Two elegantly simply plotlines intertwine in Tilt by Emma Pattee: The first is a day in Portland, Oregon, when the Cascadia earthquake strikes, bringing chaos to the city, and the story of a pregnant woman walking miles to connect with her husband. The second is the backstory to their 14-year relationship. The would-be actor and playwright met as young adults, the same age as college students who tried to jumpstart their careers, “but we were not students at a college. A fact that we never said out loud but it was in every sentence. We were on step behind where we thought we should be.”
Time passes, and the couple abruptly find themselves in their thirties with a child on the way, struggling to keep up. “Summer is really over. In a moment, it’ll start raining, then be Christmas, then a whole new year. Lately, time seems to move like that, like as soon as I get my hand firmly around a moment, it has turned to dust and there’s a new moment to try and grasp.”
The husband still pursues an acting career, working at a coffee shop with flexible hours while the wife puts her writing aside after finding an office job with healthcare benefits. The earthquake pushes any dreams for the future aside. There is no cell service, few passable roads, houses and bridges are down, and readers are left in suspense about why a woman so close to giving birth would ever walk miles to the distant coffee shop rather than home or hospital. The couple had sat through an earthquake preparation class a few years earlier, the husband preparing for a tryout for a role role as a geologist. Yet that memory includes no mention of a key recommendation for any disaster: Family members should plan a meeting place in advance.
The two plots collide with the conclusion, the protagonist's motivation becoming clear, with recollection of a conversation between the wife and husband the previous night. She vows to make a new start, to head to L.A, to quit her job, to write her play. “And if I ever see your father again, I will tell him that I get it now, that stuck is stuck is stuck…. That he’s big-time to me. He is time to me.”
Disasters can strike suddenly and broadly, destroying an entire region, or roll in with slow motion, touching one family at a time.
