In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) (15 page)

“Uh, well, you know.  I didn’t, uh, believe her or anything.  I mean, you’re one of the good guys,” she said, trying to backpedal. “This whole ‘taming Transforms’ thing, that would be just awful.  Manipulating their personalities with the juice.  I know you can’t be doing anything along those lines.”  Gail cringed to hear herself babble.  With all the times she had put her foot in her mouth, she wondered if she would ever learn to stop chewing.

“I’ll tell you what,” Tonya said, after a pause.  Her cool, almost indifferent voice turned to rock hard ice.  The thin layer of artificial good cheer covering her words only made things worse.  “When you get your household in order, and the people in your household are as happy and stable as the people in mine, I’ll be interested in your opinions about how I should manage my people.”  Tonya’s voice cut like a knife and shivered Gail’s juice.  “Until then, why don’t you hold your opinions to yourself?  Do you think you can manage that?”

Gail winced miserably and wanted to crawl in a hole somewhere and pull the top in after her.  She had managed to say plenty of boneheaded things in her life, but she couldn’t remember the last time she got herself into this much trouble.  The juice flowed into her juice buffer like water down a waterfall, and her Transforms began to curse and moan throughout the Ebener house.

“Uh, yeah,” she said, at loss for anything else to say.

“Good.  So why don’t you spend a little time trying out Beth’s advice, and see if this helps you manage your household a little bit better.  I’ll call you back some other time to check on you.” Tonya’s voice remained glacial under her artificial pleasantries.

“Uh, yes.  Yes, it’s fine, thanks.”

“Good. I’ll talk to you later,” Tonya said and she hung up.

Gail didn’t hang up.  She sat on the floor and stared at the phone and wished she could throw it against the wall.  She wasn’t sure which was worse: that Tonya did ‘tame Transforms’, or the fact Gail had just alienated one of the few people since her transformation who had managed to give her real help.

---

“Van, can I talk to you for a minute?” Gail said.  They were out on the porch, where Van sat in the midst of a pile of papers and books and the remains of dinner.  Around them, the steady Michigan rain dripped from the eaves.  It was cold enough for even Gail to need a coat.  So much for summer.

Van looked up from the legal pad in his lap, but he didn’t really see her.  His dissertation was due soon and it was tough to get his attention.

“Uhh?”

“I wanted to talk to you about something.”

“Hmm?  Oh, hey, I’m going to need to go back to the library again this evening.  It might be kind of late before I return.”

“Okay.  Look, I’ve got this problem.”

“Uh hmm,” Van said, and he looked back down at his legal pad and started writing notes into it.

“Van?” Gail said.

“Could you hold on for a few minutes, cutie?  I need to get these thoughts down…”  His voice drifted off as he lost track of her, flipping pages in the book propped against his left knee.

Gail sighed, frustrated, and gave up on Van.

Her next choice was Rev. Narbanor, and she metasensed him in the kitchen picking up his dinner.  She made her way to the kitchen, attempting to ignore the way everyone pulled away from her and stared.  She had fixed the juice after her last nasty mistake a half hour ago, but everyone remained jumpy.

“Matt?” she said to him, as he leaned over his youngest child to help her hold the plate steady.

“Gail,” he said politely, and smiled.  He was always so patient with her, despite her earlier troubles with him.  Gail wondered how he managed the patience.  He was less afraid of her than the others were, but then, she hadn’t found herself angry with him since his first few weeks in the household.  She and ministers, preachers and priests didn’t exactly get along.  Matt Narbanor, Methodist reverend that he was, had won her over anyway.

“Do you have a few minutes to talk?”

“Of course,” he said, and turned to put his plate down, but he couldn’t find an empty spot on the counter.  His wife Ruth turned to take it, but the next youngest child interrupted with “But I don’t
want
any beans” as the spaghetti on his daughter’s plate started sliding slowly off her plate and down to her chest.

