Brass Ring (23 page)

She checked on a few other patients, including Jordan Wiley, who had received a second chest tube sometime during the night. It had been a week since the placement of the first tube, which was not working efficiently, and as Vanessa examined the raw-looking incision in his side, Jordy fought tears of pain and, most likely, fear. Even with the second tube in place, his lungs didn’t sound good. She watched his face as she listened to his chest with her stethoscope. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut. The blue veins in his temples were visible beneath the pale skin.

“The pain meds aren’t holding you, are they, Jordan?” she asked.

“No,” he whispered without opening his eyes. “But if they give me more, I’ll be asleep, and I don’t want to be asleep.”

Instinctively, she ran a hand over his frizzy dark hair. A rare gesture for her. What was it about this kid that tore at her heart?

“Hopefully, this second tube will start making you feel better very soon,” she said.

He nodded, eyes still shut, his blue-tinged lips pressed tightly together, and she knew he didn’t believe her optimistic words of comfort any more than she did.

By five o’clock, there were eight message slips dotting her desk, and she settled into her chair with a bottle of apple juice and an air of grim determination to begin returning the calls.

She tried directing the callers to Terri. “Terri’s the one who’s talked to Patterson,” she said. “She’s in a better position than I am to tell you how to proceed.”

But her colleagues in the network were not that easy to get rid of. They were tenacious about engaging her in conversation, and all of them had an enthusiastically delivered story to tell her about Zed Patterson.

“He single-handedly kept abortion rights alive in Pennsylvania,” one of them crowed.

“He helped an old coworker of mine start a victims’ assistance program,” said another. “She went to his office and talked to him about the people she wanted to help and he actually shed tears.”

The man was quickly assuming legendary status, and as Vanessa listened to her smitten colleagues, sparks of lightning jerked their way into the corner of her vision.

She returned six of the calls before the urge to escape grew too strong to fight. She needed to run. It was the only solution to the mounting tension in her body.

She changed into her warm-up suit and running shoes and took the stairs down to Darcy’s office, even though she doubted Darcy would want to join her. Darcy was in the twelfth week of her pregnancy, and her morning sickness was lasting well into the night. On their last run together, Darcy had stopped twice to throw up.

Darcy groaned when she saw Vanessa standing in the door of her office.

“Forget it,” Darcy said. “No way.”

Vanessa gave her a rueful smile. Darcy did look a little green. No point in badgering her. “Maybe next week,” she said.

“Don’t count on it.” Darcy swiveled her desk chair to face her friend. “I know you can’t really understand how this feels, but I spend seventy-five percent of my time these days wishing someone would shoot me and put me out of my misery.”

Vanessa had to force her smile. “Sorry, Darce,” she said, backing out of the room. “You take care of yourself, okay?”

She walked down the hall, pushed open the back door of the hospital, and started running.

The evening was remarkably warm for mid-February. Vanessa tried to find her pace as she ran toward the park. Spiky-skinned creatures crawled beneath the surface of her skin, and she pounded the pavement hard to get rid of them. Without Darcy, she could run faster, harder, getting the steam from her system before going home to Brian, who didn’t deserve the secondhand wrath.

Darcy talked nonstop about her pregnancy these days. Vanessa didn’t mind listening—as a matter of fact, she found Darcy’s excitement contagious—but if Darcy said to her one more time, “I know you can’t understand how I’m feeling,” she was afraid she might slug her. But she bit her tongue each time. There was no point in telling Darcy she was wrong. No point in talking about Anna. She didn’t need to open old wounds.

A stone lay on the sidewalk ahead of her, and she kicked it hard, sending it skittering across a nearby lawn. Turning the corner, she was startled to see a man running toward her. For an instant, her heart kicked into high gear, but then she saw that he was in a warm-up suit. He was someone like herself, she thought, out for a run on a beautiful winter night.

She sidestepped toward the street to pass him, but he did the same, and she almost laughed at the inevitable collision until she saw the quick thrust of his arms toward her and felt his hands at her throat.

