The Ruby Tear

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  Rhinebeck

  Since she had deliberately given no warning that she was coming, there was no one to meet her. Jess took a cab from the station. Today the town looked cold and wet, draped in pocked and dirty snow.

  “You should see this place in the summer,” the driver said.

  “I have seen it,” Jess said. “Too many antique shops, but it’s lively at least. Winter always looks so grim in the country.”

  She cringed to hear herself chattering like this out of simple nervousness. She was an adult, in black woolen pants and a rust-colored turtleneck under her loden coat. She should be able to maintain a dignified silence, for god’s sake.

  They left the edges of the town behind.

  The driver said, “I don’t get many fares out this way, but I do a lot of fetching and carrying back and forth to the Griffin place. It’s a shame, what happened to Mr. Griffin. I’d sure hate to be stuck in a small town like this without being able to drive.”

  “Oh, I hear he’s done a lot of traveling in his life,” Jess said cautiously. “Maybe he’s happier staying put. That old house has been in his family for generations, too. He probably enjoys being home.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” the cabbie said. “They say he’s been to war zones, places most people stay away from.”

  Jess didn’t answer. She felt embarrassed to have said as much as she had, prattling about Nick with someone she didn’t even know. Though for that matter, she wasn’t sure she knew Nick either any more. What kind of man would she confront today at the Griffin house?

  She’d met him in a summer stock production of “Barefoot in the Park” in which he had tried his hand at acting (not very well); she’d gone around pumping friends and acquaintances about him. She’d been attracted right from the beginning and had sensed a reciprocal interest.

  What she had learned wasn’t reassuring. Nick Griffin been expelled from two prep schools. His love of theater was a taste he’d only shown after his father died. Right after college, he’d dashed off a couple of light comedies and paid with his own money to produce them to no great success.

  He’d inherited even more money plus the Rhinebeck house when his mother died. He’d shut the house and gone off to write travel columns for a magazine catering to wealthy adventurers, off the beaten track. Eventually his wanderings had taken him to Sarajevo. The ethnic upheavals in south central Europe had captured him, and he’d stayed much longer than anyone expected; longer, in fact, than Time and Tide were willing to pay for.

  But he’d continued slogging through the destroyed and dangerous countryside to talk to local people and record their stories, paying his own expenses and sending home dispatches too raw and real to be ignored.

  People who knew him said that the experience had changed him. He had come home to write his first serious play, originally titled “Blood Kin.” As part of reconnecting with stage drama, he’d joined the stock company where Jess was spending her summer that year.

  A flighty young man, a bit of a dilettante, but with an awakening passion for justice, it seemed. But none of that mattered after all. An immediate spark had lit between them, and very soon they’d become the stock company’s Major Item.

  That magical summer was painful to think about now. So much promise—all part of the ultimate wreck.

  Since the accident, people said he was different, taciturn and reclusive. His former friends lost touch. Only visitors on professional business came to the Griffin house these days—like Walter Steinhart, to discuss the plans for production of Nick’s rewritten play.

  Well, Jess was changed too. It was time the two of them had it out, whatever “it” was—the barrier that had slammed down between them when the car crashed. Until now she hadn’t had the energy or the courage to force the issue. Her initial, tentative approaches had been solidly stonewalled.

  Walter said Nick screened all his calls now, and lived like a hermit in the big house outside the town. He didn’t drive because of his bad leg and a stubborn refusal to have hand controls fitted to his car.

  She thought she had a reasonable chance of catching him at home today, showing up without warning.

  Assuming he didn’t simply slam the door in her face.

  The cab was approaching the site of their destruction, and her heartbeat sped up. They turned off the paved roadway onto a dirt track that ran down a woodsy slope to a lower level road into which it dead-ended. You could turn left back toward Rhinebeck, or right toward the village of Allenston, but you couldn’t go straight ahead.

  Jess had avoided thinking about the place since the accident. Now, it seemed like a healthy spit in the eye of Fate to deliberately stop and look.

