Brass Ring (36 page)

“No one ever let you cry over him when you were a kid. It’s about time, I’d say.”

“He just…he loved Vanessa more than he loved me.” She shrugged. “She was beautiful. She looked like my mother. It makes sense.”

Randy put his arms around her and held her tightly. “Yeah,” he said. “And it makes sense you would have resented the hell out of her for it, too.”

“But I didn’t. I was a little jealous, maybe. She was so pretty, and—”

“Do you have any pictures of her?”

Claire started to shake her head, but caught herself. Where were they, those pictures? In the attic somewhere?

She leaned away from Randy. “Yes,” she said, “I do. I have pictures of everyone.”

JEREMY, PENNSYLVANIA

1964

CLAIRE AND MELLIE ARRIVED
at the farm shortly after ten on a mild March morning. They’d sung songs the entire four-hour drive from Virginia, but Mellie’s usual energy was lacking. She couldn’t remember the words to “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” for example, and she made Claire come up with nearly every one of the songs they sang.

Mellie had insisted that Claire come with her, even though it meant missing her best friend’s twelfth birthday party. There would be other parties, Mellie had said, and that was certainly true. Claire was invited everywhere. She had many friends, and the parents of her friends adored her. “She’s such a positive girl,” they’d say. “So agreeable all the time.”

It was strange to see the farm in March. Although the air was on the warm side, patches of white still dotted the field, and snow lay in a blanket on the shaded side of the big white house. Claire only glanced at the barn as she and Mellie pulled their suitcases from the trunk of the car. She didn’t want to think about the barn. She had to keep reminding herself that they would never be here again in the summer. In fact, this was probably the last time she would ever see the farm at all.

As odd as it was to be at the farm in winter, it was stranger still to be inside the house without Dora Siparo’s chatter to greet them. Claire had gotten used to not having her grandfather around, but she’d thought her grandmother would live forever. Dora had only been fifty-eight years old and had never been sick a day in her life.

Claire had stared at her mother in utter disbelief when Mellie told her what had happened. “Grandma passed peacefully in her sleep,” Mellie had said. “Wasn’t she lucky to go that way, precious? If I ever die, that’s certainly how I’d like to go.”

Mellie stood in the big farmhouse kitchen and looked around the room, hands on her hips. The table where Claire and Vanessa had drunk so many cups of weak coffee was littered with recipe cards and baking pans, as if Dora had been struck down in the midst of planning her baking for the day. Mellie let out a long sigh, then smiled at her daughter. “We have quite a job ahead of us this weekend, sunshine. And we’re going to simply throw everything away, except the furniture, of course. That way we don’t have to look at every little object and wonder, do we keep it or give it away or toss it out? We’ll just toss everything. What do you say?”

Claire nodded. She had cramps. Two months earlier, on her own twelfth birthday, she’d gotten her first period. Mellie had responded with great joy and revelry, baking a cake to celebrate her “entry into womanhood.” Claire was not yet certain this was something worth celebrating. It was messy, and it made her ache.

They began in Dora’s bedroom. Mellie carried a few empty boxes upstairs and set them on the floor. Then she looked around the room.

“We’ll start on the bed,” she said.

The bed looked as though it had been hastily made, the quilt drawn up in a lumpy, wrinkled fashion to barely cover the pillow. Mellie pulled back the quilt, revealing bloodstains on the pillowcase and sheet. Claire glanced at her mother’s face, but it was as if Mellie couldn’t see the dark red splotches.

“Help me with this, darling?” Mellie asked.

Claire stared at the stains. Her grandmother hadn’t died peacefully. She could ask Mellie what had really happened, but her mother’s answer was sure to be full of twists and evasions and not worth hearing. Mellie needed to believe her own lie even more than she needed Claire to believe it.

Numbly, Claire pulled the corner of the sheet from the mattress.

The stain on the pillowcase reminded her of the map of Italy she’d seen in her geography book the week before, complete with little Sicily at the toe of the boot. Mellie shook the pillow out of the case, and Italy collapsed into the white folds of the cloth. Mellie bundled up the linens and threw them into one of the boxes. Then she began emptying drawers, dropping armloads of her mother’s clothing on top of the soiled sheets. She had meant what she said. She was not taking the time to look at anything.