She didn’t have time to think. She dropped her chin to her chest and pulled hard with her left hand on his arm, drawing him even closer to her. His dark eyes widened with surprise. With the heel of her right hand, she used all her strength to snap his chin up and back, and he let out a grunt. She made a fist and brought it down as hard as she could on his collarbone, and the crack was unmistakable.

“Fucking bastard.” She kneed him in the groin, and as he doubled over, she kneed him again in his face. In the faint light, she saw blood spurt across the fabric of her warm-up pants.

He was on his hands and knees on the sidewalk, but Vanessa was not through. The adrenaline pumping through her body made her feel like a coiled spring, and as the man collapsed on the ground, she kicked him, in the face, on his back, on his side. She screamed at him and kicked him until someone pulled her away, and even then she still kicked the air. A siren blared in the distance, and only then did she realize that a strange man was holding her in his arms, and she was crying and cursing and tearing at his coat collar with her bare fingers.

HER ATTACKER WAS IN
surgery, the police told her as she sat next to Brian in a waiting room at the station. The man would live, but he would be very uncomfortable for a long time. Most likely he was the same man who had raped two women in the past three months, dressing as a runner, pulling them into the bushes. Now he had a broken nose, a broken collarbone, a broken knee, and kidney damage. She knew she had broken a bone in her own little finger during the fray, but she kept that information to herself. She would take care of that later.

She owed Zed Patterson, she thought. She owed her gullible colleagues in the network and the shortsighted hospital administrators. She owed everyone who was raising her ire, because that would-be rapist had gotten it all. The rage that should have been spread out among many had all been heaped on his unsuspecting body.

Word of his foiled attack had apparently spread quickly. By the time she and Brian left the police station, TV vans and reporters crammed the parking lot. Vanessa leaned against Brian with a groan. He swept the reporters away with his arm as they crossed the lot to his car. She thought of saying a few words into those microphones, of telling women to get training in self-defense.

“I’m five-five and one hundred and ten pounds,” she imagined herself saying. “If I can do this, you can, too. Empower yourselves.” Yet she was too drained to speak to anyone, and the words slipped from her mind as she settled into Brian’s car.

She pressed her head back against the seat as they drove out of the lot.

“Straight home?” Brian asked.

She shook her head. “Hospital.” She held up her throbbing hand. The finger was swollen now and turning purple. “Emergency room.”

He stopped the car in the middle of the street and turned on the overhead light to study her hand. “
Vanessa
.” He frowned at her. “They asked if you were hurt. Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I wanted to get away from them and their questions.” She started to cry unexpected and irksome tears, and Brian reached over to hold her hand, ignoring the honking of the car behind them.

“Were you afraid?” he asked after a moment.

“No.” She hadn’t been. Only at first, when the man’s sudden appearance had startled her. After that, even when she’d felt his thumbs against her windpipe, she hadn’t felt fear. Only rage. “I think I saw him as Zed Patterson,” she said. “If they hadn’t pulled me away, I would have killed him. I couldn’t stop.” She cringed at the memory of the last few kicks she’d delivered, when his body had felt like a rag doll beneath her feet.

The car passed them, followed by another.

“Too bad they stopped you.” Brian put his own car in gear again, and as they started to roll up the street, Vanessa reached for his hand and held it snugly in her lap. Brian was smiling. He glanced at her. “How long ago was that self-defense course you took?”

“Centuries,” she said.

Twenty years, at any rate. Twenty-two years.

She’d been beaten up once in her life, when she was sixteen, a year before Anna was born. It happened shortly after she’d stopped going to school—she’d never officially “dropped out.” She was still living with her father then. At least she had a room in his house where she kept most of her clothes. He was rarely there. He’d made his money by then and had adopted the flamboyant, always-on-the-move lifestyle of a jet-setter. He didn’t particularly care where she was.

