Brass Ring (2 page)

The woman wore a light cloth coat covered with a thick crust of snow. How long had she been out here? She wore no gloves, no hat. Her hair—blond?—was hidden beneath a veil of white. She had to be freezing.

Claire reached the guardrail and could see that the woman stood at the very edge of the bridge, high above the black abyss, untethered to anything.

“Miss?” Claire called.

The woman didn’t turn around.

Claire leaned over the railing. “Miss,” she called again, but the snow swallowed the word.

“
Hello
,” she tried. “Can you hear me? Please turn around.”

The woman stood as still as an ice sculpture.

There was a narrow break in the railing a few yards from where Claire stood. She glanced behind her at the Jeep, her view obstructed by snow and darkness. She couldn’t see Jon clearly, couldn’t signal him to call the police on the car phone, but surely he was doing so. Surely he would think of that.

Tugging the collar of her down jacket closer to her chin, Claire walked toward the break in the railing. She stepped onto the platform, which was nothing more than a few feet of slippery metal separating her from the ice and rocks and water far below. She had the immediate sensation of suspension, of hanging in the air high above the river on a slender thread of concrete. She had no fear of heights, though. She didn’t feel the magnetic pull of the open space the way others might.

She clung to the guardrail as she made her way toward the woman. Afraid of startling her, she walked very slowly. When the woman finally turned her head in Claire’s direction, though, she didn’t seem surprised to find her there, and for a moment, her eyes locked fast with Claire’s. She was young—late twenties or early thirties. In the overhead light of the bridge, her eyes were translucent, like gray ice on the surface of a midwinter lake. Her lashes were white with snow. Flakes battered her cheeks and her eyelids, yet the woman didn’t blink or make any attempt to brush them away.

Claire held tight to the rail with one mittened hand and reached toward the woman with the other. “Let me help you come behind the railing,” she said.

With an air of indifference, the woman turned slowly away from her. She looked out into the darkness expectantly, as though she could see something that Claire couldn’t, and Claire lowered her hand to her side. She glanced down at the woman’s legs. The dark pants were far too short. Her feet were clad only in white socks bunched around her ankles and in tennis shoes. The toes of those sodden-looking shoes extended an inch if not more over the edge of the slippery platform, and for the first time in her life, Claire felt the sickening pull of vertigo. She tightened her hands on the railing, but it was hard to get a good grip with her mittens. The snow had turned to tiny icy pellets that stung her cheeks and blurred her vision, and deep inside the layers of her down jacket, beneath her sweater and her turtleneck, her heart beat like that of a captured bird.

She swallowed hard and tried again. “Please,” she said, “tell me why you’re out here.”

“Leave me alone.” The woman’s voice was soft, muffled by the snow, and Claire dared to take a slippery step closer to hear her better. She could touch her now if she wanted to, but she kept the fingers of both hands curled around the metal railing. There was no feeling left in her fingertips.

“Please come back,” she said. “You’ll fall.”

The woman let out a soft, bitter laugh. “Yes,” she said into the air. “I suppose I will.”

“But you’ll die,” Claire said, feeling stupid.

The woman raised her head to the sky, shutting her eyes. “I died here a long time ago.”

“What do you mean?”

She didn’t answer.

“This is crazy,” Claire said. “Nothing can be so bad. There’s always something to live for.” Slowly, Claire let go of the railing with her right hand and reached toward the woman. She circled her hand around the woman’s wrist, struck by how reed-thin her arm was inside her coat. The woman didn’t react to Claire’s touch. She didn’t even seem to notice.

Suddenly, she cocked her head to one side. “Do you hear it?” she asked. “Chopin?”

“Chopin?”

“Nocturne in C-sharp Minor.”

Claire strained her ears but heard nothing other than the muted sound of falling snow. “No,” she said. “I’m sorry. I don’t hear anything.”

“That was his problem, too. He could never hear the music.”

“Whose problem? Chopin’s? What do you mean?”

The woman didn’t answer, and now Claire thought she
could
hear something other than the snow. She listened hard. Yes. A siren, far in the distance. A city sound, out of place here as it sifted toward them through the black-and-white night.

