Substitute for Love

by Karin Kallmaker

  “You can’t exactly walk out on a class,” Holly acknowledged. “It was no problem. But I have to get going.”

  “Have lunch with me tomorrow,” Tori said suddenly. “We can talk job-hunting strategies. And I won’t be depressed at having nothing to do. One o’clock at Tish’s. It’s near Culver and Walnut.”

  “Okay,” Holly said. “Let me give you my number so you can call if something comes up.” She had not given any thought to what she would do with her tomorrows.

  She tucked Tori’s phone number in her pocket and took her leave. Running through the rain to the car, she realized she could literally do anything she wanted until she found a new job. Anything at all. She would have to ask Clay for some ideas.

  The 405 was a parking lot, so Holly decided to traipse up Harbor Boulevard all the way to Garden Grove, where Aunt Zinnia had lived for at least the last thirty years. National Public Radio didn’t hold her interest, and flipping radio channels just bounced her from commercial to commercial. She dug out cassette tapes as she drove, dismissing one after another as just not quite right for her mood. It was going to be a boring drive.

  She was so distracted she didn’t merge out of a right-turn-only lane in time and was forced to go around the block to resume her northward journey. It seemed like fate when she noticed the books-and-music store just up ahead. She got rained on yet again, but the store was steaming warm. She left a half-hour later with two new cassettes, a replacement copy of The Mathematical Tourist — the binding on her old one had finally disintegrated past saving — and a decaf coffee concoction so thick with cream it was like drinking a hot milkshake. Loaded with refined sugar, she noted to herself. Deeee-licious. Burger, alcohol, refined sugar, quitting her job. The list of chaos was getting longer by the minute.

  She slipped the Gypsy Kings cassette into the player and turned it up as loud as the Taurus’s tinny speakers could manage. Spanish guitar virtuosity combined with unstoppable rhythm had her slapping the steering wheel as she drove.

  She could not remember being so energized and happy in a very long while. She turned her mind to searching out a memory of previous highs like this one and had to go back much further than she had imagined. Six years ago? Yes, six. They’d been lovers by then for about two years. It had been Clay’s idea to join an eco-tour of Death Valley and the surrounding wilderness.

  They had been backpacking for two days in a group of eight, plus the guide, leaving the valley floor finally for the red-dirt foothills that yielded eventually to the Sierra Nevada mountains. Toward dusk their guide called a halt and she had dropped where she stood, not quite ready to tackle opening out the small tent that she and Clay shared. She was enjoying the trip, but she ached, every inch of her, and she felt like a soft, city girl. Which is what she was. But she was trying to become more, and Clay was committed to helping her.

  Clay looked as if he could have hiked another fifty miles. Even the guide, Kevin, looked more tired than Clay did. Clay ambled up the hill for a little bit, and called down that the view of the valley floor was even better.

  “We made good time, people,” Kevin announced. “We’re a good two hours beyond where we usually get to on the second day, so I brought us around through this pass because of the view. It’s very important tonight for you to check for and treat any walking blisters — there’s plenty of antibiotic ointment. We’ll get to water early tomorrow, so don’t hoard it tonight. Dehydration is a serious threat.”

  Holly wearily unzipped her pack and wished that Clay would come back. He was shouldering their water and she was thirsty. Suddenly the guide hollered at someone, “Look out!” Then a cry of pain had them all exclaiming and turning.

  The rattlesnake smashed into a tree not far from where Holly sat. Kevin was staring at his stomach in stunned surprise, then slowly he lifted his shirt to confront the two puncture wounds.

  “Oh, my God!” Jerri tended to hysteria, but Holly didn’t begrudge her, not when she was feeling faint herself. The echo of the crack as the thrown snake smashed into the tree was louder than the pounding of her heart. Jerri was gasping out, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t see it on the boulder — he stepped right in the way.” The last to her husband, who clutched her close to him.

  Clay came running from the hilltop and was urging Kevin to stay calm. Another man grabbed the guide’s battery-powered CB radio and followed Kevin’s instructions. In minutes they were patched through to air search and rescue. Kevin began to shiver, but he managed to tell Clay how to administer the anti-venom and they all waited for the welcome thrum of a helicopter.

  Only it didn’t come. They took turns signaling with a mirror into the sun, and the rescue teams still couldn’t find them. They weren’t where they were supposed to be. In spite of the anti-venom, Kevin had quickly slipped into unconsciousness without telling them the name of the pass they were in.

  “It’s just a matter of time until they find us,” Holly tried to tell Jerri. “They have to expand the radius of the search, that’s all. When the sun goes down we can build a fire.”

  “Does anyone have matches?” Clay asked the question heavily, as if he feared the answer.

  Kevin had an emergency supply of them, even though fires were illegal in this part of the wilderness, for reasonable fear of forest fires. The wind began to rise.

  The sun went down and Kevin grew more feverish. “It’s just a matter of time,” Holly kept telling herself. But how much time, and would it be soon enough for Kevin?

  Their signal torches all went out in the wind in spite of the tinder-like condition of the scrub. Jerri’s husband was reporting in to the frustrated pilot that he still could not hear any sounds of a helicopter. A second helicopter was on its way from Edwards Air Force Base, but the time was slipping away. They had two cell phones among them, but they received no signal, and wouldn’t have been much help anyway.

  The stars came out, with a sudden sharpness that was unknown nearer to civilization. There were so many of them, including the North Star, Polaris, glittering magnificently. It was of no help — they had a compass and knowing where north was wasn’t enough. They needed to know where true west was. What they really needed, Holly thought, was a mariner’s sextant. A couple of readings, a little calculation, and they would know their longitude and latitude. Until the advent of radar, it was how all travelers knew where they were.

  She felt far away, suddenly, and her mind was digging through all her geometry texts, every article she could remember. The angle — it was the angle, doubled, that would tell them where any given star was with respect to the horizon. And you could find the angle through multiple reflections of overlapping star and horizon.

  “Is there another mirror?” She startled Clay, who was leaning against her back.

  “What do you need a mirror for?”

  “Not one, two. I need two mirrors. And Jerri.” She scrambled to her feet, putting the shallow sound of Kevin’s breathing out of her mind. She needed to focus.

  Jerri was on the trip to stargaze — astronomy was her hobby. She had a complete guide to the stars in her pack.

  “Holly, what are you talking about?”

  “A sextant — we can make one of our own.”

  Jerri, who had been miserably silent for the last while, spoke up excitedly. “Yes, oh yes, that would work. I’ll need a flashlight to read the star map.” They had been sparing the batteries so they would have signals when they finally did hear the helicopters.

  Jerri’s pocket telescope worked for one of the arms, and a pen for the other. Working quickly with first aid tape, Holly bound the mirrors to the arms and then set the arms to form a wedge that was about an eighth of a circle. She would have to be more precise about the angle later, when it was crucial. Using the eyebrow pencil that Jerri sheepishly produced, she drew an X across each mirror to pinpoint their centers. The star reflecting the horizon reflecting the star reflecting the horizon — when that happened in the center of each mirror, the resulting angle between the mirror
s, doubled, provided longitude and latitude. But it would only be as accurate as her approximation of the angle. It had worked for Thomas Godfrey 300 years ago and it would work for her.

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Clay was whispering. “You’re getting everyone’s hopes up.”

  “We’ll have to go to the top of the hill. We need a good bit of horizon for the horizon glass. The more readings we can take, the more likely they can triangulate.” The parts of a sextant were coming back to her as her mind rescued more and more of what she had read.

  “When did you learn this?”

  Abruptly, she was afraid to tell him. She was certain she knew how to figure out where they were, but she wasn’t sure he would believe her. “Seventh grade,” she admitted. “It was in a geometry book I got at the library.”

  “You were never even tested on the material? What if you’re wrong? You could send them the wrong way.”

  “I know. But I don’t think I’m wrong.”

  “But what if you are? I know you have this gift for numbers, but navigation is hardly the same thing.”

  “It is the same thing,” Holly answered. Her voice shook with certainty. “The very same thing. I can do this.”

  “Based on something you read when you were what, twelve?”

  “Eleven. It was just before my mother died. I remember it,” she insisted. She turned her back on him to start the hike up the hill.

  Jerri’s husband came with them, bringing the radio. Jerri picked a star and Holly used the telescope to focus on the horizon, then adjusted the pen arm until the reflection of the horizon and the reflection of the star crossed in the mirrors. Jerri’s husband radioed in the name of the star and Holly’s estimate of the angle the two arms formed.

  After a few readings to the pilot they were patched onward to a very excited radar officer at Edwards who knew exactly what they were trying to do. He radioed back when a reading seemed to fall outside of the circle he was marking on his map, and they would take another.

  And then they heard the distant throp-throp and it seemed like only minutes before they were exultantly slipping and sliding down the hillside toward their camp, now illuminated by the searchlight of the waiting helicopter.

  A paramedic was already trying to help Kevin. The copilot beamed at the three of them. “Who’s the lady with the sextant?”

  Holly held it aloft like a victor’s trophy. That was the memory she loved, the last time she had felt so sure that she had done the right thing and was thrilled simply to be alive. She shared a spontaneous high-five with the copilot and basked in his enthusiastic, “Excellent work!”

  Somewhere she still had the note from Kevin thanking her again, for he was certain that she had saved his life. She had kept the makeshift sextant, too, but it had been years since she’d seen it.

  She had not thought about that day for a long time. She wasn’t sure that she had realized before how dubious Clay had been about her abilities. She had known exactly what she was doing and he hadn’t trusted her yet. Today, she was certain, he would have no doubt. She had done the right thing in resigning. It had been a spontaneous but ethical decision, rooted in her values, not just quick action prompted by a special skill she possessed. She had stood up for Tori because her code of morality said she should. And that was something Clay would understand because he had taught her to do so.

  From high to low. Holly had to sit for a minute at the curb, clearing her mind for the imminent conversation with her aunt. Conversation between them inevitably led to confrontation, but Holly had, for the last few years, managed to avoid the harsh exchanges that had been so prevalent in her teenage years. She reminded herself that it couldn’t have been easy for her aunt to have taken in a child she’d never expected to care for, an eleven-year-old made sullen by grief.

  She felt the gentle, familiar tide of that grief, still. Lily Markham had been killed in a laboratory explosion while working on a research project on alternative energy sources. Holly had vivid memories of her vivacious mother, but they had softened with time and love. No amount of concentration would make the colors bright again. It struck her then that she was the same age her mother had been when she’d been born. Her mother had been a relative rarity twenty-six years ago: a never-married woman with a child. Her mother told her that getting pregnant had been an accident but finding out she was going to have a baby had been one of the happiest moments in her life. She never told Holly who her father was and Holly hadn’t been old enough to yearn for that knowledge by the time her mother died.

  A live electrical source, supposed by everyone to be disconnected, had sparked, igniting a tank of compressed natural gas. Her mother and six other lab workers were instantly killed in the explosion, and three more people died in the resulting fire. That night, Holly had moved from the only house she remembered living in, but Aunt Zinnia only lived six blocks away. Grandmother Rose had been failing, and although Great-Aunt Daisy was much healthier, she had never learned to drive. Everyone agreed that sooner or later, Holly would need to be driven somewhere. Aunt Zinnia, a comfortable widow six years older than her dead sister, was the only one who could take her in and give her a relatively normal childhood and adolescence. Within weeks she was transferred from her mother’s to her aunt’s choice of school and nothing was the same except for the familiar neighborhood.

  Aunt Zinnia married Uncle Bernard a year later. He was a silent, withdrawn man who found it easier to work long hours as an accountant than to face his wife’s caustic tongue. Holly might have found in him an ally, because misery loves its own company, but he hardly spoke to her. He died almost two years to the day of the wedding. Aunt Zinnia barely grieved. Only now did Holly ask herself why they had married when love seemed so clearly not a part of the equation.

  For a long time she thought she was the problem. Uncle Bernard didn’t like it when Aunt Zinnia slapped her, that had been evident. But he never spoke up about it. Only once, she remembered, when her aunt had been telling her how clumsy she was, Uncle Bernard said vaguely, “Leave the girl alone, Zinnia.”

  As she grew older, she was aware that her aunt’s harsh discipline had stemmed from an abiding disagreement with her dead sister about what decent women do and don’t do. Decent women attend college, but they don’t get advanced degrees, and certainly not in something as unfeminine as organic sciences. College, Aunt Zinnia told Holly time and again, was for finding a suitable husband. Barring that, it should provide a useful skill for a woman to fall back on, like teaching or nursing.

  Her mother had gone to college but had refused perfectly acceptable suitors, then decided to have a child, on her own. Aunt Zinnia had been determined that Holly would not follow in her mother’s footsteps.

  The lectures, deprivations, spankings and slaps hadn’t, in the end, had much success. Holly pursued a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and moved in with Clay when she was nineteen, and decent women didn’t do either of those things.

  Clay said that Holly wasted a lot of energy maintaining some semblance of an adult relationship with Aunt Zinnia, and he didn’t really understand why she kept trying. He had serious differences with his own parents and saw them only at family events, and never with Holly along. She found it harder to walk away from people. She knew she didn’t want Aunt Zinnia’s acknowledgment that her parenting had been cruel and unfeeling most of the time — she didn’t need it. She supposed that she kept up contact because Aunt Zinnia would sometimes, reluctantly, speak of sister Lily, and Holly would feel close to her mother for a few minutes.

  Jumping over puddles, she made it to the front porch without soaking her shoes further, but she still shucked them off while she waited for her aunt to answer the door. Muddy feet were not permitted inside.

  “Oh,” Aunt Zinnia said. “It’s you.”

  And we’re off! Holly decided that nothing was going to ruin her good mood. She still had Gypsy Kings music surging through her veins. “It’s me. Have I got the day wrong?” />
  “No, I suppose not. Come in, then.”

  Not surprised or deterred by Aunt Zinnia’s lack of enthusiasm, Holly bounced inside and accepted the offer of a cup of tea. Her aunt dined early and Holly had deliberately timed her arrival for after dinner. A cup of tea meant she would be staying for approximately thirty minutes, which was how long a cup of tea could be expected to divert them.

  “Did you get someone to patch the gazebo roof?” It was a safe topic, and her aunt discussed the affair at length, expressing decided views about the shoddiness of the workmanship regardless of the outrageous sum that had been charged.

  “It doesn’t leak, at least not right now. I’m sure it will next year. Used to be when you wanted something repaired you could call someone named Murphy or Kroger, but now it’s nothing but Gonzales and Yee, and most of the time you have to draw a picture to communicate. None of them speak a word of English.”

  Holly listened to her aunt’s casual racism and said nothing. She’d given up on changing her aunt’s attitude about two years ago. They’d had much more amicable meetings since. An inner voice posed a disturbing question: You eliminated Aunt Zinnia from your efforts to make the world a better place, but what did you take up in her place? She pondered the question for a few minutes, and unwillingly remembered Jo’s comments at lunch. Already it seemed a year since lunchtime. At the time she’d had no idea she would be changing jobs. She could change careers, maybe. Teaching was a noble and rewarding profession. She had a gift; it could have a productive use. She didn’t have to use it to build bombs.

  Her aunt’s tirade was wrapping up and Holly refocused. “Do you think I should become a teacher?”

  Aunt Zinnia reacted with suspicion. “Why would you ask that?”

  “Because I quit my job today —”

  “Whatever for? It paid so well, and you had the pension.”

  “Yes, but they fired a co-worker for no good reason and I quit in protest.”

  After a shocked pause, Aunt Zinnia shook her head in dismay. “You never look before you leap, do you? Surely you didn’t have to go that far. A good-paying, stable job is a blessing. What does Clay have to say about it?”