bar? Condoms from a machine in the men’s room? Would you want that, Merritt?”

“It might be better than nothing.”

But I knew that it would not be; that it would be terrible past imagining.

“Don’t settle, love,” he said mildly and took my hand, and we rode the rest of the way in silence again, joined only by our intertwined fingers.

Glynn stood on the porch of the big Victorian. Her duffel and several shopping bags stood around her. She was alone. The yellow porch light spilled down on her, and even from the driveway I could tell that something about her was very different. Then it hit me: her hair. She had cut her hair, and it was curled around her small head in a medusa-like tangle of stiff-sprayed curls and whorls. For a moment she looked as if she was wearing a strange hat, a bright, complicated straw. Then I realized that she had bleached it, too.

“My God,” I said, and T.C. laughed. It was nearly the old laugh.

“How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Palo Alto?” he said, and to my surprise I laughed, too. There was more pain in it than mirth, but it was a laugh. I thought in sudden, swift agony that laughter was going to be his last, best gift to me. He had saddled me with a new sense of absurdity.

Glynn picked up her bags and duffel and stomped toward us. She was wearing pink sandals that tied around her ankles and had very high platforms, and she teetered perilously. It spoiled the effect of what might have been a fine, angry prowl. She wore spandex tights down to her knees and a T-shirt cropped so that it cleared her waist. Every bone and knob and rib and hollow showed, and automatically I assessed the thinness. It was less than it had been, but it was still grotesque under the straw curls and the cerise spandex. When she got close to the car we could see that she wore vivid vermilion lipstick, and slashes of mauve blush, and her eyes were so thick with makeup that I could not see anything but spiky lashes and violet shadow in the dim light. I did, though, catch the gleam of gold in one of her nostrils. A ring. My daughter had a ring in her nose.

She should have looked entirely ludicrous, but in an odd, eerie way she was beautiful: instead of a young medieval martyr, a painted Mexican madonna, a hectically theatrical actress from a forties play. I could not speak.

“Well, go ahead,” she said grumpily. “Tell me I look like some kind of whore. That’s what Marcie’s dad said we looked like. Tell me I belong on the wrong end of Sunset Boulevard.”

“Hello, darling,” I said. “Nice language. I’m not going to tell you anything, except that you look thirty years old and it’s going to take me a while to get used to it. Hop in. Where are Marcie and Jess? Did you remember to thank Marcie’s stepmother?”

“Oh, God, of course,” she said. “Marcie and Jess are in Marcie’s room blubbering.” She got into the backseat, slamming the door. She did not speak to T.C. He lifted his eyebrows quizzically, but did not say anything. My face burned; the anger was starting up again.

There was a joyous woof from the backseat as Curtis recognized her, or perhaps it was her smell. I did not see how he could have found much else to recognize.

“Oh, Curtis; oh, hello, you old dog,” Glynn said in an entirely different voice, one that was soft and so vulnerable that my very womb seemed to turn over at the sound of it. I looked back and saw that she had her arms around him and her strange new face buried in his neck. I turned back and stared straight ahead as we drove back out of town.

“He’s missed you,” T.C. said amiably. “He asked when you were coming back so often that we had to promise him he could spend the night with you when you did get back.”

Glynn was silent a moment, and then she said, “Well, that should work out just about right for everybody, shouldn’t it?”

I whipped my head around, but T.C. touched my thigh and I fell silent. For almost the rest of the trip we did not speak.

He drove past the tower and down to the lodge and cut the motor. We all sat still for a moment, and then he said, “I’ll take you up to San Francisco whenever you’re ready. You ought to give yourselves two and a half or three hours if you have to get a flight after you get there. Or I can call the airport for you tonight—”

“We’re not going anywhere,” Glynn said sharply.

“I’ll come back up when I’ve gotten everything down here squared away,” I said formally. “I need to make some calls.”

“I’ll just bet you do,” Glynn said under her breath.

She got out of the Jeep and slammed the door.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered to T.C. “I’m going to have to figure out how to handle this.”

“You want me to come in and talk to her?”

“No, she’s in too shitty a mood. I’m not going to let her talk to you this way.”

“I wish you wouldn’t let her talk to you that way either,” he said, “but that’s between the two of you. You really coming back up? You think you should?”

“I think I have to. I can’t just…I have to see you one more time.”

“I’ll put on some coffee, then. But if you change your mind and think it would be easier just to…let it stop here…I’ll understand. It might be, at that—”

“I have to, T.C. Don’t you want…a little more time?”

“Oh, my God,” he breathed. “What do you think?”

Curtis whined from the backseat and T.C. reached back and opened the door. “You still want him?” he called out to Glynn, standing rigidly by the lodge door with her back to us.

“Yes,” she said in a low voice, and T.C. said, “Go, Curtis. Carpe diem.”

Curtis took off out of the backseat like a heat-seeking missile and flew to Glynn, jumping up and down beside her, licking her knees and her hands. She knelt and put her arms around him and stayed there, motionless.

“Shall I bring him when I come?” I said.

“Whatever, he’ll let you know what he wants to do. If he wants to stay with her, let him. Merritt—”

“I’ll see you in a little while,” I said, and closed the door and crossed the lawn to where the girl and the dog were.

We went inside in silence, and Glynn vanished into her room, Curtis loping beside her grinning his red-tongued grin. She closed the door with a small, ugly slam, and I opened it and went into her room.

I stood with my back against the door, arms crossed over my breasts as if to ward off blows.

“I think we’d better talk about this,” I said tightly. “I think you better tell me what’s gotten into you. The way you’re behaving is not acceptable.”

She was lying on her back, her arms around Curtis, who had flopped on her bed with her. She sat up abruptly.

“Oh, really,” she said furiously. “Oh, well, excuse me, Emily Post. By all means, tell me from your vast store of acceptability just what it is that you’ll accept from me.”

“Glynn, what is it? Is it because you were having such a good time and you don’t want to leave? Are you worried about your father? Do you think he’s going to jump all over you about your hair and the nose ring and all? Because I promise you, I won’t let him do that. How you look is your business; you’re sixteen years old now—”

“You’re goddamn right I am! And I’m old enough to decide for myself where I’m going to be, and I’m not going home! I’m not! I’m going to stay out here; they’re holding the Joan part for me, and I’m going to do it, and you can’t stop me—”

“You know you cannot do that movie. You know we agreed on that. I told you that from the beginning; you said you understood that—”

“But that was before we knew for sure they were going to do it! And they are, and they want me, and we’ve already made plans for it; I’ve already told Mr. Margolies I could stay; he’s sent me some early scripts, and all kinds of presents, and flowers every day. It’s going to happen! You can’t stop it! I’ve told everybody!”

My head felt as light as if I were about to faint, and my pulse raced in my wrists so hard that I could feel it out to the ends of my fingers.

“It’s not going to happen and I can stop it, so fast it will make your silly yellow head swim,” I said through a red mist of rage. “What on earth has happened to you in just three days? Have you completely lost your mind? How did Margolies know where to get in touch with you? What kind of presents?”

“Aunt Laura told him!” she screamed at me. “Aunt Laura told Caleb, and Caleb told Mr. Margolies, and they’ve both been in touch with me, and it’s a done deal, and we start shooting in September, and if you try to stop me I’ll run away. I’ll starve myself. I swear to God I will.”

Oh God, Laura, I thought in dull grief and defeat. You just aren’t capable of not wrecking things for me, are you?

“Where is Laura?” I said tiredly. “I haven’t been able to get her anywhere, not at her place, not at Stuart’s.…You’d better tell me. I need to talk to her. If you don’t, I’m going to call Margolies this minute and tell him the deal’s off. And it is off, kiddo. We’re on that noon plane home tomorrow whether or not I’ve talked to your precious aunt. Don’t think that’s not going to happen.”

“I don’t know where she is,” Glynn said sulkily, dropping her awful, spiky lashes. “I can’t get her, either, and now nobody else knows where she is. I can’t get Caleb, either, and Mr. Margolies isn’t at his number…”

She looked back up at me, and there was a kind of wild radiance in her painted face.

“Listen, Mom,” she said. “You know you can’t go home without knowing where Aunt Laura is. You know it would just…haunt you. You know how you are about taking care of her. Well, why don’t we go down to L.A., and you can find her from there? She’s bound to let somebody know eventually; Caleb, or Mr. Margolies; somebody. We can ask around, and you can talk to Mr. Margolies and Caleb, they’ll make you see how wonderful all this will be for me. I know they will. We can stay at Stuart’s; he’s not there—”

“How do you know he’s not there?” I said.

She dropped her eyes again.

“He called me the other night,” she said. “He was going into the hospital, and he wanted to talk to you about Aunt Laura. He said he’d tried to call you up at T.C.’s, but nobody returned his message. I asked him and he said he’d be very pleased if we’d stay at his place and try to get ahold of Aunt Laura.”

“Why didn’t you call me and tell me that?” I said slowly and clearly. “Why didn’t you, Glynn?”

“I was afraid you’d make me go home, all right? I was afraid you’d find out something had happened to her and we couldn’t stay.”

She was shouting, her eyes screwed shut with anger and desperation.

“That was a very terrible thing you did,” I said evenly. “It was truly an awful thing. I hope you never realize how awful. What hospital is he in?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t tell me.”

“And you didn’t ask?”

“No! I didn’t ask! So what does that make me, a monster? Okay, then! I didn’t ask and I’m a monster!”

“You’re not anybody I know,” I said softly, in misery.

She came surging off the bed and ran up into my face.

“Do you think I know who you are? You aren’t my mother; you aren’t that awful saintly shit who keeps telling me what the right thing to do is, who keeps falling all over me to keep me a baby, who always, always knows the good, kind, wise, saintly thing to do.”

“I’ve never on earth tried to tell you what was right,” I whispered. “I’ve never told you how to live your life—”

“No, but you’re always done the goddamn right thing! Always, always! You’ve always been oh, so dutiful and good and pure; you’ve always taken care of everybody; you’ve always showed me what to do even if you didn’t tell me! And I’ve always tried to do it, and it doesn’t work; it doesn’t get you anywhere; that fucking old woman still runs our house; I can’t take the one good thing somebody’s offered me that was all mine alone; you’re always there with goodness shining out of you—”

“Glynn—”

“I want you to get out of my head! I’m not you! I’m me! You’re not anybody anymore; you’re just some cat in heat who’s up here fucking the hired help.”

“What the hell are you saying? How can you say such a thing?”

“I can smell it on you!” she screamed, and began to cry, hard and loudly, like a child. “I could smell it on you when I got in the car! Do you think I’m a baby? You think I don’t know what come smells like?”

She whirled and ran back to the bed and threw herself down onto it, her face buried in Curtis’s neck. She cried loudly. Curtis whined and nosed at her and licked her face. I put a hand out toward her, and then dropped it.

“I’m going up and try to get hold of Aunt Laura one more time,” I said tonelessly. “And I’m going to make us a plane reservation. I’ll be back after a while. Try to sleep. We’ll see if we can start to sort all this out in the morning. I’m sorry you feel badly. I feel badly, too.”

She did not answer, only lay there sobbing. I went out of her room and closed the door. I did not think that the part of me her words had hit would ever come alive again.

“I will starve myself!” she screamed after me through the closed door. “Starting right now! At least you can’t stop me doing that!”

Then do it, I said, but not aloud. I can’t be your reason to live. You have to find that.

I went out into the hot night and up the gravel path to T.C.

Much later we sat upon the sofa on his veranda and looked at each other. We had not made love; we had wanted to, and started it, but then we had known that after all, we could not, and neither of us had pushed it.

“Not after that business with Glynn,” he said. “I don’t want you remembering that when you remember how we were together. Remember the last time instead. Remember letting the stew burn, and you sitting on top of me, laughing like a hyena.”