The woman heard it too. Her head jerked toward Harpers Ferry, and Claire felt a spasm run through that slender, birdlike body. The woman gave Claire the look of someone betrayed.

“You called the police,” she said.

Claire nodded. “My husband did.”

“Let go of me,” the woman said evenly.

“Tell me what you meant about the music,” Claire prompted. Her own legs were trembling, and the stinging snow pelted her eyes. “Tell me what you can hear.”
Tell me anything. Just don’t jump. Please.

The siren cut through the air, through the snow. Glancing over her shoulder, Claire saw a red light flashing at the entrance to the bridge.
Hurry
.

The woman locked her gaze with Claire’s again, but now her eyes were wide and full of fear. Claire tightened her grip on the bony forearm. “It’s going to be all right,” she said. “You’re going to be safe.”

The woman twisted her arm beneath Claire’s hand in its black mitten. “Let go of me,” she said. The first siren was joined by a second. One of the police cars screeched to a stop behind the Jeep. “Let go!” the woman shouted now.

Claire only locked her hand more securely around the woman’s wrist. “Let me help you,” she said.

The woman raised her head high again, her eyes still riveted on Claire’s, and when she spoke, her voice was even and unflinching. “Let go,” she said, “or I’ll take you with me.”

She meant it, Claire knew. Behind them, there was a squeal of brakes, a rush of voices. A horn honked. The woman didn’t shift her eyes from Claire’s for even a second. “Let go now,” she said.

Claire opened the fingers of her hand, and the woman offered a small smile of victory, or perhaps gratitude. She didn’t leap so much as fly from the bridge, or fall so much as be lifted and carried by the snow. The streetlight glittered in the thousands of ice crystals clinging to her hair and her coat, and Claire thought she was watching an angel.

She didn’t think to scream. She barely breathed, suspended between the earthbound sounds of the men and machines behind her and the drifting, fading glimmer of the angel below. She barely noticed the heavy, gloved hands that wrapped around her own arms, her own shoulders. Hands that struggled to tug her back from the edge of the bridge. She tried to block out the voices, too loud in her ears, as she stared into the snowy abyss, because—at least for a second—she thought she heard the music after all.

HARPERS FERRY

JON COULD HEAR CLAIRE’S
teeth chattering nonstop during the two hours they spent in the police station. The police had questioned her at length, not in an interrogatory style but gently, and Jon felt grateful to them for their sensitivity. Claire was in no shape to be raked over the coals.

Someone—he could no longer recall who—had draped a gray wool blanket over Claire’s shoulders, and she sat on one of the metal chairs lining the wall of this small office. He had moved another chair out of the way so he could wheel close enough to put his arm around her. Her shoulders felt stiff beneath his arm, though, as if she couldn’t relax enough to take comfort from him.

The police had driven her to the station, while he’d followed in the Jeep. They’d wanted to take her to the hospital. She was in shock, they’d told him. But Claire had adamantly refused to go, insisting she was fine. They were overreacting, she’d said. Jon knew, though, that Claire was
not
fine. He had seen her in the emergency room after Susan’s grisly bicycle accident. He’d seen her seconds after she’d discovered her mother’s lifeless body in their living room. Yet he had never seen her like this. So shaken. So shivery. She hadn’t cried, but that was not unusual. She never did, at least not in front of him. She was a soft touch at movies or when reading sad books,

but in real life she held those tears inside her as though they might turn to acid once on her cheeks.

They were waiting now for the police to find them a place to stay for the night. They could have returned to the High Water, but the thought of having to explain what had happened to them tonight to so many friends and colleagues was overwhelming.

He kissed the side of Claire’s head, his lips brushing the dark hair where it was beginning to give way to silver. “We should call Susan,” he said, and she nodded. The sound of her teeth chattering made him want to wrap both his arms around her. He pulled the edges of the blanket more snugly across her chest, then tried to meet her eyes, but her gaze only darted past him on its way to nowhere. He looked at Detective Patrick, the burly, kind-faced officer behind the desk.

“May I use that?” He pointed to the phone at the edge of the desk.

“Help yourself.”

