For the Rest of My Life

by Harry Kraus

  Now John’s head turned, his eyes narrowed with concern. “I don’t like where this is going. You don’t think I had anything to do with those women—”

  “Whoa, Cerelli. I didn’t say that. But I only thought about you after the deputy brought up your name.” She paused and watched as John smirked. “He said he saw the masks in your car.”

  “So what?”

  “John, the masks that were worn by the rapist were like the ones I stock in my office.”

  “Claire! You know why I had those masks!”

  “I know!” she responded, raising her voice above the wind. “I told Deputy Jensen.”

  John shook his head and huffed, then seemed to be searching Claire’s eyes. She had to break away.

  “Look at me,” he said. When she kept her eyes on the horizon, he touched her chin with his hand. “Claire, look at me!”

  She felt anxiety rising within her. She yielded to the coaxing of his hand, looked at his troubled face. “What?”

  “You think I had something to do with the rapes?”

  It seemed preposterous, totally out of character for John, but a nagging doubt remained like a grain of sand under a sandal strap. She couldn’t voice her concern. “Of course not,” she reassured herself. “That’s ridiculous.” She tried to make light of it, turn it into a game. It was a lighthearted stab at covering the turmoil bubbling in her soul. She pointed a finger in his face and raised her voice, imitating a crime-show prosecuting attorney. “Where were you at midnight Saturday night?” She forced a laugh, but it came out sounding more diabolical than jovial.

  “Cut it out, Claire. You worry me.”

  Maybe you worry me. “Can’t you take a joke?”

  “It isn’t funny.”

  “You didn’t answer my question. Why would the deputy ask me about you?”

  John’s eyes narrowed. “How should I know?”

  “There has to be a reason.”

  He looked out toward the horizon. “He was looking at my car the other day when I was at Fisher’s Cafe. He saw the masks in my Mustang and asked me about them.”

  “So why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I just did.”

  “But first you said, ‘How should I know?’”

  “Maybe I don’t like this conversation. You don’t have any reason not to trust me.”

  “I never said I didn’t trust you.”

  “So why are we having this conversation? Why do you feel the need to ask me where I was on Saturday night?”

  “I was joking.”

  He mumbled, “Some joke.”

  “I only wanted to know why the deputy would bring up your name. I didn’t say I didn’t trust you.” She reached over and laid her hand on the back of John’s. He didn’t open his hand to receive hers. “But maybe you should be careful. Officer Jensen seemed concerned.”

  “He’s an idiot.”

  Claire let his comment fall. It wasn’t like John to speak like that. But he didn’t seem to be in the mood to discuss his feelings.

  She watched as John picked up a smooth fragment of rock and rubbed it between his fingers for a moment before heaving it into the abyss. “I’ll bet it’s some hospital orderly or something.”

  “What?”

  “The rapist. If he’s attacking women who have had surgery, he must be around the hospital to know they are weak from their procedures.”

  “Doesn’t work. Stephanie Blackwell was operated on at Brighton University. Brittany Lewis had surgery in Carlisle.”

  “Hmmm. Who else would know? Are there any surgeons who work in both hospitals?”

  “You seem to be forgetting about Billy Ray. He could have seen Brittany Lewis’s office records the day he came to my office.”

  “But what about Stephanie?”

  “John, you were there. Stephanie was up walking in the hall the other night when we went to the hospital to see Lena.” She paused, as the realization of what she was saying dawned on her brain’s frontal lobes. John was there. And he certainly was interested in looking at pretty little Stephanie in her immodest gown. A low-level dread returned to her gut. She looked away from John and tried to discount her thoughts. “Remember who else was there.”

  He nodded his head slowly. “Billy Ray.” He threw another stone over the dropoff. “He’s one weird dude.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly describe him as weird.”

  “So what’s your diagnosis, Doctor?”

  “Sarcasm isn’t your best quality.”