I had told him about the scene with Glynn. I kept nothing back. He’d listened without comment, and then said, “Poor you. Poor Glynn. You’ve started down that awful road of her growing up. I remember some of it from Katie, before I left. My grandmother used to call it starting up fool’s hill. I wish I could help you with it, but that’s for you and Pom to do.”

He spoke freely and naturally of Pom. I knew that I could not have.

We were holding each other tightly on the sofa. We had lain there together for what seemed a very long time, kissing very gently now and then, but mostly just holding each other. He had broken it off to try Laura for me, at the Palm Springs house and at Stuart Feinstein’s condo, but there was no answer anywhere, and I had no idea how to reach Caleb Pringle. T.C. had called the number Caleb had given him long ago first thing and gotten only an answering machine, and I knew that it was fruitless to try and reach Leonard Margolies. Finally he had called and made a reservation for Glynn and me on the Delta noon flight the next day. We had had to take first class; tourist was full.

“Good,” he said. “Drink champagne. Eat steak. Stretch out and sleep. Soften the princess up with macadamia nuts and maybe get her a little drunk. And then tell her very firmly to shut up; she knows nothing about love. She’ll be lucky if she ever does. Don’t be a doormat for a spoiled mall punk. Don’t be a doormat for anybody.”

“She’s not that.”

“I know. I remember her when she first got here. But you mustn’t let her start that way. On the other hand, maybe you should. Maybe now’s the time to start letting her make her own mistakes. Do you think you could find it in you to let her do this movie? If you or somebody you trusted came along to look out for her? Maybe it would do her dad good to do that—”

“No,” I said. “He couldn’t. He couldn’t if he wanted to. I see now that I have to let up, but I’m not prepared to let her go in harm’s way. I haven’t changed that much, T.C. I don’t think I ever will.”

“No. That part of you won’t change,” he said.

We lay there a while longer. The thin moon rode up the sky and diminished; it had risen a great orange crescent, apocalyptic and awful. I was glad when it shrank. The light it spilled down on us on the veranda sofa was thin and urine-pale, not the radiant cold silver it had been before. We were stuck together with perspiration, but neither of us moved.

“I won’t see you again, will I?” I whispered at last, tasting the salt of his skin on my tongue, against his chest. “I mean, I know you’ll take us to the airport, but I mean…see you.”

“You’ll see me,” he said. His voice was very low. “Whenever you see redwoods in the National Geographic, or fog, or watch Shamu on TV, you’ll be seeing me. Whenever you smell pine and spruce and day-old socks, that’s me. Whenever you hear wind in the tops of trees, that’s me, and whenever you taste crab and wine and Brie that’s me, and whenever the wind blows your hat off or you get under a cold shower, that’s me. Whenever you read about an earthquake, that’s me, sure as gun’s iron. Whenever you smell wet dog, that’s Curtis and me, and whenever you see a Rattus rattus, that’s Forrest, and I’m right behind him. Never see me again? You’ll never not see me. And I’ll never not see you. I’ve got you whole and real, just like you’ve been these last few days, in my brain and heart and the part of me you profess to want to make a life cast of. As long as I live, the Merritt of Merritt’s Creek does, too. Didn’t I say I’d always be your same stars? If you get to missing me, just look up.”

“I can’t stand this,” I said. “I think I’ll never…T.C., how can you ever go to bed with anybody else again? I don’t think I ever can—”

“Sure you can. It’s just the woman you leave up here that can’t. And that woman won’t, not ever with anybody else but me. Don’t worry about me, baby love. If it gets too bad I’ll just haul out my board with the bearskin—”

“Don’t! I love you! I love you! I can’t leave you! There’s no way I can leave you.”

“There’s no way you can stay,” he said, and stood up, pulling me up with him. He held me against him for a long moment, so hard that I could not breathe, did not want ever again to breathe.…

He stood back and looked at me in the mean light of the flinty stars.

“Get out of here, Merritt,” he said, and his face twisted and tears sprang into his eyes and ran down to meet the black pirate’s beard. But he did not turn away.

I turned and ran. I ran out of the yard and past the boy’s earthquake inventions under the shed, and past the dusty Jeep, and started down the gravel path toward the lodge. I needed no flashlight tonight; the very path seemed to glow with pale, tired heat. I ran and ran. Above me, off to my left over the lower ridges of still redwoods, Arcturus slid down the sky, going home. It looked fake, a painted star, a burned-out star in a cardboard firmament. Dead, as dead and cold as the space around my heart where, for the past small lifetime, T.C. Bridgewater had lived.

“Be my same stars, T.C.…”

“I will. I always will.…”

I stopped on the path and turned and cupped my hands.

“Carpe diem,” I shouted.

“Carpe diem,” came his voice, a small flag in the vast, dead night.

I turned back and jogged on down the path. I did not cry for him again until much, much later.

11

I was given a gift that night, one that you often receive in childhood but seldom later. It was as if a good fairy had realized she missed her appointment with me when the gifts were being passed out around my cradle and came bustling back to make up the oversight. It was the gift of sleep. Sleep as panacea, sleep as opiate, sleep as oblivion. Forever after, I have been able, when pain becomes overwhelming, simply to sleep. It has rarely failed me.

When I got back to the lodge the night before I walked straight past Glynn’s slightly opened door, saw the still mounds of girl and dog, went into my bedroom, and went to sleep. I would have said, in that dull red mindlessness of loss, that I would never sleep again, but instead it was as if I would never wake. I slept without moving until the pale first light of morning fell on my face and finally brought me back.

I lay there like someone who has wakened after a bad accident, a collision. Every muscle in my body hurt, and my limbs felt as heavy as cast iron. The thought of even moving them made me sick with exhaustion. For what seemed a very long time I lay there immobile, trying to assemble the thoughts I would need to get us through this day: this day of great distances, of tearing endings, and dreaded beginnings. My mind flailed tiredly in all directions: Laura. What should I do about Laura? T.C. had said he would keep trying to trace her after we had gone and would let me know when he heard something, but I did not want that. I did not think I could pick up a telephone and hear his voice speaking neutrally of my sister from under the great, lost-to-me trees. I simply wanted Laura out of my heart and off my hands.

Glynn. About Glynn I could only feel detached anger and pain, and a kind of abstract shame. I did not feel like coping with this hurtful and hurt new daughter, either. There was nothing left in me that could meet this dangerous complexity. If I could have gotten home without exchanging another word with her, I would have done it with alacrity. These two creatures, both of my blood and both so much of my making—at that moment I loved them not.

Pom. I did not even know how to think about Pom. I did not, in that bled-out moment, know who Pom was or what he was to me. What he might be from now on was simply unimaginable. There wasn’t any from now on. There was scarcely a now. Carpe diem, T.C.’s voice said in my head, and I felt agony rush at me, pecking. Oh, T.C., you seize it. I don’t want this day.

T.C. For a long, still moment I lay there so filled with the reality of T.C., of the actuality of him, that it was as if he had entered my body and lived under my skin. My heartbeat felt like his; my fingers touched the cloth of the coverlet and knew how it would feel to T.C. It was as if a conduit, a major vessel, ran from his body on the veranda sofa down through the earth to the lodge and into my own.

I can’t do this day, T.C., I said to him in my mind, and his answer came clear and true: Yes, you can. Get up. I go with you.

At that moment I heard the sound of china clinking in the kitchen and the gurgle of coffee being poured into a mug. I sprang up. It was him; he had come for me after all, he would heal this awful day somehow; he was waiting for me.

I flew into the kitchen, still in my underpants and bra. Laura sat on a stool at the kitchen table, a steaming cup beside her, her head in her hands as if she slept sitting there. The disappointment was so profound that I closed my eyes against it. Then I took a deep breath and opened them. Here is Laura, I thought witlessly. What does this mean? I don’t know how to think about this.

She raised her head and looked at me. She looked terrible. Her tan had faded and was flaking off the miraculous cheekbones in mustardy patches, and there were deep, incised blue circles under the slanted amber eyes. Her gilt hair was lank and lifeless, and she had simply jerked it back seemingly without combing it and pulled it tight with a rubber band. Somehow that rubber band spoke more vividly of damage to me than anything else about her desiccated face. She had often scolded me for using rubber bands in my hair.

“It breaks the hairs off and makes them thin and scraggly,” she would say. “I would no more do that to my hair than I would pour tar over it.”

“You’re going to ruin your hair with that thing,” I said stupidly, and she smiled, and then laughed. It was a spectral, shadowless little laugh, but it lit her face a little. She did not look dead anymore.

“Can’t have that, can we? Hello, Met. You look like shit.”

“It runs in the family,” I said, and went and hugged her. Her ribs felt like separate ridges under my hands, almost like Glynn’s. Not at all like the warm solidity of T. C. Bridgewater. Never again, I would never feel that again.

“I wish our family ran to fat,” I whispered against her shoulder. “I get so tired of hugging bones.”

She put both her arms around me and rocked me against her, and we stayed that way for a bit, both needing each other’s body warmth simply to live. I could not ever remember needing Laura’s arms. Wanting them, but never needing them.

“Go put on some clothes; you must be freezing,” she said. “I’ll pour you some coffee. Then I’m going to sleep for twenty-four hours. You look like you could use some more sleep, too. Then we’ll talk. I’m glad to see you, Met.”

“We can’t sleep anymore,” I said wearily. “We have to talk now. I have to take Glynn home in…what time is it? Eight? We have a noon flight. I can’t leave without knowing what’s going on with you.”

She leaned her head far back and closed her eyes.

“Nothing, not anymore,” she said. “I don’t know. I can’t seem to make my mind work. I thought you might help me. You could always see so much more clearly than I could see myself.”

I can’t see anything but the shape of my own pain, my mind wailed peevishly. Go away and take all your pretty fragments with you. The one thing I’ve got to do in this world is leave here and take my daughter with me, and right now I don’t see how I’m going to do that.

“Tell me,” I said aloud, or rather the old Merritt said, popping up like an indestructible jack-in-the-box. Get out of here I told her furiously in my mind; stay out of my head until I’m back where you live. This is not your place. I don’t want you. I want the one who came after you.…

“Tell me,” I said again to my sister. That was when I knew that the woman T.C. and I had created was not going to survive the trip home. It was the worst moment of all. I have felt no pain since that has even come close to that moment.

She took her coffee cup and went over to the sofa and sprawled out on it, putting her booted feet up. I followed her stiffly and sat in the facing wing chair. On the way I lit the half-charred logs and pulled an afghan around me. The cold felt as though it was sucking the life out of me.

She did not speak, and I said, “Did you see Caleb?”

“Oh, yeah. I found him right off, at his place. It was close to dawn, but he had company. They went out the back way; I never saw them. I don’t know if it was a man or a woman, but I can’t imagine any man friend of Pring’s sneaking out his back door when I happen by. None of them thinks I’m important enough for that. And as it turns out, I’m not. I never was. I don’t know now why I couldn’t see that.”

“I’m sorry, Pie,” I said, and I was. Sorry, sad, but at a remove, as if through a pane of glass. I didn’t know what else to say to her. I could not make this right.

“So things didn’t go well about Arc?”

She stretched mightily.

“There’s not going to be any Arc,” she said. “I killed Arc. I’m glad I did. It was a monstrous thing, an abomination. It would have been even if I’d played the grown-up Joan, I can see that now. The whole concept is…obscene. He didn’t change his mind about my doing the Dauphine; I thought at first he would, but in the end he wouldn’t. It was no mistake, of course. That’s what he wanted me for all along. That and for Glynn. When I realized he wasn’t going to budge about that I called Margolies and told him there was no chance and you were taking her home. He pulled the plug on the picture that day. Pring was furious and oh, so wounded; he said he hadn’t thought I had it in me to hurt him like that. Can you believe it? After the Arc business, after the baby—”

She stopped and dropped her face into her hands. She did not weep, just sat there, hidden behind her long, thin fingers.