  “Wait here a minute, will you?”

  The cabbie braked the car facing downslope toward the Allenston road, which here widened slightly into the right-angle meeting of dirt track and paved road beneath a thick-bodied oak tree. The tarmac looked no different than it did in the dreams Jess still had about the accident.

  She got out of the cab and stared down at the junction, her pulse heavy and slow.

  The worst dreams of this place always began with sound: the purr of the engine, the spill of Nick’ laughter, and the rush of wind. Word had come that “Blood Kin” had been accepted for production, and Nick was to meet the following weekend with the administrators of a good Chicago theater.

  Once the deal was signed and the play was slated for production, Nick would bring up the big question. He would ask, and she would answer, and they would travel on joined together for good.

  Instead, the tall man with the face of a poet and cool gray eyes that warmed and sparkled for her had driven her toward the train station for the last time. She remembered sunlight gilding the fine hairs along his forearm as the car, dark and sleek as a German forest, skimmed down the dirt track from the upper road toward the lower.

  He’d had the sleeves of his shirt rolled back to make the most of the glorious sunlight after a week of unseasonable rain. He talked excitedly as he drove, one of his long-fingered hands repeatedly leaving the leather-clad wheel to shape the air into intimations of success, acclaim, and income. A share of the proceeds were earmarked to help fund a new theater in the ruins of Sarajevo.

  “Watch the road, silly,” she’d said, poking him in the shoulder. She wasn’t really afraid. He had a calm trust in the strength and reflexes of his body that she’d come to trust.

  She’d looked ahead and seen nothing unusual, just the paved road dead-ending the dirt one they were on, a turn they had taken a hundred times before. It was so normal: the stop sign, the double-headed arrow in black on yellow warning that the dirt road ended under the thick oak that twisted upward from the earthen bank above the paved roadway. Just what she was looking at now, and just as empty: there’d been no other cars, no tractor trudging noisily by, no van or truck or bus—just an empty T-junction alongside a farmer’s field.

  But Nick had shouted in horror and stamped hard on the brakes as if avoiding—trying to avoid—what? Nothing was there.

  But the tires slid on the muddy surface, and the BMW fishtailed and careened downhill, out of control.

  “Nick—?” She grabbed his arm as he’d swung the wheel hard right, and the car had shot downhill straight for the double-arrow dead-end sign.

  Jess remembered a jolting rush of light and dark as the car hit the earthen bank and bucked, leaping upward into the tree trunk with a punishing impact. The sunny afternoon had exploded instantly into silent blackness.

  Like the silence now, on another day, another season, another year. (Healing had taken so long!) Gradually she registered today’s faint noises of dripping snow and trickling melt water, and nothing else.

  She walked briskly down to the oak, her hands stuffed deep in her coat pockets. The tree was badly scarred from the crash but appeared to be still alive. Amazing, that no living thing had had the life crushed out of it by that stunning impact—except, somehow, her living relationship with Nick.

  Th
e doctors said it was amazing that the two of them had survived, though there’d been some doubt about his mental condition. He’d come to shouting about a woman on horseback in the road, dead ahead, brake, brake, brake! But as soon as he’d gotten his bearings, he stopped talking about it. He refused to discuss the crash at all.

  He’d turned instead to rewriting “Blood Kin,” which he’d pulled from the Chicago house. He’d gone into virtual seclusion with the work; seclusion even from Jess. Especially from Jess. She’d been warned that he was much altered—his conversation brusque, his patience short, his former easy athleticism spoiled by a heavy limp.

  Running into him outside the physical therapist’s office one day she’d been thrown so badly that she could never recall later what they had talked about. If anything.

  Now, almost three years later, the retitled script was no longer the melodrama with a peace message that “Blood Kin” had been. That script had become a tense, tightly focused family tragedy with somber metaphorical dimensions. “The Jewel” quickly found a berth at the small but prestigious Edwardian Theater in Manhattan. Success seemed imminent, a success he didn’t want shared with her.