  John pulled his hand from under hers and stood up. His face reddened and he took a step back from the cliff ’s edge before he started gesticulating with Italian fervor. “Do you mind telling me what your agenda is here? You question me like I’m a rape suspect. You don’t agree with anything I say. If I say ‘up,’ you say ‘down.’ What’s the deal?”

  Claire felt her own defensiveness rise. She wanted to scream back. Instead, she attempted to steady her voice. “I’d like to ask you the same question.”

  “That’s it, isn’t it? You always want to be the one in control. You want to ask the questions, not answer someone else’s!”

  She huffed and clenched her fists. She and John had experienced lover’s spats before, but it was rare that she saw him show more than a casual amount of anger. “I’m just asking questions, John. Curiosity is a normal characteristic of the intelligent mind.”

  “It feels more like an inquisition.”

  “You’re not being fair.”

  “And maybe you’re not being understanding.”

  She pointed at him. “And you’re being defensive. What are you hiding?”

  He held his hands out to his side, palms forward. “What man wouldn’t be a little defensive when his girl suggests he might be a sexual predator?”

  Claire looked in the direction of the trail, hearing voices approaching through the trees. Their timing was impeccable. She lowered her voice, desperately wanting to keep a cap on her fury. Growing up with a violent drunk had taught her a lot about screaming. She knew she was capable of outblasting even the most exuberant Italian, but this certainly wasn’t the time or the place. “You’ve got this all wrong, Cerelli,” she seethed. “But maybe the way you’ve reacted should make me suspicious!”

  She turned and started down the path, leaving John standing on the boulders behind her. She smiled sweetly at a family of four, a father carrying a toddler on his shoulders and a mother walking behind a young boy who looked at Claire with pleading eyes. “How much farther?” he moaned.

  “Just around the corner.”

  The boy, appearing about kindergarten age, cried out, “At last! Uggh! I’m dyin’.”

  She walked on as she heard the mother’s quiet remark. “That’s the new town doctor.”

  There was no place to hide for the doctor of a small town.

  A minute later, she heard heavy footfalls on the path behind her. “Claire, wait up. I’m sorry.”

  She didn’t feel like making up. What she’d seen wasn’t the John Cerelli she loved. The idea that he could be something so different than she understood frightened her. She felt her voice tighten, as if a candy was lodged in her throat. “John, what’s wrong?”

  She felt his hand brush hers. She kept walking down the path and pulled her hand away.

  “Look, I didn’t tell you about Jensen asking me about the masks ’cause I didn’t want you to worry. The whole thing made me angry.” He seemed to hesitate. “I thought you had enough on your mind without me adding to your stress.”

  “Well, maybe I don’t want you protecting me. Maybe a good relationship means we share our problems with each other.”

  Claire kept up her pace, with long strides aided by gravity. John was nearly jogging to keep pace at her elbow. “Claire, that’s why I came to be with you.”

  She offered a saccharine smile. “Why would you want to be with a control freak?”

  He sighed and touched her arm. “Slow down.”

  She sped up and pull
ed her arm away.

  “I never called you a control freak! I just said you like to be in control.” He huffed. “It’s a human thing, everybody wants it.”

  “John, you’re softening what you said.”

  “I was angry.”

  “Are angry,” she corrected, keeping her pace at a clip just beyond a comfortable walk.

  “I want to be with you, Claire. You should know that.”

  She glanced at him from the corner of her eye. She mustered up a confident voice. “I want to be with you, too.” At least I think so.

  “Claire, slow down.”

  She stopped in her tracks, coming to an abrupt halt, as John’s momentum carried him a few steps beyond. She lifted her hands to her hips and stared him down. He looked at her, his brown eyes open and pleading, framed perfectly in a head of dark curls. Sweat glistened on his face and darkened the collarless Brighton University T-shirt he wore. Fear and love tugged at opposite ends of her soul.

  “Can we stop and talk this out?”

  She took a deep breath. “I stopped.”