“Oh, love,” I said, sadness pouring into the crater in my heart I had thought empty forever. “He didn’t want the baby?”

“Oh, God, no. Of course not. Caleb Pringle with a baby? A wife and a baby? Met, I was such a fool; I thought he would want it; he always had such a special thing with children. But the only children Pring can relate to are the ones on the other side of the camera. The only way he can see them is through a lens. It was that way with the kid in Right Time; it would have been that way with Glynn in Arc. Beyond that she wouldn’t have existed to him. It would have destroyed her. I was too selfish to see that before.”

“What did he say about the baby when you told him?”

“Well, let’s see. He said was I absolutely sure it belonged to him, and that at this stage in his life a baby was not a priority, and then he said he’d take care of things financially for me, and he wrote me out a check for fifty thousand dollars and gave me the number of a man in Santa Monica he said would take care of…things. I don’t know if he’s a doctor or not, but he must be good, or Pring wouldn’t have anything to do with him. I gather the problem has come up before and has been settled satisfactorily.”

“Laura, you didn’t—”

“Not yet. I was going to, but then Stuart tracked me down, and came flying over and spent two straight days trying to change my mind, and what with one thing and another…oh, Met. Stu’s dead. He died this morning at three; I’ve been driving ever since. I came straight here from the hospital.”

“Dead…” It was a whisper. Shock and swiftly following grief took my breath.

“He was sick when he got to me. I was still at Pring’s; the morning after our little chat he took off for the Bahamas, whether with his mysterious visitor or not I don’t know. He knows a guy with some loose money down there. He still thinks he can get Arc going, but he can’t. Stuart was coughing horribly when he came, and he had a high fever; you could tell without even touching him. He wouldn’t let me take him to a doctor, but after nearly two days of begging me to have the baby and let him help me take care of it, he just…collapsed. I called 911, but it was too late by then. He had pneumonia, that kind you get with AIDS; he was dead that night. Last night. This morning, whenever. The doctor said that all told, it was a fairly gentle way to go.”

She began to cry. I moved over and sat next to her and put my arms around her shoulder. I simply sat there, holding her while she sobbed.

What a good man you were, and how much you loved her, I said to Stuart Feinstein in my head. She’s never going to have anybody like you again.

Thank you, dollbaby, he said. But she still has you.

No, she doesn’t, I said back. There’s no me left. Ain’t nobody home here.

“Do you know what he’s done?” Laura said presently, around the sobs. “He’s left me his condo and all his money. He had more than I thought. He’s been saving it ever since he got sick and knew he wouldn’t get well. He made his will then. He only told me the day he died. He never did think Pring was going to look after me. He said that no matter what happened to him, I’d still have a place to live and a little money to raise the baby with. He said he’d talked to another agent about handling me, and that I should call him.”

“What a darling,” I said, wishing for the ease of tears for Stuart Feinstein but knowing it was not going to be granted. “Will you do it?”

She raised her head and smiled at me. It was a terrible smile.

“Who in their right mind is going to take on a pregnant thirty-eight-year-old Caleb Pringle reject, whose hot new vehicle just fell through? I did that to myself, Met. Remember that asshole Billy Poythress, the one who did the interview with me that day at the Sunset Marquis? Well, I got greedy and desperate and shot my mouth off about what a great love Pring and I had going, and about the sensational part I’d had in Right Time, and the even hotter one that was coming up with Pring and Margolies.…I didn’t tell him about Arc exactly, but Billy’s never had any trouble extrapolating. You wouldn’t believe what he made of that interview. It was unspeakable. It ran the very day I saw Pring; the timing couldn’t have been any worse. By now, of course, everybody knows that Margolies has killed Right Time and Arc, and if they don’t know Pring has dumped me and taken off they’ll know this time next week. There’s not an agent in Hollywood who’d touch me. Stu must have known, but he gave it his best shot. It was me he was worrying about when he died, Met. The last thing he said was ‘Take care of yourself, dollbaby!’”

“So what are you going to do?” I said. “I know you’re hurt and shocked, but we’ve got to make a plan for you; I’ve got to know you’re not going to…do something to the baby or yourself. Come home with us, Pie. What’s holding you here? Leave the car in long-term parking, or with T.C., and just get on the plane with us and come home. We’ll look after you; we’ll find you a good doctor, Pom knows them all; we can help you get settled someplace nice with the baby, and find good day care…you can do all the theater you’d ever want to do in Atlanta; you’d own the city. You can do commercials there, you can do movies; they’re always making movies in the South now…you could make a very good life for both of you. You might even enjoy it. It’s a good place to live, a great place to raise a child.…”

And I hate it, I thought. Right now I hate it.

“I can’t have this baby, Met,” she said dully. “I can’t look after a baby. I can’t even look after myself. Do you think I want to screw up a baby’s life the way I’ve screwed up mine? No, I thought I might go to New York. I still know some theater people there. I know I could do character parts, and the television there is always good. You know, after…I get things taken care of here. I’ll have enough money to get started. Pring was generous; he must know fifty thousand is way beyond the going rate for abortions, even in L.A.”

Her face twisted and I took both her hands.

“I can’t let you do that. You’d never forgive yourself. I’d never forgive myself. Neither would Pom. You know he’d tell you not to do it; he’s always saying you’ve got to cast your lot with the living.”

She smiled again, and it was no easier to look at than the last one.

“Met, I’d say you’re going to have a hard enough time going back without bringing a pregnant sister with you. Can’t you just see it? Maybe that horrible mother of his could babysit while you and Pom go to marriage counseling.”

I looked at her.

“I know about things up here, you and T.C.,” she said. “Glynn couldn’t wait to tell me. She jumped me the minute I walked in. Listen, I don’t care, for God’s sake. I hope it was wonderful for you. I just wanted you to know that I know about it, so you don’t feel like you have to talk around it. You’re hurting; any fool can see that. I gather it wasn’t…a small thing.”

“No. Not a small thing.”

“I’m sorry. I really am. Your time to talk now, if you want to. Listening to man trouble is one of the things I do best.”

“I can’t,” I said briefly. “Laura, what did Glynn say? I need to know.…”

“Not much, other than you’d been screwing him behind her sainted daddy’s back and she hated him and you and couldn’t wait to get home and tell on you.”

I could feel what was left of the color drain out of my face. This time she was the one to reach over and take my hands.

“I don’t think she’s going to do that,” she said. “I gave her total hell. I’m quite sure nobody has ever talked to her like that in her entire virginal little life. When I finished she was bawling like a baby. I think she retired to her room with that big old dog of T.C.’s, to lick her wounds. Not before she washed that goop off her face and out of her hair, though. I told her she looked like every other little mall tramp on the face of the planet. Among other things…My God, that nose ring! When will they learn how silly they look with them? Like cattle just waiting to be led around.”

“She said…she said she could smell it…you know…smell it on me,” I whispered. “It was a horrible thing to say. I don’t know which was worse, that she said it or that she could recognize it.”

She laughed. It was a better sound, almost an old Laura sound.

“Don’t worry that she’s been doing it, though she’d probably love for you to think she has,” she said. “That was my fault. Before I went to pick her up I stopped by to pay the guy who’s been taking care of the Mustang; he’s this beautiful kid, a real hunk, and completely gone on me; wants to be an actor, of course, and anyway, one thing led to another and I had some time, and so…I thanked him. It really had been a long time. As they say, I needed that. And then I was late, so I didn’t have time to shower. Anyway, she sniffed around and asked me, and I told her. I think I set her sexual development back at least a decade.”

“Laura, you are incorrigible,” I said, and then began, incredibly, to laugh. After a moment she joined me. We hugged each other and laughed until the laughter slid perilously close to tears, and then we stopped, and looked at each other.

“Did you?” she said. “Sleep with him?”

“Yes,” I said. “I did. Every time I could. All day yesterday. She can tell Pom or not, I’m never going to be sorry about that.”

“She won’t tell. She’s too ashamed for that. Ashamed and scared.”

“Ashamed of what? Scared of what? What on earth else did you tell her?”

“Ashamed of the way she behaved to you. Afraid she’s driven you away. Afraid you’ll leave her dad for T.C. Afraid she’s lost herself now that she’s turned herself into a perfect mall mouse. One of the things I told her was that she’d taken the most special thing she had—that real innocence and sweetness—and sold it to buy nose rings and platform shoes. I told her her looks and presence were the only reason they’d wanted her for Arc, and she’d totally destroyed those. I think she already knew that; I think she hated the way she looked and hated herself for letting her little buddies talk her into it. That’s where a lot of the anger came from. Before she even got in that car she was angry, and being angry makes you scared when you’re very young. I know. I took my anger and fright out on you for thirty-eight years. I just realized it when I lit into her.”

Tears I did not know I had left stung my eyes.

“Poor Glynn. Poor Pie. You really let her have it, didn’t you?”

“Damn straight. That’s not nearly all. I told her Arc was dead as a doornail and just what it was she’d lost by losing it—the chance to be chewed up and spit out and hardened into somebody she’d hate, somebody she’d be stuck with the rest of her life. I told her what Pring had done to me and that he and every one of the others wouldn’t hesitate a New York minute to do it to her, and that it wasn’t acting that made you special; you had to make yourself special before you could really act. I told her there wouldn’t have been a damned thing for her after Arc; that she wouldn’t have done anything to deserve it. That acting wasn’t that easy. That it wasn’t easy at all; that you had to earn it hard, and be ready to be savaged for your pains. I said did she want it enough for that. Because that had happened to me, and I wasn’t at all sure it was worth it. I just realized that, too.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing. She’d started to cry by then. I seized the home court advantage and pressed on. I told her I didn’t ever want to see her take the troubles she’d gotten herself into out on you again; that she could tell you when she was angry or scared, but she must not treat you badly. That you loved her enough to take it, but that you’d spent your whole life taking other people’s loads, and the time had come when you just couldn’t do that anymore, and I wasn’t going to let her grow up into the kind of person who took advantage of love, because that’s not growing up, is it, Met? It’s just growing older and staying the same, and what’s the point of all this shit if you don’t change into something better as you go along? That’s another thing I didn’t know I knew until I yelled it at her.”

“Pie…Laura—”

“No. I need to tell you the rest of it. Most of the rest of it is about me, and I’ve never told it to you. I’ve been a worry and a grief to you most of my life, Met, and I can’t take those years back, but I can try to see that Glynn doesn’t get started down that road. And I can tell you how much I love you for standing behind me all those awful years. I couldn’t then; somehow it just made me madder and scareder. But by God, she’s going to tell you. You should have jerked a knot in me and you should jerk one in her if she does it again. And she will, because she has finally become, God help you both, a seminormal teenager, with all the special little delights that entails. I don’t think you should lock her up, but don’t let her devalue you. Real love always runs that risk.”

Don’t settle, Merritt. Don’t ever settle…

Oh, T.C., don’t you see that not settling is the hardest thing in the world?

I got my trembling lips under control.

“Dearest Laura, you will never know what this means to me,” I said softly, reaching out to brush a strand of the wounded hair off her face. “But about Glynn being normal, being a normal, healthy teenager is what we always wanted most for her. We used to pray for it in church…”

I thought of Pom and his dark, troubled face, of the pain in his electric blue eyes when things were worst with Glynn. Pom…when it came to Glynn, he was the “we” of me. Where in this new equation did that fit?

“How can I punish her for being normal?” I said, feeling thick and stupid and tired again, utterly unable to cope.

