Brass Ring (22 page)

“Please don’t talk that way. I said I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to do.” There were tears in her eyes, but they didn’t spill onto her cheeks. “What can I do, Jon?”

He sighed and leaned back in the chair. “Can you make the old Claire come back?” he asked. “The Claire who was always dependable and who gave a shit about her work?”

Claire pressed her fingertips to her lips and stood up. She walked over to the window and pulled the wispy curtain aside to look out. “I wish I could,” she said without turning around. “I miss her, too. I’m not intentionally trying to screw up. My life doesn’t seem to be in my control anymore and I—”

“Bullshit.” He saw her start, the way she had when she’d heard the noise in the hallway. She didn’t turn around, though. She remained a dark, featureless silhouette against the backdrop of the window. “Whose control is it in, then?” he asked. “Do you hear yourself? What would you say to one of your patients if they started talking that way, huh?”

She didn’t speak, and Jon finally slit open his muffin, buttered it, and took a bite. He had nearly finished it when she returned to the table and sat down.

“I know this isn’t the time,” she said, her voice so soft he could barely hear her. Her eyes were lowered to her lap. “I know you’re furious with me right now, but I want to tell you what’s been happening to me lately.”

Her voice chilled him. Tested him. She was waiting to see if he would hold tight to his anger or let it go, at least for the moment, to give her something she seemed to need desperately. He remembered her crying last night, and the memory took the edge off his rage.

He rested his napkin on the table. “What do you mean?” he asked.

Claire picked up her own still-folded napkin and began playing with it, twisting one corner. “Well, these strange little images keep popping into my mind,” she said. “Tiny little snippets. They’re probably nothing, but they scare me.”

What was she talking about? “What kind of images?”

He listened as she described a bloodstain on a piece of porcelain. The image would slip into her mind unexpectedly, she said, and it made her feel dizzy and sick. Then she told him about small mirrors filled with green.

“Remember when we were riding to the play and I held my purse against the window?”

He nodded. He remembered it vaguely.

“It was happening then. I put up my purse so I couldn’t see the mirror.” She looked down at the napkin she was twisting in her lap. “Weird, huh?” she said, and he saw her struggling to smile.

He leaned forward until his fingers touched her knee. “Why haven’t you told me this was going on?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I was hoping they’d go away, but they haven’t. Randy thinks it might be something from the past. I have no idea what it could be, but I do think I have some gaps in my memory, Jon.” She looked at him as though this idea had just occurred to her, and he sat up straight, immediately alert.

“Why do you think that?” he asked.

“Well, you know how I always talk about the carousel and how wonderful my childhood was?”

He nodded. Yes, he knew.

“Well, Randy was asking me things like, how did I feel when Vanessa left? How did Mellie react? And I don’t remember. I was ten when Vanessa left. I should remember something about it, but I don’t. I only remember Mellie saying that we’d see her again soon, but—”

“Mellie was
crazy
,” Jon interrupted her. He had never said those words to her before, although he’d thought them often enough.

“Well, she wasn’t crazy. She just, you know, had her own way of handling things.”

Yes, indeed she had. Mellie had lived with them during the last three months of her life, ten years ago. She’d been terminally ill with lung cancer, yet even then, even in those terrible last stages, she wouldn’t admit to being seriously ill. She had a chronic cough, she would tell visitors. A chronic cough, she would even tell herself. Mellie had a way of twisting the truth to keep everyone smiling. Jon realized back then that Claire had the same dubious skill, and that she’d come by it honestly. Probably unhealthy as hell. But now that she seemed to be losing that ability, he missed it.

“Well, anyhow, Randy doesn’t buy it that only good things happened to me. He tried to push me to—”

“Don’t let him push you into anything, Claire. Come on. You probably had a dream sometime that you don’t remember and these are just little images from the dream. Nothing more than that.”

She had twisted the napkin into a long pink snake, and she raised it to the table. He pried her hand from it, squeezed her fingers.

“Please listen to me,” he said. “You were a happy, satisfied woman before this thing with Margot happened. At least I think you were, am I right?”

