“Let's not fill the house with the smell of frying meat, okay?” He tipped his head toward the bedroom and did his impression of a vomiting gecko.
“Mm. Forgot.”
When we had our breakfast ready, we settled at the kitchen table. Tom switched on the television on the counter to get the early-morning news coverage of the earthquake. The top of the news was the scene outside the emergency room at the hospital half a mile from my house, where anguished relatives were gathering to await news on an infant boy named Tommy Ottmeier, who had been badly injured when a heavily laden bookcase fell on him during the quake. Tom whipped his hand out and had the channel changed in a blink. “I just can't stand this kind of thing,” he muttered, looking anywhere but at me.
The fragile moon-shaped face of the Utah state geologist now filled the television screen, floodlights glinting off her glasses, her elegantly cut graying hair glowing in the lights like frost. She stood hunched up against the cold in front of the massive concrete rampart of what looked like the outside of the new sports arena. “The good news is that the quake was as small as it was,” she was saying.
The TV camera shifted briefly to a studly young reporter who was soberly nodding his head as if agreeing with her on every point. “What we're all wondering is, Dr. Smeeth, is it safe to go back into our homes?” he asked importantly. “Aren't aftershocks likely?”
The camera shifted back to Dr. Smeeth. Her hands danced, proving that, like every other geologist, she was incapable of speaking with her mouth only. “It's always important to remember that it's not earthquakes that kill people, it's collapsing structures
that kill people. As I was saying, the good news is that the quake was no larger than it was, but we don't know yet if this morning's shaking was a foreshock or the main event. We simply don't have enough records from previous seismic events in this area. In the meantime, Caleb, we need to mobilize our crews to inspect buildings that may have been damaged. Much of Salt Lake City is built on soft sediments, which tend to liquefy when shaken, intensifying the destructive force of any quake.”
The reporter's voice cut back in. “You asked us to meet you here at the new sports arena. It's built to the latest standards. Do you really anticipate any problems here?”
Dr. Smeeth said, “Caleb, I am concerned. The fault zone responsible for this morning's earthquake runs right underneath the city, and because most of it is buried, we don't even know the exact locations of many of its branches. You see, it's not just one line on the map. Part of it may run right underneath our feet, and when it comes to buildings, the best and the latest can also mean the least tested. So it is crucial to make certain that the ground accelerations involved have not caused critical damage to any of our public or private structures. And we should start with this building here.”
The state geologist drew herself up as if girding for a street brawl. “I chose this stadium because in just a few short weeks, Salt Lake City will host the Olympic games. Every hotel and every city service will be filled to capacity, and, as I've been telling the governorâ”
The view suddenly cut to a reporter at another location. He looked surprised. Caught unprepared, he fumbled with his microphone. He fingered the wire that led into his ear, his eyes wide with astonishment, as if he were receiving advice from a miniature oracle. “Ah ⦠thank you for that report, ah ⦠Caleb. Now ⦠I'm here with Fred Bower at Temple Square. Fred, what's the condition of these famous structures?”
Fred Bower popped his eyes at the camera, giving the impression
that he had a thyroid problem. He smiled unctuously. “Good. Heavenly Father is merciful. Everything is fine. Nothing amiss. Salt Lake City is ready for the Olympic Games!”
Tom switched off the TV. “Nothing worse than trying to invent something to say,” he observed.
“Sounded like the state geologist had plenty to say. Wonder why they cut her off?”
Tom shot me a look. “Getting paranoid, little Emily?”
I narrowed my eyes witheringly. “I know, I know. âSome days, a cigar is just aâ'”
I was interrupted by the distant sounds of Faye once again emptying her already-empty stomach.
“When'd this vomiting start?” I asked.
Tom peered into his coffee like he'd seen something swimming in it. “Oh, she threw up yesterday morning, but she seemed okay last evening. Except that she about chewed my head off.” He winced at the memory.
“Why?”
He arched one grizzled eyebrow, making its first few long, twisty hairs dance. “For nothing at all.”
“Nothing, Tom? You?”
He took a long draw on his coffee, savoring it, then slowly let it slide down his throat. A mischievous smile flickered at the corners of his lips. “All I did was pat her on her stomach and observe that it looked pleasantly Rubenesque. It was a compliment.”
“Are you tired of living?”
Tom knit his brows in a burlesque of defensiveness. “Faye is a lovely, slender woman, and very sure of herself. I was just noticing that she had gained a pound or two, and affectionately suggesting that it suited her. Since when does the Faye Carter we know and love involve herself in such cultural norms as worrying about her figure?”