She sat up on the sofa and smoothed back the straggling hair, and made a small face of distaste.

“Listen and let Mother Teresa tell you. What you do is make a deal. She gets to be a real teenager with all that entails, and you get to be a real person. A real woman, with all that entails. It’s going to be harder for her to honor a deal like that than for you. She’s already had a taste of what you’re like when the woman and not the mommy takes over, and it terrified her. She’s going to want to keep the mommy. And I’m here to tell you, that act has always been a bitch to follow.”

“Have I really been that sanctimonious and smug?” I said.

“No. Just perfect. Just selfless. I used to wish you’d do something so sleazy and slutty that you could never jump on me again; I used to daydream that I’d come home and find you screwing the UPS man. And now you’ve screwed the caretaker and I find that I love you even more for it. It’s turned you into somebody who knows what it means to want the wrong person so bad that your fingers curl and your teeth ache. And that there’s a whole, greedy female woman in there. That’s what’s been missing all along.”

I said nothing, but bowed my head in case the stinging tears ran over. They didn’t, though. There weren’t enough left. Presently I said, “He wasn’t the wrong person, Pie. There’s never been a righter person for me. It’s just that the me he was right for isn’t the one who’s going back home today. I know that’s not rational or consistent. But I know that it’s okay, too. If I could have stayed that woman, I might not be going home, but in the end you go home, because it’s your place and it never works for long when you leave your place. Just like he might have come back with me if he could have, but he couldn’t because this is his place. So what we had was us, here, now. Like he says, ‘Carpe diem.’ I wish there could have been more of it, but what we did have was as near perfect as I’ll ever know about. Laura, I didn’t know how on earth I was going to get us home. Since I woke up this morning, I’ve thought I simply couldn’t do it. But you’ve made me see that maybe I can, and even a little bit of how to start. And you’ve made me see that maybe, just maybe, I haven’t driven my daughter away permanently. If I can find the right words when I talk to her—”

“The hell with the right words,” she said, fishing a cigarette out of her pocket. “Use the words you feel like using. Don’t lie to her. Don’t ever do that. Let her see you whole. It’s your job now to drive her away; it’s what comes next, I think. How else will she get out into the world? She needs that real bad, Met.”

I smiled at her. It was a watery smile.

“You’d make a wonderful mother, Pie. You know that?”

“No I wouldn’t,” she said heavily. “I can talk it but I can’t do it. I’d probably let my daughter catch me screwing the UPS man; that’s the difference between you and me. I can’t be a mother. I just can’t. Don’t start on that. What it boils down to is that I flat just don’t want to do it. The thought bores and horrifies me. You’d probably get stuck with it, and then I’d hate you and me, too.”

We sat silent for a while. I knew that I should get up, get dressed, get going. Time was bleeding out of the morning. I knew that it was useless to try and persuade her to keep the baby, to come home with us. But I could not seem to move. I was reluctant to let her go. She was, in this moment, well-loved friend and peer, as well as my sister. I did not know if I would ever get that back.

“Are you going to leave Pom?” she said presently, and I said, before I even thought about it, “Of course not.”

She raised an eyebrow at me.

“I had an idea he had a little something going on the side,” she said. “I thought that might be one reason you hooked up with T.C.”

“He may,” I said slowly. “I keep hearing about a doctor who used to be with the clinic. Amy, of course, told me she’s back in town. And when I called home the other night, she answered.…I know it was her. But it could have been nothing; I don’t know about that. Pom has brought colleagues home before. It’s not really the reason for T.C. and me, but I guess it…hurried things along a little. How did you know?”

“I’ve always thought he would, eventually. Men like Pom are superglue to women. I never thought it would amount to anything, but I’ve always thought it would happen.”

“I never did,” I said. “I may be stupid, but I really never did.”

“Are you going to tell him you know about her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you going to tell him about T.C.?”

“I don’t know…no. That didn’t have anything to do with him. That had to do with me, and it’s over now. I don’t want Pom to turn it into something it wasn’t, and I don’t want to use it for a club or something. No matter what happens with Pom, I’ll never do that again. I couldn’t. There isn’t anybody else like…him.”

I could not say, T.C.

“You really are in love with him.”

“Yes, I am. All of the me I am now is. I don’t think it will be that way when I get home, not after a while. Or I would die. Speaking of which, I have to get going, darling. We have a noon flight. I’ve got to wake Glynn and get her started.”

“How are you getting to the airport?”

“He’s going to take us. T.C.”

The name cut like glass on my lips.

“Isn’t that going to be awful?”

“Beyond imagining,” I said.

“Oh, hell, I’ll drive you,” she said. “I can make better time than that Jeep. Don’t put yourself through that. I’ll go up and tell him. You get it together with your daughter.”

“Where will you go after that?”

“Home, I guess. Palm Springs. Then I have to close up Stu’s place and get it listed. I’ve got a bunch of loose ends to take care of, before…I go to Santa Monica. I’ll call you.”

“How can I let you go through that alone?”

“I won’t. I’ll take a friend with me. There’s one who’s gone through just the same thing. It really isn’t bad this early, Met. This guy keeps you overnight, puts you up in a very pretty little bed and breakfast next door, and sends a nurse with you for the first night. Just like a facelift. It’s not back streets and coat hangers anymore, you know. It’s been legal a long time.”

“Oh, Pie, I hate this,” I said, and swallowed the bitter, scanty tears and went, finally, to wake my daughter. Behind me, I heard Laura get up and walk slowly to the door, heard the click of her boot heels as she went to tell T.C. that we did not, after all, need him.

It was a monstrous, killing lie.

Glynn and Curtis were still mounded under the covers, but they were not asleep. Glynn lay staring into space and slowly stroking his blunt head, and he lay on his back, eyes closed, as blissful as a sybarite in the sun.

“You two look like an old married couple,” I said, with what normalcy I could muster, and she looked at me. Her swollen eyes filled with tears and she began to cry again. Curtis stirred and looked up at her and sat up and began to lick her face.

I sat down on the bed beside her.

“Don’t cry, love,” I said. “No matter how either one of us has behaved, nothing calamitous is going to happen.”

“Oh, Mama!” she wailed, and threw her arms around me, and I held her very tightly while she cried. I had been right last night; the ribs were not so sharp. She had washed the excelsiorlike frizz out of her hair, too; it was still damp under my fingers and smelled of apple shampoo and stood up at the back of her head like a rooster’s comb. It was still thick and silky, and beneath it her neck felt so vulnerable and young that I wanted to wrap it swiftly in something to protect it, like a thick muffler. The nose ring cut into my shoulder.

Curtis jumped down from the bed and looked at us, and whined.

“I think you better dismiss your roomie,” I said into the damp hair. “He hasn’t been outside since last night, and he must have to go awfully bad. He’s just too shy to tell you. He probably wants to go home to breakfast, too. And you need some yourself.”

“Oh, poor Curtis,” she gulped, still sobbing. “Go on, Curtis. Go home. Carpe diem. I love you.”

Curtis woofed softly and trotted to the back door, looking back at her. I got up and went to let him out. Behind me I heard her sniff loudly and go into the bathroom and turn on the water. Curtis put his nose into my hand and then loped out into the morning. It was just like the last two: white-bled and hot and still. Only inside the lodge did the chill of night linger. Curtis stopped still and sniffed and looked back at me and then toward the trail that led to the tower. He held himself rigidly, as if he might come to a point.

“It’s okay. I’ll take care of her. Go home, Curtis. Carpe diem, dearest dog.”

He trotted away springily, still stiff-legged, looking into the woods on either side of him as though he smelled something in them. Perhaps he did. T.C. had said there were deer often, and once in a while bear…T.C. Curtis.

I closed my eyes and stood very still against the sickening wash of pain, and then it receded and I went back into the lodge and started breakfast for my daughter.

She came into the kitchen a little later, red from scrubbing, mouth still quivering. She looked so strange to me for a moment that I simply stood staring, and she began to cry again.

“I know it looks awful. I don’t know why I let Marcie and Jess talk me into it.”

“For the same reason I dyed my hair red when I was a sophomore,” I said. “It turned out fuchsia. I thought my father was going to kill me. Yours is different, but it’s not bad, sweetie. The color can be toned down with a rinse, and the length is becoming, very smart. You have the features for it. You might even want to keep it short. As for the ring, well, if you get tired of it, Dr. Pierson can take it out in a second. Nothing’s broken that can’t be fixed.”

She came to me and put her arms around me and laid her head on my shoulder. Once again I held her.

“Really, really?”

“Really, really. I told you that.”

“I was awful to you. I said terrible things. Aunt Laura is furious with me. How can that not change things?”

I took a deep breath into her hair.

“I did things you thought were awful, too. I did sleep with T.C., and more than once. And I can’t ever be sorry for that, Glynn. But it ended last night, and it won’t happen again. We’re going home this afternoon, and unless you want it to, the way we live at home will not change.”

“You aren’t going to leave Daddy?”

“No. Not because of this. Things between daddy and me probably will change some, but that doesn’t have anything to do with what happened up here. And they won’t change between you and Daddy, or us as a family. At least, I don’t think so. To be very honest with you, no, I would not leave your father, but I am going to have to insist on things he may not be able to do, and he may not be able to stay. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but I can’t say for sure. I do know that we both love you more than anything in the world. And that will never change.”

“Do you? Do you really?”

“I wouldn’t be going home if I didn’t,” I said simply.

She pulled back and looked at me blearily. The nose ring jarred, but the scrubbed, shiny face was Glynn’s. I had told her the truth; the short, soft hair around her face was striking. It was just the cut they probably would have given her for Arc, without the unspeakable curls.

“You love him, then.” She jerked her head toward the tower.

I nodded.

“I do. I can’t tell you I don’t. But I can tell you that it doesn’t mean I can’t love your father, too. It’s a totally different kind of love.”

“Sex, you mean.”

“No. Much, much more than that. But that, too, yes.”

She shut her eyes.

“I hate all of this,” she said. “I don’t see how you can love two people. I just don’t see how you can do those things with two people at the same time. I don’t see how it can not change things.”

“Glynn, you can love a great many people at the same time, for a great many different reasons. I don’t know how to explain this, because it’s new to me, too. But I think love makes more love. To love, to love anything or anybody, is to start some kind of engine that makes more. The only thing is, you do have to choose what you will do about the loving; in the last analysis, I think you have to do that. I chose to have this time with T.C. for as long as I could, as deeply as it was possible to go. But I never meant to try and take it home, and he agreed with that. In fact, he’s the one who made me see it. It is quite apart from what I have always had with your father, and will not spill over into that. But you should know that I will always keep this time up here in my heart, and I will always treasure it. As far as I am concerned, it will not change our family life, but it will probably change me some, and I will need to act on those changes. I know this is hard. I don’t understand it yet, either. But I’m not going to lie to you, and I’m going to try very hard not to hover over you anymore. You are your own person, and I’m going to try to see you that way, and it is going to be hard because you have been my little girl for all of your life. I will ask you to try and see me as my own person. That will probably be hard, too.”

“I want…I want you just to be my mother,” she said, beginning to sniffle again.

“I won’t stop being that. I couldn’t. It’s just that you get a woman friend along with the mother. Two for the price of one. At least, I hope you’ll let her be a friend to you.”

“Will you tell Daddy?”

“I don’t think so. Will you?”

“What if I did? What would happen? Would it matter?”

“Probably, to him. I don’t know what would happen. Do it if you have to. I’m not going to let you hold me hostage with it. I can’t do that.”

“I can’t promise I won’t get so mad at you sometime that I’ll just blurt it out.”

