Brass Ring (47 page)

Claire lifted her head from her knees and looked at him. The color was back in her cheeks. “I feel better now,” she said.

He could nearly make out his reflection in her eyes. He touched her cheek with the back of his fingers. “I’m sorry I haven’t been there for you these last few months, Claire,” he said.

“And I’m sorry I laid all this on you.”

Jon shook his head. “What do you think will happen to me if you tell me terrible things? Do you think I’m going to crack up? Slit my wrists?”

She smiled weakly. “I don’t know.”

“Are you afraid I’ll cry?” He tugged gently on a strand of her hair. “That might happen. I might cry if you tell me about something that hurt you. Would that be so terrible?”

She lowered her feet to the floor. “It’s a habit, not telling you things that might upset you.”

“Yeah, I know. But you don’t need to protect me anymore, Claire. You don’t need to keep your sad or angry or otherwise shitty feelings from me. I can handle them now, all right? Give me a chance to be there for you.”

“That’s what you said in your speech.”

“My speech?”

“At G.W. I was there for your keynote speech—the one I was supposed to make with you. But you were really wonderful all by yourself.”

He smiled, touched and surprised to learn that she’d been there. “But lonely, Claire,” he said. “I was fine, but I was lonely up there on that stage. And that pretty much sums up my life lately. I’m fine— but lonely for you.”

She smiled at him, then leaned over and hugged him hard. “I miss you too,” she said, standing up, backing away from him, and she left his office quickly, anxious, no doubt, to make her phone call.

VIENNA

SITTING BEHIND HER DESK
in her old office at the foundation, Claire found she had lost the sense of urgency to call Randy. The cloak of Jon’s comfort was still warm around her shoulders. She’d been too shaken by Vanessa’s visit to curb the flow of what she’d told him, but he had listened well, indeed. Had he always had that ability? Had she simply not given him the chance?

It was hard to focus on the monumental stack of files on her desk when thoughts of her sister still haunted her. She told herself she had to make a dent in the files before the eleven o’clock staff meeting, and so she was on her lunch break by the time she had a chance to call Randy. She had expected to eat lunch with Jon, as they used to, over the desk in his office. But he had scheduled a lunch meeting with one of their consultants—and without her. He didn’t even invite her to join them, which was probably wise. She didn’t have a good grounding in the project they were discussing, and she doubted she would be able to give the meeting all her concentration.

Randy was at the restaurant when she called. She could hear the clank of dishes in the background.

“How are things at the office?” he asked.

“Looks like everything ran smoothly in my absence.” She drew sloping lines on the notepad in front of her, a string of slender snakes, reverse Ss, across the blue paper. “
I’m
not running too well, though. My sister stopped by my apartment this morning.”

“Vanessa? You’re kidding. Is that good or bad?”

“Well, it shook me up a bit. I’ll tell you about it tonight.”

“Do you need to talk now?” he asked. “Can you take a break? I could meet you someplace.”

She felt a rush of tenderness at his concern. “Thanks for offering,” she said. “It can wait.”

After getting off the phone, she once again attacked the stack of work on her desk. Besides the files, there were memos to be read and forms to be filled out about issues and people she could barely remember.

So much had changed at the foundation in the last month. She felt like a visitor. The new receptionist at the front desk hadn’t even known who she was when she arrived that morning. At the staff meeting, she’d initially listened to the esoteric chatter with a sense of alienation, and it was obvious that no one knew exactly how to treat her. Jon, though, set the tone with his laid-back, unflappable good humor, including her on decisions, asking the others to fill her in on their various projects. Pat spent a few minutes with her after the meeting, updating her on plans for the retreat, telling her how good it was to have her back. Still, Claire’s sense of disorientation was almost dizzying. It was going to be okay, though. She simply needed to get her sea legs under her again.

As she pulled into Randy’s town house parking lot that evening, she almost dreaded the recounting of Vanessa’s visit. She no longer felt the need to talk about it. Randy began questioning her as soon as she was in the door. They sat in his dark and cozy living room, and he furrowed his brow and listened closely as she repeated the incident to him. It felt like a mere updating, though. The telling had lost its emotion.