  John sighed and stepped to the side of the trail to sit on a large rock. After a full minute of listening only to the sounds of the forest around them, he spoke. “You’re afraid, is that it?”

  “Women are being raped. My patients, John.” She leaned against a tree. “Of course I’m afraid.”

  “Are you afraid of me?”

  She didn’t want to look at him. He’d always been able to read her, to see through whatever front she displayed. It had been that way with John ever since their undergraduate days at Brighton. And it was that way last year in Boston when John gave her an engagement ring and she responded with enthusiasm on her lips but ambivalence in her heart. John had read her then and he could do it now. She lowered her head and scraped her Nike running shoe against the edge of a stone. “I don’t know.” She shook her head, then added quietly, “I guess the circumstances have me freaked out a little.”

  His voice dripped with sarcasm. “A little?” He threw up his hands. “I’m not like Brett,” he added.

  “This isn’t about him.”

  “Is that why you’re questioning me? You were taken in by Brett. He was so slick, wasn’t he?” John expanded his chest with a big breath, pushing his shoulders back. His voice was caustic, cutting with jealosy. “A real man. A surgeon. Smart. Caring.”

  Claire nodded, remembering the resident with a lifeguard body, a friendly smile, and the heart of a deceiver.

  “What a fraud!”

  “I really don’t want to think about him.”

  “But he’s still affecting you, interfering with the way you interact with others . . . with me!”

  “This is crazy.”

  “Is it? Then why do you find it so hard to trust me? Where do these little doubts come from?”

  She didn’t have an answer. His questions made sense, but his insistence that she trust him made her all the more uneasy.

  John shook his head. “What can I do?” He put his hands on her shoulders, squaring her to look in her eyes.

  He seemed sincere. He was from a family she knew and loved, nothing like the outward-perfect, inside-broken family of Brett Daniels. So what made her hold back? She was at a loss for words. She couldn’t share her fear with John. Instead, she shrugged and rocked forward on her tiptoes to plant a kiss on his cheek. “There aren’t always answers for why a woman feels a certain way.”

  She sidestepped John and slipped from his grasp. “Let’s go.”

  She heard him sigh behind her. They walked on without speaking, the tension between them growing as she tried to analyze John’s hypothesis about her. Maybe he was right. Maybe it was normal for her to be suspicious after the bad experience she’d had in Boston. But as they descended the trail, images of the past flitted through her mind like pieces of a puzzle. The masks in John’s car. The way he looked at Lena. Billy Ray’s accusation. John’s defensiveness. John’s access to her medical records.

  For the next forty-five minutes, the silence hung between them like a heavy drape. Claire spoke twice during the return to the small gravel parking lot, both times to fellow hikers they met on the trail. Pleasantries are expected with strangers, but not with close companions where volumes can be communicated without vocalization.

  She slowed where the trail crossed a shallow stream, allowed John to pass, and watched as he stepped from rock to rock, meticulously, surefooted, testing any landing spot with partial weight before committing. There, revealed in his movements, she saw a metaphor of John’s life. Testing, being sure, committing his all, then repeating the process again. Claire, ever the visionary, was often on to the third or fourth project while John was hammering down the first one.

  Maybe this is why he hasn’t proposed. He needs to test the water before jumping in. He needs to know the future before committing to it. She wavered, one minute wishing their future together would be cemented, the next, entertaining a silent doubt that maybe John wasn’t the man of God she’d always thought he was.

  At the car, John paused by the trunk of his Mustang. Claire stopped, hoping for a cold drink from the cooler John had locked in the trunk since his top was down. He motioned toward the passenger seat. “I’ll get you a drink.”

  She didn’t move.

  John hesitated. “What do you want? Diet Pepsi? Water?”

  She leaned over and grabbed her ankles, stretching her hamstrings with her knees straight. “Water,” she replied, straightening up.

  He set his hand on the roof of the trunk. “Have a seat. I’ll get it for you.”

  “What is it, Cerelli? What are you hiding? Open the trunk.”