“Yes, you can. You very well can promise that. You can and will get angry with me; I think we’ve just started with that. But you can decide not to blurt it out. That’s your call. Like I said, it’s up to you. You stopped being a child up here, much as I regret that. You’re accountable to yourself now.”

“I won’t tell him. I never would have done that.”

“I think it’s good that you won’t. But that’s probably more for his sake than mine. We’ll renegotiate things as we go along.”

She looked startled, and then grinned. Some of the old Glynn was in it. Someone new and rather fine was, too.

“Can you do that? Is that allowed?”

“It better be,” I said. “How on earth would people live together if it wasn’t?”

“Do you and Dad do that?”

“We will now.”

“He’s not going to like that.”

“Probably not, at first. But I think he’ll come to see that it’s necessary. Things just can’t go on being all one person’s way. I need some things for myself that I don’t have yet. So do you. That’s what I’ll start with.”

“Like Mommee.”

“Like Mommee. God love her, I hope you’ll be able to remember her the way she really was. All that life, and spirit…She can’t help what she’s become, Glynn. But she needs to be in a place where they can concentrate just on her and help her, and we need a place just for ourselves. That’s one of the first things Daddy needs to see.”

“Will he?”

“I have no idea.”

“What about…you know, you said we could look at Lab puppies.”

“You’ll get your dog. Even if it and I have to sleep in the doghouse. That I can promise.”

She fell silent, and I put my chin down on the top of her head and we stood like that for a while.

“I’m sorry about Arc,” I said. “I know that was hard to give up.”

“Yeah. But Aunt Laura made me see a lot of things about that. It’s not a good life, is it? She told me about Pring. I wouldn’t have believed it. Mama, she told me about the baby, too. Isn’t there something we can do about that? I don’t think she ought to just…kill it.”

I felt her wince at her own words. I flinched away from them, too.

“Me either. But only she can make that decision. That’s very much her own to make, any woman’s own. That’s one thing we don’t butt into.”

“She could have it and we could take care of it.”

“Who? You? You want to raise a baby instead of finishing school and going to college and making your own life? Or do you want me to do it?”

“Well, you’ve done it before. Twice. Once with Aunt Laura, and once with me. You know how. We could get a nurse—”

“No. As you say, I’ve done that. I have other things I need to do now. The baby is Aunt Laura’s responsibility.”

“She isn’t going to take it.”

“No.”

“That’s awful.”

“Don’t judge, Glynn. You just don’t know enough yet. It will be a while before you do.”

“You said we’re going home—”

“Yes. In about an hour. So let’s get you fed and packed up. Aunt Laura’s going to take us to the airport.”

“Are you…are we going to stop by at the tower?”

“No.”

“So I won’t see Curtis again?”

“You can walk up and say good-bye, and we’ll pick you up on the way out,” I said. “And I’ll bet T.C. will send you a picture of Curtis. Why don’t you ask him?”

“I don’t see how I can talk to him.”

“It’s easy. Just open your mouth and let ’er rip.”

“What should I say?”

“How about, ‘Good-bye, T.C.’?” I said, and felt the tears again, and turned quickly to the refrigerator to get out the eggs and bacon.

She came close behind me and touched my shoulder.

“Mama, I’m so sorry. About what I said, and about…T.C.,” she said, and vanished into her room.

“Me, too, my little girl, who never will be that again,” I whispered.

She had finished her breakfast and gone to repack her duffel when Laura came back. I had put on the blue traveling suit from a faraway life, stacked my bags at the back door, and was putting our bed linens into the washing machine. Laura had said she would come back to the lodge and spend the night and make sure all traces of us were gone before she started for Palm Springs.

“I can’t stand the thought that his next…whatever…might find something I left behind and put it on,” she said. “On second thought, maybe I should hide my dirty underwear where he’ll never find it. Make him smell me every time he turns around.”

Now she came and stood in the sun beside me and leaned comfortably against me. We stood that way for a bit.

“If I were you I would never leave him,” she said presently, and I turned to look into her face. Tears stood in her eyes.

“He’s so torn up over you he can barely talk. But we did, a little bit. About you. I would give a whole lot for a man I loved to say the things he did.”

I could not speak. I hoped desperately she was not going to tell me what he had said. She didn’t. There did not seem to be anything at all to say, so I said nothing, either. We leaned together in the mounting heat, smelling the scent of sunburned pine, feeling our shoulders press together. I thought that I could easily sleep standing there.

“But then,” she said briskly, “I’m not you and he’s not Pring, and if anybody did say those things to me I’d probably smart off at him and ruin it. Y’all packed? I guess we ought to get this show on the road.”

The trunk of the Mustang was up, and the top was down, and we were ready for the road, and the wind, and the sun. But I did not think that this time we would sing.

Glynn came out with her duffel and slung it into the trunk. I put my bags in and Laura slammed it shut.

“Well,” she said.

“Did you see Curtis?” Glynn asked Laura, and Laura nodded.

“He’s up there with his daddy, helping him fiddle around with that junk under the shed. He said to tell you he’s waiting for you to come say good-bye.”

“Then I think I will,” Glynn said, and looked at me, waiting. I nodded.

“Pick you up in a minute,” Laura said.

Glynn started up the trail, and then came running back and hugged us both, hard. She looked cool and pure and young again, with her clean, shining skin and the palomino hair falling in a soft bang over her forehead. I could smell the soap and shampoo; she had showered again, I thought. Her cheek was still damp, and cool.

“We really are a family, aren’t we?” she said, muffled in my hair. “We went through all this whole crappy week and we came out still a family. I’m so glad.”

“Me, too,” I whispered, and Laura hugged her hard and said, “Cain’t nothin’ bust this act up, pardner,” and Glynn laughed and turned to the trail again.

As on the first morning when I had started up the trail toward the tower, lost in fog, we heard Curtis before we saw him. He was barking, sharp, steady, peremptory barks I had never heard before. He barked steadily and did not stop, and as he came nearer, the barking got louder, and we could hear the thudding of his feet before he exploded around the bend and shot toward us like an arrow.

“Oh, you old dog,” Glynn cried, stretching out her arms. “You couldn’t wait!”

But he did not run into her arms. He danced before us, staring hard into our faces, barking, barking. When we did not, for a moment, respond, he jumped up and put his feet on Glynn’s shoulders and barked into her face.

“What?” she said helplessly.

I saw the note in his collar then. No bandanna this morning, just a scrap of torn paper stuck under his worn red leather collar. It was perforated, and there were words scrawled across it in red. The paper from T.C.’s homemade seismograph, the pen from it.

I took it from Curtis’s collar.

Get out now, it said. The red pen skidded off the paper in a scrawl. I stared at the note, and then at Glynn and Laura. Curtis barked and barked.

It smote me then like a great wave, cold and numbing.

“There’s an earthquake coming,” I said, forcing the words through shaking lips. “We’ve got to go now.”

Laura gave a small scream and instinctively crouched in the doorway with her arms crossed over her stomach. Glynn, white-faced, turned and headed for the house.

“No!” I screamed. “Not in there! Stay out in the open, lie down!”

Curtis was a sleek, dark missile as he leaped at Glynn and caught the tail of her shirt in his teeth. He pulled fiercely, and she stumbled out of the door and down the one granite step. He knocked her to the ground and leaped on her. I started for both of them.

It hit then.

You seldom hear them, all the experts will tell you. You will, of course, hear the roar and crashing of falling masonry and collapsing beams if you are near man-made structures, and you will hear the whipping and long, tearing cracks of trees splitting, and the thunder of their falling, and later you will hear the shrieks of car and house alarms and the icy crystal tinkle of shattering glass, and even later you will hear the fire and rescue alarms, and perhaps the cries of those who still live. But you will not, in all odds, hear the quake itself.

But I heard it. I knew in that moment that I was hearing the very voice of the snake, and I know it now, though I am told over and over that I could not have. The quake was deep in the earth; its hypocenter was almost as deep as the Loma Prieta, and that was the deepest ever recorded on the San Andreas fault. No man-made drill has ever reached that black depth, where the earth is no longer solid. I heard its deep-buried war cry, like the long bellow of a great distant steer, and I felt its indrawn breath even before the ground began to move. In the instant that I felt my body come down over those of Glynn and Curtis, I thought, this is what T.C. means. This is what he hears; this is what he feels.

The shaking began then, a violent, furious, side-to-side heaving as if something unimaginably huge had taken the earth in its fist and shaken, and then the ground rolled like the sea, and we were flung from side to side so hard that we ended up on our backs, fully ten feet from the place we had hit the ground. I remember lying there with my arms stretched out over my daughter and the dog, watching the air thicken rapidly with swirling dust so dense that I saw the sun grayly, as if through morning fog, and felt a great hot wind driving particles of grit and bark and pinecone into my face and mouth. It was so strong a wind that even in that moment of blank terror I wondered at it. I had never heard of an earthquake wind. Only later did I hear someone saying that in the mountains the quake had been so severe that the whipping treetops stirred up a wild windstorm before they began to come down.

When they did begin to fall, the noise of their dying was louder than anything that had gone before: the long, shrieking cracks, the snap, the whistling of the hot wind, the great, following booms of their collision with the ground, the sighing rustling of their last limbs and leaves and needles as they settled into the treacherous earth. On top of their death cries came a long, shuddering, rattling thunder; I thought, idiotically, of the great elephant stampede in Elephant Walk. Elizabeth Taylor, hadn’t it been? Whipping my head to the side I saw that the lodge had settled in upon itself like those buildings you see demolished on TV, by implosion. The dust was now blinding. The screams of the redwoods went on and on.

Somewhere in there, the rolling and shaking stopped, but the trees did not. I became aware gradually that I was screaming at them, a high, endless dirge of fury: “You will not! You will not! By God you will not, you will not…”

I saw the one that would finish us. It was falling directly over us, slowly; so slowly that it seemed to have been filmed in slow motion. It came down and down, its scragged top denuded of needles, growing larger and larger. Still I howled in my rage, “You will not…”

Something like a great, black, scratching, spurring pterodactyl settled down over my face and then my body, shutting out the dust and the light and the sound of everything but my voice, still screaming invective. I waited for the darkness to swallow me, but it did not; there was a gigantic, shuddering thud, larger than any that had gone before, and a screech of tearing metal, and a great whistling of limbs, and the little knives of needles and branch tips cutting my face, and a great, diffuse weight sinking onto my body. But no more darkness came. There was a last thud, and the earth shook with it, and then there was silence. Nothing more. Just sun and dust and silence.

Much later, I don’t know how long, I felt a tentative squirming beneath me, and heard my daughter’s muffled voice crying, “Mama? Mama!”

The redwood had come down sidewise across us, its top striking the Mustang. The Mustang had flattened, but it had held enough to take the main weight of the tree. The pterodactyl I had been its outer top limbs; they had been small enough so that they cut my face and tore my pantsuit to shreds, but their combined weight had not been enough to hurt me badly. I pushed the branches off me, stood up on shaking legs, grabbed the longest one and pulled. It lifted, groaning, off Glynn and, beneath her, Curtis, just far enough for them to wriggle free. They did not, though; Glynn lay there looking at me with great, empty eyes, and even Curtis was still. I could see his eyes though, dark and bright, moving restlessly about him, and see his doggy, panting pink grin through the gray mask of dust that he wore. Glynn wore one, too. She was a gray child, a daughter of dust.

“Move!” I shouted, and she did, wriggling out like a snake, and Curtis followed her, shaking himself so that dust flew and needles sprayed around him.

I let go of the branch and it snapped back, and I sat down hard on the ground and closed my eyes. Later, they told me I could not possibly have lifted the branches, but I simply looked at them in their ignorance. I could have lifted them with one hand; the rage was that strong. I could not even tell where I left off and that red, boiling rage began.

