Brass Ring (31 page)

In the family room, she pulled the afghan from the sofa, wrapping it around herself as she sat down and reached for the phone. She dialed Randy’s number, the sirens still in her head. Her heart pounded against her ribcage, and she leaned back on the couch, hoping she wouldn’t get sick.

“Hello?” Randy’s voice was muffled by sleep. What time was it? She had no idea.

“I woke you. I’m sorry, but I had a nightmare, or maybe a memory. I don’t know.” She was crying, and only then realized she’d been crying from the moment she’d opened her eyes that morning. Maybe she’d even been crying in her sleep. “It’s terrible, Randy. I can still—”

“Slow down,” Randy said. “Take a deep breath.” His voice was low and calm and warm, and she clutched the phone with both hands and tried to settle her breathing. Her heart was going to leap from her chest.

“There were ambulance sirens,” she said. “First they were in the distance, then coming closer and closer. And ‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart’ was playing. It was organ music, like on the carousel. And they were hammering crates closed—big wooden crates, and—”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

Claire closed her eyes to try to recapture the image, but instead she saw a towel hanging on a towel rack, the wall behind it tiled in white. The towel was also white, but stained with blood. Claire leaped from the couch as if she could run from the picture in her mind.

“Oh, God, Randy,” she said, “make them go away! The flashbacks just keep coming. Or maybe I’m making them up. They’re too crazy to be real. But if I’m making them up, then
I
must be crazy.”

“Whoa, Claire.” Again the calm, deep voice filled her head, and she stood still in the middle of the room. “Did you figure out who was hammering the crates?”

“No.” She pressed one hand to her forehead. “It was just a sound. The hammering.”

“How do you know it was a crate?”

“I just do.”

“What else?”

“Someone was screaming.”

“Male or female?”

“Female, I think.” The vertigo struck suddenly, and she sat down on the couch again, swallowing hard. “I can’t think about it anymore. I have to stop.”

“What makes you think the sirens were from an ambulance? Not a fire truck or the police?”

“Randy, I can’t now! I’m so dizzy, and Jon could wake up any second.” She was shaking. She stretched the afghan to cover her feet. “I wish you were right here next to me,” she said. “I think I could do it then—think about the dream.”

There was a long silence. Her heart thudded dully in her ears.

“What do you want me to say, Claire?” Randy asked finally. “I would love to be right there next to you. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you. But we can’t see each other without feeling guilty, and I don’t want that.”

“I know,” she said softly, glad he was willing to provide the voice of reason she seemed to have lost.

“I’m sorry you’re still going through all of this,” he said. “I was hoping Jon was right and that once I was out of your life, you’d feel better.”

“I don’t think I’m ever going to feel better until I know why this is happening to me. I started seeing a therapist, but I’m afraid to talk to her about the flashbacks. I feel like something terrible will happen if I start talking about them without you around. Like I may completely lose any grip I still have on my sanity, which isn’t much anymore. Oh Randy, how can I see you? I don’t want to lie, but Jon will never understand.”

“Does he know what you’re going through?”

“A little. Jon wants to help me, but he just isn’t capable of it. Maybe if I begged him to listen to me, he would, but the truth is, I only feel able to really get into the details with you.”

She drew in a breath. Her heartbeat had finally slowed down. The trembling had stopped, and she didn’t think she could conjure up the sound of sirens or hammering or music if she tried. “I’m better now,” she said. “I should go. Jon will be up soon.”

Randy didn’t speak right away. “I don’t want to let you off the phone,” he said finally.

And she didn’t want him to. “If I can come up with a way to see you, would you be willing?”

“Of course. But not if it involves a lie.”

“No, I won’t lie anymore.” She thought she heard a sound in the hallway. “I have to go.”

“All right, Claire. Please take care of yourself.”

She hung up the phone but stayed on the sofa, wrapped in the afghan, clinging to the small sense of calm Randy had given her, wondering how she could hold on to it for the rest of the day.

