Brass Ring

by Diane Chamberlain

  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 s
tay 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.

  35

  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.

  Ski season was technically over, but an early-spring snowstorm had given Slim Valley a bonus weekend. “The weather god created that storm just for you, Jon,” Pat had said to him the day before. “Come on. I know it’s only been a couple of weeks since Claire left. I know you’re grieving, but I think it would do you a world of good to get out. Weekends are hard when you’re alone.”

  That argument was probably her strongest. He dreaded the weekends and had already decided to spend this one in the office. “I have plenty of work to do,” he said.

  “All you do is work, Jon. It’s not healthy.”

  The work kept his mind off Claire. Most of the time, anyhow. One night this past week, the pain of losing her, of imagining her with Randy, was so bad that he drank himself into a mindless stupor.

  So he had let himself be persuaded. He and Pat had come close to blows over transportation to the mountain. Pat had wanted to ride in the car pool with the other members of Mountain Access; he’d wanted to take his Jeep, preserving the time he felt in control. Pat had finally relented and agreed to ride with him. She probably figured it was the only way she’d get him to go.

  “There’s the mountain.” Pat pointed to an outcropping of white in the distance, a mere bump in the horizon covered by bare trees, and Jon thought she must be mistaken.

  “What mountain?” he asked.

  Pat laughed. “You’ll see.”

  The Jeep began a gradual ascent, and piles of dirty, crusty snow appeared in clumps at the side of the narrowing road. Jon felt his ears pop.

  “Make a left here,” Pat directed after a few miles.

  He turned the Jeep into the parking lot of the ski lodge. The handicapped spaces were filled, and they had to park a distance from the other cars in order to have room to fully open their doors. Jon got out of the car first, then steadied Pat’s chair as she transferred from the Jeep’s high seat. She muttered under her breath the whole time, and although he couldn’t make out her words, he was certain she was cursing him for insisting they take his car. She was accustomed to a lift.

  The air was crisp and cold as they wheeled to the front door of the lodge.

  “Watch it.” Pat pointed to the grate in front of the door. Jon angled his chair as he crossed over it, wondering how many wheelchairs had lost a caster in those grooves. Someone opened the door for them, and suddenly they were in the warmth of the lodge. Across the room, the mountain—it was not the Alps, but it would certainly do—shot up behind a glass wall, and Jon was mesmerized. A surge of excitement began edging out his apprehension.

  There were wheelchairs everywhere. People turned to look at him and Pat, and he heard whispers of “Jon Mathias” coming from all directions at once.

  “Hey, Jon!” someone called.

  “Never thought we’d see you on the slopes, bro’,” someone else shouted across the room.

  “About time you saw what your money’s buying, Mathias.”

  He and Pat were quickly surrounded. Many of the faces were familiar, others were not, but all were welcoming and friendly.

  A member of the resort staff—a blond, tanned man in his thirties—walked over to Jon and pumped his hand.

  “Come on,” he said. “You and Pat come to the front of the line.”

  Only then did Jon realize there was a registration line to his right. He swallowed his discomfort as the blond man ushered them to the front, but the people they passed seemed unperturbed. They wheeled out of his way as though a red carpet marked his path, and within minutes he and Pat were registered and ready to ski.

  Once outside, Pat went off with a group while Jon waited for the appearance of his instructor. Not far from him, he could see a few skiers transferring into the mono-skis. He’d never seen one of those contraptions up close before. They looked pretty simple from where he sat—a seat mounted above a single ski—and the skiers seemed to have little problem getting into them without help. For some reason he’d imagined having to be lifted into the ski like a sack of flour. He smiled as he watched.

  “Are you Jon Mathias?”

  The voice came from behind him, and he turned to see a young woman walking toward him. “I’m Evie,” she said, holding out her hand. “I’ll be working with you today.”

  She was tall and very attractive. Twenty-six or -seven. Her snug

  ski pants and jacket were a brilliant blue that matched her eyes, and wisps of blond hair fell from beneath her hat.

  She sat down on a bench near him. She was a physical therapist, she explained in a sunny voice that distracted him from the little nervousness he had left. She asked him appropriate questions about his injury and abilities, listened carefully to his answers, then led him over to a mono-ski.

 
Suddenly, a young black man appeared next to them.

  “This is Lou,” Evie said. “He’ll be your buddy.”

  “You look like you work out,” Lou said to Jon. Despite the bulk of Lou’s skiwear, it was evident that he spent a good deal of time in the gym himself. “Think you need any help getting into the ski?”

  “I think I can do it,” Jon said.

  Lou pushed the ski next to his chair, and he and Evie guided Jon into it without incident. Evie strapped him in, and the fit was tight but comfortable. He was a little wobbly, though, until Lou attached the outriggers to his arms. The two small skis helped keep him upright.

  “Hold your arms out to the side,” Evie said. “Let’s check your balance.”

  He did as he was told, and Evie and Lou applauded.

  “He’s not gonna have any trouble out there,” Lou said. He explained the mechanics of the ski for getting on and off the lift, and when Jon had no problem mastering the lever, Lou looked at Evie and said, “I’m gonna find me a skier who needs my help.”

  Evie nodded as Lou walked away from them, and Jon grinned. If he was being patronized, he didn’t care. He had this ski down pat. At least on level ground.

  His first run was on the beginners’ slope. Evie skied backwards in front of him, giving him directions the entire distance down the hill. “Turn your head to the right,” she’d call out. “Great! Now the left. Now do a series of turns.”

  He was quickly gaining control of the ski. It felt like an extension of his body, and he longed to pick up speed, to really fly down the mountain, but Evie was methodical. “Got to learn the basics,” she said when he complained about the slow pace, and he promptly took a spill on a turn, proving her point.

  They took the lift up together, and he felt the rush of being carried into the air, mono-ski and all.

  “You’re doing incredibly well,” Evie said as they rode in the air above the slope. “You must have skied before your accident.”