Like the quake, the rage ended suddenly, too, and I simply sat on the ground with my daughter kneeling beside me and Curtis at her side, nosing her all over, nosing at me. I did not open my eyes. Later, in a moment, I would get up and we would go away from here. They were not hurt. I was not hurt. We would go away, we would go home.…

“Mama,” Glynn was shaking me. “Mama, Aunt Laura! Help me get Aunt Laura out! I can hear her.”

I could too, then. She was crying softly, from the heaped, dust-swirling mess that had been the lodge. We could not see her, the dust still swirled so thickly, but I could follow the sound of her, and led by Curtis, we ran to the pile of rubble and leaned down to it.

Like us, the treetop had saved her. The treetop and the doorframe, hewed all those years ago from thick, solid Western pine. It still stood, like a ruined but not vanquished arch of a fallen Greek temple, and beneath it, under tangles of bare black and green, Laura lay huddled on her side, her eyes screwed shut, crying.

She lay in a fetal ball, wrapped in her arms, and also like me, she was completely whitened with leprous dust, and runnels of shocking red blood cut down her face and arms, from the little knives of the needles and branch tips.

“My baby,” she sobbed. “My baby, oh, God, Met, my baby.”

It was a kitten’s sound, with no breath behind it. I reached in among the branches and lifted her to her knees. Still, she cried. Still, her arms wrapped her stomach. Still, her eyes were shut tight. Glynn and I pulled the branches off her and stood her up between us, and I looked her over sharply. I could see nothing amiss but the scratches and the dust.

“Can you talk?” I said. “Open your eyes, Laura, and look at me. I think you’re okay. The tree took the weight of the house off you. Open your eyes!”

She did, looking at me with white-ringed golden eyes. Her pupils were black and huge, but her breathing seemed all right, though shallow and very slow. Shock, almost surely; I had had all the right Red Cross courses. But nothing else that showed. Perhaps, after all, we would be all right.

“My baby,” she whispered again, and I looked quickly between her bare, bloodied white legs, but saw no terrible, spreading stain.

“Are you in pain? Do you think you’re bleeding?”

“No…no…”

“All right. Then your baby’s probably fine. They’re a lot tougher than we are. We just need to go slowly now—”

“Where are we going to go?” she said in the breathy whisper that had taken the place of her rich voice.

“I’m going up to T.C.’s,” I said, sure of it in that moment. “I’ll go up there and get him, and he’ll take us out in the Jeep. Listen, this is wonderful; he’s got a complete earthquake kit that he keeps in an old safe on the porch, with first-aid stuff and food and bottled water, and flashlights and blankets and…and everything. I know right where it is. I’m going to walk up there now, and we’ll come back in the Jeep and get you. You all sit down. Glynn, sit your Aunt Laura down and put her head between her knees and keep her still, and if she starts to bleed take off your shirt and press it up there and hold it—”

“I want to go with you,” Glynn began to whimper. Her eyes filled with tears, and they tracked down through the white dust, leaving snail-like trails. “Don’t go off and leave us; what if it comes back; what if Aunt Laura’s not all right; what if something happens to you—”

“No,” I said calmly and firmly. A ringing, faraway peace had fallen over me, now that I knew just what to do, now that I knew where to go.

“You’re perfectly all right but your aunt is in shock, and you cannot leave her. The earthquake is not coming back. If you feel anything else it will be an aftershock and will not hurt you. What on earth could happen to me? I’m just going a quarter mile up the trail—”

“Mama—”

“You are not a child, Glynn,” I said, and she fell silent and looked at me out of her minstrel’s face.

“All right,” she said softly, and I gave her cheek a quick pat and started up the trail.

Beside me, Curtis whined and whined, dancing in place, looking from me up toward the invisible tower, and I said, “Okay, Curtis, you marvelous, darling hero, you. Go home. Carpe diem.”

He was off like a shot, in silence, and I listened until I heard the thudding of his feet in the dust fade, and then began once more to walk. Only then did I realize that my left arm was hanging useless at my side, and that no matter how I tried, I could not lift it. It did not hurt, but when I tried again to move it a sharp, not-unpleasant shock rather like electricity shot up into my shoulder.

“Okay,” I said aloud. “To hell with it. I don’t care. It doesn’t hurt. T.C. will fix it.”

I talked aloud the entire time I was on the trail. It was chatty talk, with a sort of hilarity bubbling just under its surface. The path looked nothing like it had before; trees were down across it, and the spill of a small rockslide blocked it at one point, so that I had to climb over it, and far over to my left, at the edge of the forest, I could see that earth had opened in a great fissure that whipped off into the depths of the woods. Beside it, trees were torn off midway up their trunks. I could not see into the depths of the opened earth. But the long, golden rays of sunlight still fell, incredibly, though now on ruin. Ferns were pulped and most of the small flowers and bushes buried by a rainstorm of needles and thick white dust. I turned my head back and did not look again.

“What a shame,” I said. “It’s such a pretty place. Maybe it will be like those places in the wilderness where there is a wildfire; maybe the flowers and trees will come back even stronger.”

But I knew that it would be far out of my lifetime before these redwoods stood tall again. The knowledge did not seem to pierce the shell of the peace, though.

“Well, so, this is what we’ll do,” I said. “We’ll put a sling on this arm and put Curtis and the kit in the Jeep, and we’ll take some food and water with us in case we can’t get through for a while, and we’ll pick up Laura and Glynn and we’ll get as far as we can today. Maybe we can get all the way through with no trouble. If we don’t, they’ll be looking for us pretty soon, and they’ll probably find us before we get to them. They’ll patch us up and give us something clean to wear, and put us on a place home. Laura will come with us, of course. No more of this silliness about not having the baby. Oh, wait, oh damn…Pring won’t know yet there’s been an earth-quake. Well, then…no, Stuart is dead. How could I have forgotten that? Poor Stuart. But the forest service must know somebody’s been at the lodge; but then, how would they? T.C. hasn’t seen anybody this week that I haven’t seen, and they sure haven’t been the park service. Maybe Marcie’s father and stepmother, then…

“Pom will know. Of course. Pom knows where I am. Pom will tell them, Pom will come…

“Pom will come.

“Won’t he?”

I walked on in the sun, muttering busily to myself. The silence was larger and deeper than I had ever heard it. No birds sang. The great, surflike breathing of the redwoods was still. Nothing rustled in the undergrowth, nothing chirped or buzzed or clicked. It was hot and still and it seemed to me that I walked and walked without making any progress, and that the sun was frozen in its arc overhead, and that it was no time at all. My own chattering voice was the only sound that went with me.

And then there was a sound, and my heart dropped like a stone and froze as solid as black ice in my chest, and I stopped. It was a howl; a terrible, primal animal howl of pain and desolation, and it rose and rose and rose through the heat and swirling dust until I thought that my eardrums would burst with it. And then it stopped.

“Don’t do this, T.C.,” I whispered, breaking into a trot. “This is just too much. This is not fair.”

I came into the clearing on rubbery, leaden legs and stopped. There was no tower, no shed, no Jeep, no surrounding trees. Only a huge, dust-whitened pile of rubble, like that the lodge had disintegrated into; only a swirling cloud of dust; only the stems of maimed redwoods; only their fresh-torn yellow flesh.

Only Curtis, lying at the edge of the rubble pile, his head on his paws, whining and whining.

I went across the clearing to him, stepping over branches and chunks of wood and metal and once a recognizable piece of T.C.’s earthquake machine, the part that had been, I thought, the hi-fi speaker. I knelt down at the edge of the monstrous pile and put my hand on Curtis’s back. He thumped his tail, but did not move.

“T.C.?” I asked experimentally, and the answering silence was so terrible that I did not speak his name again. I did not look around for him, either. I sat down on the earth cross-legged, like a child playing Indian, and laid my hands in my lap.

I want you to come out from there right now, I said prissily in my head. This is not funny.

Then I said, thought, oh, of course, he’s gone for help, to get a truck or a car or something.

But I knew he had not. He would have taken Curtis with him.

I looked down at the dog. It was only then that I noticed that his paws were bloody, and his muzzle, and that he had laid his head on something that he was guarding, for he would not lift his muzzle when I tried to see what it was.

“Are you hurt, sweet dog?” I said, and picked up his paws, one after another. He let me do that. The blood was damp-dry and I could scrape it off, and when I did I saw no torn flesh, no injuries.

“Oh, good,” I said to him. “I couldn’t have stood it if you’d been hurt. Okay. Good. Good.”

He lifted his head then, and laid it on my knee, and I saw that what he had been guarding was a pair of metal-rimmed glasses, mended with tape, whole except for the lenses, which were spiderwebbed with cracks. I looked from them to the rubble pile. I could see then that Curtis had tunneled far into it, but that the debris had slid back down and filled it partly in. I did not move to clear it out.

I lay down on the earth beside Curtis, carefully, because my electric shoulder and arm spat and crackled at me. No pain followed, though. I stretched myself full out and laid my injured arm at my side and put the other one around Curtis. He wriggled until he had fit himself into my side, and we lay there together, silent and still. I worked my good fingers under his chin and picked up the shattered glasses and cupped them loosely in my palm.

At first, even in the pounding sun, my body was cold. The earth itself and the rubble and dust upon it were warm, but they gave no heat to my body. I was as cold and stiff as if it had been a long, terrible arctic cold that felled me. Only Curtis, in the curve of my arm, was warm. He did not move.

Very gradually though, so gradually that I was only aware of it after it had happened, warmth seeped up from the earth and into my body. It seeped into my stomach and flattened breasts, out to the end of my fingers and toes, into my cheek where it lay pressed into the dust. The cold and stiffness drained away, and my body seemed to melt into the very earth. I shifted to feel it even closer, and then lay still. Curtis still did not move.

Far below me the earth spasmed again as the great snake, sated, flexed itself voluptuously. Rage flooded back, but it was a dull rage, abstract.

“You fucking bitch,” I whispered to her. “You seduced him. You talked to him and you sang to him and you made love to him, and then you never told him. You didn’t tell him. He loved you, and you didn’t tell him…”

But she had. Told him just far enough in advance so he could send his emissary flying to us: Get out now.

I closed my eyes again, and waited, and the rage gradually slunk away and the warmth came stealing back. It was as if his body lay beneath me, giving me its warmth through the broken earth.

“Hey,” I whispered. “You there?”

Always, I heard, though not with my ears.

“You got your wishes, you know,” I said into the earth. “All three of them. And now you won’t ever have to leave. Only I have to do that. Don’t worry, though. I’m not going for a while. Not for a long time.”

Stay.

Maybe I will. Maybe I will.

And I lay there, not moving, joined to him through the earth as I had been above it, only a day ago. I closed my eyes and drifted in silence and time, Curtis heavy and warm against me, the earth softening below. This is not bad, I thought. This is good. Presently I felt the stiff, bloodied white mask on my face split with a smile, and I wondered if, when it happened, he had been dancing.

12

It was Glynn who led us out. Glynn and Curtis, walking side by side, she with a stout branch she used for a walking stick, Curtis padding steadily beside her, head and tail down, wearing the harness she had fashioned that carried some of our supplies. Forever after when I thought of valor, I thought of my tall daughter going before me, the dog like a patient wolf by her side.

I don’t know when it was that she came to me at the ruin of the tower. I know I heard her calling me up the trail before I saw her, heard the anxiety and the last remnants of the child in her voice, and heard her cry of fear when she saw me lying on my stomach with the dog beside me, motionless. It seemed that the sun was higher, directly overhead perhaps, but the thick, sullen heat of the past few days was gone. It was as if the snake had loosed her grip on the very skies when she was sated, and let the winds blow free again.

