Improbable Solution

by Judith B. Glad

  They reached the head of the line at last. He murmured condolences to Sally's aunt, who responded with equal impersonality. Then he was before Sally, and her hand was in his before either of them quite realized it.

  The electricity surged and burned up his arm, jolting him with a deep and piercing pain. He almost dropped her hand, except that he could not. It was like a true electrical shock, when muscles lock into rigidity. All he could do was hang on and hope for the best.

  Sally blinked, seemed to shiver. Then she closed her eyes and shook her head, a tiny movement of denial.

  "Thank you for coming." Her voice was thin and weak.

  He wondered what hidden reserve she was drawing strength from. "How are you holding up?" God only knew. She didn't look strong enough to stand, let alone deal with all the stress of this difficult ritual.

  "Fine," she said, in a near-whisper. Clearing her throat, she repeated, "Fine. Aunt Trudy is a real tower of strength. And Juana, too."

  "Good," he said, while clinging to her hand. If her aunt was such a tower of strength, where had she been during all those months Sally was half-killing herself with the total care of her father?

  "Sally, I—"

  "Gus, I—"

  They both stopped and looked at one another. Sally gestured for him to go ahead.

  He wasn't sure what he'd meant to say, but he knew what he had to do. Releasing her hand, he took her into his arms. Holding her close, he buried his face in her hair. It smelled of honeysuckle and sunshine, but only faintly, just as everything about her was a faint ghost of the Sally he had held in his arms only a few days ago.

  "Come to me," he whispered. "Tonight. Please." It was the only way he knew to comfort her.

  "Oh, Gus," she breathed, so softly he could hardly hear, "I can't. Aunt Trudy—"

  He released her, unwillingly but without protest. Of course. The funeral was over, but she still had obligations.

  "Soon, then."

  She nodded against his shoulder, but then stiffened, pulled back. "If I can." Her voice was polite and cool. She looked everywhere but at him.

  * * * *

  "No, Sally, there's really nothing I want," Trudy said as they sat over coffee the next evening. "Remember? I took several boxes back when I was here before, after your mother's funeral."

  "But what am I going to do with all this?" Sally looked around the library, at the shelves stuffed with books, the racks holding Pop's vinyl record collection, the framed needlepoint decorating the walls. "I can't just leave it here!"

  "Of course, you can. You said yourself the house will be perfectly safe."

  "But what if—?"

  "What if nothing!" Trudy said. "I won't say that being here to take care of Will was wrong, but staying would be a crime. You deserve a life, girl!" She caught Sally's shoulder and spun her around to face her reflection in the big mirror above the fireplace. "Look at you! Gaunt, bags under your eyes and looking years older than me!"

  Sally looked, and didn't like what she saw. Her aunt had just gone through her third facelift and didn't look anywhere near her age. But neither did Sally look younger...did she?

  "I have lost weight the last little while. But I needed to."

  "Pooh! You're so bony it's a wonder that gorgeous man didn't get bruises when he hugged you this afternoon."

  Not wanting to talk about Gus, Sally turned and gestured toward Pop's desk.

  "He must have gone through these before he got so bad. Everything's here—his insurance policies, the house deed, even a copy of the geologist's report on the mine."

  "Oh, lordy, I hope you're not thinking of opening that old pit up again. Then you'd never get away from here."

  "Oh, yes, I will. Just as soon as I can get the house closed down."

  Once she'd said the words, she felt curiously adrift, as if she'd already cut her bonds to home.

  "Well, then, that's all right." Trudy picked up the empty coffee cups. "Now I think I'll go on up to bed. I'm not as young as I used to be, and having to leave here at five to catch my plane means an early night."

  Sally glanced at the clock as she walked with Trudy to the kitchen door.

  "If you're going to bed, I think I'll go for a walk. Do you mind?"

