Downstairs, Mellie sat alone at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette. She hadn’t put on her makeup yet, and small lines were etched into the skin around her eyes and mouth. The whites of her eyes were pink; there were half-moons of gray on the skin beneath her lower lashes.
“Hi, babies,” she said when the girls walked into the kitchen. Her smile didn’t look real.
“We’re just going straight out to the barn,” Claire announced.
“Oh, no.” Sometimes Mellie could put on a whiny-little-girl voice, and she was doing it now. She stubbed out the cigarette. “Grandma’s on the porch shelling peas and I’m all by myself. Have some breakfast with me. I’ve been waiting for you to come down.”
Vanessa and Claire exchanged looks. They were trapped. They sat down at the table as Mellie hopped up to get the coffee.
“Is Daddy still sleeping?” Claire asked.
Mellie didn’t look at them as she splashed coffee into their cups. “Daddy had to go back to Virginia. He realized he had too much work to do to spend the whole weekend here,” she said. She sounded as if she were rehearsing the lines in a play.
“Is he mad at you, Mommy?” Vanessa only called Mellie “Mommy” when she was upset about something.
“Mad at me?” Mellie laughed as if that was the craziest thing she’d ever heard, and Vanessa actually smiled. “Why would you think a thing like that?”
Mellie plopped one of Dora’s greasy doughnuts onto each of their plates.
“We could hear you yelling last night,” Claire said.
Mellie sat down again and looked from daughter to daughter, a perplexed expression on her face. “Yelling? Last night?”
Claire nodded.
Mellie shook another cigarette from the box of Salems. “Well, we were talking, but we certainly weren’t yelling.”
“Daddy sounded mad,” Vanessa said.
Mellie slipped the cigarette between her pale lips and lit it with a shaky hand. “He was tired,” she said, blowing a stream of smoke into the air. “You know how grumpy he can sound when he’s tired?”
The girls nodded.
“I think you completely misunderstood whatever you heard, punkins,” Mellie said. Then she smiled. “That’s what you get for snooping.”
Vanessa lifted her doughnut to her mouth, pressing her tongue against the powdered sugar, her eyes never leaving her mother’s face. Claire picked her own doughnut apart on her plate. “You two have these worried little frowns on your beautiful faces.” Mellie smiled, and this time the smile looked real and reassuring. “I’ve never seen such silly little frowns.”
Vanessa scrunched up her nose, trying to make her frown even sillier, and Mellie laughed with delight.
They ate their breakfast, chatting about one of Mellie’s stories on TV as though the people in the soap opera were real—neighbors or relatives, perhaps—and as though this was just another Saturday on the farm, even though it would be the first Saturday that Len Harte was not with them.
When the girls got up to leave the table, Mellie rose, too, and gathered them into her arms, planting kisses on their cheeks and the tops of their heads.
“Nothing’s wrong, darlings,” she said. “All is right and safe and good in your world, and it will always be that way.”
LEN RETURNED TO THE farm the following weekend, and the weekend after that as well. Only once did the girls think they heard another argument between their parents. Again, it occurred late at night, and when they asked Mellie about it the following morning, they were not at all surprised to hear they had been mistaken. Actually, Mellie told them, she and Daddy had been laughing together about one thing or another. She was sorry they had been loud enough to wake them.
But Len Harte didn’t seem like himself for the rest of that summer. He was grumpier than he used to be. Mellie said that was because he was working too much and too hard. He was absent-minded, too. Once he brought a doll for Vanessa and forgot to bring anything for Claire. It was not an intentional oversight. Anyone could see the stunned look on his face when he realized he had nothing for his oldest daughter. He said he’d inadvertently left his gift for Claire at home in Virginia. Claire tried very hard to believe him.
That night Len drove Claire into town and let her pick out a doll from the five-and-dime. The selection was limited, and the doll she chose—a pink-skinned baby doll with short brown curls—seemed plain to her. But Mellie and Dora and Vincent made such a fuss over it that by the time Claire climbed into bed that night, she had almost come to believe that her father had given her the prettiest doll of all.
