Brass Ring (42 page)

Again, she could think of nothing to say. He didn’t seem bothered by her silence, and she gradually became aware of the even rhythm of his breathing, the rise and fall of his head on her shoulder.

It was far too early for sleep, but she continued lying there, eyes wide open, the knot of sadness still tight in her throat. In an instant, she had allowed the nature of their relationship to change, and she knew she had lost something in the process. Honor. Self-respect. She had crossed a line she had never intended to cross.

AT BREAKFAST THE FOLLOWING
morning, Randy touched her hand across the table, the tips of his fingers resting lightly on her gold wedding band. “Are you going to leave this on?” he asked.

She looked at the ring. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d removed it, but she did so now, tugging at it, twisting it. She slipped the ring into the pocket of her robe, then looked across the table at the man who had suddenly become her lover.

“I don’t know what I want, Randy,” she said. “Please don’t have expectations of me that I—”

“Shh.” He leaned across the table to kiss her. “I don’t. I’m just very happy you’re here right now.”

They talked awhile longer, and she studied him, reminding herself that she had felt the undeniable heat of desire the night before. But had it been desire for Randy or merely the desire of the moment? She couldn’t say.

After breakfast, she put her dishes in the dishwasher and then climbed the stairs to the second floor, and only when she reached the guest room did she realize that her hand was wrapped, tight as a fist, around the abandoned gold ring in her pocket.

THEY MADE LOVE IN
his bed again the following night. Claire didn’t even bother with the pretense of the guest room. She hadn’t been able to sort out her feelings yet. They were snarled together in a tangle of guilt and need. She was making Randy happy, though. That in itself was worth something.

She lay awake after he’d fallen asleep, thinking back over the past week. She’d finished painting the scenery and was now spending her time either working with Randy at the restaurant or helping the seamstress with the costumes for the upcoming play. She was actually sewing. She despised sewing.

She missed her house. She missed Amelia and the foundation. She’d thought of asking Jon if she could return to work on a part-time basis. She’d talked to Debra Parlow about that idea, and Debra had agreed she needed the stimulation her old job would offer. But would that be fair to Jon? Especially now. How could she ask him to work with her when she was practically living with another man? And she could no longer say to him, with any honest indignation, that she was not sleeping with Randy.

She had called Jon’s voice mail a few times, telling him thoughts she was having about the retreat, offering suggestions. Her mind-numbing activities during the day seemed conducive to the generation of creative ideas as well as to the regeneration of memories.

The memories often came to her these days in complete, detailed form, and they were no longer merely the pretty remembrances of a happy childhood. She saw her father slapping Mellie in the farmhouse kitchen; she heard her parents arguing loudly after she and Vanessa had gone to bed. Each new image surprised her, and she was still not convinced of their authenticity. She felt such distance from the memories that it seemed as if they’d been stolen from someone else’s life.

“They’re yours,” Randy would say quietly, and she knew he was right.

She snuggled against him now, and he pulled her closer in his sleep, mumbling something she couldn’t make out.

“Randy?” she asked. “Are you awake?”

“Yes.” His eyelids fluttered open for a second before closing again.

“Can we talk for a minute?”

“Mmm.” He rolled onto his back. “Sure.”

“I’m thinking of going back to work at the foundation,” she said.

“Oh.” He sighed, tightening his arm on her shoulders. “I didn’t think painting scenery and sewing costumes would hold your interest very long.”

“I miss my work,” she said. “I think I can concentrate on it now. Part-time, anyhow.”

He wrapped his other arm around her, too, squeezing her to his chest. “You miss Jon,” he said.

She was surprised. “No, I don’t. Not really.”

Randy stroked her hair. “Oh, I think so.”

Neither of them spoke for a moment.

“You never talk about him.” Randy broke the silence.

“Well, no. My mind’s been filled with other things lately.” She stared at the ceiling. “Actually, I try not to think too much about him. It’s too…difficult.”

He ran a hand down her arm. “Tell me how you met him,” he said.

“Why?”

“I’d like to hear about it.”

She hesitated. “I’d feel strange talking to you about him.”

