Brass Ring (18 page)

“I’m fine, now,” Vanessa had insisted. “Nothing really bothers me anymore. And I finally have a relationship I haven’t screwed up.”

“Yes, you’ve made very good progress. But I’m concerned your problems will reemerge when something happens to trigger those old feelings.”

“But I’ve dealt with those old feelings.” Vanessa had felt impatient, annoyed with Marianne for not acknowledging all the work she’d done.

“Yes,” Marianne had said, “but you haven’t confronted the people who hurt you. In your case, Vanessa, it’s a necessary step.”

Brian sat down next to her. “She said you needed to confront the—”

“Brian.” Vanessa opened her eyes. “Not tonight. Please.” She touched his cheek. His face was tight with worry. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just want to live my life now. In the present.”

“All right, Van.” He rested his cheek against her hair.

She drank in the smell of him, sinking her fingers into the softness of his sweater, and tried to forget about them all—Zed Patterson, Claire Harte, even J.T.—the conspiracy of reminders suddenly poised to attack.

VIENNA

AMELIA WAS PROPPED UP
in her bed reading a novel when Claire brought in the tray laden with tomato soup, half a cheese sandwich, and a dish of applesauce. The late-morning sun played across the pink comforter and white flannel sheets. Amelia looked much better than she had the night before, when she’d been battling the flu. Claire had come over to nurse her through the fever and had been stunned by her friend’s pale, weepy weakness.

“Want some more water?” Claire picked up the empty glass from Amelia’s night table.

“Please.” Amelia’s damp gray hair was combed back from her face, and she’d taken the time to put on lipstick after her shower. She grinned at Claire. “God, I could really get used to being waited on.”

Claire carried the glass into the bathroom and began filling it at the sink. She caught her reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror and was surprised by the tired, red look of her eyes. There was a small, round magnifying mirror jutting from the side of the cabinet, and she turned it toward her for a closer look, only to find the entire mirror filled with green.

She let out a shriek, dropping the glass on the edge of the sink, where it splintered into a thousand pieces.

“Are you all right?” Amelia called from the bedroom.

Claire couldn’t answer right away. She sat down on the edge of the tub and closed her eyes. “Just broke the glass,” she called back. “Sorry. I’ll clean it up.” But she made no move to get up. Instead, she slid sideways along the edge of the tub until she reached the wall, and she leaned against the cool tile, waiting for the panic to pass.

What was wrong with her? The mirrors were everywhere. Small mirrors, usually filled entirely by the color green or, on a few occasions, by a mixture of colors that shifted in the glass until she averted her eyes—which she did quickly. The vision was invariably accompanied by a strong, sudden, incapacitating nausea, like the nausea holding her captive right now in Amelia’s bathroom.

It was minutes before she felt ready to get up from the tub. She hung a washcloth over the small mirror and carefully picked up the larger shards of glass before leaving the room.

“Broom in the hall closet?” she asked Amelia as she passed through the bedroom.

“Uh-huh.” Amelia looked up from her soup. “Sorry you have to do that.”

“It’ll teach me to be more careful next time.” She got the broom from the closet, took it back into the bathroom, and began cleaning up the splinters of glass.

It was Saturday, and Jon was in Baltimore for the weekend, attending the Accessibility Conference. She had stayed behind, since one of them needed to meet with Gil Clayton to talk about the workshop he’d be presenting at the SCI Retreat. It felt odd to be separated from Jon and to imagine him handling a conference alone. Watching him drive off in the Jeep the day before, she’d felt an unfamiliar emptiness. She didn’t let herself sulk, though. She would have a good quiet weekend, she told herself, the meeting with Gil her only obligation. But then Amelia had called, achy and feverish. Usually, that wouldn’t have been enough to reduce Amelia to tears, but yesterday had also been her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary—or it would have been, had Jake lived. That, in combination with her illness, had been enough to flatten her.

So, Claire had spent the night with her. She’d listened to Amelia’s grief over Jake’s death. It had been three years, but Amelia’s pain was still alive, and Claire couldn’t bear to see her suffering through it. She tried to talk her into watching an old Steve Martin movie, something that would make her laugh, but Amelia was too lost in the past to concentrate on anything other than her own misery. Claire let her talk herself to sleep, then made up the bed in the guest room and fell asleep herself.