Vera Bracken stepped forward to level the little girl’s plate with a “Let me hold this for you, sweetheart.”  Bart Wheelhouse, noticing the exchange, took Matt’s plate from him.  Matt followed Gail into the Ebener’s bedroom.

Rain still dripped along the window of the dim room, and the room remained cold enough to notice.  Gail turned the light on and sat down on the floor, because she saw nowhere else to sit but the bed and she knew Matt wouldn’t want to sit on a bed with a woman who wasn’t his wife.

“Sit,” she said, and smiled.  “Talk to me where I can see you.”

Rev. Narbanor sat down and leaned against the wall.  His clothes were still damp from the rain.

“What can I do for you?”

Gail looked down at her hands.  “I have a moral question,” she said, after thinking things through.

Narbanor nodded and waited for more.  Gail ran her hands through her hair.  Her short hair still felt strange.

“What do you do,” she said, “if someone you know a little bit, who’s been pleasant and helpful, turns out to be doing something really awful?”

“I assume this isn’t a theoretical question?”

Gail shook her head.

“So is there any chance you might convince this other person to stop doing the awful thing?”

Gail remembered Tonya’s cold voice on the phone and winced.  “No.”

Narbanor nodded.  “Does this other person recognize they’re doing something wrong?”

Again, Gail shook her head.  “She thinks that she’s doing the right thing, and that I’m ignorant and inexperienced.”

“Hmm,” he said.  “So you think what she’s doing is immoral and she thinks it’s perfectly correct?”

“Uh huh,” Gail said.

“Well, it’s quite possible that you’re right and she’s wrong, but you do always need to consider the possibility she might be right.”

Gail looked down at her hands and didn’t answer for a long time.

“She’s another Focus,” she said eventually.  Narbanor nodded, encouraging.

“One of the things she does for a living is the bad thing I’m worried about.  It’s called ‘taming Transforms’.”

“Ah,” Narbanor said, unhappy.

“I recently learned there’s some kind of business going on among the Focuses.  If some Focus has a Transform she can’t deal with, she can pay money and send him to this other Focus.  This other Focus fixes, um, changes his personality and sends him back.”

Narbanor turned pale.  “This goes on among the Focuses?  You can pay money and get someone’s personality changed?”

“Uh huh,” Gail said.  “Uh, Matt, I’m sort of new at being a Focus, and well, don’t look at me that way.  I can’t do any such thing.”

Narbanor drew a breath. “Knowing about this doesn’t make me feel comfortable.”

“Uh huh.  Me, either.  That’s why I brought up this, uh, rumor, with this Focus.  She confirmed it.”

Gail looked at his drawn face in sympathy.  He didn’t respond.

“I shouldn’t have told you this, should I?”

“No, it’s all right, this is the sort of moral burden Ministers were made for.  I think.  Um,” he said.  “It might, ah, might be a good idea if we didn’t pass this on to everyone else, though.”

“Uh huh.”

“So what did you want to ask me?” Narbanor said, his voice strained.

Gail bit her lip at Matt’s reaction, his very Transform reaction.  If she had the brains of a rutabaga, she would have kept her mouth shut.  Too late now, though.

“A part of me wants to do the right thing and stop dealing with her,” Gail said.  She turned away. “Another part of me wants to be her friend, and wants her to be my friend, because she’s sharp and sassy and reasonable.  I don’t know what to do, Matt.”

Narbanor looked away from her, his face still drawn.  He watched the rain drip against the window glass for a long time.  Finally, he turned back to her.

“I would really like to give you advice,” he said, slowly.  “But I don’t, ah, don’t think I can give you any unbiased suggestions.  This one seems to hit a little too close to home for me.  I apologize, but I don’t think you should get your advice from me.”

Gail nodded again.  “It’s all right.  I never should have asked a Transform.”

Narbanor smiled a bit.  “But we could pray together, if you’d like.  God’s wisdom is a lot greater than mine.”

Months ago, Gail would have hated the idea, but she was grateful for it now.  Desperation had brought her back around to religion again, to Narbanor’s relatively liberal Methodism, rather than the strict church of her parents.  She needed all the help she could get, and something larger to lean on.