“Yes,” she said. “Absolutely.”

“And I know it takes time to get over that sort of trauma, but it seems to me that by seeing Randy—Margot’s
brother
, for heaven’s sake—you can never really put the whole thing behind you.” He recognized the self-serving element to this argument but forgave himself for it. Spending time with Randy was hurting her, he was certain of it. Those little snippets she was talking about shook him up. They were small things, simple things. Maybe they actually were from a dream. Or maybe they were from
the
gaps in Claire’s memory, the existence of which she could only guess at but which he knew for a fact. He had long taken comfort in Claire’s selective memory. “If you’d forget about Randy and Margot and put your energy into work or planning a vacation or
anything
, then maybe everything else would fall into place.” He wondered if she heard the urgency in his voice.

She lowered her gaze to the table, nodding slowly. “You’re probably right,” she said. “When I’m not in the middle of one of those…flashbacks…it’s easy for me to imagine they’ll just disappear one of these days. Or that I’m making too much of them. I probably am.” Her smile was very weak, and he felt a crack in the armor around his heart. He had to remind himself she had come here last night. She’d driven an hour to sleep with him. She could have spent the night with Randy, and he never would have known. But she hadn’t. She’d wanted to be with
him
. Randy was a friend, as she’d said. A friend who didn’t seem afraid to challenge Claire’s blindly optimistic attitude toward life. Randy wouldn’t have let the tears she’d cried in bed last night go unexamined.

HE WAS SORTING HIS
papers for that morning’s session as she was preparing to leave. He watched her pack her overnight case on the bed. There was a heaviness in her shoulders he had never seen before. He wheeled over to the bed as she zipped the case closed. He reached for her hand, and she sat down on the edge of the bed, facing him.

“I’m sorry we fought,” he said.

“And I’m sorry about Gil. Really, I am.”

“I know.” He stroked his thumb across her palm. “I think we need to make some changes,” he said. “Do you think we could do something fun together? Besides planning a vacation, I mean? We need to make it a point to get some fun back in our lives. When was the last time, Claire? I can’t even remember.”

She smiled wryly. “I thought last night was kinda fun.”

He returned the smile, squeezed her knee. “Yes, it was. But you know what I mean. When you said you and Randy went to the museum, I felt—”

“Hurt.”

“Yes. Left out.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t think about that.”

“So, could we do something like we used to?”

“Yes,” she said. “We can each think about what we’d like to do, then compare lists and decide on something.”

She was trying to put some cheer in her voice and failing badly. Her heart wouldn’t be in this, he thought.

“All right.” He leaned forward to kiss her. “I love you, Harte.”

“You too, Mathias.”

She gathered up her overnight case and her purse and headed for the door. He watched her leave the room, then wheeled immediately to the phone.

He was relieved to find Pat Wykowski at home. “I want to run a hypothetical situation by you,” he said.

“Shoot.” Pat was cooking something. Pots and pans rattled in the background.

He ran his fingers over the keypad on the phone. “Let’s say that Party A doesn’t remember something that happened to him or her in the past—something bad—and Party B knows what happened. Should Party B tell Party A what he or she knows?”

“This does not sound like the sort of thing that would come up at an accessibility conference,” Pat said.

“So what’s the answer?”

Pat hesitated a moment. “Well, there are differing theories, but I’d say that Party A has blocked those things for a reason. It’s probably a good healthy defense mechanism and Party B should keep his or her trap shut.”

Jon looked out the window, wondering if he’d presented the situation accurately. “But what if Party A is beginning to have disturbing…flashes of memory seeping into his or her head which may or may not be related to what Party B knows?”

“If the memories are interfering with Party A’s functioning, then Party A better get his butt into therapy—with someone competent— and figure out what’s going on. But he has to uncover that sort of stuff on his own time frame. Party B needs to trust A’s little psyche to feed the information to him at a pace he can tolerate.”

Something fell, clattering, on Pat’s end of the line, and she muttered to herself before speaking into the phone once more.