She’d been walking to a boyfriend’s house when it happened. The man appeared out of nowhere, and before she could force a scream from her throat, she lay beaten and bruised in the gutter. She’d crawled to her boyfriend’s house. She couldn’t remember the boy’s name—she didn’t remember any of their names. He talked her out of calling the police. He had a record, he told her, and they might think that he’d done it. Plus, they would probably make her go back to school, and they’d get her father involved. So, she slept for two days straight in her boyfriend’s bed with a heating pad and cold compresses. Once she was feeling better, the boy spent an entire night teaching her how to defend herself, teaching her techniques he said he’d learned in prison. Then he took her to a self-defense class taught by an old friend of his. It didn’t matter how small she was, the instructor said, or what sex she was. She could kill if she had to. She’d thought she’d forgotten all she’d learned back then, but in some sloppy yet effective form, it had come back to her on the street tonight.

Brian parked the car in front of the hospital. Vanessa reached for the door handle, but Brian stopped her with his hand on her arm.

“Marry me,” he said.

She had to laugh. “Why are you bringing this up now?” she asked. “I’m a mess. I just almost killed someone. I wake up every damn night with bad dreams. You should be running in the opposite direction from me, not proposing.”

“I’m asking you now because I want you to know that even at your angriest, saddest, most volatile, most screwed-up moments, I still love you.” He leaned his head back against the seat, but his eyes never left her face. “I love you because you’re the smartest woman I’ve ever known. And because when you talk about your patients, there’s passion in your eyes, and your concern for them is so genuine, and you get such a thrill out of the challenge of figuring out ways to help them. And when we make love, you make me feel like no one ever has before. And I love you because, even though you’re busy as hell, you take the time to make me chicken Kiev, and you tuck mushy cards in my suitcase when I have to travel.”

She felt the tightness in her jaw as she tried to keep her tears from falling again. The Adam’s apple bobbed in Brian’s throat. He ran his finger lightly over her swollen hand. “And when something hurts you, I feel it too, Vanessa,” he said. “If you choose never to marry me, I would still stay with you. But you won’t ever convince me that’s what you really want.”

She wanted to believe he meant what he was saying. She
did
believe him. “I don’t know how bad this is going to get,” she said, “this mess with Patterson, and—”

“Van?”

She said nothing, waiting for him to continue.

“If I were diagnosed tomorrow with a terminal illness, and I had three years to live, and they were certain to be terrible years during which I could do nothing except lie in bed and drool, what would you do?”

The scenario was impossible to imagine, yet she felt herself tearing up at the thought of him wasting away like that. “I would take care of you,” she said. “I’d try to make you comfortable and make you chicken Kiev every night and—”

“Or if my ex-wife suddenly sued me for who knows what and sent me death threats and I had to spend all my money—every last dime—on lawyers, what would you do?”

“I’d help you any way I could. I’d listen to you rant and rave about her.” This made her smile—she had already done a few years’ worth of that listening. “I’d give you my money to help you pay your legal fees.”

“So, why do you think I would walk away from you when you have problems, huh? Do you think I’m less noble than you are?”

She smiled again. “I love you,” she said,

“So, will you please marry me?”

She looked into her lap, where his hand formed a nest around her bruised and swollen finger. “Yeah,” she said, heart thumping. “I will.”

JEREMY, PENNSYLVANIA

I960

AT LUNCH ONE DAY,
Vincent Siparo announced he was too tired to take an afternoon walk with his granddaughters. He was tired a lot toward the end of that summer, and he got out of breath easily, so Claire and Vanessa decided to go for their walk in the woods without him, Tucker tagging along at their heels.

They were smart girls, and they knew the woods well; it wouldn’t even occur to them to feel fear as they trudged through the trees.

“Let’s explore,” Claire said, turning off their usual path, and Vanessa followed dutifully. Soon, they were walking through an unfamiliar section of the woods, and the girls carefully twisted branches and dropped stones on the path as markers, the way Vincent had taught them to do, so they would always be able to find their way back.

Suddenly, Vanessa stopped walking, her eyes riveted on the ground near a gnarled old oak tree.

“What’s the matter?” Claire asked.

Vanessa pointed to the ground in front of her. Claire walked toward her sister gingerly—in case it was a snake that had caught Vanessa’s eye. But it was not a snake. In front of Vanessa, beneath some fallen limbs and dried leaves at the foot of the oak, a wooden cross jutted from the earth. Claire tugged away some of the dead limbs, and the two girls stared at the cross. Painted in white letters on the wood was the name tucker.