Fault Line by Sarah Andrews Page A

his sisters’ postures had shifted, their heads swiveling like so many radar dishes, tracking the package, measuring it, burning holes through the paper with X-ray vision, their eyes widening and contracting as they noted that it was a big package, not a small one. Not a ring. Little smiles flickered across certain faces. I avoided Ava’s eyes but stared down each sister in turn, unable to hold my
defiance in check any longer. I wanted to say, He offered me the ring last summer and I said not yet, but such candor was inappropriate, then and perhaps forever. Reining in my anger as best I could, I managed to smile as I yanked the ribbon off the box, tore off the paper, slid it open, and saw … a ski sweater. A vivid, rose pink, soft, fuzzy ski sweater. Ray patted my walking cast and said, “This comes with ski lessons.” I said, “Thank you” and “I love it,” then returned the peck of a kiss to his handsome cheek. With stiffened fingers, I touched the mass of pink fuzz, pretending to admire its softness, but I could see only how sallow my hand looked against the color. As I set the box aside, Ray’s sister Katie managed to catch my eye. Katie is the number two sister, about twenty-five years old and already the mother of three. She looked smug. “See, I told you she’d like it, Ray. You just leave that shopping to me,” she purred, grandstanding her prior knowledge, her complicity. I spent the next hour trying to imagine a way to rip the putrid pink mass into strips and knot it into a vengeful noose. I even picked out a beam from which to hang a rope that I could loop around Katie’s deceitful neck, and imagined her kicking as she swung. It was a long, bitter afternoon, during which I reproved myself continually for my paranoia and inability to let things roll off my back.
    Extracting myself once again from the delicacies of this fantasy and touching down briefly in the present moment, I found a new crack on the ceiling of my bedroom, this room that Ray had never entered. Had this new rift been there the day before? Had the earthquake caused it?
    Suddenly, I could no longer stand to be alone.
    I jumped up and threw the UGS materials and my freshman physical geology textbook into a backpack along with a sandwich and a bottle of water, put on some hiking boots (I was beginning to feel self-conscious about the red ropers), and then headed out to the street where I’d left Faye’s car. I was soon once again hammering all that horsepower up the hill toward her house. She
would understand. She would help me through the coming hours. And she had many more immediate worries under whose weight I could bury my fears.
    This time as I ascended toward her house, I took much greater interest in the surrounding topography. Surprising how much more menacing those boulders on the rampart above the development looked now that I could no longer assume that the developer had done his geologic hazards homework. Was that slope sufficiently stable to ride out a truly big earthquake, or perhaps even a springtime mudslide?
    I was so involved with reading the landscape that I zipped right past the place where my truck had died without noticing that it was gone. Or perhaps it was a combination of the landscape and my need to be in the comfort of my friend’s company. Or just call it denial.
    And Faye was not home.
    I stared numbly at her front door. If she wasn’t there, then I urgently needed something to do. I remembered the maps and books. I pulled the backpack out of the Porsche and headed up the road.
    It was only a short distance to the foot of the rock-strewn slope above. At the end of the pavement, I passed a parked pickup truck bearing official state of Utah plates and stepped onto a path that led into the “open-space corridor,” that steepening slope I hoped the city or county officials had deemed unsuitable for building.
    The ground rose steeply into arid scrub