He was right. At five-ten and a scant, lithe 142 pounds, Faye
was sleek as a racehorse. A thoroughbred. A purebred. Muscular and elegant. If she'd had fur, it would have shone like satin. “Nice going, Tom. She may look anorexic to you, but remember that this culture teaches us fool women that Barbie dolls are the ne plus ultra. It's subliminal. We've been brainwashed. We can't help ourselves.”
He shrugged. “The Barbie doll is a distortion of everything I love about the feminine sex. Worse yet, the form was adapted from a doll given out by post-World War II German streetwalkers to their marks. What self-respecting student of history would want to look like that? Give me the Venus of Willendorf any day.
There's
a woman built to last a hard winter. Or June Cleaver; now, she had hips. To hell with you gen-Xers and your imitations of prepubescent waifs. I want a woman with a little adipose tissue. Nice mama-san with T and A.”
Mama-san?
Suddenly, things began to come together. I had just raised my coffee cup to my lips, but set it down again with a thud. I opened my mouth to speak, but shut it without uttering a sound.
“What?” Tom demanded.
I had to think fast and cover my reaction. “IâI just remembered what I forgot.”
“What?”
“I think I left my door unlocked,” I said evasively. “On the truck.”
Tom's shoulders relaxed, and only then did I realize the extreme tension with which he had been holding them. “You afraid someone's going to steal that broken-down wreck? In this neighborhood? More likely, they'll ticket you for besmirching their
feng shui.
Eat your eggs.”
“Right.” I shoveled into them, quickly emptying my plate. “I'll clean up,” I said. “You run along down to your office.”
“The maid comes in today. I'll see you to the door.”
“Maybe she won't come. There's been an earthquake. Remember?”
Tom pointed toward the door to the garage. “March.”
My mouth sagged open. I knew now what was really bugging Faye, and I had no doubt that she wanted Tom to leave for work before she would discuss it. She had merely taken advantage of an event that no doubt had awakened me to get me here as early as possible.
I stared at Tom, measuring his resolve. A card-carrying workaholic, he was frequently off to his office by six, and he returned home only after what he termed his “half daysâyou know, twelve hours.” Not a man to love if you needed a lot of companionship. But on this morning, he was sticking to her like glue, or should I say, sticking to me. “Come on, Em, the garage is this way. You take her car, like she said.” He tossed me a set of keys off the hall table. “You go on home. Go back to bed. It's not even light out yet. Wait until the birdies start chirping.”
I said something like “Yup, okay,” and followed him out into the spacious garage, which still smelled of newly laid concrete. It was big enough to play touch football in. Not for the first time, I vowed that in my next life, I, too, would be a trust-fund baby.
Tom hit the lighted switch that triggered the door behind Faye's Porsche and walked out onto the driveway to his own car, a ten-year-old American-built sedan with a bashed front fender. I dithered around with the Porsche, pretending that I didn't know how to get it started, but even this last stall didn't work. Tom leaned patiently against his car, waiting for me to leave. He had even picked up his cell phone and was making a call, talking into the darkness.
I backed the Porsche out next to him and waited, pretending that I was fiddling with the CD player. He finished his call, came over to my side of the sports car, and tapped at the glass. I
lowered the window. He bent down and leaned in, bracing his hands on his knees. “What?” he demanded.
“I'm ⦠just worried about her.”
Tom kissed the end of my nose. “Get out of here,” he said softly. “Scram. Faye will be fine. Just needs some sleep.” But as he straightened up, he folded his arms and just stood there, watching me, willing me to leave.
I backed the car out of the driveway, but as I pulled away into the street, I glanced into the rearview mirror. He was still standing there, watching me. He looked gruff, but reassuringly solid in the bright light cast from the garage. I hit the remote control to close the garage door, dropping him gently into the deep ultramarine blue that presaged the coming dawn, and wondered if he, a detective of such repute, could miss the symptoms that Faye was displaying. Or did he interpret the signs exactly as I did, and feel an overwhelming need to stand guard over the tiny new life she carried inside her womb?
I heard about a man from Kodiak, Alaska. He saw the ocean pull out miles from the shore. The slope was terribly steep there. He knew what was coming. He ran downhill to get his family, who were down near the water, then ran back uphill with them. [The tsunami came and] the water came up and up and stopped just short of them. He'd run so hard that he had ruptured blood vessels in his lungs.
The official death toll was much lower than the actual, because there were many transients living in hovels by the waterfront.
