Brass Ring (32 page)

“No, though I’m not sure I can.” Other than the scraps she’d nibbled as she put together the casseroles, she hadn’t eaten all day.

His kitchen surprised her with its bright white cabinets, but in all other ways it reflected Randy’s taste. Gleaming copper pots and utensils hung suspended from the ceiling; the spice racks ran the length of one counter, and the spices were arranged alphabetically. The floor was hardwood—dark oak—and a massive butcher block island rested in the exact center of the room. Everything was in order. Not a crumb on the counter.

The copper glow of the pots and pans filled the room with a soft light. Randy had made chicken in wine sauce. She surprised herself by having two servings, and she smiled at him across the table as she ate, aware of the comfort she felt with him, comfort that had been missing in her life during the two weeks she’d cut herself off from him.

“I made the bed in the guest room,” he said when they were nearly finished eating. “I’d much prefer that you spent the night with me, but I seem to recall a comment about me being your long-lost brother, or whatever.” He gave her a rueful smile. “I don’t think sleeping with me is what you’re after, unfortunately.”

“The guest room will be perfect,” she said.

Climbing the stairs to the second floor, she felt a wave of homesickness, which she quickly swept from her mind. She got a glimpse of Randy’s bedroom as she walked through the upstairs hall toward the guest room. His room was dimly lit from some unseen source. A sleigh bed, unmade but not disheveled, curved gracefully along the far wall. The sheets and comforter were a green paisley print that seemed to fit both the room and Randy. Dark. So dark she could barely see the pattern in the fabric from the distance of the hallway.

The guest room was also bathed in pale light from the yellow-shaded lamp on the night table. The bed here was brass; the spread, a patchwork of creams and peaches. She set her suitcase on a trunk in the corner.

“Do you need anything?” Randy asked from the doorway.

“No,” she said. “This is great.”

She felt sleepy as she climbed into the high bed, but the moment her head touched the pillow, the sirens and hammering and screaming filled her ears again. She sat up, startled, and the sounds began to fade. Drawing back the gauzy curtain at the window next to the bed, she stared out at the parking lot. The wet macadam was shiny with moonlight.

Once her breathing had returned to normal, she lowered herself beneath the covers again. Thoughts of Jon tried to slip into her consciousness, but she fought them off by naming the states in alphabetical order, then the capitals. She had nearly bored herself to sleep when the sound of hammering struck again. The bloody towel blew across her vision like the sail of an ill-fated ship. This time, she jumped out of bed, the strange room twirling around her as she pulled on her robe, and she shivered as she slipped down the hall to Randy’s room.

His door was open, his room lit now by moonlight. She knocked on the open door, feeling foolish.

Randy rolled onto his back. “Claire?” he asked.

She hugged her arms across her chest. “Who else would bug you in the middle of the night because she’s seeing things that aren’t there. And hearing things. The sirens and—”

Randy threw back the comforter. He got out of bed, reaching for the robe draped over the footboard. He had nothing on, and the moonlight captured the lines of his body in sharp detail. Claire turned her head away.

He was wearing a blue robe as he walked from the room. “Come on.” He nodded toward the end of the hall, and she followed him into a small dark room where she could just make out a sofa and some large piece of exercise equipment.

They sat down on the sofa together, and he put his arm around

her.

“Tell me,” he said.

She raised her feet to the sofa, covered them with her robe. “I keep hearing those sounds from that dream this morning,” she said. “And seeing this bloody towel.”

“What bloody towel?”

“I don’t know. It’s white. It’s hanging on a towel rack and it’s…” For some reason, the towel made her think of Italy. “You know, I don’t think this fits into the other flashbacks. I think maybe this is something I saw when I was in Italy one time. I have no memory of ever seeing it there, but I don’t have a memory of anything else either, so why should that be any different?”

“What makes you think you saw it in Italy?”

“I don’t know. Just a feeling.”

“Maybe it’s tomato sauce and not blood.”

That made her laugh; it was such a wondrously hopeful thought. Perhaps all her fragments of memory were no more than the distorted creations of a mind that had suffered too much excitement on the Harpers Ferry bridge.