18
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
JON OPENED HIS EYES in the morning to find Claire awake and watching him. Her head was on the hotel pillow, and there was a smile in her eyes. The crisp white sheet rested low on her breasts, and he reached out to slip one fingertip beneath its hem.
He remembered back to the night before, to seeing her in that crowded ballroom. He’d felt an instant of visceral attraction before he even recognized her as his wife, and a surge of pride once it all sank in. He’d had plans to get a drink with some of the conference attendees after the reception, but none of them questioned his change of heart once they’d seen Claire. It was rare for her to flaunt her looks that way. He’d forgotten how well she could do it when she wanted to.
Jon rested his palm on her cheek. “Do you know how much it means to me that you came up here?” he asked.
She curled her body closer to his, wrapping her arm around his waist, and he sank his fingers into her hair. “I wanted to sleep with you.”
“What a surprise to look up and see you in that room with all those stodgy suits. A sight for sore eyes, in that sweater. Mmm.”
“Think I’m getting too old to wear that outfit?”
“Never.” He drew away only far enough to lift her chin for a kiss, then held her close again. Sleeping with her last night, feeling so close to her, made him keenly aware of the distance that had crept between them this past month.
She had cried sometime during the night. He’d heard her, at first not placing the sound of her quiet sniffling because her tears were so rare. He had asked her what was wrong, and she’d simply requested that he hold her. She didn’t seem to want to talk, and he didn’t press her.
“What time’s your first meeting this morning?” she asked.
“Not until ten, so we can goof off for a while. Shall I call room service? Do you feel like breakfast in bed?”
She nodded, and he made the call as she lay next to him, stroking his chest.
“I want to talk to you,” she said when he had hung up the phone. “I want to tell you about my weekend so far.” There was a strange tone to her voice. She sounded like Susan when she was testing the waters, trying to determine the safety of bringing up an inflammatory topic. Or maybe it was only his imagination.
He propped up his pillow and leaned back against it, wrapping his arms around her. Her hair was everywhere—splayed over his arms and chest, pressing against his face where her temple met his cheek. “Go ahead,” he said.
“Well, Amelia got sick Friday night.”
“She did? What kind of sick?”
“Just some flu thing, but she was very upset because it would have been her and Jake’s twenty-fifth anniversary.”
“Oh, yeah. That’s right.” He coiled a strand of her hair around his finger.
“She was a mess, so I stayed with her Friday night and yesterday morning. By yesterday afternoon, though, she was feeling much better, so I—now, please don’t be upset by this, Jon.”
“Upset by what?”
In the hall outside their door, someone dropped something—a tray of dishes, perhaps—and Claire started. He held her tighter. “Well,” she said, “I’d told Randy so much about the carousel that he wanted to see the Siparo horses, so he invited us—you and me—to go to the Smithsonian. You weren’t there, of course, so I went with him alone.”
His fingers balled into a fist ar
ound the strand of hair. “Yesterday afternoon?” he asked. “Before or after you met with Gil Clayton?”
Her hand froze on his chest.
“Claire?”
“Oh, my God, Jon. I completely forgot.”
He pushed her away from him to look her in the eye. “Please tell me you’re kidding.”
She sat up, pulling the sheet to her breasts. “I guess I got confused by Amelia being sick. It threw off my plans, and it never occurred to me to check my appointment book because it was a weekend. So when Randy called I…I just completely forgot about Gil.”
“How the hell could you forget?” He wanted to shake her. “Do you know how important that meeting was? That was the whole reason you didn’t come up to this conference with me, remember? The whole reason you stayed in Vienna. Not to go out with Randy Donovan.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What the hell is happening to you?” He threw off the sheets and reached for his chair.
