Ring of Truth (35 page)

“I did for about thirty seconds that first day before we started talking. He sized me up in minutes. With me, he's always been the honest one, the fearless one. If he wants to see me now, it's because he wants me to be that way too.”

He looked to her for explanation.

“Let's go find him. You'll see.”

They had no trouble finding Eddie's room. People on the hospital staff greeted Jack and pointed the way. Most offered to look in on his brother in the heart unit.

In Eddie's room Jack checked his chart.

“How do I look, doc?” Eddie leaned back against the pillows of the raised bed surrounded by blinking machines that hummed and beeped. Someone had combed the leaves out of his hair.

“You're hooked up to an IV wearing a hospital gown—you've looked worse. What were you thinking?”

“Desperate times call for desperate measures.” Eddie didn't lift his head, but he looked closely at them. “I got you two together.”

They nodded in sync, and Jack pulled her against his side.
Ooh, it felt good to be there.

Eddie looked straight at her. “Did you tell him the truth?”

“I plan to. How did you know?”

“About your phony Mr. Wright? Mr. Wrong, I'd say. Give me some credit for brains, girl. All the time you were sending Justin around the globe, you never looked like a woman who was giving or getting any loving.”

“Wait.” Jack turned Tara's face up to his. “There's no Justin?”

“So there's a look?” Tara tilted her head toward Eddie, trying to keep her cool, but Jack's expression did unsettling things to her female parts.

“There's a glow.” Eddie reached out his hand with its orange plastic ID strip and IV port. “Show me that ring.”

Tara offered him her hand. Jack watched her closely.

“There we go.” Eddie's excitement caused his bed to beep like a backing truck. “That's the ticket. Look at that thing, lit up like a ballpark for a night game.”

They got the bed to stop beeping, and as they turned to leave, Eddie called out, “Hey, get my brother into bed. He's exhausted.”

Good idea.

***

Tara had no trouble convincing Jack to come to her place. He stumbled over the threshold, caught himself, and apologized for falling asleep in the cab. He had spent the previous night going from ER to ER in his search for Eddie. Inside she steered him through her little living room and into the bedroom. She pushed him and he collapsed on the bed. “Sleep,” she commanded.

“I will, but don't think I've forgotten that there's no Justin and that you have explaining to do.”

“It can wait until morning.”

His eyes drifted down. “I'm not sleeping alone.”

“You're not?”

He reached out and snagged her hand. “No more elevator doors closing or ambulances driving off. You're with me now.”

“I am,” she confirmed, and let him pull her down on the bed. He rolled her into his embrace and kissed her thoroughly until she felt his arms go slack as sleep claimed him.

He woke once more as Tara was arranging a quilt over him, and took hold of her hand. “We won't make love until you're ready, but if you could feel ready by tomorrow, that would not be too soon.”

***

When Tara came out of her kitchen in the morning, she found Jack in her window seat, examining Bingo with the same attentive, curious touch he'd used on Eddie. She felt suddenly awkward with her untold truth and the desire he'd confessed about wanting to make love to her.

“Tell me about the fire,” he said. He patted the bench beside him. She had forgotten that she'd mentioned the fire to him. She started to sit primly on the edge of the bench, but he pulled her into his arms, so that she leaned back against him, nestled between his legs. She admired his bare feet.

 “I was eleven,” she began and then could hardly stop. The story tumbled out of her from the first wisp of smoke to their last visit to the ashy ruins of their house. His arms held her the whole time.

“Did you get a new bike?”

She shook her head. “My mother said I could make a list of twenty-five things I'd lost, for the insurance claim. I kept playing with the list, remembering things. In the end, I didn't put the bike on the list. I didn't think I would ride it in the city.”

“And this guy?” He held her bear. “Why did you pick him?”

“Oh, Bingo didn't come from the fire. He was here with my grandmother. She had given him to me one Christmas, and I'd rejected him for not matching my fantasy of a talking animal friend.”

“So he was here after the fire.” Jack pulled the string on Bingo's back, and his recorded voice said,
I want a hug.

“He was the Justin of my childhood.” It was the closest she had come to the truth she still had to tell him.

“Ah.” He put the bear aside and closed his arms around her, holding her, waiting. She didn't know how much he'd figured out, but the moment had come.

“There is no Justin. I made him up.”

“What do you mean, you made him up?”

“He's a fiction. I was no good at dating. It felt so up and down, like investing in an emotional stock market, where I was bound to lose every time. I'd come home from a date with my hopes raised and a text would dash them the next time I looked at my phone. Even if I had five dates in a row with the same man, the whole relationship would suddenly collapse with no explanation. I decided to invent a romance that went the way it should go.”

