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.
19
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.
She checked on a few other patients, including J
ordan Wiley, who had received a second chest tube sometime during the night. It had been a week since the placement of the first tube, which was not working efficiently, and as Vanessa examined the raw-looking incision in his side, Jordy fought tears of pain and, most likely, fear. Even with the second tube in place, his lungs didn’t sound good. She watched his face as she listened to his chest with her stethoscope. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut. The blue veins in his temples were visible beneath the pale skin.
“The pain meds aren’t holding you, are they, Jordan?” she asked.
“No,” he whispered without opening his eyes. “But if they give me more, I’ll be asleep, and I don’t want to be asleep.”
Instinctively, she ran a hand over his frizzy dark hair. A rare gesture for her. What was it about this kid that tore at her heart?
“Hopefully, this second tube will start making you feel better very soon,” she said.
He nodded, eyes still shut, his blue-tinged lips pressed tightly together, and she knew he didn’t believe her optimistic words of comfort any more than she did.
By five o’clock, there were eight message slips dotting her desk, and she settled into her chair with a bottle of apple juice and an air of grim determination to begin returning the calls.
She tried directing the callers to Terri. “Terri’s the one who’s talked to Patterson,” she said. “She’s in a better position than I am to tell you how to proceed.”
But her colleagues in the network were not that easy to get rid of. They were tenacious about engaging her in conversation, and all of them had an enthusiastically delivered story to tell her about Zed Patterson.
“He single-handedly kept abortion rights alive in Pennsylvania,” one of them crowed.
“He helped an old coworker of mine start a victims’ assistance program,” said another. “She went to his office and talked to him about the people she wanted to help and he actually shed tears.”
The man was quickly assuming legendary status, and as Vanessa listened to her smitten colleagues, sparks of lightning jerked their way into the corner of her vision.
She returned six of the calls before the urge to escape grew too strong to fight. She needed to run. It was the only solution to the mounting tension in her body.
She changed into her warm-up suit and running shoes and took the stairs down to Darcy’s office, even though she doubted Darcy would want to join her. Darcy was in the twelfth week of her pregnancy, and her morning sickness was lasting well into the night. On their last run together, Darcy had stopped twice to throw up.
Darcy groaned when she saw Vanessa standing in the door of her office.
“Forget it,” Darcy said. “No way.”
Vanessa gave her a rueful smile. Darcy did look a little green. No point in badgering her. “Maybe next week,” she said.
“Don’t count on it.” Darcy swiveled her desk chair to face her friend. “I know you can’t really understand how this feels, but I spend seventy-five percent of my time these days wishing someone would shoot me and put me out of my misery.”
Vanessa had to force her smile. “Sorry, Darce,” she said, backing out of the room. “You take care of yourself, okay?”
She walked down the hall, pushed open the back door of the hospital, and started running.
The evening was remarkably warm for mid-February. Vanessa tried to find her pace as she ran toward the park. Spiky-skinned creatures crawled beneath the surface of her skin, and she pounded the pavement hard to get rid of them. Without Darcy, she could run faster, harder, getting the steam from her system before going home to Brian, who didn’t deserve the secondhand wrath.
Darcy talked nonstop about her pregnancy these days. Vanessa didn’t mind listening—as a matter of fact, she found Darcy’s excitement contagious—but if Darcy said to her one more time, “I know you can’t understand how I’m feeling,” she was afraid she might slug her. But she bit her tongue each time. There was no point in telling Darcy she was wrong. No point in talking about Anna. She didn’t need to open old wounds.
A stone lay on the sidewalk ahead of her, and she kicked it hard, sending it skittering across a nearby lawn. Turning the corner, she was startled to see a man running toward her. For an instant, her heart kicked into high gear, but then she saw that he was in a warm-up suit. He was someone like herself, she thought, out for a run on a beautiful winter night.
She sidestepped toward the street to pass him, but he did the same, and she almost laughed at the inevitable collision until she saw the quick thrust of his arms toward her and felt his hands at her throat.
She didn’t have time to think. She dropped her chin to her chest and pulled hard with her left hand on his arm, drawing him even closer to her. His dark eyes widened with surprise. With the heel of her right hand, she used all her strength to snap his chin up and back, and he let out a grunt. She made a fist and brought it down as hard as she could on his collarbone, and the crack was unmistakable.