JON HAD AWAKENED ABRUPTLY
as Claire fled from the bedroom. She hadn’t taken the time to pull on a robe, and the gray morning light washed over her bare skin as she ran. She was crying, gasping for breath, as if something were chasing her. He’d called her name, but she didn’t seem to hear him, and he’d gotten out of bed and into his chair to follow her.

From the hall, he’d heard her on the phone and knew immediately whom she had called. He’d sat and listened, eavesdropping shamelessly. The sound of her crying cut through him. He had never heard such desperation in her voice before. Such panic. The fear she had allowed him to see these past couple of months was nothing compared to the real terror churning inside her. She was pouring it out to Randy Donovan, though. Talking to Randy, her guard was down; she held nothing back.
Jon wants to help me, but he isn’t capable of it
.

She was right. He sat quietly in the hallway, waiting for her to hang up. He was steeling himself, trying to find a sort of courage he’d never needed before. He was going to help Claire the only way he could.

She hung up the phone, and Jon wheeled into the family room. Claire was wrapped in the afghan, her legs folded beneath her on the couch, one shoulder bare. Her face was pale and pinched with the guilty look of a child caught in some forbidden act. He felt a painful rush of love for her, and although he wanted to pull his chair close, he stayed in the doorway. It would be easier that way.

He could almost see her mind racing as she tried to create an explanation for why she was up so early, wrapped in a blanket on the sofa.

“I had a terrible dream,” she said. “I panicked and called Randy before I stopped to think about it. I’m sorry.” She had obviously meant what she’d said about not lying anymore.

“I heard the call,” he said.

“You did?” Alarm sharpened her features.

“Yes. All of it.”

Her tears started again, and she pressed a fist to her mouth. Still, he made no move toward her.

“Claire,” he said, his voice strong, “I want you to leave.”

“Leave? What do you mean?”

“I mean, I want you to leave the house. Leave me.”

“What?”

“Then you can see Randy as often as you like without—”

“No!” She put her bare feet on the floor and leaned forward. “That’s not what I want.”

“Apparently that’s what you need, though. You just said that. I heard you.”

“Jon—”

“You’re right. I haven’t been able to help you with this. I’m very sorry…” He felt the threat of tears and struggled to hold them back. “I’m too close to it to help you.”

“You’ve helped me, Jon. You’ve—”

“I want you out.” He cut her off, suddenly sick of the way she always changed reality to make problems disappear.

Claire sat back. She licked her lips. The crease between her eyebrows was deep. “You can’t be serious.”

“Yes, I am. You cannot stay here.” His hands were tight on the wheels of his chair. “I don’t want you here.”

“But you…how would you manage?”

He drew in a sharp breath. Her words made him angry, and the anger felt good. “I’m not a child!” he said. “I need a wife, not a fucking caretaker!”

“Don’t yell!” She lifted one hand from the afghan to tug anxiously at her hair. “Please don’t be angry. I didn’t mean anything. I just…I can’t leave you. It doesn’t make any sense for me to—”

“It makes more sense than going on the way we have been, with you wanting to be with someone else.”

She opened her mouth to protest, but he cut her off again.

“Don’t deny it, Claire. You want him; I’m giving you permission to have him.”

“It’s not like that,” she snapped. “It’s not what you think. It’s never been what you think.” Her anger was raw and unfamiliar. “I had the first real male friend in my adult life and you took him away from me.”

“So, now I’m giving him back to you.” He started to turn his chair around. “And I’m getting dressed for work. You’ve got all day to pack up and get out, but please be gone by the time I get home.”

“What do you mean, I’ve got all day? I have to work, too.”

“Forget work. You haven’t been doing any anyhow. I’ve done ninety-five percent of the work on the retreat.”

She looked down at the floor. He knew she couldn’t argue with him on that.

“I know I haven’t been able to concentrate very well at the office,” she said, “but I still want to come in and—”

“No, Claire,” he said, unnerved by the thought of her there. “I don’t want to see you, all right? Get it? I don’t want to have to look at you in the morning after you’ve been sleeping with Randy all night.” His voice broke then, and the tears he’d been fighting spilled over his cheeks.