Claire leaned forward quickly, curving her hand around his arm, tugging at him, trying to keep him in the bed, but he shook her off. The warmth of the night was gone. Forgotten. He didn’t look at her as he transferred into his chair, and he wheeled into the bathroom with a few quick flicks of his wrists.
He closed the door behind him and sat still for a few minutes, breathing deeply, trying to get control over an anger that was alien to him. He pictured Gil Clayton arriving at the deserted foundation office, unable to get in. Checking his watch. Freezing in yesterday’s windy cold. How the hell would they make this up to him? Damn Claire.
She was wearing jeans and a white sweater by the time he came out of the bathroom and had combed the tousled look out of her hair as best she could. She must not have taken the time the night before to remove her eye makeup, and now there were faint dark circles beneath her eyes. On the table by the window rested the two breakfast trays, which must have arrived while he was in the bathroom.
She stood up. “I’m sorry, Jon,” she said again. She was wringing her hands. He had never seen her do that before. “I really screwed up. I know that.”
He didn’t look at her as he wheeled to the table. “I’m done in the bathroom if you want it.”
She squeezed his shoulder as she walked past him toward the bathroom, and Jon sat stiffly, seething above his orange juice and fruit cup and muffin. Was there any time during their twenty-three years together that he’d felt this kind of anger toward her? He could think of none. But there had never been a Randy Donovan in her life before.
She came out of the bathroom and sat across from him at the circular table, making no move toward the food on her tray. “I’ll call Gil when we’re done with breakfast and apologize.”
“It’s too late for a simple apology. Maybe you’ve forgotten, but this is a man we’ve cajoled and begged and kissed up to for the past three years. We’ll have to come up with something more inventive than ‘I’m sorry.’ I’ll take care of it.” He knew that the tone of his voice implied that he no longer trusted her with this. And he didn’t. He glanced at her. She was staring down at her plate, and he saw her swallow hard.
He ate an orange section from the fruit bowl on his tray. “So,” he asked. “Was it worth it?” He was appalled at the sarcasm in his voice. He knew how to fight fair. He trained people in those skills. Right now, though, there was greater satisfaction in fighting dirty.
“Was what worth it?” She raised her huge green eyes to him.
“Your little trek to the museum, which I might point out is the type of trek you and I haven’t made together in what…a decade?”
“You always say we never have time.”
“No, Claire. You always say that, but apparently you can find time when the magnificent Randy calls, even if it means shirking your responsibilities.”
“Please don’t talk that way. I said I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to do.” There were tears in her eyes, but they didn’t spill onto her cheeks. “What can I do, Jon?”
He sighed and leaned back in the chair. “Can you make the old Claire come back?” he asked. “The Claire who was always dependable and who gave a shit about her work?”
Claire pressed her fingertips to her lips and stood up. She walked over to the window and pulled the wispy curtain aside to look out. “I wish I could,” she said without turning around. “I miss her, too. I’m not intentionally trying to screw up. My life doesn’t seem to be in my control anymore and I—”
“Bullshit.” He saw her start, the way she had when she’d heard the noise in the hallway. She didn’t turn around, though. She remained a dark, featureless silhouette against the backdrop of the window. “Whose control is it in, then?” he asked. “Do you hear yourself? What would you say to one of your patients if they started talking that way, huh?”
She didn’t speak, and Jon finally slit open his muffin, buttered it, and took a bite. He had nearly finished it when she returned to the table and sat down.
“I know this isn’t the time,” she said, her voice so soft he could barely hear her. Her eyes were lowered to her lap. “I know you’re furious with me right now, but I want to tell you what’s been happening to me lately.”
Her voice chilled him. Tested him. She was waiting to see if he would hold tight to his anger or let it go, at least for the moment, to give her something she seemed to need desperately. He remembered her crying last night, and the memory took the edge off his rage.
He rested his napkin on the table. “What do you mean?” he asked.
Claire picked up her own still-folded napkin and began playing with it, twisting one corner. “Well, these strange little images keep popping into my mind,” she said. “Tiny little snippets. They’re probably nothing, but they scare me.”