She should feel mortified at the revelation of the lie, the silly pretense that she'd clung to for so long, but she felt free, as if she'd stepped out of hiding into the open. She waited a suspended heartbeat for Jack to speak.

“So what was Justin like?”

And just like that, Jack let her know that he understood.

“Why do you want to know?”

“I just want to know what I'm up against. What if he was a Justin Timberlake clone, or a super chef?”

“He did dance. He took me to lots of great restaurants. He sent me my favorite chocolates and flowers. Are you worried?”

“No. If that's all he's got, I think I've got the edge, a secret advantage.” His arms tightened around her.

“What?” She twisted in his hold to look at him.

“I'll tell you later.” He took her hand in his. “So where did the ring come from?”

From the window ledge she took the red box and handed it to him. He opened it and read the little paper. She leaned back against his shoulder. The parrots arrived and set up their squawking.

He lifted the hand that wore the ring and kissed the green stone. “I owe this little heart a lot.”

Later they took the muni across town to feed Jack's dog, a yellow lab, whom Jack introduced as his secret advantage. Watson squirmed to be petted by Jack, and Tara understood how the dog felt to be on the receiving end of Jack's touch. Jack sent an email to his partner about some contest he had to bow out of. He showered and changed into jeans and a sweater while Tara explored his apartment and befriended his dog. Then they walked Watson and visited Eddie, who was sitting up, eating, and making plans to get out of the hospital as quick as he could. He and Carol, the night nurse, were great friends. One of the aides, Lynn, had helped him wash his hair and shave, and he winked at Tara and vowed to make a conquest of the no-nonsense day nurse, Barbara.

Then Jack proposed kayaking, and somehow Tara agreed, floating along without any resistance to his plans on a current of happiness, until they actually stood on the dock looking down into the bright yellow shell bobbing in the water.

Jack took in the doubtful look on her face. “It's a kayak. My kayak.”

“I know what it is.” What had she agreed to? She realized she stood between him and a floating coffee stirrer. A surfboard was wider. She clutched her bag to her chest.

“You can't take a cargo container on a kayak.”

“Are you referring to my bag?”

“That's not a bag. It's a storage locker. You don't need it. You can never lose the things you keep in your heart.”

She glanced over her shoulder. He understood her so well. “What happens if the thing tips over?”

“We get wet.”

“What about sharks and hypothermia and drowning?”

“Try not to let them spoil the fun.”

“Seriously, there must be safety lessons.”

“There are. You learn to roll with the—”

“—punches?”

“Actually,” he took her by the hips, “the thing you have to learn is called a hip snap.” His hands applied a gentle pressure, and she felt her hips tip as if she were doing a Hawaiian dance, then back. “Only quicker. Under water.”

His hands on her hips almost made her forget that they could drown. Then she remembered. And something more, something she'd locked away and kept inside for so long that she'd forgotten it was there, something that she had denied for far too long, had to come out.

“Wait. There is something I have to say before... before we take off.”

“I'm listening.”

He looked so good then, so real and honest and brave. She liked the way the faint brightness of sun through the fog brought out the squint lines around his eyes and the way the cold air pressed the worn denim of his jeans against his lean, muscled legs. There was a risk she had to take, a hope she had to go for.

She put her bag down on the dock. “People can say what they like about marriage as a failed institution. Moms and dads can divorce each other. Novelists can write that marriage is the ‘death of self and possibility.' But I want it. I want a dog and a porch, and a bicycle and babies. I want a union of true hearts, friendship, loyalty, and love, like this crazy ring.” She waved the ring in front of his face.

Jack caught her by the shoulders in a tight grip. “Are you proposing to me?”

A distant foghorn sounded its deep bass note. A gull cried. Tara laughed. “No. You are supposed to propose to me.”

“Well, then, Tara Keegan, you'd better stop talking so I can get on with it.”

“Wait. You can't be proposing to me. We've known each other less than three days.”

“Listen to your heart.” He released her shoulders and took her hand, the hand with the magic ring and pressed it close to her heart, and closed his own big warm hand over hers.

She closed her eyes and let the sounds of the city around her fade into the white nothing of the fog itself, opening her ears for that inner voice, the one she couldn't quite hear whenever she demanded that the ring speak. But under the ring where she felt its ridge against her chest, she felt her own heart beat. When she opened her eyes, he was still there, real and solid, even though everything around them was as insubstantial as mist.