  Maybe she shouldn’t have come up here. Maybe she was lucky not to be married after all to some cold, shadowed version of the exuberant man she had loved.

  She didn’t feel lucky. Kicking angrily at the edge of the tarmac by the oak tree, she felt bitter and betrayed. She had no illusions about her interrupted career. She’d been a theatrical lightweight before the accident. If she’d died in Nick’s car friends would have mourned her, but in the larger world her talents wouldn’t have been missed. The world was over-supplied with aspiring actors.

  But to play Eva—a supernatural being and a battered prodigal returning, the character appeared to different members of the family, meaning something different to each of them. All this was set in the pressure-cooker environment of the castle cellars where the family had taken refuge from bombardment by unseen and relentless enemies.

  “The Jewel” was a powerful piece, full of passion and discord as the little group of characters quarreled over old grudges and the treasure, left by their dead patriarch to whichever of them could make the best use of it: the “jewel” of the title. Greed, pride, ambition, idealism—the family members fought and schemed as the castle was battered down above them. The allusions to the ethnic fighting in Eastern Europe were clear and disturbing.

  Only a man of deep feeling could have written “The Jewel,” a playwright with conviction and the power to express it. She needed this part. There was more to it than getting her career going again. If she could use this play to overcome the fears that had kept her off the stage since the crash, that would be worth everything.

  If only she could face an audience. If only her study, performance, and memorization skills hadn’t wasted away during her long recovery. If only Nick would just let it happen!

  And if she could rise to the challenge and do the part of Eva, someone more complex and powerful than any part she had played before, the justice it deserved.

  She was freezing out here, trying to warm herself with ifs.

  She turned back toward the cab, trudging moodily up the dirt road. The driver got rolling again without a word. Soon they were passing alongside a fieldstone wall with tall trees reaching up behind it. The trees gave way to a sweep of tan winter grass mounting to a white, gabled house on a rise set well back from the road. The cab turned between two stone pillars and swept up the driveway under black, leafless branches.

  Jess paid the driver, then sat a moment gathering her nerve and staring at the front steps where a few wet leaves clung. Aloof, self-assured, the Griffin house crowned the low hilltop with graceful aplomb. The roof slates glimmered with the moisture of melting snow, and the curtained windows were elegantly set off by the glossy black shutters pinned back against the white walls.

  She had forgotten how intimidatingly beautiful it was.

  She took a deep breath and got out of the cab.

  “Call when you need to get back to the station; ask for Bart.” The driver handed her a business card and drove away.

  Jess mounted the front steps. The paint on the railing was new. Nick must have had the house refurbished, as if he had decided to settle in for good. Fixing up the grand old place was something they had planned to do together. Maybe he had found some other woman to share the project with, someone Walter had avoided mentioning? Biting her lip, Jess stabbed at the bell.

  A Short, Sharp Shock

  The door chimes rang, followed by fierce barking. The dogs were something new, a part of Nick’s abrupt, almost paranoid withdrawal into seclusion. Walter had warned her.

  “Dobermans,” he’d said, shuddering. “I can’t help it, I hate the damned things!”

  The paneled door opened and Nick stood looking down at her. She swallowed, wordless.

  It was as if she had seen him just yesterday, as if the accident had just happened, slamming their lives together so powerfully that the intervening months were obliterated. There was so much to say, and she couldn’t find the words. For God’s sake, why was he just standing there? Why was it up to her to make the first move?

  She wanted to step forward and embrace him—surely a hug couldn’t hurt? But something held her back. He was just so different: aged by calamity. He was using a cane. It made him look planted more firmly in place—blocking her way. If this kept up, she knew she’d crack. The last thing she wanted was to have come all this way to break down in tears on his doorstep.

  “Hello, Nick,” she said finally, trying for a normal tone. “How are you?”

  He moistened his lips, but didn’t speak, so she plowed doggedly on. “I’m sorry if this is a bad time, but we have some things to talk over.”