“I’m still curious about the hammering,” he said. “Who’s doing it? And how do you know it’s a crate they’re hammering?” He questioned her for a while, and she tried to let the sounds slip into her mind again, but they were subtle, barely there, as if they had run their course for the night. They offered her little in the way of answers.

“I’m not hiding from the sounds,” she said, more to herself than to Randy. “But I don’t think I can force them.”

She closed her eyes as silence filled the room. The scent of pipe tobacco was mixed with something else in here, something pleasing. A scented candle, perhaps. Or potpourri.

“Claire.” Randy spoke quietly, and she turned her head so she could see him.

“Yes?”

He ran his hand slowly across her face, then lifted her chin with his fingers as he kissed her. The kiss was slow. Dizzyingly slow, and it stopped only to start again. Claire barely felt it, though. Her mind burned with confusion. Should she allow this or not? She didn’t want it, but he did. So badly. Yet she couldn’t lead him to think that she shared that need.

“Randy.” She lifted her fingers to his lips, shifted her head away from his.

He nodded. “Right. Sorry.”

“I know I’m asking a lot of you,” she said. “I like it when you hold me and comfort me. I seem to need that. But I don’t want more than that, and I know I’m being unfair to—”

“I’m a big boy, Claire,” he said. “Let it be my problem.”

“All right.” She lowered her feet to the floor and stood up slowly. Bending over, she hugged him lightly. “Thank you.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said as she left the room, and she turned to smile at him.

“So am I,” she said.

It was cold in the guest room. She hadn’t noticed the temperature before, but now the chill made her pull the blanket and spread up to her chin.

Jon
.

Alone with her thoughts, defenses down, he was there. She squeezed her eyes closed, thinking back to that morning when he’d told her to leave, his voice firm, absolute. Would he be able to sleep tonight, alone in the bed they’d shared for so long? Was he thinking about her, here with Randy? He probably thought she was sleeping with Randy. She touched her lips where Randy had kissed her, and her eyes filled.

Oh Jon, don’t think about this. Don’t. Take a sleeping pill. Lose yourself in sleep, sweetheart, please.

She crawled as far beneath the covers as she could get, but no matter how closely she wrapped the blanket around herself, she could still feel the cool air of the room against her skin.

IN THE MORNING, SHE
found a container of egg substitute in Randy’s refrigerator, along with green and red peppers and an onion, and while he showered, she made him an omelette. His heart wouldn’t suffer at her hands.

She was pouring a bowl of cereal for herself when he walked into the kitchen. He was wearing the blue terry-cloth robe he’d had on the night before and carrying the
Washington Post
in its plastic bag. Wet from a shower, his brown hair looked very dark, and he had combed it back from his face. She was struck by his handsomeness.

“Good morning.” She smiled. “I’ve made you a fantastic breakfast.”

He glanced at the frying pan. “Looks good.” Sitting down at the small oak table in the corner, he rested the paper on the broad window ledge. There was a quiet restraint to him, something she couldn’t quite read.

She transferred the omelette to a plate and set it on the table in front of him, wincing as he automatically reached for the pepper without even tasting the eggs first.

“I was thinking about your living situation,” he said, looking up at her. “The guest room is yours whenever you want it, except when Cary’s here. And he’s coming this afternoon, I’m afraid. It’s my weekend to have him, and I don’t want him to meet you. Not yet, anyhow. It would confuse him.”

She sat down across from him with her bowl of cereal. “You could just introduce me as a friend,” she suggested.

Randy shook his head. “No.” He set down his fork and reached across the table for her hand. “Listen to me, please. I’m very”—he looked away from her, struggling to find a word—”very uptight about all of this. I feel like I’m the cause of you and Jon splitting up.”

“You’re not the cause. I am.”

“And I feel like I’m taking a big risk with you. Letting myself care about you, get close to you, when I don’t know that you’ll ever want the same sort of relationship with me that I want with you. Whether you do or not, I’m willing to take that risk for myself, but I’m not willing to put Cary in that position. All right?”

She was touched by his concern for his son. “All right.” She picked at her cereal. “Will I ever get to meet him?” she asked.

He cut into the omelette with the side of his fork. “I hope so. Once I feel as though I can explain your existence to him clearly.”