  "Mind? Whatever for? I'll be asleep. I still haven't adjusted to the time change." She started up the stairs, but stopped on the fourth step. "Sally, promise me you won't give up your dreams. Will used to send me the reviews of the productions you'd worked on, and it sounded to me like you were making a name for yourself."

  Sally looked up at her. "All that seems like so long ago. Almost like it happened to someone else."

  "As soon as you get back to work, it will all be real again." Trudy continued up the stairs, calling "Goodnight," as she disappeared around the landing.

  "I hope so," Sally said softly, knowing there was no one to hear her doubt.

  She took a sweater from the hall tree and slipped out the front door. Was Gus waiting for her, or had he given her up? She hadn't said she'd go to him.

  It wasn't her abilities she doubted, she told herself as she walked down Jasper, but her pluck. In the past few days, she'd given a lot of thought to her options. Each time she'd seriously considered going back to Portland or Seattle she tensed up, thinking of the stress she always felt in the city.

  If there were only some way she could have the best of both worlds, she thought. She wanted to live in Whiterock and work in Portland.

  How much of the uncertainty she was feeling was due to Gus and his decision to purchase Cowles Implement?

  INTERVAL

  Carruthers energy muted, contained. Fading.

  Bonding suspended.

  Loring remains suspicious.

  Foreboding. Apprehension.

  Fear?

  EIGHTEEN

  Gus didn't speak when he opened the door. He simply took her into his arms and held her. Sally clung, again sensing his great strength. After a while he lifted her and carried her to the sofa, and settled her upon his lap.

  "I'm sorry," she said, relaxing for the first time since the night she'd walked away from him. "I'm sorry I stayed away."

  "There's nothing to be sorry for." He buried his face in her hair, nibbled on the lobe of her ear. "I just wish I could have done something to help."

  "You were here. Just knowing that helped." She shivered at the tiny pain his teeth inflicted and shifted in his embrace. "Can we talk about something else?"

  "Sure. What?"

  "Anything. I don't care. Tell me a joke." It would be nice to laugh at something totally dumb again.

  His brows lowered, as if in thought. "Okay. Tell me: if April showers bring forth May flowers, what do May flowers bring?"

  Sally had heard the rhyme many times, but she didn't think there was another line to it. "June...June something..." She was still finding coherent thought difficult. "I give up. What?"

  "Pilgrims."

  She groaned, and it felt almost as good as laughing.

  "I'll tell you another joke. I signed the papers on Cowles Implement today."

  "So, you went ahead and did it. I don't know whether to congratulate you or commiserate with you. I don't see why it's a joke, though."

  "Bob Larkin says it is," he said, his mouth twisted in a plaintive grin. "He seems to think I'll lose my shirt. Offered to bet me a hundred-to-one I'll go under within a year."

  "Pooh, don't listen to him. Bob's the most negative person I've ever met, and he'll bet on anything."

  "Maybe I am making a mistake." He sounded almost in need of reassurance.

  "I won't argue," she admitted, "but Pop always..." Her voice broke, and she took a deep breath. "Pop always said the best thing about failure is that it says you were brave enough to try in the first place." Twisting in his loose grasp, she faced him, almost nose-to-nose. "Where did you get the money, anyway?"

  It was none of her business, but she had been consumed with curiosity, almost since she first met him. He certainly wasn't
the itinerant man-of-all-work he'd seemed at first.

  "Sold my share of a partnership." His eyes became shuttered and the lines around his mouth deepened. He buried his face in both hands, elbows on his knees. His fingers dug into his scalp, and the tendons in his neck stood out against the skin.

  Quickly kneeling beside him, Sally slipped one arm around his shoulders. "Gus? What is it?"

  He took a deep, shuddering breath. "Nothing," he said at the end of a violent exhalation. "Just a headache."

  He raised his head and attempted a smile. It was unconvincing. If eyes were mirrors of the soul, Gus's soul was in Hell.

  Sally had seen glimpses in him of great suffering more than once, back before they had become lovers, but they had been quickly concealed behind his frequent withdrawals. She honestly had forgotten, but now she saw it again, stronger than before.

