Brass Ring

by Diane Chamberlain

  “My parents bought me skis before they bought me shoes, I think,” he said. “But it’s been a long time. This feels terrific.”

  “Well, you’re going to feel even more terrific in another few minutes,” Evie said.

  And she was right. The moment Jon pushed off from the top of the big slope, he felt whole. Able-bodied. The sensation, at first alarming, quickly thrilled him. What a total escape from reality! Bare trees flew past him, and he was carried back to the thrill of skiing as a teenager, before the accident. It felt no different. Maybe better. His euphoria stole his caution, and he took another spill—at high speed this time—near the bottom of the slope, but he was laughing when Evie arrived to help him up.

  He pushed himself to the lift with his outriggers. Evie sat next to him again, and she teased him about his cockiness. He loved the lilt in her voice. He loved the view of the mountain from his seat on the lift and the bite of the cold air on his face.

  He asked Evie questions about herself. Where she’d gone to school, where she was from. He liked looking at her. He watched as she drew a stick of lip balm across her full pink lips. Her goggles had fogged up, and when she opened her jacket to find a tissue, he could see the shape of her small breasts beneath the textured blue cloth of her long johns.

  She’s barely older than Susan. Don’t be an idiot. But he was happy. Drugged happy. Crazy happy. Slipping off the lift, he was grinning to himself. I don’t need you, Harte.

  When he’d pictured how this outing would unfold, he’d seen himself—and Pat if he could tear her away—driving home early while the rest of the Mountain Access group put up in a nearby motel. But the sky was dark before he was ready to surrender the mountain. Pat had long since retired to the lodge, where he imagined she was warming herself by the fire, talking with other skiers. As he transferred back into his chair from the mono-ski for the last time that day, a wave of melancholy washed over him, and he felt the loss of the mountain and the loss of freedom, from both his chair and his thoughts.

  Halfway home, he and Pat stopped for dinner. Over thick chowder and corn bread, they decided that it made no sense to drive the rest of the way home that night. They were tired. They could get a couple of rooms in the motel next door.

  There was a moment of quiet awkwardness between them as they drove into the motel parking lot.

  “We can get one room, if you’re comfortable with that,” Pat said in an offhanded way. He glanced at her, and she quickly added, “It’d be cheaper, and the rooms probably have two beds. Unless you’d rather not.”

  He didn’t care about the money, but the idea of sharing a room appealed to him. He wanted Pat’s chatter surrounding him tonight. He was afraid of the void, of the crash that seemed inevitable after so full and glorious a day. He didn’t want to think about the nasty twist his life had taken.

  “But if you’d rather get two rooms,” Pat stammered on, “that’s fine. I didn’t mean to imply anything untoward.” She was positively squirming in her seat, and he laughed.

  “One room sounds good,” he said. “I don’t particularly relish the thought of being alone tonight.”

  The room was spartan but large, and it was indeed furnished with two queen-sized beds. He and Pat took turns in the bathroom. He would have to sleep in his T-shirt and boxers, but Pat emerged from the bathroom in an enormous pink nightshirt, an evil-looking black cat painted on the front, the fabric stretched across her large breasts. Obviously, she had been prepared to spend the night away from home. She must have known he would enjoy the slopes in spite of himself.

  They got into their respective beds and turned off the lamps on their night tables. Jon stared at the ceiling, marveling at the oddity of the situation. Here he was, lying alone in a strange bed, while a woman he’d worked with for years—and whom he loved dearly—lay alone a few feet from him. Their wheelchairs stood like barriers on the floor between them.

  In the darkness, they talked about skiing. Every time Jon closed his eyes, he saw the white ground falling away in front of him and felt the sensation of speed, smooth and freeing. Even after he and Pat stopped talking, images of the mountain continued to draw him, careening and weightless, into the valley below.

  “How is Susan handling the separation?” Pat asked suddenly, jerking him miserably back to reality.

  “Not well,” he said. He and Claire had spoken with Susan two days earlier. As planned, Claire made the initial phone call, and Susan had reacted with a stunned, shocked silence, quickly followed by anger—anger that masked hurt or confusion or fear. It was clear that she blamed Claire for the separation, and Claire shouldered the blame with grace. He’d been surprised by her honesty with Susan. For once she didn’t try to submerge the truth under a sea of wishful thoughts. Claire was changing.

  “Susan’s pretty confused,” Jon said to Pat.

  “Yeah, well, so’s your wife, if you ask me.” Pat’s voice was uncharacteristically icy. “I mean, I understand that she’s suffering some sort of posttraumatic stress because of the incident on the bridge, but she should be working it out with her husband at her side, not some other guy. She’s in therapy, I hope.”

  “Yes, though I don’t know how well that’s going.”

  Neither of them spoke for a few minutes. All Jon could hear was the soft, steady hum of the traffic on the highway.

  “I’m going to tell you something, Jon.” Pat’s voice cut across the dark room.

  “What’s that?”

  “I could never say this to you in the light of day, but right now we’re in…well, strange circumstances.”

  He smiled. “Yes.”

  “I think you’re an incredible person. I would much rather be next to you in that bed than over here. And I know at least six or seven other women who feel the same way.”

  He grinned at the ceiling. “Yeah? Who?”

  “Never mind. Just remember that if Claire is crazy enough to actually end her marriage to you—and once you feel ready to move on, of course—there will be a string of women waiting to help you do the moving.”