Until she got to the vanity dresser. Then she sat back in the flimsy little chair and lit a cigarette, and Claire followed her gaze to the framed picture on the dresser top. It was of her and Vanessa, sitting with Mellie and Len on the porch of their old house in Falls Church. After a moment, Mellie picked up the picture to study it more closely, and Claire braved the question she had stopped asking sometime during the last two years.

“When are we going to see Vanessa and Daddy again?” she asked.

She waited for her mother’s encouraging response, but it was long in coming this time. Mellie let out another of her deep sighs. She ran a finger over her lower lip, took a drag of her cigarette, then nodded to herself. “We have to believe it will be soon,” she said. “I feel it in my heart.”

Claire had that familiar, funny mix of longing and trepidation she always felt at the thought of seeing her sister again.

Mellie set the picture on the floor, propping it up against the wall, and Claire realized with a surge of happiness that she didn’t intend to throw it away. Then Mellie picked up a small, delicate crystal angel from the collection of knickknacks on the vanity. It was a Christmas ornament; a tiny wire jutted from its halo. Mellie balanced the angel on her palm, and all the light in the room seemed to catch in the folds of the little angel’s robe. It was beautiful. Claire watched her mother, hoping they could keep it.

“Mother always let me hang this one on the tree myself when I was little,” Mellie said. She sounded as if she was speaking to herself.

Claire reached out to take the angel from Mellie’s hand, but Mellie didn’t seem to see her. She dropped the angel into the box, where it landed on a perfume bottle and splintered into tiny shards of light. Then Claire watched as Mellie brushed the rest of the knickknacks from the top of the dresser with a sweep of her arm.

Claire stared at the jumble of broken glass and ceramic for a minute before walking into the bathroom, where she began emptying the medicine cabinet. It was full of ancient prescription bottles, some of them dating back to before she was born. She threw them into an old shoe box, along with glass bottles of thick liquid and oozing tubes of ointment. The towel hanging over the rack behind the door also bore a bloodstain. She folded the towel so the stain was not visible, so that when she walked past Mellie to throw it in the box with the linens, Mellie wouldn’t have to see it.

In the living room after lunch, Mellie plucked a book from one of the massive bookcases. “I suppose we should box up these books and try to sell them,” she said. “Heaven knows, we can use the money, right? Once we sell the furniture and the house, though, we should be able to buy a little place of our own.”

“I like where we live now.” They were renting a small, two-bedroom house near the junior high school in Falls Church. Most of Claire’s friends lived close by.

“It’s better to own.” Mellie pulled the big, broad photograph album with its dark brown leather cover from the lower bookshelf, and Claire’s eyes widened as she watched her mother throw the album in the trash box. How many hours had she sat with her grandparents, looking at those old pictures? There were small, brown-toned photographs of Joseph Siparo carving horses. Pictures of Mellie when she was a baby. Mellie and Len’s wedding. Claire and Vanessa riding the carousel.

“Can we save that, Mellie?” She pointed to the trash box.

Mellie looked Up at her distractedly. Then she stubbed out her cigarette and patted the floor in front of her. “Come here, Claire,” she said.

Claire sat down, and Mellie looked at her squarely, her blue eyes dry and cool. “You must always look forward,” she said. “Remember that. Everything in this room is from the past. The past can only make you sad, and is that what you want?”

Claire shook her head.

“Of course not. The future is full of promise.” Mellie smiled and lifted her hands up to the heavens. “It’s wide open for you, darling. The past can only hold you back from moving forward. All right?”

Claire nodded, but she could almost feel the pull of the aged and love-filled pictures from where they rested in the box of trash.

Around one-thirty, the truck arrived. It rumbled and creaked up the long driveway. Claire looked out the upstairs window of her room—the room she had once shared with Vanessa—to see the truck pull into the field and come to a stop not far from the barn. Three men climbed out of the cab. Three burly, hateful men. She flew down the stairs, grabbing her jacket from the chair by the kitchen table, and ran outside. The ground was sodden as she raced across the field. The men were pulling open the broad barn doors as she neared them. She was breathless. They stood back, hands on hips, shaking their heads in awe at the unexpected beauty of the carousel in front of them. Before he died, Vincent had completed the carousel except for one horse. Someone from the park that was taking the carousel had told Mellie they would get an original Siparo for that spot.