“Fucking bastard.” She kneed him in the groin, and as he doubled over, she kneed him again in his face. In the faint light, she saw blood spurt across the fabric of her warm-up pants.
He was on his hands and knees on the sidewalk, but Vanessa was not through. The adrenaline pumping through her body made her feel like a coiled spring, and as the man collapsed on the ground, she kicked him, in the face, on his back, on his side. She screamed at him and kicked him until someone pulled her away, and even then she still kicked the air. A siren blared in the distance, and only then did she realize that a strange man was holding her in his arms, and she was crying and cursing and tearing at his coat collar with her bare fingers.
HER ATTACKER WAS IN surgery, the police told her as she sat next to Brian in a waiting room at the station. The man would live, but he would be very uncomfortable for a long time. Most likely he was the same man who had raped two women in the past three months, dressing as a runner, pulling them into the bushes. Now he had a broken nose, a broken collarbone, a broken knee, and kidney damage. She knew she had broken a bone in her own little finger during the fray, but she kept that information to herself. She would take care of that later.
She owed Zed Patterson, she thought. She owed her gullible colleagues in the network and the shortsighted hospital administrators. She owed everyone who was raising her ire, because that would-be rapist had gotten it all. The rage that should have been spread out among many had all been heaped on his unsuspecting body.
Word of his foiled attack had apparently spread quickly. By the time she and Brian left the police station, TV vans and reporters crammed the parking lot. Vanessa leaned against Brian with a groan. He swept the reporters away with his arm as they crossed the lot to his car. She thought of saying a few words into those microphones, of telling women to get training in self-defense.
“I’m five-five and one hundred and ten pounds,” she imagined herself saying. “If I can do this, you can, too. Empower yourselves.” Yet she was too drained to speak to anyone, and the words slipped from her mind as she settled into Brian’s car.
She pressed her head back against the seat as they drove out of the lot.
“Straight home?” Brian asked.
She shook her head. “Hospital.” She held up her throbbing hand. The finger was swollen now and turning purple. “Emergency room.”
He stopped the car in the middle of the street and turned on the overhead light to study her hand. “Vanessa.” He frowned at her. “They asked if you were hurt. Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I wanted to get away from them and their questions.” She started to cry unexpected and irksome tears, and Brian reached over to hold her hand, ignoring the honking of the car behind them.
“Were you afraid?” he asked after a moment.
“No.” She hadn’t been. Only at first, when the man’s sudden appearance had startled her. After that, even when she’d felt his thumbs against her windpipe, she hadn’t felt fear. Only rage. “I think I saw him as Zed Patterson,�
� she said. “If they hadn’t pulled me away, I would have killed him. I couldn’t stop.” She cringed at the memory of the last few kicks she’d delivered, when his body had felt like a rag doll beneath her feet.
The car passed them, followed by another.
“Too bad they stopped you.” Brian put his own car in gear again, and as they started to roll up the street, Vanessa reached for his hand and held it snugly in her lap. Brian was smiling. He glanced at her. “How long ago was that self-defense course you took?”
“Centuries,” she said.
Twenty years, at any rate. Twenty-two years.
She’d been beaten up once in her life, when she was sixteen, a year before Anna was born. It happened shortly after she’d stopped going to school—she’d never officially “dropped out.” She was still living with her father then. At least she had a room in his house where she kept most of her clothes. He was rarely there. He’d made his money by then and had adopted the flamboyant, always-on-the-move lifestyle of a jet-setter. He didn’t particularly care where she was.
She’d been walking to a boyfriend’s house when it happened. The man appeared out of nowhere, and before she could force a scream from her throat, she lay beaten and bruised in the gutter. She’d crawled to her boyfriend’s house. She couldn’t remember the boy’s name—she didn’t remember any of their names. He talked her out of calling the police. He had a record, he told her, and they might think that he’d done it. Plus, they would probably make her go back to school, and they’d get her father involved. So, she slept for two days straight in her boyfriend’s bed with a heating pad and cold compresses. Once she was feeling better, the boy spent an entire night teaching her how to defend herself, teaching her techniques he said he’d learned in prison. Then he took her to a self-defense class taught by an old friend of his. It didn’t matter how small she was, the instructor said, or what sex she was. She could kill if she had to. She’d thought she’d forgotten all she’d learned back then, but in some sloppy yet effective form, it had come back to her on the street tonight.
Brass Ring Page 18
