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.