They went for a walk through his neighborhood before dinner, and she realized with some guilt that Randy had concerns of his own tonight. He’d gotten a call from LuAnne that afternoon. Cary was in trouble at school for beating up a girl. Never mind that the girl had been making fun of one of Cary’s friends, a boy with burn scars on his face and hands. LuAnne wanted Randy to talk to Cary by phone that night. Claire held his hand as they walked, helping him plot his end of the conversation. She offered suggestions as best she could, trying to give him her full attention as he had so often done for her, but she couldn’t stop thinking about Vanessa, in a hotel room not

ten miles from her. She would have to call her, have to try. Surely their entire link as sisters couldn’t be erased by an error in judgment made when she was ten. She couldn’t discount the severity of that mistake, but wouldn’t both their lives be richer by becoming part of each other’s family?

After their walk, she helped Randy make dinner in his white and copper kitchen.

“I’m a bit bewildered,” Randy said as he took a glass baking dish from one of the cabinets. “How come you’re so calm about your sister’s visit? It sounded extremely upsetting, yet you seem”—he shrugged—”almost complacent.”

“I was beside myself this morning,” she said, slicing mushrooms for their salad, “but then I told Jon about it. I was late to the office because of Vanessa, and I wanted to call you when I got in because I was such a wreck, but Jon stopped me to ask what was wrong, and I blurted the whole mess out to him. So I guess it doesn’t seem so urgent now.” The mushrooms were white and perfect, and she had sliced far more than they needed.

Randy’s back was to her as he wrapped sole fillets in parchment. “So how did Jon react?” he asked.

She scooped the mushroom slices up with her hands and dropped them into the salad bowl. “Very well,” she said. “He surprised me.” She put a bowl of frozen spinach in the microwave and hit the defrost button. “I realized I’ve always kept things from him. Anything that might have upset him. Or upset
us
. I heard him speak the other day, and—”

Randy turned to frown at her. “You heard him speak? Where?”

She’d forgotten that Randy didn’t know about the symposium. It hadn’t felt like deceit on her part at the time, but now the small side trip seemed like a betrayal.

“I stopped by G.W. on Tuesday,” she said. “Jon and I were supposed to be the keynote speakers at a symposium there. I wanted to see how he’d handle it alone.”

“Oh.” Randy rested his hand lightly against her back. “I didn’t mean to jump on you.”

“That’s all right.” Claire slipped the knife into a green pepper. “Anyhow, in his speech, he talked about being overprotective of your loved ones, not wanting them to suffer any more than they already have. He said that by protecting them, you don’t give them room to grow or to learn how to take care of themselves. He was referring to me, I suppose. Or to both of us. We took care of each other extremely well.”

Randy laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“You were very well trained. Mellie protected you the same way. It’s all you knew how to do.”

She set down her knife with a sense of defeat. “I don’t want to be that way anymore.”

Randy walked across the kitchen to the steps leading down to the basement and his wine cellar. “Don’t worry, Claire, you’re not,” he said. “If you were still into protecting people, you wouldn’t have told me how good you felt talking to Jon today.” He disappeared into the basement, and she stared after him, trying to discern if his words had been meant as a compliment or if they were, instead, an expression of hurt. She hadn’t known that Randy needed her protection.

She pulled the bowl of spinach from the microwave. The icy green block was still hard. Setting it on the counter, she began chopping at it, the knife in her fist.

Suddenly, her hand froze in midair, and the vertigo fell over her with such force that she had to lean against the counter. The bright green of the spinach made her stomach roil, and the knife shook in her hand. She wanted to drop it, but her fingers were locked in place around the handle. Frightened, she started to call for Randy, but stopped herself.

“Open your damn hand,” she said out loud. She nearly had to pry her fingers from the knife. When it fell into the bowl, she backed away from the counter and lowered herself into one of the kitchen chairs.

