Brass Ring

by Diane Chamberlain

  “No. I’ll have to call you back.”

  “Jackie’s working late tonight, but she’s going to be tied up with a client till about nine. Could you call back at nine-thirty, our time? I’ll be sure she picks up then.”

  “Yes, all right.”

  “Good. We’ll talk to you later then.”

  “Wait!” Vanessa was not finished. “How’s the girl doing?”

  “She’s terrified. You wouldn’t believe how tough this kid is, ordinarily. Not afraid to walk by herself through the streets of D.C. at night. But every time she thinks about having to look Patterson in the eye and talk about what he did to her, she throws up. Every time. I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to get her on the stand.”

  “What does she look like?”

  If the woman was surprised by the question, she didn’t let on. “Not like a kid who’s going to win the hearts of the jurors, that’s for sure. She’s grossly overweight for her age. Never smiles. One eye doesn’t track properly, and you can never be sure if she’s looking at you or not.”

  Tears welled up in Vanessa’s eyes. She wanted to hold this child. Probably no one ever held her.

  “You might be her only hope,” the attorney said. “You’ll call at nine-thirty?”

  “Yes.”

  BRIAN WAS OFF FROM work for two days, and by the time Vanessa got home that evening, he’d built an enormous fire in the fireplace and a pot of stew was simmering on the stove. It was 5:30. 8:30, east coast time. She’d called him earlier to tell him about her conversation with the lawyer. He knew what was on her mind when she walked in the door.

  She dropped her briefcase on one of the kitchen chairs, checked her watch—although she’d checked it only seconds earlier—and grimaced at her husband.

  “What should I do?” she asked.

  “No one can answer that question for you.”

  “You could try.” She smiled wryly.

  He rested the mixing spoon on the stove and wrapped Vanessa in a hug. “I think you’re a gutsy, compassionate woman. You’ll do what feels right to you.”

  She glanced without interest at the stew. “Can dinner wait a bit? I have some work to do at my desk first.”

  He looked at her, an unasked question in his eyes. “Sure,” he said.

  She sat down at her desk in the corner of the family room, sorting through a stack of bills and writing checks until 6:35. Brian sat on the sofa reading the paper. He kept the fire going, rising wordlessly once or twice to add a log, and the heat of the flames warmed her. At 6:40, she tried to balance her checkbook, hunting for an elusive thirty-seven cents the bank said she had but that didn’t appear in her check register. Her chair faced the window, and she could see Brian’s reflection in the glass. Occasionally, he looked up at her, but neither of them spoke. They had forgotten to turn on the stereo tonight; the crackling of the fire was the only sound in the room, and Vanessa could feel the slow passage of minutes.

  The rich, tomato-heavy scent of the stew drifted into the room. A wave of nausea passed through her, and only then did she let herself think of the girl no one would believe. She looked at her watch again. Seven-ten.

  Setting down her pen, she turned to face Brian.

  “What could they possibly do with my thirty-year-old allegations?”

  He folded the paper slowly and rested it on the coffee table. “I don’t know, Van.”

  “Are you disappointed in me?”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “It’s behind me. I have to leave it behind me.”

  He said nothing, and she was relieved when he patted the sofa cushion next to him, inviting her to join him. She walked over to the couch. He slipped his arm around her shoulders as she sat down, and she got another whiff of the stew.

  “I don’t think I can eat tonight. I’m sorry. It looked delicious. Can we save it for tomorrow?”

  “Of course.”

  Again the silence. She wished she had turned on the stereo on her way to the sofa.

  Brian softly ran his thumb back and forth over her shoulder. After several minutes, he took in a long breath.

  “It’s only a little after ten now, their time,” he said. “I bet that lawyer’s still waiting there in the hope you’ll muster up your courage and—”

  “Brian, don’t!” She pulled away from him. “I’m through with it, okay? I shouldn’t have called in the first place. Please let it go.”

  He drew her back again by the shoulder. “Sorry,” he said.

  She felt restless and wired. She could go for a run. Or read. Rent a movie. She couldn’t get a firm grasp on what she wanted to do tonight. The only thing she knew for certain was that she wouldn’t allow herself to sleep. Sleep would only invite a ride on the carousel. And next to her would be an unsmiling girl, so plump she would have to grip the pole to stay upright on the horse. Her one good eye would be focused hard on Vanessa as their horses galloped around and around, far too fast, in a circle that had no end.

  37

  VIENNA

  THE BEDROOM SMELLED LIKE Jon, like his aftershave, that warm and subtly masculine scent Claire had long associated with him. For a moment, she felt immobilized by the unexpected pain of longing. She had to force herself to walk into her closet and gather up the clothes and shoes she had come for.

  Jon had been reluctant to have her come to the house at all, finally agreeing that she could stop by if she did so when he wouldn’t be there. It had only been three weeks, but already the house felt as if it belonged to someone else. Things had been rearranged: The suitcases were no longer in the laundry room but had been lined up in the hall closet. The bread box was now on the counter closest to the sink. The coffeemaker had been moved next to the refrigerator. She received her biggest surprise, though, when she opened the cupboards to put away the food she’d bought in anticipation of Susan’s arrival for spring break. She’d spent seventy dollars on Susan’s favorite cookies and crackers and soups and frozen pizza, only to discover that Jon had already stocked the kitchen with the same items. She’d simply stared at the full shelves in the open cupboards, stunned that he had even known what to buy. He was doing okay. He was in control of his life. The house was clean, orderly. He’d even gone skiing, he’d told her. He was doing perfectly fine without her.

  He’d asked her not to call so often. She didn’t think she’d been calling him that much—every couple of days or so—but he said it made it harder for him when she called. So she’d stopped, and now there were days when she found herself missing his voice. She zipped up her packed suitcase and carried it into the kitchen, setting it by the back door. Then she went into Jon’s bedroom closet, opened the trapdoor leading to the attic, and pulled down the stairs.

  It took her twenty minutes to find the old photograph album. It was at the bottom of a trunk filled with Susan’s ragged stuffed animals and lying beneath—ironically—two old hand mirrors, which Claire quickly turned facedown on the floor.

  “I’m a danger on the road,” she’d joked to Randy the night before, when she’d looked in her sideview mirror to check her blind spot and saw it filled with a shifting sea of green.

  The album felt fragile in her hands as she carefully lifted it from the trunk. Randy wanted to see pictures of the barn, he said. He wanted to see her grandparents and parents, and Claire-the-child and her sister Vanessa. Claire had told Randy she didn’t want to disturb Jon by coming to the house to pick up the album, but the truth was, she was afraid of the memories those pictures might elicit from her. She had enough elusive thoughts floating in and out of her head as it was.

  She stood up, feeling the weight of the album in her hands, and had a sudden recollection. She had rescued this album at one time. Someone—who?—had thrown it away, and she’d saved it from the trash pile. She looked down at the smooth brown leather, ran her hand across it, and for a moment considered sitting down at the top of the folding stairs to look through it. No. Not here in the cold dark of the attic. Not until she was w
ith Randy.

  She left a note for Jon on the kitchen table. I took some clothes, my old Harte family photo album, and a few books. She thought of other things she might say. She wanted to ask him if he recalled ever seeing a bloody towel on one of their trips to Italy, but she suddenly remembered the guarded, apprehensive look that would come into his eyes when she’d mention one of her flashbacks. That made her miss him less. Good. Being here, surrounded by Jon’s things, Jon’s scent, she needed a reminder as to why she was no longer with him.

  There’s enough food to keep Susan happy for several spring breaks. You did a good job grocery shopping. Was that condescending? She wished she could erase the line, but she’d written it in ink.

  She stared at her daughter’s name. Tomorrow Susan and Jon would be together in this house while she would be in her cubbyhole of an apartment. It seemed unnatural, unreal, and for the first time during this entire ordeal, she felt pure guilt: She was terribly selfish to put her daughter through this.

  AN HOUR LATER, JON picked up Claire’s note from the table. He smiled at her allusion to the food he’d bought for Susan. Of course he’d taken care of that. What did she think?

  She’d taken the photograph album. The words sent a chill through him.

  He wheeled over to the refrigerator and took a plastic container of leftover macaroni and cheese from the shelf. He put it inside the microwave, then poured himself a beer, taking a sip as he waited for the oven to heat his dinner.

  A decade ago, he had looked through that album with Mellie.

  Mellie had been living with them a little over a month by then, suffering through the final stages of her lung cancer. Jon had been home from work with a urinary tract infection. Mellie was bedridden, but at least Jon could get around. He would make her lunch, change the television channels for her. Their odd bond of illness lasted close to a week. Claire would come home from work and ask how the two invalids were doing, and Susan, who was nine at the time, made them dual get-well cards, which they hung on the wall in the guest room, temporarily transformed into a room for Mellie.

  Jon had never liked his mother-in-law. It was hard to like someone who kept a wall around herself, who answered questions with whatever she thought her questioner would like to hear, who never let people know who she really was. Something changed during their week together, though. Mellie began talking, saying things he knew she would never say to Claire. Perhaps not to anyone. “You’re the strongest man I’ve ever met, Jon,” she told him. “I can tell you anything, and you won’t fall apart.”

  They sat together in her room one day—Mellie in the hospital bed they had rented for her, Jon beside her in his wheelchair—and looked through the old album, dusty from the attic. He loved seeing those pictures of Claire when she was small. So tiny and big-eyed and innocent. The pictures made him ache with love for her.

  The album seemed to draw confidences from Mellie’s lips. She told Jon that her husband used to beat her late at night after Claire and Vanessa had gone to sleep. She told him how her mother, whom Claire thought had died peacefully in her sleep, had actually died an undoubtedly frightening death of a hemorrhage, entirely alone there in the farmhouse in the middle of the night. She told him many things she’d never told anyone before.

  One cold, rainy day, when his infection was much better and Mellie’s cough was much worse, she told him that she knew where Vanessa was. Vanessa and Claire’s father had died the year before, and he had left a letter to be delivered to Mellie at the time of his death. Vanessa was just graduating from college—at the age of twenty-eight—and planning to start medical school, he had written. She was extremely bright, but it had taken her a while to get her feet on the ground. And he’d enclosed an address for her.

  Jon was repelled by the man who would keep his daughter separate from her sister and mother, and even more angry with Mellie for keeping her knowledge of Vanessa’s whereabouts to herself.

  “Claire has a right to know where her sister is,” he’d argued.

  “Why? They don’t even know each other now. And it would only wake up the past.” Mellie clutched his hand. “Claire’s got a good life with you, Jon. Let the past rest.”

  She told him that she had traveled to Seattle herself after receiving the letter from her ex-husband, showing up at Vanessa’s rundown apartment building only to have her daughter tell her to “get the fuck off my porch.”

  Jon continued to argue with her until Mellie reluctantly gave Vanessa’s address to Claire. Claire wrote a letter to her sister, the first of several that never received a reply.

  Jon grew to like Mellie, if not love her. He grew to understand that although her secrecy might be misguided and harmful in the long run, it was borne of her intense love for the people around her. She simply didn’t know how to be any different. In those last days before her death, though, she learned to open up, if only with her son-in-law.

  After a particularly gruesome attack of coughing one day, she told him, “I’m going to die soon.” His first impulse had been to say, “Of course you’re not,” or “Don’t think that way,” but he caught himself. She thought he was strong, and so he would be strong for her. He’d held Mellie’s hand and looked her right in the eye.

  “Yes,” he said. “I know.”

  And she had smiled at him.

  And then she told him something that took all his strength to endure.

  38

  VIENNA

  IT WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT by the time Susan arrived home from William and Mary, but Jon had waited up for her.

  “Hi, Dad.” She walked through the kitchen door and breezed past him, stopping only long enough to bend down and whisk her lips across his cheek on her way to her bedroom. He heard her toss her things on the bed as he poured himself a glass of milk. After a minute or two, she reemerged.

  “How was the drive?” he asked.

  “Fine.” She looked past him toward the refrigerator. “Is there any pizza or anything in the freezer?”

  He nodded. “Plenty. Help yourself to whatever you can find.”

  He watched her walk across the room, struck by her thinness. She had always been slender, but now her jeans seemed to hang from her hipbones and bag around her thighs. “You eating enough at school?” he asked as she pulled the plastic wrapper from the pizza.

  She shrugged. “I don’t think about it much.” She put the pizza in the microwave. “When I get around to it, I guess. I’ve got so much work to do.”

  “You look like you’re wasting away.” He himself had lost ten pounds since Claire left. He could see it in his face when he shaved in the morning. “What are your plans while you’re home?” he asked.

  “See everybody.” The microwave beeped, and Susan pulled out the pizza, tested the center with the tip of her finger, and put it back in.

  “Who’s home?” he asked.

  “Everyone.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “You know, everyone.” She rattled off a string of names as she slid the pizza from the oven to a plate. Then she sat down at the table and began eating in silence.

  Jon watched the shimmering top of her head for a moment and let out a sigh. Talk to me, Susie. When had she changed? Where was the little girl who had bubbled around him, who wanted to talk about everything under the stars? Sometime in high school, that child had disappeared and left this uncommunicative kid in her place. And there was so much they should be talking about. In the past, both he and Claire would have been waiting to greet Susan when she arrived home from school. Neither he nor Susan was acknowledging what was different now.

  Maybe midnight, though, was not the time to press her.

  He took a long swallow from his glass of milk. “How’s Lisa?” he asked, referring to the friend with whom she’d driven home.

  “Good.” She nodded, her mouth full, then looked up at him with her big, dark eyes. “You want some of this?”

  “No, thanks.” And then he couldn’t help himself. “Your mot
her is anxious to see you,” he said.

  “Well, she can stay anxious.” She answered quickly, as though she’d been waiting for him to raise the subject. “I’m not going to see her while I’m home.”

  “Susan, you have to. She’s your mother.”

  She stood up, swallowing the last of the pizza and rinsing off the plate at the sink.

  “I’m really tired, Dad,” she said. “Good-night.”

  She escaped quickly to her bedroom, leaving him alone again, the air of the kitchen charged with his frustration.

  SUSAN WAS TRUE TO her word. She was out day and night with friends. Jon rarely saw her. On the few occasions they were in the house together, she was steadfast about avoiding any topic of significance. She didn’t return her mother’s phone calls. The one time Claire managed to reach the house when Susan was there, Susan said abruptly into the phone, “I don’t want to talk with you, Mother,” and hung up.

  One night, Jon came home from the gym to find his steel-hearted daughter in tears. He came in the back door and wheeled into the family room, where he saw her sitting on the sofa, facing the fireplace, head in her hands. Obviously, she thought she was alone, and he vacillated between interrupting her and ducking into his bedroom to give her privacy.

  “Susan?”

  She swung around to face him, her face a heartbreaking, tear-streaked red.

  He wheeled toward her. “What is it, honey?”

  Her lower lip trembled. “I don’t understand how she could do this to you.”

  “She hasn’t done anything to me. She’s doing something for herself.”

  “I can’t believe she’s being so selfish.”

  He wondered how he could respond without shutting her up in the process. That was the last thing he wanted to do right now.

  “You know,” he said, “you’ve kept to yourself so much this week that it’s been hard for me to know how the separation is affecting you. It’s hard to know if you care or—”