John Krygelski - The Aegis Solution

“Which one?”

“How to get us out of here!”

Elias stared at Tillie, trying to read her eyes. She stared back defiantly.

“Tillie, my dear, you know a way out?” Wilson inquired softly.

She nodded. “I always have, basically since I came into this place.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

She turned to look at Wilson. “Why? Did you ever once say you wanted to leave?”

“No. You know that I didn’t.”

“Then why would I tell you?”

“How did you find it?” Elias asked.

“Not important. I just did. Remember me? I like to explore. I like to crawl through every nook and cranny to see where it goes.”

Elias took a deep breath, aware that he was rolling the dice. “I don’t believe you.”

“WHAT?” She nearly swung up off the sofa as she shouted.

“I don’t believe you. I’ve been in the business my whole life. The reason I’m still alive is that I can tell if someone is feeding me a line of baloney.”

She laughed once, derisively. “I don’t know about the rest of your life, but the reason you are still alive at this moment is me. If your ability to survive is what you’re hanging your hat on, from the little bit I’ve seen, I’m not impressed.”

Wilson began to chastise Tillie, but Elias held up his hand to stop him. “Tillie, this is easy to resolve. If you know a way out, why don’t you show me?”

“Why don’t you go to hell?”

The three men fell into silence, all staring at her. She was perched on the edge of the cushion, leaning forward, her eyes wide, her breathing ragged, her fists clenched, her entire body so tight it might have been a coiled spring.

In a soft and gentle voice, Wilson spoke to her. “Tillie…I have known you almost since the day I arrived. I have counted you as my friend. In that time not a day has passed in which we did not spend time together. Throughout much of it, you have been my lifeline, my thread of optimism, a stabilizing force when I might have wandered too far from the realm of hope.”

His words had an effect on her, as the tension gradually seeped out of her body. Her fists slowly unclenched.

“You have been the only friend I have had in this unnatural habitat. And you have been the only friend I have needed.”

She turned her eyes to look at him. A hint of a smile curled her mouth.

“I must say that the Tillie sitting before me is not the same person who wielded the shovel as we planted my trees and bushes. It is not the same person who sat with me for hours as we laughed, cried, and shared our thoughts; not the same person who gave me my only reason to look forward to each day in this self-imposed prison.”

A single tear welled in the corner of her eye and spilled down her cheek.

“Mathilda, please tell me what is wrong.”

As Wilson spoke, more tears had joined the first in a trek down the sides of her face. In the course of less than a minute, the hard, angry countenance of the woman evaporated, replaced by the fragile, vulnerable face of a younger girl.

Speaking to Wilson as if they were the only two in the room, Tillie, her voice muted and breaking, said, “This isn’t what I wanted, what I hoped for when I put up the sign.”

Wilson smiled at her reassuringly. “I know. It is not what I hoped for, either.”

“It’s almost like I made things worse.”

“No, no, Tillie. What is happening around us now was all in motion long before you put pen to cardboard.”

She tilted her head slightly to the side, a move which seemed to accentuate her sudden vulnerability. Elias and Stone watched silently.

“I know that, Wilson. But I thought the cavalry would come charging in, or at least Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwartzenegger, not Andy Griffith and Don Knotts.”

Elias took a breath to speak but was stopped by Wilson who lifted a single finger, never moving his eyes away from Tillie. “I believe that sometimes people might actually pleasantly surprise you.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so, Wilson. I mean, look! Everything that’s happened since Elias has arrived I’ve done, not him. And when we were on your front porch, it was you who had planned for an attack and prepared the things that saved us. If we were relying on them, we’d both be dead or in one of Kreitzmann’s cages by now.”

“You need to trust, Tillie…trust in your judgment. You need to be willing to give people a chance.”

“I can’t!”

Wilson hesitated, sensing that he was entering some forbidden territory, one that over the years he had verbally stumbled close to and always quickly backed away. He knew that this time, now, he must plunge ahead. “Why, Tillie? Why can’t you?”

She was biting her bottom lip, no longer looking at Wilson. Her gaze and her mind had traveled to another place and another time. Almost a minute passed before she spoke, her voice even more subdued than before, her tone flat and emotionless. “It has to be me. I can’t count on anyone else.”

“You still haven’t told me why.”

Wilson could see the muscles in her jaw flex repetitively. Her eyes now darted, unable to fix upon one location. “Because if I do, someone dies.”

“Tillie?” Wilson spoke her name and waited for her eyes to connect with his. His patience was soon rewarded, and he continued, “This is why you are in Aegis, isn’t it?”

Staring at him, she unsteadily jerked her head up and down to indicate that he was correct.

As soothingly as he could muster, Wilson asked, “What happened?”

Her voice suddenly sounded as if it came from someone years younger. “I don’t…I don’t want to say.”

“I’ve never asked you before, Tillie. I’ve always known not to. But I think perhaps it is time.”

Her head began swaying side to side, a nonverbal denial of the cascading thoughts within her mind. The motion intensified, almost as if she were trying to shake out the images or memories. Wilson waited.

The swaying reluctantly ceased. She said nothing for such a long time that Wilson was about to coax her, when suddenly she began.

“I was sixteen. Almost sixteen. My mother had told me that I couldn’t date until my birthday. I thought I knew better. I always did. I was secretly seeing a boy named Jason from the school I used to go to.

“My dad was dead. He had been for about three years. Right after he died…I mean right after, my mother started dating. A lot of guys. A regular parade through our house. I hated her for what she was doing. I thought that she was glad he was gone, that now she felt free. And probably since I hated her for dating so soon after Dad died, she started hating me, too.

“It wasn’t long before one of the guys…she wasn’t even sure which one…got her pregnant. It didn’t matter, since all she did was pick the one she wanted to believe it was and told him he was going to be a father. She might as well have said that a meteor was coming and was going to hit our town; he split so fast it was nuts!”

The men listened to her story, transfixed. Although her voice, to this point, had been flat, inflections and emotions began to creep in.

“She had the kid. I don’t know if it was the whole Catholic thing or what it was, but she didn’t have an abortion. So there I was, almost sixteen years old, with an eleven-month-old baby brother named Maxwell.”

She made a nervous, stuttering sound intended to be a giggle.

“Goofy name, huh? I refused to call him Max. I thought that sounded like a dog’s name. Anyway, I loved Maxwell from the moment I saw that wrinkly little guy come out of her. Yep, that’s right. I was at the delivery, standing right where the father was supposed to be.

“It’s a good thing I did love him, because she sure as hell didn’t. Well, at least I thought I did.”