âCarol Benfell, journalist, recounting events associated with the tsunami that was generated by the magnitude 8.6 “Good Friday” Alaskan earthquake of March 27, 1964
WENDY FORTESCUE CLUTCHED THE MOUSE ON HER COMPUTER much more tightly than usual. From outward appearances, the four-foot-eleven-inch-tall blonde looked her everyday abstracted self, the temple pieces on her glasses askew and her third cup of coffee chilling on the desk beside her. She sat staring into the big, goggling, glass eye of her computer monitor, surveying a long, squiggly line. Across the room, an array of seismograph needles tickled out their giddy record of movement within the Earth on slowly revolving drums. The seismographs were hitched to the data-storage cold room to her right, and to the computer in front of her, and together, the extraordinary cluster of machinery
was tallying the few paltry aftershocks of the morning's quake as they arrived, plotting them in time and space.
There ⦠that's another one, so small we didn't even feel it.
She shifted in her chair, irritated. Being shaken awake had been fun, and plotting that first big set of shock waves had been exciting, but now things were disturbingly quiet.
C'mon ⦠gimme some more here. Gimme enough to plot the fault plane at least!
Wendy's array lurked deep in an inside room in the engineering building on the campus of the University of Utah. Most days, she was alone in her domain, which suited her fine; her close friends had nicknamed her “the gnome” clear back in high school. Why disappoint anyone by suddenly becoming a social butterfly?
That would shake people up as much as ⦠as this morning's quake.
Wendy shook her head at the screen, ignoring the raft of reporters who stood watching her. As a seismology technician, she had known a quake could occur at any time along the Wasatch fault; in fact, she found it more surprising that the human settlement had existed this long in Salt Lake City before experiencing a “big one.”
A 5.2 is chump change,
she mused.
A couple chimneys down, grandma's Delft figurines bite the floor. But this fault can deliver a 7.0 or larger, almost 1, 000 times the jolt.
She thought it appalling that the news sharks who now circled her could be so blase about the threat. Hadn't any of them been here in 1983, when a 7.1 cracked off in southern Idaho?
Well, okay, I wasn't here myself; I was just in high school back in Santa Barbara, but hell, everybody knows about the Idaho quake ⦠.
A giddy vibration ran through the room, and Wendy heard several of the journalists suck in their breath. “Another earthquake!” someone said, and the hubbub of voices started anew, swapping speculations on how big that one was.
Three point five,
Wendy wanted to say, but she kept her mouth shut. She had long since learned not to say anything she didn't want repeated, out of its proper context, in some damned newspaper.
What do they expect? We're sitting practically right on top of the damned thing.
A big man with one bushy black eyebrow that framed both eyes strode into the room. “That was an aftershock,” he informed the reporters, keeping his voice level. “To those of you who have just arrived, I'm Hugh Buttons, director of the Seismic Center. As I explained earlier, aftershocks are to be expected. It's just Mother Earth's way of releasing the stress. We'll be triangulating responses from several stations to plot the precise locations of these shocks. With any luck at all, this will give us a much-needed picture of the fault trace. Three or more points, or in this case earthquake hypocenters, describe a plane. As you know, the Wasatch fault divides into an array of fractures under Salt Lake City, but until this morning, none of these had produced an earthquake that we can definitively ascribe to the Wasatch fault.” He pointed to a map on the wall. “Most people don't realize that the majority of earthquakes do not cause ground ruptureâour name for a crack at the surface. As you can see, we've had to infer the precise locations of several of the branches of the fault. This is because they are covered with regolith.” He smiled, which produced an eerie, toothy effect on his craggy face. “That's soil to you. Surface cover. Although surface cover includes houses, what we call the âbuilt environment.' The really large earthquakes that have occurred on the Wasatch faultâthose measuring six point five or sevenâall of them struck long before Salt Lake City was built. Before white people came to the area. There was presumably nothing here then to fall down. Nothing
built,
you see.”
One of the reporters asked a question. “How big an earthquake before we'd see a crack in the ground?”
Dr. Buttons smiled. “That would take one of the big ones. They don't leave cracks, exactly. They leave a âscarp,' a small cliff, perhaps three to ten feet high, where the valley drops down and the mountains stay high. Another term is
surface rupture.
With
an earthquake of this sizeâjust five point two in magnitudeâthe actual rupture and movement do not propagate to the surface. The area of rupture in moderate-size quakes is relatively small, and quite deep. Several miles, perhaps ten. The Earth is fairly elastic, you see.”
Wendy shifted again in her seat. Hugh Buttons was her boss. His name had won him highly predictable nicknames, and the fact that he was six foot-four-inches tall made them
stick. Huge Buttons,
Wendy mused, noticing that once again the man had dressed entirely in clothing that had not one such fastener, not even a zipper or a snap.