Glynn knelt beside me, beginning to cry, and I made an effort far larger than I thought I was capable of and sat up. Curtis, who had lifted his head at her voice, hauled himself to a sitting position, too, and thumped his tail faintly.

“I’m all right, baby. Just resting,” I said, my voice thick and cracked in my dry throat. It was as if I had not spoken for months, years.

“Oh, Mama! It’s all gone! Oh, God…Curtis! Mama, he’s got blood all over—”

“It’s not his blood, baby. He’s not hurt. I looked.”

She was silent. Then she said, “Is he…under there?”

I nodded. I was afraid to look at her. If the frail, shining shell around me cracked I did not think I could survive what rushed in.

Another silence, and then: “We have to dig. Mama, we have to dig for him. Lots of people survive earthquakes; you hear about them being found later perfectly okay—”

“No.”

“Mama—”

“No, Glynn.”

“I’m so sorry.”

I heard her begin to cry again, softly, and I touched her dust-whitened knee and said, “You can’t cry, baby. I’m sorry too, but that’s one thing that we just can’t afford right now. Later, but not now. Now we have to think what to do.”

But I could not think. I wanted only to sit in the sun beside the great, obscene mound of rubble and be very quiet and still.

Presently she reached down and took hold of my arm to pull me up. A great shaft of electricity shot up to my shoulder. I cried out.

“Oh, Mama, you’re hurt!”

“It doesn’t really hurt. It just sort of buzzes. But I can’t move it. I think it may be broken. It’s my left one, though. I can use my right one just fine.”

She sat back on her heels, her arm around the big dog, who leaned against her, his eyes closed. She scratched his chin in silence. Then she said, “Okay. We’re going to have to walk out of here. We’ll need some things to take with us. Let me poke around in this stuff and see if there’s anything.…”

It was not a voice I had heard before. I looked at her mutely. She looked back at me levelly, as if daring me to contradict her.

“I think we should stay here,” I said dreamily. “It’s warm right here in the sun, and the…wreckage makes a shelter from the wind. We’re close to the road. Someone will come before long. Your dad will come.…”

She looked at me, hope flaming in her eyes.

“Does Daddy know where we are?”

“Sort of. He knows we were up in these mountains; I think I told him Big Basin.”

She shook her head.

“That’s not good enough. You’re hurt. Aunt Laura is…I don’t know. She just sits there holding her stomach and staring. I don’t think we can wait for anybody to remember we’re up here. They may not even be able to get to us. We don’t know what the road is like—”

“Glynn,” I said, “how are we going to get a shocked, pregnant woman and a one-armed one out of here? What will we do if we don’t find our way to a town or something before it gets dark? We don’t even know what’s still standing; I have no idea how bad that thing was.”

Her chin lifted. She looked like she had when she had been a four-year-old, haughtily offended when someone told her she was too young to do something she wished to do. In spite of myself, I smiled. I felt the mask crack again.

“I’m going to get us out,” she said. “I’ve had eight years of scouting. I took that emergency course at school last semester. All I need is a few things for us to take along; didn’t you say there was an earthquake kit here somewhere? In an old safe? I don’t think I can get into where the lodge kitchen used to be, and the car trunk is…gone. But maybe a safe would hold.”

I drew a breath to argue with her, and then let it out. I was simply too tired to talk. Come to that, I was too tired to walk. Let her find that out for herself, later; activity and planning would be good for her now. In a moment we would see about Laura. In a moment.

“Here,” she said, “hold on to Curtis. I’m going to poke around in this stuff. There’s all kinds of things sticking up out of it.”

“Be careful,” I murmured, and put my arm around Curtis. He moved against me and tucked his head under my arm. He was warm and solid, and I clung to him, smelling the dusty smell of still-hot dog hair.

It seemed a long time later when I heard her cry out, “Here it is! Hot shit! Part of the steps held the rubble off it! Oh, thank God, it’s busted open, and there’s all kinds of stuff in it.”

Thank you, I said in my head to him. You’re going to get us out after all, aren’t you?

Told you, he said.

Glynn had her things together in about an hour. From the battered safe she took two Mylar blankets, so thin they folded to washcloth size, and a first-aid kit and packets of freeze-dried food and coffee and trail mix, and a flashlight and compass and spare batteries. She found a map and folded it into the pocket of her jeans, along with matches and a folding water cup. There were plastic bottles of water, too, but they were too bulky for us to carry many of them, so she set aside only four. She made a sling for my arm out of an ace bandage and snugged it tight. Then she fashioned a kind of harness that fit around Curtis’s chest and neck and tucked the blankets and freeze-dried packets and trail mix into it. Curtis sat passively, but whenever she passed he thumped his tail, and she stroked his head. He had not moved from his position at the edge of the rubble pile, though.

Curtis and I sat together while she went back down to the lodge for Laura.

I’m so proud of her, I told T.C.

Kid’s got good genes, he said.

The only thing left to say then was good-bye, and I could not say that, so we sat placidly in the sun, Curtis and I, in the same companionable silence that the three of us had often shared in the last days.

When Glynn brought Laura up I felt a bolt of pure fear go through me. She walked like a little old woman, bent far over, her arms crossed over her stomach, staring straight ahead of her. She was whitened and bloodied and her clothes, like mine, were shredded by the whipping branches. Glynn lowered her to the ground beside me and I reached out and touched her arm with my good one, and she put her hand over it, but she did not speak or look at me. Her flesh was as cold as death.

I patted her in silence. Surely Glynn would see that we must stay here now. This woman could not walk.

But Glynn shook out one of the blankets and tucked it around Laura, and started a small, wavering wood fire in a spot of clear ground, and opened one of the bottles of water and washed Laura’s face and arms and hands gently with moistened gauze from the kit, and when she had cleaned most of the blood and dust and grit away, she put salve all over the scratches, and made instant coffee in the folding cup and held it to Laura’s mouth while she sipped it, and then gave her more water and with it two aspirin. Then she did the same to me. When her own face and arms were cleaned and salved, and we had all had heavily sugared hot coffee and aspirin, she stamped out the fire and scattered the ashes, and tied two of the bottles of water to her belt and made a belt for me out of the twine from the kit and hung the other two from my waist.

She stopped and considered her handiwork, hands on hips, and then went back to the safe and took out a heavy Swiss army knife and dropped it into her pocket. Then she came back.

“We have to go now,” she said. “It’s the middle of the afternoon. According to the map, if we turned right on the road instead of left like we usually do, we’d come to a little town called Boulder Creek that’s a lot closer than anything else. It’s south, I think. That’s where we’ll head. If the road’s clear we could maybe walk it by tonight. Or I could, and could bring people back for you, but we have to get on the main road. Nobody can see us in here.”

Laura said nothing, and I didn’t either.

“Get up, Mom,” my daughter said and held out her hand, and I pulled myself up with my right arm. I swayed dizzily, unreality boiling over me, but in a moment I was steadier.

“Help me,” she said, and together we got Laura to her feet. The coffee and aspirin seemed to have helped some; her eyes made contact with ours, and she smiled, the bleached ghost of her old smile.

“Merritt and Laura and Glynn’s excellent adventure,” she whispered. “Wouldn’t this make a movie, though?”

“How do you feel?” I said.

“Queer. Okay. Nothing seems real. The baby feels all right. Have I bled any?”

“No,” Glynn said. “I’ve kept checking. I think you’ll be all right if we take it slow, and we’ll rest real often.”

Above me the trees sighed, the first time in days I had heard that great, elemental breathing. The wind touched my face and ruffled my hair.

Whenever you hear wind in the tops of trees, that’s me, he had said.

Well, I have to go now, I said to him. I’ve stayed as long as I could. We have to take care of everybody now.

It’s time, he agreed.

You mustn’t worry about Curtis; Glynn will love him forever and ever. So will I.

I know.

I think I will die from losing you.

Who said you were losing me? Don’t you remember anything?

I remember. About the pine and spruce, and the redwoods in National Geographic, and the crab and the wine and the cold shower and the wet dog and the day-old socks and the Rattus ratti. I remember…

Then…Carpe diem, Merritt.

Carpe diem, T.C.

“Come on, Curtis,” Glynn said, snapping her fingers lightly. “Carpe diem.”

Slowly the big brown dog got up from his place on the earth. He looked back and whined softly, and then came to stand beside her. She put her fingers lightly on his head, and picked up her staff, and we began to walk. No one but Curtis looked back.

We walked for about an hour before we stopped the first time. We soon found our natural order: Glynn and Curtis in front, Laura and me behind. We had started out single file, with me behind Laura so I could catch her if she wavered and swayed, but she looked around so often to see if I was there that I soon moved up beside her. She trudged along, her hand on my right arm, looking down at her feet. After a time I looked down, too. Not only was the going slow and treacherous, with fallen trees and tossed boulders to pick our way around, but the sight of the blasted redwoods and the litter of bark and needles and dust was simply too terrible. By the time we reached the place where the lodge trail cut off Highway 9, we were sweating and I was shivering and rubber-legged. So was Laura.

It was time to stop, and we would have in any case, but what really stopped us was that the road was no longer there.

T.C.’s fire tower sat on the very top of the ridge that defined the spine of the mountains. The road was cut into the side of it, about a hundred feet down the opposite side. That hundred feet of blasted earth was all that was visible now. The earth had simply let go and flowed over the patched, bumpy old road, obliterating it as certainly as if there had always only been raw, clawed earth and shattered trees and rocks. We looked straight out into a sea of devastation that swept down to meet the next ridge before it rose again in a series of corrugations that stretched toward the suburban sprawl around San Jose. We could not see the suburbs there for the sea of diminishing ridges, and I was profoundly thankful. I could not even imagine what the human places must be like. This was awful enough, this casual, bomblike devastation of the wild places.

As far south as we could see there was no road, only landslide rubble and the great, hovering cloud of dust. I sat slowly down on the earth beside the twisted sign that said “Pringle,” which had somehow survived the slide, and drew Laura down with me. She leaned her head on my good shoulder and closed her eyes.

“Okay, let’s take a break,” Glynn said matter-of-factly, as if we did not stand in the middle of devastation and the very textbook definition of lostness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m sorry,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After we had eaten and Curtis had had reconstituted beef stew and water, Glynn said, “I want to stay awake to keep the fire going. I’m going to stretch out for just a little while; do you think you can stay awake long enough to wake me in a couple of hours?”

“You bet,” I said. “You and Curtis roll up in that blanket and lie down beside the fire. It’s going to get cold before morning. I’ll poke you in a little while.”

“No longer than two hours,” she said, and called Curtis to her and rolled the Mylar blanket around them both, and stretched out before the fire.

“Night,” she mumbled sleepily, and I smiled in the darkness. I had no intention of waking her before dawn. I did not intend to let myself sleep. Now, now was the time to let go and sink down into it; to see how far I could go before I had to pull back before the howling pain and emptiness. Now, when no one else would have to bear the cost of it.

“Night, darling,” I said to her. She did not reply.

I pulled the blanket more closely around Laura and put the trailing end of it around my shoulders. We lay close together, she breathing slowly, I staring into the fire and trying to unclench the frozen fist inside me. I was not cold; the fire warmed my body, but the space around my heart was cold once more as it had been when I had first lain down on the earth above T.C.

I don’t know if I can let it go, I said to him. I don’t know if I’ll still have you if I do.

I said you would, didn’t I? Didn’t I tell you that?

It doesn’t feel like it.

Then take it on faith.

T.C., you said I’d always have you and you’d have me as long as you lived. So now what? Damn it, have I…has—what did you call her? The Merritt of Merritt’s Creek—is she with only you now? Do I still have any of her?

I said you still have me, didn’t I? Well, if you have me, you have her. As long as you still have me, she’ll be with you.