  She laid a hand on his arm and felt the drawn-steel strain there. "No. You're feeling something more than a headache."

  His arm jerked violently, flinging her hand away. "Damn it! Let it be, will you? I told you I've got a headache, and if you can't give me credit for knowing how I feel, maybe you'd better go!"

  "I don't think I should," she said, no longer angry now but worried.

  "Go away, damn you!" he shouted as he leapt to his feet and strode to the window overlooking Main Street. "Go, Sally," he said again, his voice more quiet but the tension in his body no less.

  She followed, to stand behind him, not quite touching.

  "Do you really want me to?" she said softly, remembering the times he'd held her, soothed her, listened to her troubles.

  "Yes," he said, but she heard doubt.

  She waited.

  "No," he said, at last. "Stay."

  She could see some of the tension drain from his back, leave his shoulders.

  "Please, stay."

  She did, as much for herself as for him.

  Gus wanted her to go because if she stayed she'd pity him, and he couldn't take that. He wanted her to stay because while she was here he wouldn't be alone with his memories.

  As long as he'd been running, he'd successfully left the memories behind, but now—now that he was committed to staying in Whiterock—they were back with a vengeance.

  Running had been easier—safer. It had worked, too. Until he'd come to Whiterock. He'd managed to keep the memories locked solidly away in that back corner of his mind where they couldn't hurt him. Now they were clamoring for release.

  For the first time he wanted to talk about what had happened. Perhaps by talking he could erase the pain from his soul.

  But not tonight.

  He led her back to the sofa and pulled her down beside him. Tucking her head against his neck, he stroked his hand along her bare arm, marveling yet again how like velvet she felt. He told his body to relax. Tonight, Sally needed his comfort. Nothing else.

  Especially not his confession.

  "I'm such an awful person," she eventually said into the silence. He had thought she'd fallen asleep. He certainly had been close to it, himself.

  "Why?"

  She didn't speak for a while, but he could feel the tension in her body.

  "Because I'm glad Pop is dead." A long silence, then: "Well, maybe not glad..." Her voice broke a little. "Relieved," she finally said, the word coming out on a sob.

  "Shouldn't you be? I hadn't seen him for a while, but I can't imagine he'd gotten any better."

  "No. He just kept deteriorating." Her voice was stronger now, but he didn't like the hysterical note in it. "Do you know what the first thing I said was, after...after I told him goodbye?"

  He grunted an interrogative, but he had a good idea, given her so-obvious guilt.

  "I said, 'Now I'm free.' Can you believe that? My father had just died, and all I could think of was that now, at last, I can go." She covered her face with her hands until her voice was muffled. "I can have a life again. I can do all the things... Oh, God, Gus! How can I be so selfish?"

  Her words cut into a wound still unhealed. He tried to find the right words, the words that would allow her self-forgiveness. He had heard them himself. Heard and hadn't believed.

  How could he offer Sally false coin?

  He took the coward's way out. He said nothing, only stroked her, rocked her, murmured formless sounds he hoped were comforting. She never did weep, but he gradually felt her relax. He continued to hold her, hoping she was deriving comfort from his embrace.

  After a while, when he thought she'd fallen asleep, she spoke.

  "I have to go." Her voice was hoarse from tears unshed. "Trudy's leaving early tomorrow, and I want to be there to say goodbye."

  "Then we'd better get you home right now." He picked her up, pulled her onto his lap. She was light in his arms, lighter by far than she had been that first day he'd carried her up the narrow stairs to this apartment.

  He drove her home.

  She wouldn't let him inside. "Come tomorrow night." Her kiss was more sisterly than loverly. "I'll be alone then."

  Gus went back to his pickup, wondering why it hurt so much to know she was preparing to say goodbye.

  Aunt Trudy was curled in a wing chair in the living room, when Sally let herself in. "We need to talk."

  Talk was the last thing Sally wanted.