Poor sot. The same assholes call me “thinker Bell.”
As Dr. Buttons droned on for the press, the phone next to Wendy's computer monitor warbled. Automatically, she plucked it up, positioned it by her ear, and nipped her shoulder in to pin it in place. “Seismograph Station,” she said into it, pitching her voice into a throaty tenor from the long habit of making herself sound bigger and more authoritative than she looked.
“Wendy?” The voice was familiar: Ted Wimler, down at the state Geological Survey. He sounded breathless, as if his asthma was acting up.
“Speaking,” she replied in a voice cool enough to freeze ether. What was Ted calling about? Looking for juicy tidbits about the aftershocks? Couldn't the
putz
wait like everybody else for her to analyze the results and pass them upstairs for the official announcement?
Male gossips,
she thought disparagingly.
Worst kind. Gotta have the most about the latest, and the grislier the better.
“Wendy, are you sitting down?”
Wendy contracted her eyebrows toward her nose, as if something stank. On an ordinary day Ted's tone was melodramatic, but this time, it was cracking, even shaky. The guy was going to have to get a life. “Spill it, Ted. I'm busy.”
“âSpill it'? My God, Wendy, it's Dr. Smeeth. She'sâ”
“Who?” Wendy asked, knowing exactly whom Ted meant.
Sidney Smeeth, state geologist. And, incidentally, her landlady. She glanced at her boss. He was just finishing up with the reporters, now managing to extract himself from the room with the suggestion that he'd be back in half an hour with another report. She gazed at the center drum, checking the latest aftershock. Sure enough, it had again registered the broadest needle sweep of the group
. Same cluster. Ride 'em cowboy.
In her ear, Ted's voice said, “She's dead, Wendy! Christ, she's the state geologist and we've just had an earthquake! And I mean, you live in her basement! What are we suppose to do? One moment your life is going along normally, you're maybe getting a good night's sleep for a change, you'reâ”
Wendy shifted her crosshairs and clicked the mouse. She didn't have time for Ted's hallucinations today. On the best of days, she greeted Ted's idiocy with the same affection she would afford the discovery that ointment prescribed for an embarrassing rash was sticky and stank conspicuously.
“State the circumstances,” she said abruptly.
“Christ, Wendy, you're like a ⦠a navy colonel or something.” He repeated her command in a high-pitched, nasal, kindergarten-sassy kind of voice: “âState the circumstances! State the circumstances!'”
Wendy sighed heavily. So she'd had a little dalliance with him on the AWG raft trip the summer before; did that mean she had to tolerate every little perturbation and fantasy that flitted through his beleaguered skull? Or was he suffering the postquake shockiness that was so often reported? Now, that would be interesting ⦠. “For your information, Ted, the navy has commanders. Colonels are with the army or the air force.” A moment later, realizing that the obnoxious voice of her one-night paramour was still yammering in her ear, Wendy said, “Ted, get yourself a cup of coffee and go smell it or something. I've got a seismic event going on here, so, like the man said, unless you've got good news or money, get off the line.”
Ted's voice rose to an hysteric screech. “Good news?
Good news?
She's
dead,
Wendy, not late for a meeting!”
Mother Smeeth isn't there holding your little hanny, so you lose that itty-bitty marble you call a brain,
Wendy thought angrily as she trailed the phone back to its cradle and dropped it with a
thunk. Overdosed on Aspartame at long last,
she decided, settling her mouse-driven crosshairs onto the beginning of the P-wave portion of the newest wiggly line that she had conjured on her computer screen.
Almost instantaneously, the phone rang again. Swearing under her breath, she plucked it back up into position next to her ear, ready to hang up if it was Ted. “Seismograph Station,” she barked.
The voice she heard this time was Hugh Button's. “Wendy,” he said, his voice gruff with emotion. “I got some bad news. Sid Smeeth was just found dead.”
“Yow,” she whispered. Wendy's brain rocketed through a series of tight calculations of how this might affect her immediate future, not to mention the closely knit world of professional interaction in which she moved. “Give me a mo',” she said, then rose from her chair and turned to the journalists who stood all around her. She heard a cell phone warble. “That would be your editor calling,” she said tonelessly. “I have to clear the room a moment, okay? You take that call out there in the outer room, and take everyone with you. I'll get back to you.” She stood up and waved her arms, hurrying them through the door.
Eager but a bit confused, the journalists shuffled through into the outer office, craning their necks to listen in on the conversation their colleague was now having through his cell phone. Another phone rang, and another. Wendy closed the door behind them and returned to her desk. She found that her hand was trembling as she raised the telephone back to her ear.