What am I going to do with her back in Atlanta, T.C.? Nobody there even knows who she is. Do I have to hide her; will she ambush me; what if I can’t find her after all? Or suppose if I can. I don’t think Pom would know what to do with her. I don’t think she would know what to do with Pom. Not with anybody but you.

If you’re smart you’ll let her out and sic her on ol’ Pom and let her just flat turn him inside out. You’d be a fool to waste that woman, Merritt.

He may not be able to accept her.

Then he’s a fool too, a worse one than I think he is. Don’t go hunting tomorrow’s trouble. Carpe Diem. How many times do I have to say it.

I turned over restlessly, and Laura stirred.

“Who you talkin’ to?” she said thickly.

“T.C.,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”

“Oh,” she said, and did.

The thing is, you don’t need to settle, Merritt. Use everything you were up here. Use it to get what you want back there.

What do I do with all that leftover love? That was yours.

Didn’t I hear you say that love made more love? Didn’t I hear you tell Glynn that yesterday morning?

Yes…

Well, then.

I must have slept after all, because presently the little fire fell in on itself and sent a shower of sputtering sparks up into the night like fireflies, and I started up. It was cold, but drier. Beyond me, wrapped in silver, Glynn slept on. But Curtis had lifted his head and was staring off into the black space beyond the wavering fire. As I watched, the hackles rose at the base of his powerful neck, and I saw his lips go back, and caught the gleam of his long white teeth, and heard his low, menacing growl. It was soft and sibilant, and went on and on, and in that moment there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that something purely and simply evil waited just outside the circle of the dying light.

My heart pounding queerly, I rose to my knees and reached out very slowly and picked up the knife that Glynn had taken out of her pocket and laid on the earth beside her, so that she would not roll on it. I unfolded its blade, still staring at the place where Curtis looked. The growling went on and on, soft and low and utterly terrible. I felt my own hair prickle at the back of my neck, and felt the little puckering of the fine hairs on my arms. I waited there on my knees, not breathing.

Then it ebbed. Whatever it had been was simply not there anymore. After an endless moment, Curtis looked around at me, gave me a toothy, embarrassed grin and thumped his tail, and laid his head back on his paws. He closed his eyes. I felt sweat break out at my hairline and under my arms, and then I got up silently and built the fire back up and sank down again beside Laura. I don’t know how long I had slept before the falling of the little logs waked me, but when I looked up at the sky the fog had gone, and the stars burned huge and silver and gaudy in the sky.

Didn’t I say I’d always be your same stars? If you get to missing me, just look up.

I take your point, I said, and pulled the silver blanket back around me and slept without moving until dawn. When I woke, it was to the huge, clattering sound of a helicopter that seemed to hover directly over us, filling the cold morning world with noise and wind and confusion, and we had been found.

I wouldn’t have believed you could set a copter down anywhere in that scrambled wilderness, but the young National Guard pilot did, and quite neatly. Soon we were spinning low over the line of the landslide, heading south. From the air you could see where the snake had thrashed and convulsed; in the mountains there was devastation, but it ended with the far edge of the landslide that had obliterated the road. On the far side, the trees stretched away unbroken and unvanquished, and the small towns and suburbs that I could see beyond them looked fairly whole. There were many fires in them, though; I could see their smoke. Gas fires, the pilot said, from where the heaving earth had broken the mains and the winds had whipped the fires alive. Further north whole sections of San Francisco were burning.

“Looked like the start of Desert Storm from the air last night,” the pilot said.

“How bad was it? The quake?”

“Don’t know yet. Big as Loma Prieta at least,” he said. “Hardly any towns and cities for about two hundred miles around that haven’t taken a hit. Don’t have any casualty counts yet. I been in the air since last night.”

“Have you found many people?”

“Just you all. It’s you I been hunting. Somebody said in Boulder Creek that they’d seen a fire up in the Santa Cruz’s around Big Basin. I didn’t see nothing, though, till the sun came up. Saw it reflecting off them blankets then. Don’t know if we ever would’ve found you if it had been foggy.”

He followed the now intact road down to Boulder Creek and set us down on a football field behind the high school. A welter of tents, large and small, had been set up, and from the air the big red crosses told us who would be succoring us. There were trees down on the earth here, too, and the school itself sat strangely askew, but it stood. I did not see much of the rubble that would have marked completely destroyed houses and buildings, but everything I did see leaned or canted slightly and horribly. The whole scene looked like a child with little coordination had drawn it, just awry enough to be unsettling.

“There’s bigger aid stations around, but they’re jammed,” the pilot said. “You’ll be better off here. They got a full medical staff just waiting. It’ll be a while before the folks from the mountains start coming in. There anybody else you know of up there?”

“Yes,” I said. “Up at the very top of the ridge, where an old fire tower used to stand. You don’t have to hurry, though.”

He winced.

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

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

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

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

He looked shocked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mommee, though—”

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

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

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

I thought about that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I remembered how crazy he and his brother had been about Laura when they were children, and what short shrift she had given them. They had adored Glynn, too. The stupid tears were back, scalding and inexorable.

“They’re all right. They’re fine. I’m at a Red Cross station on the high school football field at a place called Boulder Creek, not far from the top of the ridge where Big Basin starts. Where the lodge…was. Tell him that; the National Guard will find us. They found us out in the middle of the woods this morning.”

I stopped, gulping and gasping, and he said, “Don’t cry, Met. It’s all over now. I promise he’ll be there in a little while. God, he’s been so upset; I’ve never seen him like that—”

Suddenly I was angry.

“Well, when you talk to him, you tell him something for me,” I said. “You tell him that Mommee is going to a nursing home and no two ways about it, and that—”

“Met, he took Mommee and clapped her in the Alzheimer’s unit at Sable not thirty minutes after that earthquake hit—”

“Well, then you tell him that black woman better be out of there and on the road to Morocco or wherever before I leave California airspace, or—”

“What black woman? You mean Ina? There’s no black woman here but Ina, and she’s been crying for a day and a half, she’s so worried about you—”

“Ina’s back?”

“Back? Where’s she been?”

I paused for a long moment, getting my breath.

“Then you tell him I’m bringing a pregnant woman,” I continued fiercely, “and a big dog, a great big dog, and I don’t want to hear one word—”

“Met, you could bring a T Rex home with you and Dad wouldn’t care. What’s the matter with you? Are you really all right?”

“I don’t know,” I wailed, and hung up, and went back to my cot and cried for at least an hour. After tentative efforts to pat me and soothe me and cosset me, Laura went for the nurse and sought help, and the nurse said just to let me cry.

“Post-traumatic shock syndrome,” she said. “You’ll all have it sooner or later. Let her get it out. The sooner she does, the better.”

So Laura let me cry, and I slid from the tears into a hot, restless, flailing sleep in which things roared and crashed and battered at me, and Curtis growled endlessly. I knew I was dreaming, but I could not wake, and when Laura finally shook me, and I woke to the cool gray of twilight, I still did not know where I was.

“I think he’s here,” Laura said, smiling. Tears ran down her face. “I keep hearing somebody yelling ‘Fowler, Goddamn it, Fowler’ and it sounds like Pom when he’s pissed. Go on out there. I’ll wait a little while before I wake Glynn.”

I got up stiffly and walked out of the tent, still dragging my army blanket, blinking in the last of the sunlight. My arm throbbed hideously, and my mouth was dry, and dried sweat stuck my unchic, flopping new clothes to my body. I stared, trying to focus. I saw him then. He stopped and looked at me from midway across the football field. He was as disheveled as I had ever seen him even for Pom; his black hair hung in his eyes, and he had a rime of black stubble on his jaw that was plain even at that distance. He lifted his head a little, and I saw the startling blue flash of his eyes. I had once described them to Crisscross, I remembered, as the blue of the light on the tops of police cars. He had been waving his arms at someone, but when he saw me he dropped them to his side and stood, simply staring at me.

I did not know him. I literally did not know this man. He was a collection of parts, each somehow significant, yet that added up to nothing, just as T.C. had seemed to me on the path down to the lodge that morning, a million years ago now—a heartbeat ago. Who was this man who had come for me across a continent, who stood looking at me now as if he, too, saw a stranger? What was expected of me; what came next?

T.C., who is that? I said in my head. I felt him close all of a sudden, so close that he might have stood just behind me. I almost leaned back so that his body could take my weight.

That’s Pom. That’s what comes next. Go on, Merritt. It’s what should happen now.

But I don’t know him…

Yeah, you do. Look, Merritt. Just look.

Pom stood still. He moved one of his hands as if to stretch it toward me, and then dropped it. I saw his mouth make my name: Merritt. But I heard no sound. Neither of us moved.

Pom began to cry. His face crumpled and tears ran down from his blue eyes and left clean tracks on his filthy face, and he did not move, just stood there with his arms hanging at his sides, crying. Something inside me gave a great, swooping slide, as if the earth had moved again, and then I knew him. Pom. Of course. Pom.

“Pom…” I said, in a small voice with no breath behind it.

Go! T.C. said from his mountaintop. Go!

I dropped the blanket and began to run.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks are due, as always, to Ginger Barber and Larry Ashmead, agent and editor respectively, who are truly a dream team for any author. Martha Gray, who translated and processed, is invaluable and knows it—or should. Two writers to whom I owe much are John McPhee and Kenneth Brown, whose books informed and enchanted me. And Dr. Peter Ward of the U.S. Geological survey in Menlo Park was generous beyond expectation with his time and expertise. The facts are his, the errors mine. And thanks to Heyward, who loved Fault Lines unconditionally down to the last word—because someone’s got to.

About the Author

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS’s bestselling novels include Nora, Nora; Low Country; Up Island; Fault Lines; Downtown; Hill Towns; Colony; Outer Banks; King’s Oak; Peachtree Road; Homeplace; Fox’s Earth; The House Next Door; and Heartbreak Hotel. She is also the author of a work of nonfiction, John Chancellor Makes Me Cry. She lives in Charleston, South Carolina.

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CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS AND

FAULT LINES

“In the front ranks of Southern writers.”

Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Anne Rivers Siddons is one of the giants in contemporary Southern fiction, a storyteller who turns out bestseller after bestseller.…Her themes are universal, and the messages she delivers and the stories she tells are universal. Everyone can read and enjoy this story and learn from it.”

Chattanooga Times

“As [Siddons] has done in the past, [she] creates here a cast of strong, engaging women, emblematic of the contemporary South, and her writing—lush with compelling details—carries you along effortlessly. In short, Fault Lines is another Siddons success.”

Southern Living

“A wonderful novel…stunning…[Siddons] seems to know the Deep South like the back of her hand.…[She] plunges deep into the cold recesses of her characters’ psyches, with words as rich and warm as any in her previous novels.”

The State (Columbia, SC)

Books by

Anne Rivers Siddons

NORA, NORA

LOW COUNTRY

UP ISLAND

FAULT LINES

DOWNTOWN

HILL TOWNS

COLONY

OUTER BANKS

KING’S OAK

PEACHTREE ROAD

HOMEPLACE

FOX’S EARTH

THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR

HEARTBREAK HOTEL

JOHN CHANCELLOR MAKES ME CRY

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents, are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

“Aquarius” Words by James Rado and Gerome Ragni. Music by Galt MacDermot, Nat Shapiro, United Artists Music Co., Inc. All rights controlled and administered by EMI U Catalog Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Warner Brothers Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.

FAULT LINES. Copyright © 1995 by Anne Rivers Siddons. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of PerfectBound™.

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Table of Contents

O NE

T WO

T HREE

F OUR

F IVE

S IX

S EVEN

E IGHT

N INE

T EN

E LEVEN

T WELVE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PRAISE

BOOKS BY ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

COVER

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER