Green Dream

by Robert Gollagher

  Thank you for your friendship.

  You will always have mine.

  With much love,

  Ruth.

  Chapter 21

  Michael stayed in Ruth’s house three more weeks. In the hospital, Ruth had encouraged him to stay on as long as he liked. And he did. It gave him time to put all the pieces of his life back together, gave him time to think about Ruth and to come to accept her death. In his heart, she would always be alive as part of his life, just as Marie always would, just as Ian and Diane always would. Ruth was the friend who saved his life in his hour of need and taught him how to live again. And slowly he found that she was right – he could think more of the time they shared together and of the goodness in that, than of the death that separated them and of the tragedy in that. The time they shared had been not quite one third of a year long.

  And when the day came to lock up Ruth’s house and hand over the keys to the young woman solicitor who was the executor of her will, who would hold the house until Claire arrived from Canada to have it sold, Michael even found he could smile, as he locked the front door for the last time. He found, the last time that he left that house, that his face was creased with the lines of a wistful smile, not the lines of grief.

  Michael handed the keys to the solicitor.

  “Don’t worry, Mr Andrews. We have a security firm to look after the property. It’ll be quite safe until Mrs MacDonald’s daughter arrives. Did you get everything she wanted you to have?”

  Michael held Sally’s diaries, and a framed photograph of Ruth and Sally. “Yes, thanks. I did. What about her car? Has that been taken care of?”

  “Yes. It’s going into a security lot this afternoon.”

  “Okay. That’s everything, then. Did you ... know Ruth?”

  The solicitor shook her head. “Not really. She came into the office about a year ago, to update her will. I don’t think her daughter will be too happy about it, though.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, originally she left the house and all her possessions to her daughter, Claire. But when she came in last year, she changed her will completely. The new document leaves one-third of the sale value of the property to Claire, and two-thirds to a registered charity.” The solicitor looked down at her notebook. “It’s called, um, the Young Hope Centre. Apparently it’s a halfway house for kids from violent homes. It provides counselling and emergency accommodation.”

  “Ah,” said Michael. “That makes sense. She had a granddaughter who was bashed by her father.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “You lived here for a while, then?”

  “Just a few months. It’s a pity you didn’t know Ruth. She was a top lady.”

  “I’m sure she was.”

  Michael took one last look around him. He looked out over the front garden to the river. “Well, I’d better get going. I’ve got a house of my own to get back to. Nice meeting you.”

  “You too, Mr Andrews.”

  Michael smiled one of his charming smiles and got into his car.

  The solicitor watched him drive away.

  Ruth had left instructions that she didn’t want a formal funeral. Her body had been cremated and the ashes were commemorated by a plaque at Karrakatta Cemetery, in the shade of a line of eucalyptus trees, next to the plaque which commemorated Sally. Two months after Ruth’s death, Michael went to visit that place. He left a bunch of flowers for Ruth and another for Sally, and he walked through the grounds and thought of Ruth, with a smile. He was a fortunate man to have met her, and a happier man for it. But when he really wanted to remember Ruth, he would walk along the Canning River, the same walk that Ruth used to take for so many years, or he would fly above her old house and think of her joy at her first time flying in a Tiger Moth. And he would think of her wish for him, that he be happy. And he was happy, or at least, learning to be happy again.

  He was living in his own home again, the home that he and Marie had shared. And when he thought of Marie, when he looked at her pictures, at her clothes in the wardrobe, her things in the bathroom, her books in her study, he remembered the good times, and, as his friends used to say, what a lucky bastard he really was. He had lived a wonderful life with Marie for fifteen years. And he had known much laughter and many good times with his friends, Ian and Diane. For fifteen years, he had lived a charmed life. And while it was true that the spell had been broken, it was still true that he had known the very best of life, and that both Ruth and Marie would have wanted him to know the very best of life again. It would be many more months before Michael would be ready to love someone new, but one day he knew he would be ready, and he looked forward to that day.

  By June, he had begun work as a flight instructor at the local airport, the same one from which he had flown Ruth in the Tiger Moth. His old job at the charter company would be coming up again in July, when the replacement pilot returned to Sydney, and in the meantime Michael wanted to keep busy, so he had asked an old friend, who owned the flight school, if he could volunteer to teach a few students for three or four weeks.

  And so it was, one chilly day in June, that Michael found himself sitting in the familiar cockpit of a Cessna 172, with an eighteen-year-old girl who was excited about having made her first landing.

  There was a glint of light in her pale blue eyes and an excited smile on her freckled face. “That was wicked! Unreal!”

  “Okay,” said Michael, calmly. “Don’t forget where you are. Look around for other aircraft. Let’s taxi back to the hanger.”

  “Sorry.”

  Michael smiled. “That’s okay. It was a good landing, Kylie.”

  “It was, wasn’t it?”

  “Yup. It was. Well done.”

  Michael looked at the young girl, her red hair pulled back into a tidy ponytail, her face a picture of joy. He heard her words.

  “Ha! I knew I could do it! I knew it.”