Claire was instantly on her feet. “Jon, please!” She grabbed his arm, but he pushed her away. His fingers caught in the weave of the afghan, accidentally pulling it from her breasts, and he let go quickly. He pressed his palms hard on his thighs.

She sat back on her heels, clutching the afghan across her chest. “Sleeping with Randy is not what I want.” Her voice was tiny, defeated. He could barely hear her. “I only want to feel better. I want to feel happy, like I used to.”

He wished she would yell at him again. Her sadness made this harder, and he had to force himself to turn his chair around and wheel back into the bedroom.

Once in the bedroom, he stared at the closed door for several minutes before starting to get dressed. The useless muscles in his thighs began to spasm as he pulled on his pants, and once or twice he had to blink to clear his vision. He thought of Claire in the family room. Maybe she was calling Randy. Or maybe she was crying, still struggling to make some sense of his order to leave. That had been the hardest thing he’d ever done. Hard and painful and filled with risk. But as he brushed his teeth and combed his hair and studied the lines around his eyes in the mirror, he felt a growing certainty that he’d been right to do it.

MCLEAN

IT WAS RAINING, A
cold rain that matched the chill in her heart. She drove through the dark streets of McLean toward Randy’s town house, her suitcase in the backseat. What were you supposed to pack when you had no idea where you were going? She’d taken only enough for a few days, enough to keep her afloat until she had a clearer sense of what she would do next.

She figured she could stay at Randy’s for a night or two, then she would have to find a place of her own. What that meant, she couldn’t say. She couldn’t think beyond the moment.

Randy had sounded stunned when she’d called him late that morning to tell him Jon had asked her to leave. She heard him trying to contain his pleasure, worried he might be gaining something at the expense of someone else. He asked concerned and sincere questions about Jon. Had he been thinking clearly or simply acting on the emotion of the moment? Did he seem terribly distraught? Would he be all right without her?

She shared his concern and even called Jon around noon to ask him if he had reconsidered.

“Absolutely not,” Jon had said. “I want you out. And please don’t call me again today.”

She’d hung up the phone with a sense of freedom edged with fear, and with tearful gratitude toward her husband. This was a gift he was giving her. She knew it, and she was certain he knew it as well.

Still, she worried about leaving him alone. She bought groceries, stocking the pantry and refrigerator. She made and froze two casseroles and a huge pan of lasagna. A long note was waiting for him on the kitchen table, reminding him to take his medication, telling him where she kept the emergency numbers, the spare keys. She vacuumed the entire house and changed the sheets on the bed.

The flashbacks had been constant while she worked in the house, but she blocked them, shutting the cupboard door on them over and over again.
Soon
. Soon she would be with Randy and could let those images take her wherever they pleased.

“I’ll have to find a place to stay,” she’d said to Randy on the phone. She’d thought of saying “a place to live,” but that sounded too permanent. Too final.

“You can stay here tonight,” Randy offered. “I have a guest room. I’ll help you think about what to do after that.”

Her car skidded as she turned into the parking lot of his town house. Not thinking, she pressed the brake, and the rear of the car fishtailed behind her. She lifted her hands from the wheel, abdicating control, and was almost surprised when the car came to rest safely in the center of the lot. She took a deep breath and resumed driving, parking close to 167.

The rain had stopped. It was after seven, and the parking lot light illuminated the white brick as it had on her last visit to the town house. She took her suitcase from the seat and marched toward the house and up the front steps, where she lifted the heavy brass knocker and let it fall.

After a moment, Randy opened the door. He was wearing a red flannel shirt and khaki pants. His smile was tentative.

“Well,” she said. “I’m here.”

He hesitated a moment before wordlessly pulling the door open, and she stepped inside to feel the dark warmth of the room embrace her. Randy set her bag on the floor next to the staircase, then, without saying a word, moved forward to hold her. She closed her eyes, wrapping her arms around him, breathing in his scent. His heart beat against her breast. It was a strong, solid beat, and she could almost feel it pick up speed as he pressed his hands to her back, his touch a little fevered. She pulled away gently, and his hands fell to his sides.

“I’ve made dinner,” he said. His cheeks were flushed. “You haven’t eaten yet, have you?”