  He shrugged with nonchalance, but she detected a reddening hue above his collar. He opened the trunk and quickly lifted the lid to the cooler and grabbed two drinks. Claire stared into the trunk and lifted what appeared to be an odd pair of binoculars.

  “What’s this?”

  “Night-vision goggles.”

  She squinted at John.

  “These things are really cool. In situations of minimal light, just strap these babies on and it really seems to brighten everything.”

  An uneasiness touched her. Since when was her renaissance boyfriend into outdoor survival gear? She eyed him pensively and tried not to look bothered. “Oh,” she responded. “Sweet.” She laid the goggles back into the trunk and took a bottled water from his hand, suddenly unable to look in his eyes.

  She wasn’t sure how to file this new information. John was clearly uncomfortable, perhaps sensing her suspicion. She listened to the memory tape of her conversation with Officer Jensen she’d had earlier in the day. “Or perhaps you don’t know him as well as you think.” She shook her head. Her fears were ridiculous.

  She pressed back into the seat and stared straight ahead as John began the journey back toward Stoney Creek. She didn’t feel like making small talk and found herself in the rare position of hoping John might flip on an Italian opera, anything to take her mind away from the dark obsessions she entertained.

  She glanced at him discreetly as he drove. John’s eyes squinted at the road as he silently tapped at his forehead, a sure sign he was concerned about something. As they neared the outskirts of the town, she spoke in a quiet tone. “Are you at all afraid for me, John? I mean, with a number of rapes in our community and all . . . do you worry . . . well, you know . . . have you given it any thought?”

  He glanced over at her, then apparently into his rearview mirror before turning his eyes to the road again. “No. I guess I hadn’t really been thinking about it.”

  That’s what I was afraid of.

  He shrugged. “You don’t really fit the profile. He’s attacking pretty women who live alone and are disabled in some way. That’s not you.”

  “Which one?” She punched his arm.

  “Ow!” He laughed, apparently relieved that she could still be jovial. “Duh!”

  She twisted his rearview mirror around and looked at her reflecti
on.

  “You think I’m pretty.”

  He was silent, shaking his head.

  She flipped the mirror back toward him in disgust. John wasn’t exactly making her more comfortable. I know I’m pretty.

  And I’m not disabled ...yet.

  John stayed quiet until he pulled to a stop in front of the McCall house. “Look, Claire,” he started, clearing his throat.

  She waited a moment as he twisted his expression as if he tasted something sour. Suddenly, she felt her own stomach tighten in response to his manner. “What’s the matter?”

  He took a deep breath. “I’m thinking of going to Brighton.”

  She waited for more. Going to Brighton wasn’t exactly big news. “So?”

  “To live. To be closer to my work.”

  She felt the blood drain from her face. “But . . .” She halted. “Your work? You came here to be with me. If you—”

  “This just isn’t working like I’d expected.”

  She shook her head. “Your boss isn’t upset. You’re still covering your clients okay, and you—”

  “You know what I mean, Claire.”

  She knew. In her heart, she knew his statement about being closer to his work was only a cover for the real reason he was leaving. Their relationship had stalled, without apparent hope for progression. John had tested the water, jumped in, and waited. Waited for Claire to jump in.

  She hadn’t responded. Their relationship hadn’t progressed as planned. His test hadn’t worked out, so it was time to move on. “This isn’t about your work.” She looked away. “You’re walking away from us.” She snapped her long, delicate fingers. “Just like that, huh? You’re outta here.”

  She listened as he slowly exhaled. She knew he would try to control his response. He didn’t like her accusing him of making a loud, Italian reaction. He kept quiet, thinking.

  “But what did you just tell me on the mountain?” Her voice thickened. “You said you wanted to be with me.”

  “I wasn’t lying, Claire. But wanting to be with you and understanding the reality that this isn’t working are true, true, and unrelated.”

  “Unrelated? If you want to be with me, you try to make this work.”

  “Maybe I just need some time away.”