When she checked her home answering machine this morning, there was a message from Randy. She had spoken to him a few times on the phone since the night of the play. He’d invited her to lunch once, but she’d declined. Not yet. Let Jon get used to the idea of this friendship-over-the-phone first. She’d been surprised by Jon’s jealousy, by an insecurity she’d never seen in him before. She told him about each of the phone calls, almost verbatim. She hoped that the more open she was about Randy, the more she could convince her husband that he had nothing to fear.

Jon would listen politely, then gradually shift the conversation to work and the foundation, subjects that, ever since that night on the bridge, couldn’t hold her attention as securely as they once had.

She looked forward to Randy’s calls. He talked about Cary, his ten-year-old son, and she talked about Susan. Randy seemed to be a devoted father, although he rejected that compliment vehemently.

“I haven’t been the greatest dad to him,” he’d said. “I’m trying to make up for it, though. I was a workaholic. I focused practically all my energy on myself and the restaurant and not enough on my family.”

With each call, each conversation, Claire felt the closeness deepening between Randy and herself. She could listen to that warm voice on the phone for hours. The attraction was not physical. Not sexual, at any rate. Yet she wanted him close to her. She wanted him in her life and had even considered fixing him up with Amelia. After last night, though, she knew it would be a while before Amelia was ready to let another man take Jake’s place in her heart.

“The play’s over,” Randy had said that morning on her answering machine tape, “and Cary’s got a bad cold this weekend, and LuAnne doesn’t want to let him visit. So, looks like I have some time on my hands, and I woke up with a yearning to see a Siparo carousel horse. I was wondering if you—and Jon too, of course—would like to join me for a trek to the Smithsonian this afternoon.”

She’d called him back, telling him that Jon was out of town and that she wouldn’t be able to go because she had to take care of Amelia. But now Amelia looked 100 percent better.

“You go home,” Amelia said after Claire had gotten up the last of the glass. “I’m fine now.”

Claire sat down on the bed, cross-legged. “You sure?” She was picturing the Museum of American History at the Smithsonian, the display of carousel horses. She wanted to go.

“My temperature’s normal. I’m normal.” Amelia laughed. “I was out of it last night, wasn’t I?”

Claire reached out to stroke the back of Amelia’s hand. “It was a hard night for you.”

“Well, I think I’m going to sleep away the afternoon, so there’s no point at all to your being here.”

Claire offered to go to the grocery store for her or do a load of laundry, but Amelia wouldn’t hear of it. Claire might have insisted had she not felt the pull of an afternoon with Randy and a herd of wooden horses. She called him again from Amelia’s kitchen, and a few hours later, she was riding in his car on the way to the Smithsonian.

It was odd to stroll through a museum with a man at her side, a man whose arm occasionally brushed against hers, whose eyes were nearly at the level of her own. It was odd not to have to think about negotiating narrow doorways and locating elevators. It was freeing, and she felt a pinprick of guilt for noticing the difference at all.

There were several examples of carousel horses lining the walls, and Claire didn’t have to say a word to Randy for him to know which was the finest, the most striking, the most beautiful of them all. He went immediately to the prancing chestnut stallion, even before reading the plaque that identified it as a genuine Siparo.

“It’s stunning.” Randy ignored the sign admonishing him not to touch and rested his hand on the carved saddle. He admired the windblown golden mane of the horse’s tucked head. “Is this gold leaf?”

“Yes.” She cupped her palm beneath the horse’s muzzle, remembering what it was like to watch her grandfather painstakingly set the thin sheets of gold on the sticky varnished surface of a mane. “Butterfly wings,” she said.

“What?”

“My grandfather said the gold was as thin as butterfly wings.”

“Oh.” Randy smiled. “Where are the rest of the horses your great-grandfather carved?”

“Some are in museums, some on carousels around the world. The closest is in New Jersey. Some of them belong to collectors.” This was not her favorite topic. Her family had been shortsighted in not holding on to any of their treasures. Not one of Joseph Siparo’s horses had been kept in the family.