“Tell me.”

He was insistent, and she began to talk. She was accustomed to sharing her memories with him, and so slipping into this one was easy, so easy she was afraid she might forget to censor it for the tender ears of a lover.

She had met Jon on a clear, brisk day in October of her senior year. He wheeled himself into her homeroom for the first time, and Claire was immediately intrigued. She had never seen a wheelchair-bound student in her high school, with the exception of one of the football players who had broken his leg the year before and did a brief stint in a chair. But Jon Mathias didn’t look like a football player. Everyone’s eyes fell immediately to his legs. Was this a kid with a temporary disability or something more? They needed to know quickly, as one did in high school, how to categorize the newcomer.

But it was more than the wheelchair that fascinated Claire. It was his face. His demeanor. He was unsmiling, almost angry looking, and he didn’t so much as glance at his prospective classmates as he wheeled himself to the front of the room with a note for Mrs. Wexler. Claire could almost see the chip on his shoulder.

The rumors spread at a furious pace. By lunch she knew that he was from California and that his back had been broken in a plane crash. He was—or at least, had been—very wealthy, attending only private schools. Most likely, he was accustomed to a very different type of student than those who now surrounded him.

Listening to other students talk about him, Claire felt a pain in her heart that grew as each new fact was revealed. He’d spent six months in a rehabilitation hospital and was now living with an aunt in Falls Church. His parents and sister had died in the accident. In the space of six months, he had lost his family, had nearly lost his life, and had gone from being rich to not rich. Where was the money? If his parents had died, wouldn’t he still have it? She knew the neighborhood where his aunt lived. The houses were small and poorly maintained. Maybe the money was nothing more than an embellishment to the story.

On that day in October, she was eating lunch with her boyfriend of six months, Ned Barrett, when Jon wheeled into the cafeteria. He stopped for a moment, looking dazed and daunted by the sea of tables. Then he wheeled himself forward again, toward the end of the food line.

“I can’t believe they let him into this school,” Ned said, his eyes following the chair. “Why didn’t they stick him in Garrett?”

Jon had reached the tail end of the food line and sat staring at the waistband of the tall boy in front of him.

“Because Garrett is where the retarded kids go,” Claire said. “Just because he’s handicapped doesn’t mean he’s not smart.”

“How do you know he’s smart?”

“I don’t know that. But you’re assuming he’s not just because he can’t walk.”

“Paralyzed from the waist down,” Ned said with a snicker. “Walking’s not all he can’t do.”

Claire threw her empty milk carton at him, and he laughed. Ned was a big, good-looking boy, with white-blond hair and pale eyelashes. He was vice-president of the class and quarterback of the football team. Claire thought she was in love with him and had recently contemplated losing her virginity to him. Sometimes, though, Ned’s thick-headed insensitivity bothered her.

“It’s not right.” Ned’s eyes were on Jon. “I mean, nothing against him—I’m sure he’s a great guy and all—but how’s he ever going to fit in here? I’m talking about what’s fair to
him
. He should be with people like himself. You know, handicapped or whatever.”

Claire was barely paying attention to Ned. She watched as another of the football players deftly cut in line in front of Jon, who actually backed his chair up a bit, doing nothing to regain his advantage.

“Did you see that?” Claire asked. “Stu cut in front of him.”

Ned shook his head. “Yeah, well, that just proves my point. No one’s going to treat him like he’s human or—”

She was already out of her seat and walking toward the food line. She tapped on Stu’s arm. The big blue-eyed halfback looked down at her, draping an arm across her shoulders. “Hey, babe, what’s up?”

“Maybe you didn’t realize it, Stu, but Jon was ahead of you in line.”

“Who’s Jon?” Stu looked down at Jon, who stared straight in front of him. “Oh, are you Jon?”

Jon said nothing. Claire saw blotches of color forming on his cheeks.

“Get behind him, Stu, come on.”

Stu laughed but didn’t put up an argument. He stepped behind Jon’s chair. “There, bleeding Harte, you satisfied now? No wonder Ned’s so pussywhipped these days.”