“Kids are more resilient than you think.” She smiled at him. “He’ll be fine. Does he like museums? Maybe someday we could—”

Randy suddenly grabbed her wrist, and she dropped her spoon into the bowl.

“You’re not listening to me,” he said, his voice more gentle than his actions would suggest. “I’m upset, Claire. Please stop talking as though there’s nothing wrong. Please don’t wear your fake smile when you’re with me. Everything is not fine. Things are screwed up, and that’s just the way life is sometimes and you have to deal with it. If you pretend things are fine, nothing ever gets fixed.”

She drew her hand away from him and lowered it to her lap. A cold fear swept over her like a blanket of snow, and she knew she had wanted something from Randy she had no right to ask for. She wanted to be taken care of, to take care of him, to move into a new life without concern for the old. She was good at turning a messy situation into one that sparkled with possibilities. It was, perhaps, her one real skill.

“This is the only way I know how to be.” She felt the tremor in her lower lip and struggled to still it. She wouldn’t be needy with him. She wouldn’t be pathetic. “If you take away my optimism, I won’t have anything left. I’ll just be a scared, crazy woman with a bunch of scary, crazy memories.”

“That’s crap. You’re courageous as hell.”

“No, I—”

“Hey, Claire.” He cut her off, his fingers touching her hand again. “Remember the woman who went out on the bridge with my sister? She was a real chickenshit, wasn’t she?”

She smiled, shrugging. Then she straightened her spine with determination. “Okay,” she said. “So how do I find a place to live?”

Randy pulled the newspaper from its plastic bag and handed her the classified section. She felt teary again as she opened the paper to Rentals, and the print blurred on the page. She read him the ads, and by the time they were through with breakfast, she had circled several—small apartments in private homes, mostly, where she wouldn’t have to sign a year’s lease.

Randy had commented on the ads as she read them—”good part of town,” “too far from me,” “a lot of traffic noise”—but it was apparent that, with Cary’s imminent visit, he wouldn’t be able to accompany her when she went to look at the apartments.

“What are you doing?” he asked, wearing a half-smile, half-frown as he pointed to the paper.

She looked down. She had covered the margins of the paper with that strange, reverse-S doodle she’d been drawing for weeks. Every blank piece of paper on or around her desk at the foundation had been graced by it.

She shrugged. “It’s a new compulsion,” she said as she shifted her eyes back to the ads, where the tiny print taunted her with enticing descriptions of things she didn’t want. She watched Randy as he stood up and began loading the dishwasher. His back was broad. She wouldn’t recognize him from this angle on the street. What was she doing here?

It would all fall into place, she told herself, folding the newspaper carefully in half. Everything would fall, neatly and comfortably, into place.

VIENNA

CLAIRE SAT ON THE
lumpy sofa in the small efficiency apartment, eyeing her surroundings. She’d been sitting there for thirty minutes, possibly an hour, although the entire contents of the apartment could have been memorized in a few seconds’ time.

The apartment was charmless, although it was attached to a lovely old, noble white colonial on a quiet street no more than a mile from her own house in Vienna. The woman who owned the colonial had been surprised that Claire wanted to move into the apartment that very day, that very minute. She’d eyed her with such suspicion that Claire went to the bank in order to give the woman the first month’s rent in cash. Money was not a problem; she had access to all the accounts she shared with Jon. There was a part of her, though, that felt as if she were playing a game when she turned the rent over to her new landlady. A month? In these two little rooms? Who was she trying to kid?

The rooms were furnished, barely. Besides the sofa, there was a small wrought-iron, glass-topped table and three matching chairs, which looked as if they’d been purloined from an ice cream parlor. Folding doors opened to reveal a stove, microwave, refrigerator, and sink. The second room, separated from the first by louvered doors, held a double bed with an ancient but pretty rattan headboard and a matching rattan dresser. The closet was surprisingly large, but the

bathroom had barely enough room in which to turn around. Everything was spotlessly clean, though. That’s what sold her on the apartment. No sign of previous tenants. She didn’t feel as though she was following in the footsteps of a string of miserable, displaced people who had no more than these two lifeless rooms to call their own.