  He stepped back, making way for her. Behind him two dogs stood, forelegs braced. They began barking again as she stepped inside.

  “Quiet!” Nick commanded. “Beth! Mac! Settle down. Let them sniff of your hands so they’ll know you’re not a visiting ax-murderer.”

  “Are you sure of that yourself?” Jess said. “For a second there, I thought you were considering leaving me outside to freeze.”

  She sank onto her heels and reached out, crooning, to fool with the dogs. Now that the ice was broken, they provided a warmer welcome than Nick seemed willing to extend.

  The larger dog leaned close and gave her an approving lick on the cheek, daintily using just the tip of its tongue. The smaller, a glossy male with golden eyes glowing in the dark mask of his face, flopped on his back and waved his paws, begging for a belly-scratch.

  “Looks like you’ve got a way with dogs,” Nick said, sounding a little miffed by how easily his guardians were tamed.

  Jess smiled, slowly rubbing the warm, delicate skin of Mac’s armpits. The dog stretched ecstatically, mouth open and eyes glassy with pleasure.

  “My mom raised Dobies when I was a kid,” she explained. “They’re pussycats, until some moron gets hold of them and brutalizes them into becoming the dangerous maniacs he wants them to be. My parents quit breeding them because they couldn’t stand the people involved, not because of the dogs.”

  “Well, you’d better stop scratching him,” Nick said, “or you’ll be down there all day, keeping him happy. Come inside where it’s warmer.”

  He limped ahead of her, leaning hard on his cane, into the airy room to the left of the entrance hall. She remembered sitting back to back in the window-seat there, sharing the Sunday Times and drinking coffee as strong as paint-thinner. He had always taken great pride in grinding coffee fresh, his own secret blend of beans, in the little electric machine she’d bought him for their first Christmas together.

  Pair of yuppie fools, she thought now, stabbed with a kind of jealousy of the easy, playful confidence they had shared in those days.

  Now a fire leaped under the mantelpiece; heavy tapestry drapes held in the heat. Where stiffly posed family photographs had once hung, small landscapes
in oils glowed with summer colors. Nick’s uncle Robert had been a well-regarded local artist. A cache of his work had been found stored in the basement the last time Jess had been in this house.

  “You’ve changed some things,” she said, pausing to pull off her muddy boots. “It looks good. When did you get the dogs?”

  “A year ago,” he said. “They’re trained as guard dogs, though you’d never know it to look at them now.”

  “That’s the way you want them,” Jess said, draping her coat over a brocade chair. “Fierce with strangers, relaxed with your friends. You’re smart to get them professionally trained. That way they know just what’s expected of them.”

  Chitchat; she despised it. But seeing him made her feel shaky and sad. She sensed failure: he was perfectly civil, but he showed no softness toward her. It was as if there was none in him.

  The house, which she had fallen in love with in those other days, today felt chilly and unwelcoming. It wasn’t just the winter light gleaming on the snow-scarved terrace outside the French doors. It was the dogs (Mac was pressed against the side of her leg, madly licking her fingers, so that she wondered if they got any affection from Nick); the paler color of the walls, the new pictures.

  Most of all it was Nick, standing as if impatient for her to get this over with and be gone.

  Deliberately, Jess took a seat on the massive plush sofa. She untied her white silk muffler and stretched her legs in front of her, crossing her ankles.

  Nick sent the dogs out into the garden. Then he came and sat down opposite her. He moved with the deliberation of a much older man. The radiant confidence that she remembered in him was dimmed. She felt angry and resentful, under a wash of pity, but she kept her expression neutral.

  There were new lines of tension around his eyes and mouth, and he wore his fair hair cut closer than was the fashion in theatrical circles. It was almost a military cut, minimal and severe.

  His clothes were good but casual, as always—dark slacks, a camel sweater over a pale linen shirt, and low-topped brown boots. The cane was a straight blackthorn with a brass handle.