They knelt and prayed.  Narbanor didn’t ask that she make her decision one way or another, but asked only for wisdom, and help making the right decision.  She was calmer when they finished, but she still didn’t know what to do.

The rain drizzled down inside Gail’s coat, and plastered her hair to her head.  She paced, alone, at the far end of the Ebener’s property, out of range of her household, so she could think, and stew, and fume, without hurting them.

The grass was high again, and drenched.  Mud covered her feet up to above her ankles, and her pacing soaked her all the way through.

Tonya did wrong, and she shouldn’t condone Tonya’s actions.  Tolerating bad behavior was nearly as bad as the behavior itself, and she had condemned that sort of hypocrisy most of her life.  How could she not reject that behavior, in every way possible?

Except every time she tasted her bit of rational analysis in her gut, it tasted like a two-year old’s temper tantrum.

Rejecting Tonya would reject Beth.  She had already rejected Focus Adkins.  Where would these latest rejections leave her?  The rain dripping down her nose was one answer.  The other?  This would hurt her household.

Tonya had been pleasant to her personally.  ‘Pleasant’, though, wasn’t enough to justify ignoring Tonya’s behavior, but she had done business before with people she disagreed with on moral issues.  Her parents, for two.

Gail stuck her tongue out in disgust at herself.  ‘Doing business’ sounded like nothing more than a smarmy rationalization.  She walked in the rain, around in a long oval at the far end of the Ebener’s yard, while her thoughts wound in circles in her head.

She didn’t have anybody to ask, except God.  So she prayed.  She prayed as she walked, desperately hoping for some insight, some help.  Instead, she realized that all she was doing was looking for an excuse.  She didn’t
want
to lose Tonya.

Such a bleak realization, to recognize the hypocrisy in herself.

Her realization did clarify the question.

Sylvie’s words echoed in her mind: ‘Give up this damned saint thing you’re stuck on, and
move the damned juice
.  Do whatever it takes.’

And ‘If you’ve got anything you think is as important as moving the juice, you’ve got your priorities screwed up.’

And, from Van, after she got home from visiting Beth: “Gail, you’re the one who told
me
the Clinic pamphlets and the common public knowledge on Transforms was worthless.  You should have trusted your own judgment and gone on this visit without any preconceptions.”

As Sylvie’s and Van’s voices ran through her mind, for a moment, just for a moment, she
saw,
not the rainy field she stood in, but places
beyond
.  Evil court jesters, formal gardens, religious icons, nightmare beasts, mythological Gods and Goddesses, and Tonya, kneeling, holding her own still beating heart in her hands, an offering to the green eyed Valkyrie who towered over her.  The blood drained out of Gail’s extremities, instant aching pins and needles at the shock of the sudden insane vision that filled her mind.  Gail screamed bloody murder, and kept on screaming until her screaming banished the unwanted vision.  She fell to her knees, shaking, icy cold, barely able to breathe, hands wrist deep in the mud.

“What.  The fuck.  Was that!” she said, nowhere near as loud as she wanted.  She didn’t have enough breath to scream again.  She did turn back toward the house, where she swore half of her household now ran toward her, as fast as they could kick their way through the mud.

She only had a moment of freedom left, and in her last moment of freedom she made her decision.  The crazy hallucination, prompted by stress, lack of sleep and who knew what else, had been a quick kick in the head reminding her of her hard-learned lesson that she didn’t understand shit about what was going on with the Transforms, and possibly neither did anyone else.  There was no way she had the right to draw a moral line in the sand based on her own half-assed guesses and suppositions.  She had always been a good judge of people, and Beth was a good person, and Tonya sure sounded like a good person, worthy of the benefit of the doubt.  For the good of the household, the now sodden mass of people gathered around her as she knelt like a loon in the mud, worrying about her, for the good of the household she couldn’t draw a moral line in the sand
yet
.