  "I thought you were going to bed early." She wanted to bite the words back as soon as she'd spoken them. Trudy was her last close relative, and she should cherish every moment they had together. Florida was a long way from Oregon, and they probably wouldn't see each other again for years.

  "I was. Until my conscience got the best of me." She gestured toward the matching chair on the opposite side of the fireplace. "I brought this to show you, and then decided not to. But when I went to put it into my suitcase tonight I realized I couldn't take it away again." She picked up a thin, shabby book that had been tucked between her thigh and the chair's curved arm. "Maybe you can make sense of it."

  Sally made no move to take the book. There was something about it... Something that made her reluctant even to touch it.

  "What is it?"

  "Your great-grandmother Lorena's journal."

  "Grandmother Lorena? The one who—" Her interest was piqued, in spite of her disinclination.

  No one would ever talk about the grandmother who had abandoned her husband and son when the baby was only four months old. As far as she knew, no one knew—or cared—what had become of her.

  "Does it tell why...?"

  "I think so. Will disagreed. He believed, as our father did, that she'd run away because she couldn't abide living here, so far from anything remotely resembling culture. But I think she had a different reason. One that always frightened me." Aunt Trudy drew circles on the cover with her fingers, hesitated, and finally went on, almost musingly. "I found this in the attic when I was about twelve. Because no one would ever talk about her, I kept it hidden. But I read it—and had nightmares for months."

  "Good grief! Now you've really got me interested. What's so scary about it?"

  "I'd rather you read it for yourself. Make up your own mind whether to believe what she says. And if you do... No, I won't say any more. It's just too fantastical." She rose, tapped the spine of the book against her lips. "I left home partly because of what Grandmother Lorena says. After reading that, I could never feel comfortable here again. Even now..."

  She thrust the book at Sally. "Take it. Make up your own mind. Maybe you'll think I'm crazy."

  Sally took the book and held it with two fingers, still not sure she wanted to touch it but having no choice unless she wanted it to fall to the floor.

  "Won't you tell me more? Why it scared you? Why you want me to read it? Why—"

  "No. I've probably already said too much." Aunt Trudy's shrug spoke of confusion, indecision, puzzlement. "Just read it. And make up your own mind." She seemed about to embrace Sally, but then she pulled back, as if uncertain how her affection would be received. "I've got to get some sleep. See you in
the morning."

  Before Sally could object, she ran lightly up the stairs.

  Sally stared down at the book, not sure whether she wanted to know what scared Aunt Trudy, who had always seemed to be one of the most self-possessed, competent women she knew. Pop had always said his sister should have gone into politics.

  "With her brains and determination, she would have ended up running the country," he'd commented the day they got the news she'd been offered a partnership in a law firm.

  Aware of a shivery, tingly sensation at her nape, she carried the book to Pop's office and slipped it into his desk—her desk now—where she would see it again when she started sorting through the details she must deal with before she could leave Whiterock forever.

  The last thing she needed right now was a crazy family legend.

  * * * *

  After seeing Aunt Trudy off, Sally went back to bed—five-fifteen was far too early to be up, even on a hot day in late July. She slept until after noon, and woke in a pool of sweat, with the bedclothes tangled about her feet and tears in her eyes.

  Once she dragged herself out of bed, she couldn't seem to get started. She needed Gus—or someone—to give her the incentive to do something besides sit at the kitchen table drinking coffee and feeling exhausted.

  Was he coming to dinner tonight? She had a faint memory of asking him to...to what? Shoving her coffee cup aside, she laid her head on the table and closed her eyes. Even thinking about fixing dinner was exhausting. Probably because of all those interrupted nights. She had hundreds of them to make up for.

  The phone rang, startling her.

  "Sally? Gus. Look, I got a call from Abe Zigler. Their baler is acting up, and they want to get the haying done before more weather moves in. Can I have a rain check?" He spoke hurriedly, as if he'd only remembered to call her as he was running out the door.