Closing her eyes, she steadied her breathing. She tried asking herself the questions Randy might ask. Had she seen anything—any images from the past? No, she had seen nothing but the knife in her hand. That alone had been enough to sicken her.

And what did the knife remind her of?

Nothing. No, that wasn’t true. She pictured the barn. The workshop. Carving. She could see herself in her grandfather’s shop, carefully working the knife around a pattern in a block of balsa wood. That was a good memory, though. Nothing to bring on an attack of terror.

“Damn it!” She pounded her fist on her knee, tears filling her eyes. Wasn’t she ever going to be free of this? She’d hoped her flash backs had been linked to the incident with Vanessa. With that out in the open, they should leave her alone, shouldn’t they?

She heard Randy on the basement stairs and quickly stood up again, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. Gingerly, she removed the knife from the bowl before putting the spinach back in the microwave. She wouldn’t tell Randy what had happened. She wasn’t hiding it from him, not in any underhanded way. She simply needed to know she could do this on her own.

Randy called Cary later that night. He used the phone in the study, across from the master bedroom, where Claire waited for him under the paisley sheets and comforter. She could hear his side of the conversation, and she listened with admiration. Randy talked about loyalty to friends, options to violence, respect for the opposite sex. The conversation lasted a very long time.

When he came into the bedroom, he undressed quietly and climbed into bed without reaching for her. She looked over at him, at the faint shine of tears on his cheeks, and her heart broke.

She pulled close to him. “Cary will be all right,” she said. “He sounds like a healthy kid who—”

Randy shook his head. “Do you hear yourself, Claire?”

She thought about her words. Empty, soothing words—the kind she was best at uttering. “Yes,” she said sheepishly.

“And it’s not Cary I’m upset about right now.”

She ran her fingertips over his cheek. “What is it?”

He suddenly closed his arms around her, holding her so tightly she could barely breathe. She heard him swallow, and it was another minute before he spoke.

“I guess I’ve known all along that I was only borrowing you,” he said.

“Borrowing me?” She lifted her head from his chest. “What are you talking about?”

“You’ve always loved Jon. I’ve been serving some need in you that you didn’t think he could meet.”

She wanted to protest, to offer him some sort of reassurance, but said instead, “I don’t want to need either of you anymore.”

“I don’t regret a moment I’ve spent with you,” Randy said, as if he had decided for both of them that their relationship was over.

She pulled back from him, sitting up.

“I was hoping your feelings about me would change,” he continued, reaching toward her. His fingers came close to her satin-covered breast, but he lowered his hand to the bed without touching her. “Even after all this time, though, you still think of me as a brother.”

“That’s not true.” She gently cradled his hand in hers, knowing that she and Randy were on new ground here, that in the next few seconds, the fabric of their relationship would stretch and give until it had taken on a different shape. She was ready for that; she felt profound relief that the time had come. “I think of you as a wonderful friend who’s helping me through a terrible time.” She touched the hem of the sheet where it lay above his waist. “I’ve felt dishonest, though.”

“How so?”

“By becoming lovers.”

“Oh.” He shook his head. “Don’t feel guilty. You’ve never led me to believe there was more between us than there was. You and I have had different hopes and expectations right from the start. We both knew that.”

Her throat felt tight. “I don’t want us to make love anymore,” she said.

He nodded, squeezing her hand. Silence filled the room, and all Claire could hear was the sound of their breathing.

“Will you go back to Jon then, if he’ll have you?” Randy asked finally, and the question surprised her because she hadn’t even considered it an option at the moment.

“No,” she said. “I just want to be with Claire for a while.”

“Well, I admire you for that,” he said. “And I’m selfishly very glad. I hope that means I can still see you. Can we still be friends?”

The thought of not seeing him hadn’t even crossed her mind. “I’m counting on it,” she said. She let go of his hand, folding her own hands together in her lap. “But right now, I think I’d better move to the bed in the guest room.”

He nodded, a look of resignation on his face. “If you insist,” he said.

She got out of the bed and let out a long breath, as if she’d just endured some taxing physical challenge. “I love you, friend,” she said, leaning over to kiss his cheek. “Thank you.”