“And the carousel your grandfather built in the barn? What happened to it?”

Claire moved to another horse, a heavily armored Stein and Goldstein. Beautiful in its own right, but not a Siparo. “After my grandparents died, my mother sold the farm and donated the carousel to Winchester Village Amusement Park in Pennsylvania. I haven’t seen it since I was twelve.”

“Really? Wouldn’t you like to?”

“Yes, and I always planned to. Every year, when Susan was small, we would talk about going up there, but something always got in the way.”

Randy ran his hand lightly over the smooth saddle of an Illion’s Appaloosa. He was grinning.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“Oh.” He seemed surprised by the question. “Cary. I was just remembering the last time I took him to King’s Dominion. I went on practically every single ride with him. I was pretty sick by the end of the day, but he could have gone for another few hours, I think.”

“You miss him,” she said.

Randy nodded, dropping his hand to his side, slipping it into his pocket. “I’ve gotten used to having him with me on the weekends. I enjoy being with him more than I could have imagined. I just wish I’d taken advantage of those days when I was around him all the time. It’s easy to take people for granted, you know?”

She nodded.

Randy walked slowly toward one of the other horses. “And I hate to think about what it was like for him during that last year or so before LuAnne and I separated,” he said. “His mother was miserable, his father was at work during most of his waking hours. The only time the three of us were together, Cary would have to listen to LuAnne and me fighting.”

Claire was walking toward the far wall, where black-and-white photographs of horse carvers were displayed, and without warning, the bloodstain filled her head. The image was clearer than she had ever seen it before. The white, porcelainlike surface was not flat, but gently rounded, curved. The stain itself was nearly rectangular in shape, dark at one end, blurring to almost nothing at the other. Claire leaned against the wall, a moan slipping involuntarily from her lips. She was almost certainly going to get sick, here in the middle of this exhibit.

“Claire?” Randy wrapped a hand around her arm.

“Can we get out of here?” she asked, pulling free of him as she started to walk. If she had fresh air, sunlight, she would be all right. She walked blindly through the hall, trying to push the image from her mind.

“Claire, wait a minute.” Randy caught her elbow, but he couldn’t slow her down. She was nearly running through the hall, as though she knew exactly where she was going and would disintegrate if she didn’t get there soon. Turning a corner, she came face-to-face with the dead end of the corridor and a door marked Personnel Only, and suddenly it was as if all the oxygen had been sucked from the air.

Gasping, she made an about-face, ready to flee in the opposite direction, but she found herself in Randy’s arms instead. She sagged against him.

“Please,” she said. “I need to go outside.”

“In a minute.”

“Now,” she said, but her voice had lost its power, and she felt the solid comfort of his arms, the warmth of his chest. Locking her own arms around him, she held tight. Her cheek was pressed to the dark blue cotton of his sweater, and she didn’t budge. Once she moved, she would have to speak. How could she explain her preposterous behavior to him? How could she make sense of it to someone else when it made no sense to herself?

She felt shored up by his arms, and after a moment pulled herself away from him, embarrassed. The image was gone. Brushing her hair back from her face with her fingers, she looked down at the floor. “You must think I’m batty,” she said.

“Was it the dizziness again?”

She shook her head. “No. Something else.” She pressed her palm to her temple, smiled weakly at him. “I’m cracking up, I think.”

He put his arm around her waist and walked her around the corner to a bench. She sat down without protest.

“Tell me what upset you,” he said.

“I’m hallucinating or something.” She laughed and felt the color rise to her cheeks. “I keep seeing what looks like a piece of porcelain stained with blood. At least, I guess it’s blood. It’s happening more often lately. And there are mirrors, too.” She shuddered. She didn’t want to think about this. Turning to him, she grabbed his hand. “Do you have time for a movie?” she asked. “Is there anything really funny playing? I want to get all these weird pictures out of my mind. I want to spend a couple of hours laughing.”

A man and woman passed by them. The woman stared at her, and Claire thought her desperation must be etched into her face.