Kate Wilhelm - The Price Of Silence

Ruth Ann nodded. “Why do you suppose they always seated the man and had the woman stand in those old portraits? And they never smiled, did they? My mother was very beautiful.”

“I can tell,” Todd said. “Even without a smile, she’s lovely.”

She began to unpack her laptop. After she had it plugged in and positioned on an end table, they looked at the pictures she had taken with her digital camera at the cemetery. “I thought you would be able to see them better on the monitor than on the small camera screen. After you decide which one you want, I’ll put up the front-page layout with it in place.”

“You have the newspaper on your little computer?”

“Not really. Just on a CD, a compact disk. That’s how I can work at home. And the laptop is small, but it has even more room on the hard drive and more power than the computers in the office.”

Ruth Ann was impressed. She had known that Todd did much of her work at home, but she had assumed it was on a standard computer like hers at the office. She picked out the funeral picture to go with the obituary, and watched as Todd slid in a CD and opened a screen with the front page, then added the new picture. It looked like magic.

After Todd left, and lunch was over with, Ruth Ann thought again about how Todd was able to take old faded photographs and do whatever she did with them to make them as sharp and clear as if they had just been taken. The photograph of Louise when she was a teacher at the one-room school, faded, yellowed and brittle with age, had come to life again with Todd’s tricks. No wonder the new generation loved their toys, she mused.

But she was really thinking of the photographs she had come across in Louise Coombs’s box. She had a box just about like that of her own, as well as whatever her mother had preserved of her father’s papers. At first she had been thinking of no more than a simple print special edition for the centennial, perhaps a one-page insert, but she was reconsidering. Old pictures of the town as it had been, from its first days on. The people who had lived here, even letters…Todd said she could scan anything on paper, digitize it, enhance it, reproduce it.

Second by second, a much more elaborate special edition was reforming in Ruth Ann’s mind.

Usually Todd and Barney cooked dinner together, but since Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were her only really busy days, on those nights he most often made dinner and had it ready when she got home. That night, chilled again by the strong wind, she entered the house, then called out, “Fe, fi, fo, fum. That smells good and I want some.”

“Maniac,” he said from the kitchen. “Lasagna, ten minutes. Wash your hands.”

They ate at the kitchen table and she told him about the funeral. “There must have been a couple hundred people there. And I was freezing. That wind was brutal today.”

“I know. I walked down to Safeway. We need to get out our winter gear. Summer or winter here, no in-between apparently. Guess who I saw at Safeway.”

“I give already. Who?”

“Miss Sexpot herself. She wanted me to buy her a cup of coffee, to warm her up, she said.”

“Oh dear,” Todd said. “You’ll have to come by the office to borrow my whip and chair.”

“I told her I was mentally conjugating Greek verbs and couldn’t be distracted. You might try that line with Shinizer. It worked with the sexpot.”

“Two problems,” she said, shaking her head. “He wouldn’t know what conjugating means, and he doesn’t know a verb from a velocipede. Anyway, after I told him that what he claims is friendliness the law considers sexual harassment, he hasn’t come within ten feet of me. Deal. You take care of the sexpot and I’ll take care of the bum. I can, you know.”

“I know you can, tiger. Deal. What’s a velocipede?”

Grinning, she said, “It’s a two-wheeled horse that little boys rode in Victorian novels.”

He looked doubtful and she laughed and started to clear the table.

Todd was dreaming. She was standing on a vast dun-colored plain with not a landmark in sight, no grasses, no rocks, nothing, just the endless plain. A strong wind was blowing granules of ice at her and no matter how she twisted and turned, they kept blasting her in the face. She ducked her head and tried to protect her face, her eyes, but the wind was too strong. “Don’t cry,” she told herself. “Don’t cry.” Tears would freeze on her cheeks.

“Todd! Wake up!”

“Don’t cry,” she whimpered, struggling against the wind, weeping.

“Todd! Come on, wake up.”

She jerked awake with Barney’s hands on her shoulders. She was shaking with cold.

“A door must have blown open,” he said. “Where’s another blanket?”

She couldn’t stop shaking. “Closet shelf.” She pointed and pulled the covers tighter around herself. Barney hurried to the closet and yanked another blanket from the shelf, wrapped it around her. He was shivering, too.

“I’ll go close the door. Be right back.” Pulling on his robe, he left the room. She huddled under the covers, drew herself up into a ball, and realized that she was weeping, her face was wet. Even with the covers over her head, she couldn’t stop shivering, and she couldn’t stop crying.

Barney was back. “Come on,” he said. “This bedroom is like an icebox. I put a log on the fire. We’ll be warmer there.”

He had moved the sofa in front of the fireplace, where a hot fire was blazing. They sat holding each other on the sofa, wrapped in a blanket, not talking. Gradually the warmth reached her and the shivering subsided, with only an occasional tremor coursing through her. Barney got up and left, returned with a box of tissues. “Are you okay?” he asked. At her nod, he said, “I’ll make us some hot cocoa. Be right back.”

She didn’t know how long they sat on the sofa before the fire, sipping the sweet hot cocoa. Eventually they moved the blanket away, but they didn’t get up.

Then, warm through and through, even sweating a little, she said, “There wasn’t an open door, was there?”

After a moment he said, “No. Why were you crying?”

“I don’t know,” she said in a low voice. “It wasn’t just me. You were freezing, too, weren’t you?”

“I was pretty damn cold,” he said, “but you were like ice. And crying. You were dreaming, crying in your dream. Do you remember the dream?”

Miserably she shook her head. She had to fight back tears, because sitting there with the fire, with Barney’s arm around her shoulders, safe and comfortable, she felt a nearly overwhelming sadness, a loneliness such as she had never experienced before. “Let’s go back to bed,” she whispered.

Ruth Ann was dreaming that she was a small child in the old press room where the machinery was gargantuan, high over her head, making ogrelike growling noises. Her father spread blank newsprint on the floor and she began to help him paste up the news stories, crawling over the paper on hands and knees. She had a paste pot and a brush and carefully brushed the paste on an article, then crawled around trying to find where to place it. Her mother said, “For heaven’s sake! Look at you. You’re all over ink.”

Ruth Ann stood up and looked at her knees and both hands, then stamped her foot, and her mother said, “Don’t you stamp your foot at me, young lady.”

She stamped her foot again and her father laughed as the newly pasted news stories came unstuck and scattered.

She woke up when the cold descended, and this time when Maria glided into the room carrying the electric blanket, Ruth Ann had already put on sheepskin slippers and a heavy wool robe.

“I won’t be going back to bed until this air mass moves on,” Ruth Ann said. “In fact, I was going to go make a cup of tea. I’ll make two cups.”