Jon wheeled forward a foot or two and lifted the phone into his lap. It was nearly eight o’clock. He thought Susan might be out with her friends, but she answered on the fourth ring.

“Hi, Susie.”

“Hi. You still in Harpers Ferry?”

“Yes. We’re going to have to stay here the night, hon.”

“Oh, sure. No problem. It’s pretty awful out.”

He thought he detected relief in her voice, and he felt a jab of pain. Susan had reached the age—nineteen—where she needed them far less than they needed her. Sometime during this past year, he’d finally admitted to himself that she had labored to graduate early from high school not because she was brilliant or an over-achiever but because she was anxious to leave home, anxious to escape from him and Claire. He had never shared that thought with Claire. He would let her believe they had an ambitious daughter, hungry for college.

“We were on our way home, but…” He let his voice trail off as he collected his thoughts. He was going to have to find a way to tell this story. This wouldn’t be the last time he would have to recount the events of this evening. “There was a woman standing on the bridge outside of Harpers Ferry and we stopped to try to help her, but she…she jumped off while Mom was talking to her.”

Susan was quiet for a moment. He could picture her leaning against the kitchen counter in her tight jeans and oversized gray sweater, her long brown hair falling in a shiny swath over her shoulder. A cloud would have fallen over her large dark eyes and she would be frowning, two delicate lines etched into the perfect fair skin of her forehead. “You mean, this lady committed suicide right before your eyes?”

“I’m afraid so. Right before Mom’s eyes, anyhow. Mom was out on the edge of the bridge with her, trying to talk her out of jumping.”

There was one more beat of loaded silence from Susan’s end of the line. “What do you mean, out on the edge of the bridge?” she asked.

“Outside the guardrail.”

He heard a sound through the phone—a book being slammed onto a table, perhaps—before Susan spoke again. “God, why does she
do
things like that?” she asked, her voice rising. “Is she there? Can I talk to her?”

He glanced at Claire. “She’s a little upset right now, and—”

Claire shook her head and reached for the phone, the blanket falling from her shoulders to the chair. Reluctantly, Jon relinquished the receiver.

“Hi, honey,” Claire said cheerfully. Detective Patrick looked up from his desk at the transformation in her voice. “We’re fine…Hmm?” She frowned at Jon as she listened to her daughter. “No, Susan, I don’t think I can save the world,” she said, “I just thought I might be able to help one person.” She nodded. “Yes, I know. And I’m so sorry we won’t get to see you tonight. I’m going to put Dad on again, okay?”

He took the phone back and immediately heard a volley of chatter from Claire’s teeth, as though they were making up for the minute and a half they’d had to be still while talking with Susan.

“Susie?” he said into the phone.

“She could have gotten herself killed.” There was a small break in Susan’s voice, and Jon heard the love behind her words. He ached to see his daughter, to hug her, before she took off for school again.

“Mom’s okay,” he said. With a little surge of joy, he thought of the snow. Susan wouldn’t be able to drive back to school until the roads were clear. “I guess we’ll still get to see you tomorrow,” he added. “You can’t drive to school in this weather.”

“Yes, I can. Or at least, I’ve got a ride. I’ll have to come back in a few weeks for my car, though.”

“Who are you riding with?”

“There’s this guy here who has some kind of four-wheel-drive wagon. He’s taking a bunch of us down.”

Jon winced at the thought. “Well, tell him to drive carefully, all right?”

She let out one of her exasperated sighs. “Right.”

“I love you.”

“Okay. You drive carefully, too.”

He hung up the phone, setting it back on the desk, and Claire let out a sigh of her own. “I’m going to the rest room,” she said. She stood up, pulling the blanket once more around her shoulders.

After she had left the room, Detective Patrick raised his eyes to Jon’s. “Do you mind a personal question?” he asked.

Jon shook his head.

The older man looked down at his desk, rubbing a hand over his jowly chin. “Well, I’m asking this because my nephew just got a back injury.” He lifted his eyes to Jon’s. “A spinal cord injury, they call it.”

Jon nodded again.

“And, you know, you see people in wheelchairs and you don’t think about it much until it happens close to you, and now it looks like he’s going to be paralyzed and…well, do you mind if I ask what happened to you?”