Debbie went back in the house a few minutes later. It was too hot outside for her, and the air had gotten humid, heavy, and muggy. It really did feel like what people called earthquake weather, but Meredith knew it was just a myth. She’d never heard any evidence that the weather had been muggy during the 1906 quake, which was the biggest one of all. The ’89 quake happened during the World Series, so it might have been hot and humid then too. Meredith wasn’t worried about it. It was just trivial conversation, something to say about the weather.
As she picked up her basket of gardening tools at five o’clock, she thought of calling Kendall that night. Meredith still made the effort. They hadn’t talked in a long time. Kendall rarely called her. The last time they’d spoken, Kendall had been battling with her nineteen-year-old daughter who wanted to drop out of college at NYU and not go back for junior year. She hated school, although she was majoring in drama at the Tisch School at NYU.
If she had dropped out, she was following in her mother’s footsteps. Kendall had done her junior year in Florence, for her year abroad. She’d been twenty, had fallen madly in love with George Holbrook, the eldest son of an important and very wealthy banking family in New York. They were both students in Florence at the same time. Afterward, Kendall had refused to go back to Columbia. They had gotten engaged at Christmas and married a few months later. Kendall was stubborn. She never went back to school. Both sets of parents had been afraid the marriage wouldn’t last and thought they were too young to get married. But twenty years later, they were still together and Kendall said they were happy. They’d had a baby, Julia, ten months after their wedding day, which didn’t seem prudent to Meredith either, to rush into becoming parents, especially so young, but Kendall always did what she wanted, and she and George were a good match as it turned out. They were conservative, very social, and somewhat stuffy, in Meredith’s opinion.
Kendall was on all the important charity committees in New York. George’s parents hadn’t been thrilled that Kendall came from a family of actors, and Kendall had never gone back to school or worked. She was the classic society wife, which their daughter, Julia, detested. Julia wanted to follow in her grandparents’ footsteps, go to L.A. and try to become an actress. She wanted to try her wings and fly, and her parents weren’t happy about it. Meredith smiled, thinking about it. It was Kendall’s turn now to have a daughter rebel, take off, and reject everything her parents stood for and had achieved.
Kendall had never liked her parents’ acting careers, particularly since their work had taken them away from her so often when she was young. She also didn’t like her parents being so recognizable and well-known. She hated their being stopped on the street by strangers for autographs. Meredith didn’t deny that she had been on location a lot of the time. Kendall had been born just when Meredith was first becoming a major star. Justin was born twelve years later, when she was more mature and could handle it better. She was just as busy, but Justin never seemed to mind their absences the way Kendall had, or their being recognized. Sometimes he even liked it and often said he was proud of them. Kendall wasn’t. She was embarrassed and jealous of her mother, although Meredith was discreet, and never made a fuss about her fame, which was impressive, given what a big star she was.
By the time Justin came along, she and Scott were trying to alternate the films they did on location so that at least one of them would be at home with him. When Kendall was a child, they were often both away at the same time, which she held against them later, especially her mother. She blamed her mother for all the ills in her early life.
Justin had a more easygoing nature than Kendall. Kendall had always been upset about something, and she resented her mother’s career, although Meredith underplayed it at home. Kendall didn’t resent her father’s fame. But even now, when they spoke, Kendall made caustic comments about when her mother was a star. She was proud of her father’s career now, but she never really acknowledged how famous and successful her mother had been. What she remembered most about her mother was how harsh she had been with Scott when Justin died. All Kendall’s sympathy and compassion had been with him. She chose to overlook that any part of her brother’s death had been her father’s fault, and that Scott should never have let him go out in the sailboat alone. She couldn’t bear to think that her father had been responsible for it at all, although she had loved Justin passionately. She considered his death an act of fate, or the hand of God. Her father was her hero, and she liked to believe that he was a saint. She never talked about how Scott had walked out on her mother, and had an affair with Silvana that was on the front page of every tabloid around the world. And, married by then herself, Kendall had been old enough to understand it, but chose not to.
Meredith thought of Julia and wondered what she was like now. As shocking as it seemed, she hadn’t seen her granddaughter since she was ten years old. Meredith hadn’t fully recovered from Justin’s death until then, and Kendall always made it difficult for her mother to see her only grandchild, and kept her away. The timing was never convenient to visit them, and she never brought her to San Francisco to see her grandmother, except once nine years before for a few days, and hadn’t been back since.
Meredith hadn’t traveled anywhere in fourteen years, and for years now, Kendall had spent the holidays with her husband’s family and not her own. She and George had bought a house in Aspen, so now they spent Christmas there and had never invited Meredith. She didn’t force the issue, and didn’t want to beg Kendall to come home. She knew it wasn’t exciting to come and visit her, and for Kendall, the memories of her brother there were just too painful. She always told her mother she was “too busy” to come out. For Meredith, the outside world had lost some of its reality, like a TV show she hadn’t watched in a long time, and had lost the thread of the plot. The characters had become unfamiliar to her, and she felt as though she had missed too many episodes in their lives to re-engage in the story now.
* * *
—
She had just turned the TV on to one of her favorite series, which she watched religiously every week during the entire season. It was the third year, and she hadn’t missed a single episode, and re-watched it all again at the end of the season. She was tucked into a comfortable chair in her bedroom, when there was a strange groaning sound, as though it came from the depths of the earth. The television began to shake and the screen went black. The chandelier overhead was swinging wildly from side to side. When she looked up and saw it, she realized what was happening, just as everything slid off the coffee table in front of her and fell on the floor, and a painting came crashing down. She wasn’t sure what to do at first. There was the sound of breaking glass around her, as the groaning in the earth continued and got louder, and she could hear things falling and breaking all around the house. Remembering what to do in an earthquake, she rushed to her bedroom doorway, and stood there shaking, as two more large paintings fell. Her feet were bare, and she had cut her foot on a piece of glass as she ran across the room. She didn’t even feel it. All the lights had gone out by then, and she could see out the window that the whole neighborhood had gone dark. It felt like it went on forever, and after what seemed like an eternity, the groaning stopped, and there was a brief final shake. Meredith stood in the dark with a sea of broken glass around her, and she could hear Debbie calling out to her. A moment later, she heard Debbie coming up the stairs. She was breathless when she found Meredith in the doorway, and they stood there staring at each other for a moment. Debbie was carrying a powerful battery-operated lantern, and shined it around the room, at the fallen paintings and broken glass.