“Come on,” she prodded, “who are we talking about? If it’s one of our patients, I should know about—”

“It’s not,” he said. “Don’t push me on it, Pat, okay?”

She sighed. “Okay. Well, I’m making low-fat spinach bran muffins. I’ll bring you one tomorrow.”

He grimaced at the thought. “Can’t wait,” he said. They talked about the conference for another minute or two before ending their conversation.

After hanging up the phone, Jon sat still for a minute, looking out the window, disappointed and at the same time relieved. He wanted to help Claire, yet he couldn’t imagine hurting her with what he knew.

He stared out at the distant harbor, a quiet fury building inside him until it suddenly exploded. He pounded his fist on the wheel of his chair.
God damn you, Mellie
, he thought.
Now look what you’ve done.

SEATTLE

THE PHONE CALLS WERE
getting to her.

Vanessa arrived in her office after rounds to find three message slips on her desk and the phone ringing. She didn’t pick it up. The receptionist would answer it and write out another message slip, which she would ignore for as long as possible.

When she’d put together the network years ago, she’d hand-selected the most motivated, dynamic, and committed people she knew in the adolescent medicine world. Yet even she couldn’t have predicted the current level of energy and enthusiasm in that geographically scattered group. Once word had gotten out that help might be available in the sympathetic form of Senator Zed Patterson, members of the network, desperate to keep their programs alive, sprang into action.

And it seemed as though they’d all decided to begin with a phone call to her. She knew they viewed her as the leader of this fight, and she was trying to come up with a subtle way to shift the focus to Terri Roos, or to anyone willing to take it on. How obvious would it be if she were to take an entirely passive role in the battle? She simply had to extract herself from this mess as best she could for the sake of her health, both mental and physical. She was doing all right during her waking hours; the headaches were better, and her temper was under control at work. Once she was asleep, though, the control was snatched from her hands. The real Vanessa Gray— Vanessa
Harte
—emerged at night. The scared and helpless little girl on the carousel.

Her own AMC program would still reap the benefits of any positive change, whether she was active in the fight or not. She would have to come up with some logical-sounding excuse, though, and right now she couldn’t imagine what that might be. She only knew that she could tell no one the truth behind her refusal to deal with Patterson.

She moved the message slips to one side of her desk and opened the chart she’d carried with her from rounds. Shelley Collier. The anorexic who, after four weeks in the eating disorders program, should have been ready for discharge by now. She studied the results of the girl’s most recent tests, a frown on her face. The numbers were not good and made little sense. Pete Aldrich had reported that, despite the fact that they’d taken away her laxatives, forced her to eat, and didn’t allow her to exercise or use the bathroom after meals, Shelley continued to lose weight.

Vanessa leafed through the chart. Was there some other disease process at work here? Or were they missing something obvious?

She had a sudden hunch. She’d seen a case like this once before. Getting up from her desk, she tucked the chart under her arm and left her office.

The housekeeper was emptying the trash basket in one of the private rooms when Vanessa found her.

“May I speak with you a minute?” She motioned the woman out into the hall.

The housekeeper pulled off one of her plastic gloves to brush a strand of dark hair from her forehead, then followed Vanessa out of the room. She stood next to her supply cart, waiting expectantly.

“This may seem like an odd question,” Vanessa said, “but can you tell me how often you fill the soap dispenser in room six-oh-one?”

The housekeeper looked at her quizzically. “Funny you ask that,” she said. “I’ve noticed that I have to fill that one three or four times more often than in the other kids’ bathrooms.”

Vanessa had to smile. Her hunch had been right. “Thank you,” she said. She was about to turn away when she decided she owed the housekeeper an explanation. “The patient in that room is drinking the soap,” she said simply. “Making herself a little laxative cocktail.”

The housekeeper grimaced, then shook her head. “These kids.” She turned to extract another glove from the box on her cart, muttering to herself. “Crazier every year.”

At the nurses’ station, Vanessa shared what she’d learned with Shelley’s nurse, adding that the girl would need to be watched in the shower as well as after meals. They would help Shelley Collier in spite of herself.