What was she talking about? “What kind of images?”
He listened as she described a bloodstain on a piece of porcelain. The image would slip into her mind unexpectedly, she said, and it made her feel dizzy and sick. Then she told him about small mirrors filled with green.
“Remember when we were riding to the play and I held my purse against the window?”
He nodded. He remembered it vaguely.
“It was happening then. I put up my purse so I couldn’t see the mirror.” She looked down at the napkin she was twisting in her lap. “Weird, huh?” she said, and he saw her struggling to smile.
He leaned forward until his fingers touched her knee. “Why haven’t you told me this was going on?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I was hoping they’d go away, but they haven’t. Randy thinks it might be something from the past. I have no idea what it could be, but I do think I have some gaps in my memory, Jon.” She looked at him as though this idea had just occurred to her, and he sat up straight, immediately alert.
“Why do you think that?” he asked.
“Well, you know how I always talk about the carousel and how wonderful my childhood was?”
He nodded. Yes, he knew.
“Well, Randy was asking me things like, how did I feel when Vanessa left? How did Mellie react? And I don’t remember. I was ten when Vanessa left. I should remember something about it, but I don’t. I only remember Mellie saying that we’d see her again soon, but—”
“Mellie was crazy,” Jon interrupted her. He had never said those words to her before, although he’d thought them often enough.
“Well, she wasn’t crazy. She just, you know, had her own way of handling things.”
Yes, indeed she had. Mellie had lived with them during the last three months of her life, ten years ago. She’d been terminally ill with lung cancer, yet even then, even in those terrible last stages, she wouldn’t admit to being seriously ill. She had a chronic cough, she would tell visitors. A chronic cough, she would even tell herself. Mellie had a way of twisting the truth to keep everyone smiling. Jon realized back then that Claire had the same dubious skill, and that she’d come by it honestly. Probably unhealthy as hell. But now that she seemed to be losing that ab
ility, he missed it.
“Well, anyhow, Randy doesn’t buy it that only good things happened to me. He tried to push me to—”
“Don’t let him push you into anything, Claire. Come on. You probably had a dream sometime that you don’t remember and these are just little images from the dream. Nothing more than that.”
She had twisted the napkin into a long pink snake, and she raised it to the table. He pried her hand from it, squeezed her fingers.
“Please listen to me,” he said. “You were a happy, satisfied woman before this thing with Margot happened. At least I think you were, am I right?”
“Yes,” she said. “Absolutely.”
“And I know it takes time to get over that sort of trauma, but it seems to me that by seeing Randy—Margot’s brother, for heaven’s sake—you can never really put the whole thing behind you.” He recognized the self-serving element to this argument but forgave himself for it. Spending time with Randy was hurting her, he was certain of it. Those little snippets she was talking about shook him up. They were small things, simple things. Maybe they actually were from a dream. Or maybe they were from the gaps in Claire’s memory, the existence of which she could only guess at but which he knew for a fact. He had long taken comfort in Claire’s selective memory. “If you’d forget about Randy and Margot and put your energy into work or planning a vacation or anything, then maybe everything else would fall into place.” He wondered if she heard the urgency in his voice.
She lowered her gaze to the table, nodding slowly. “You’re probably right,” she said. “When I’m not in the middle of one of those…flashbacks…it’s easy for me to imagine they’ll just disappear one of these days. Or that I’m making too much of them. I probably am.” Her smile was very weak, and he felt a crack in the armor around his heart. He had to remind himself she had come here last night. She’d driven an hour to sleep with him. She could have spent the night with Randy, and he never would have known. But she hadn’t. She’d wanted to be with him. Randy was a friend, as she’d said. A friend who didn’t seem afraid to challenge Claire’s blindly optimistic attitude toward life. Randy wouldn’t have let the tears she’d cried in bed last night go unexamined.
Brass Ring Page 17