“My grandpa made all of them,” Claire said loudly.

The men turned to look at her, then at each other, chuckling to themselves. “He did a real fine job, missy,” one of them said. Another of the men winked at her. “And we’re going to be real careful moving them,” he said, “so don’t you worry about that.”

She pulled a small crate from the corner of the barn and set it on the ground a few yards outside the open doors. She sat on the crate and watched them dismantle the horses from the carousel. It was a slow process, with the quiet working of screwdrivers and wrenches and little real action until it was time to actually remove one of the uncoupled horses from its roost. It would take two men, then, to carry the horse to a crate. Claire couldn’t see inside the crates, but she hoped they were thickly padded. She felt relatively calm as she watched the men. Until they started working on Titan.

“He’s my favorite,” she said, hoping her words would make them take extra caution. But they were talking among themselves, trying to determine the best way to detach him or whatever, and they barely glanced in her direction. She said it again, this time only loud enough for herself to hear.

She blinked hard as they lowered Titan into the crate, and her chest hurt from the effort not to cry. The gold of his mane shone in the sunlight, then disappeared into darkness as they set the lid on top of the huge wooden box.

She hadn’t heard Mellie approaching, but suddenly felt her mother’s hand on her shoulder. “We deserve a break, don’t we?” Mellie asked.

Claire didn’t turn around. She didn’t take her eyes from the barn.

“Let’s go into town for an ice cream sundae,” her mother suggested.

Claire didn’t want to go. She wanted to stay right where she was until the carousel had been completely dismantled. She was an overseer. Her grandfather wasn’t here to do it. Someone had to.

But she looked up at Mellie’s face. There was a fragility there she had never seen before, or maybe it was the way the March sun fell on Mellie’s pale features. Without protest, Claire stood up and followed her mother to the car, turning back only once to watch the men hammering shut the top of Titan’s crate.

At the diner, Mellie dropped a bunch of coins into the little jukebox that rested on their table, and they took turns selecting songs. Over their sundaes, Mellie asked her a dozen questions about school and her friends, and Claire threw herself into the conversation, not thinking—and certainly not saying—anything about what was happening back at the farm, anything that might make Mellie lose her smile.

By the time they got back, the truck was gone. Claire walked into the barn. The carousel itself stood empty of the horses. The men would come again to take apart the platform and crate up the organ, and in another day or so, when she and Mellie were back in Falls Church, the barn would become nothing more than a barn. She walked around the platform for a while, but it was too eerie, too sad, and so she went outside again and walked slowly across the field to the house.

By the side door, the boxes she and Mellie had dragged from the house awaited the trash truck. She sauntered around the boxes, almost casually, until she found the one she was looking for. The photograph album jutted from one corner, and she carefully freed it and carried it into the house.

“Mellie?” she called once she was in the kitchen.

“In here!” Mellie sang from the dining room, and Claire tiptoed up the stairs to her bedroom, where she took her clothes from her suitcase and set the album deep inside.

SLIM VALLEY SKI RESORT, PENNSYLVANIA

WHY HAD HE LET
Pat talk him into this?

Jon drove his Jeep toward Slim Valley, Pat riding next to him in the passenger seat. They passed through one small farming community after another, the gently rolling terrain still lifeless under its winter brown blanket. It was hard to believe that somewhere nearby existed a snow-covered mountain.

Pat was talking about plans for the retreat, but Jon only half listened, consumed by a mounting, multifaceted anxiety he was struggling to bring under control.

He’d tried to get out of the trip with complaints about his burned foot, but the burn was nearly healed, despite the dire predictions and chiding of the physician he’d seen in the emergency room. Pat had ignored his protestations anyway. Jon was too ashamed of the honest reason for his resistance to talk with her about it. Today, he would be lifted into a mono-ski by strangers, who wouldn’t know him as anything more than a mass of defective body parts. He was accustomed to pursuing activities with Claire or other able-bodied friends. Always, he had held himself above the masses. It was not intentional, not a snobbishness, but merely a function of the fact that he was the guy at the top, the guy responsible for developing and financing the programs, including this particular program, Mountain Access. Pat was chattering about this person or that—friends of hers who would be skiing today. Unlike Jon, Pat belonged to dozens of these activity-oriented organizations. She was off on some adventure nearly every weekend.