She touched Jon’s arm. “Please excuse his rudeness. Not everyone here is like him. Most people are really nice.”

Jon looked up at her, his big brown eyes stormy. “Thank you,” he said, and even in those two small words she couldn’t miss his sarcasm. “You just made me look ten times more helpless than I already am.”

She watched him numbly as he wheeled past her, and Stu chuckled. “Nice going, Claire,” he said.

She returned to her table, where Ned was engrossed in conversation with a couple of other students about next week’s game against Mount Vernon, and watched Jon make his way toward the food. Someone else cut in front of him, and two boys had a brief food fight in an arc above his head, but she didn’t budge from her chair.

After school that day, she asked Mrs. Wexler to assign him to her.

“Assign him to you?” Her gray-haired homeroom teacher looked confused by the request.

“Yes. Pretend we do it all the time. Pretend like, whenever there’s a new student coming in midyear, you assign someone to help them get a feel for the place. Not a bad idea, anyhow, right?”

“I suppose—”

“Great! Thanks.” And she was off. She had cheerleading practice.

The following day, she told Jon he had been assigned to her and that they would have to eat lunch together. He didn’t seem pleased. Neither was Ned, who looked at her with sympathy when she told him why she couldn’t eat with him that day. She tried to talk to Jon in the food line, but it was awkward, him being so much lower than she was. Besides, he wouldn’t look at her and seemed to have nothing to say.

“You know, I’m sorry about yesterday,” she tried. “About the food line. Stu made me so furious, and I thought I was helping you.”

Jon gave a slight nod of his head. “You meant well,” he said. “But that sort of thing is my problem to figure out, all right?”

There was no hostility in his voice, and for the first time he was looking directly at her. She wondered if it hurt his neck to look up that way.

“All right,” she said.

Over the next few days, she barely left him alone. She knew she was forcing herself on him. It was hard for him to retreat from her because of his chair and because he had no other friends to turn to. She told herself that he needed her to persevere. Besides, she had decided that he was the most beautiful boy she had ever laid eyes on. When she reported her infatuation to her two best friends, they looked at each other incredulously. “Better than Ned Barrett?” one of them asked.

Claire nodded. She didn’t understand her reaction herself. Ned was Adonis perfect. Girls lost their concentration when they walked past him in the hall. But there was something about Jon’s soulful eyes, those sexy, gaunt cheeks, and that slender, battered body that held enormous appeal for her.

At first, she had to badger him with questions. After a week, though, he seemed to loosen up and started talking on his own. He didn’t want to be there, he told her one day in the cafeteria. He hadn’t wanted to leave his rehab program, where he’d attended school with other kids like himself. Here, he felt like a freak. He had to use the service elevator in the rear of the school to get from floor to floor. And there were two steps between the hall and the cafeteria that seemed an insurmountable obstacle to him. She strained her neck to see the entrance to the cafeteria without success. She couldn’t picture the steps.

“You’ve never noticed them because they’re not an obstacle to you. Try being in a chair for a day. The security guard has to help me up the steps. It’s humiliating.” He shook his head. “God, I want out of this place!”

He told her that he’d played tennis before his accident, that he’d been pretty good at it.

“I was supposed to play for UCLA next year,” he said, and it hit her suddenly how his well-ordered, well-planned future had been snatched from him. It made her reach across the table to rest her hand briefly, lightly, on his, and he didn’t pull his own hand away.

He’d skied, too, he said. His family had flown to a resort in Colorado several times a year. He had loved skiing. She caught the tears in his eyes when he talked about it, even though he quickly turned his head away from her.

They fell into a pattern of eating lunch together, Jon talking about his past and complaining bitterly over what fate had handed him for the future.

“Why, that boy is spending all his energy feeling sorry for himself,” Mellie said when Claire told her about her conversations with Jon. “You should start telling him about you. Let him think about someone other than himself for a while.”

It seemed almost rude to talk about her own perfectly wonderful life when his was such a disaster, but she tried it.

Over lunch, she told him about cheerleading and Mellie and Ned.

He smiled at her. “Life’s a bowl of cherries for you, huh?”