“Do you want to know why I can propose to you?”

She nodded.

“Because even though you expect disaster and carry more gear than went down with the Titanic, you are incapable of not helping people, incapable of walking away from the truly helpless. And when I'm with you, I'm alive. I'm not just going through the motions. Are you ready now?”

She could only nod.

Jack took her hand and knelt on the wet boards of the dock. “Tara Keegan, I love you. Will you marry me?”

She nodded, and Jack pulled her down into a kiss. It was a Jack kiss, the kind she was beginning to know, a kiss that could face anything, lose anything, and still believe in goodness and happy endings, a kiss to build a life on. When she opened her eyes, there were no rose petals, no tower views, no musicians, or bottles of champagne, only a man's steady blue eyes and an extraordinary green flash.

In the end they did not drown or get eaten by sharks. Tara did not learn the hip snap, but Jack promised they would work on it.

Tara left her bed. Jack did not move. He lay on his stomach, his dark hair tousled, his jaw shadowed, lashes down over those blue eyes. He looked so at home in her bed. She checked the ring on her finger.
Yep, it glowed brightly.

In minutes she had her running clothes on, gray, cropped T-shirt, black yoga pants, and a favorite red sweatshirt tied around her hips. She gathered her phone and her keys and retrieved the burgundy ring box from the window seat. It was time to pass the Claddagh on to another woman. She didn't know how she knew, but she knew. She stopped to write Jack a quick note explaining that she'd be back with coffee and a treat. She felt his scrutiny and looked up.

“You have no idea what you do to me,” he said.

They had made love twice the night before, but she started to pull the cropped top down over her rounded belly.

“Don't!” She froze at the intensity of the command.

Jack threw back the covers and rolled out of bed, crossing to her, grabbing her, and whirling her around in his arms. He put her down and cupped her belly in one hand. She loved his hands. “That's one of the happy parts of you.”

“Happy?”

“Well, all of you makes me happy.”

Several distracting kisses later, she pushed back in his arms.

“Where are you off to?” He glanced at her unfinished note and the box.

“Well, a morning run, but...” She held out her ring hand. He would understand. “It feels as if I should start looking for the next woman who needs the ring.”

“Ah.” She could see he approved of the idea. He let her go, and she stepped back. She tugged on the ring, and it slipped easily from her finger. For a moment her finger looked naked.

Jack took her hand in his. “You know I am grateful to that ring, but now...” his thumb and forefinger encircled her ring finger...”there's a space for my ring, the one we pick out together.” Jack's smile made her blink like looking into bright sun. His thumb caught the moisture from her eyes.

She gave the ring a kiss for luck, placed it back in its well-worn box, and tucked the box in the pouch of her sweatshirt.

Leaving her grandmother's place, Tara headed down Hyde to Aquatic Park and turned east. Passing through the touristy Fisherman's Wharf area until she reached the long curving sweep of the Embarcadero, she felt so light she could run forever.

A tangerine sun was coming up on her left over the Oakland hills, healed now from the fire, and the windows on the hill on her right were catching the light in a coppery blaze of morning. She felt so alive as if she were really seeing people, seeing the world. She kept an eye out for that woman who needed the ring. She wasn't sure she would recognize her. It was early, and there were few people about, but Tara had certainly learned to trust the ring. She had not understood how it worked at first in spite of the carefully worded instructions. She had been skeptical and demanding, only gradually discovering how the ring opened her up to listen to her own heart.

Now she knew that when the moment was right, there would be someone who needed to learn from it, as she had learned. For her the lessons had been about letting go. She had had to let go of all the past hurts and fears that she had been carrying in her absurdly heavy bag. She had had to let go of the protective fantasy of Justin Wright. She had had to let go of her perfect job. And she had had to do it all without any guarantees. That was how hope worked. Now she had a last bit of letting go to do, letting go of the ring. It would pass to someone else, but Jack had taught her the secret of letting go—that the things one kept in one's heart could never get lost.

She could see a white and blue Marin ferry approaching across the bay and thought she would take a look at the passengers as they disembarked, so she angled to the left along the water, and halted on the wharf side of the Ferry Building to watch the crowd hurrying to work. She realized that the ring was still guiding her.

And suddenly there she was. Tara knew her instantly, the one who must receive the Claddagh. And she realized the final lesson of the ring, that it would keep on giving, that the miracle would be repeated. Tara smiled and knew that her smile was, like the one she had received from the woman at the cable car stop, the smile of a woman who knew her own heart.

*********