  He looked over at his longtime friend, her face barely visible in the darkness. “Thanks,” he said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  Another moment of silence passed between them, and Jon became aware of the broad emptiness of his bed. What the hell, he thought.

  “Pat?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is there a chance you’d like to share my bed tonight in a non-consummatory fashion?”

  It seemed to take her a minute to understand his choice of words, but then she laughed. “I’d love to.”

  He switched on the night table lamp and watched her sit up in bed. The cat’s hindquarters were painted on the back of her pink nightshirt, and they swelled and shrank as she got into her chair. Moving his chair out of the way, Pat wheeled the few feet to his bed, where she transferred deftly in beside him. She lay on her side, her back to his chest, and he hugged her against him. Her breasts rested heavily on his arms. She was a much larger, much softer woman than Claire. Her hair smelled like summer sunshine.

  “This feels good,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. And it did. “That’s one of the hardest things for me to get used to. No physical contact. I don’t mean sex. I mean touching. Hugging.”

  “At least you’ve had it for twenty years,” she said, and he realized that Pat was one of those people who never had it, who went to bed night after night without the touch of another human being’s hand on their skin.

  He pulled her close and breathed in her sun-smelling hair. He had a pleasant sense of exhaustion and had nearly drifted off to sleep when Pat suddenly asked him, “Have you met the man?”

  Jon drew in a long breath, fully awake. “I met him briefly,” he said. “He’s this big, good-looking dude who walks on two legs. I hate his fucking guts.”

  Pat shook her head, her hair brushing against his cheek. “I just don’t understand Claire,” she said. “I mean, she and I talked sometime
s, Jon. Girl talk. And she’d rave about you. About how wonderful you are. It just blows my mind that she—”

  “Claire raves about how wonderful everyone is, haven’t you ever noticed that?”

  “No, this was different. She thought she was so lucky to have you. It didn’t matter one speck that you were in a chair. I mean, you know as well as I do that it’s not that this other guy’s able-bodied. You believe that, Jon, don’t you?”

  He sighed, wondering how much to say. “It’s hard for me to feel as though he and I are on equal footing. Forgive the pun. But I do think the attraction goes beyond the physical. Way beyond. She claims it’s not physical at all. Even if that were true, it doesn’t make me feel any better. Maybe worse, in a way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He thought of his conversations with Claire over the past few weeks. She was still having flashbacks, she said. He tried to get her to tell him about them, determined to listen, but she gave him only the briefest description, and he knew it was Randy who was hearing her recollections in detail.

  He squeezed Pat’s arm. “Do you remember when I asked you about that hypothetical situation? Party A and Party B?”

  “The blocked memories. Right.”

  “Well, I’m B and Claire’s A.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  He pressed his cheek to her hair. “Claire doesn’t remember a whole lot about her childhood,” he said. “She’s repressed a lot of it. I swear, I didn’t believe in repression until I realized she was the master of it. She has completely blocked whole chunks of time. She only remembers the good times.”

  “Wow,” Pat said. “That fits Claire, doesn’t it? I always wondered how anyone could have such a perpetually bright outlook on the world.”

  “Well, she doesn’t anymore. Not since she saw that woman jump off the bridge. She couldn’t come up with any nice little cliches to make that experience go away. To change what happened. And then she started getting these little flashbacks, which I’m afraid might be some of the missing pieces from her childhood. The bad things that she’s blocked. When she’s with Randy—well, he seems able and willing to help her try to remember those things.”

  “Does he have the professional background to do that?” Pat switched to her shrink voice.

  “No. At least I don’t think so. He owns a restaurant.”

  “Asshole. He’s playing with fire. She’s forgotten those things for a reason. To protect herself. If he’s forcing her to dredge up parts of her past she’s not ready to remember, it could have a disastrous outcome. Even well-trained, well-meaning therapists have fallen into the trap of eliciting false memories from vulnerable patients.”

  “These memories are real.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.”

  “Well, I still think this guy’s out of his league.”

  Much as he would have loved to join her in bashing Randy, he knew it was unmerited.

  “I don’t think he’s forcing her to remember stuff. Encouraging her, maybe, but not forcing. The flashbacks or whatever they are seem to be coming naturally. And slowly But she’s preoccupied with them. They’re her world right now. There’s no room for me in it.”

  Pat didn’t speak again right away. “Jon…” She sounded hesitant. “These flashbacks of hers. Are they?…You don’t need to tell me the specifics, but how bad are we talking about?”

  “Well, like I told you, I know something that happened to Claire that she doesn’t remember. And it was bad, and I—”

  “I don’t understand how you could know something she doesn’t.”

  He waved her question away. “Doesn’t matter. Just trust that I do. So, do I tell her or not? I think maybe if I told her, it might put an end to this whole mess. She wouldn’t need Randy anymore. At least not for the purpose of jarring her memory.” He didn’t want to think about other purposes she might have for Randy.

  Pat was thoughtful for a moment. “I’m afraid I still feel like I did back when you guys were A and B. It sounds like she’s uncovering things at her own pace, Jon. I think it would be a real mistake to push her.”

  He nodded. “I hope you’re right,” he said. He would have loved to force an end to Claire’s painstaking excursion into the past, yet he was still terrified of sharing what he knew with her.

  “And I hope she’s working with her therapist on this stuff and not just with the charlatan,” Pat said. “This sounds like serious business.”

  “I know.”

  Pat let out a long sigh. “I’m glad you told me all of this, though,” she said. “I’ve been feeling so much anger at Claire. Understanding the situation eases the fury a little.”

  “Don’t let it ease too much, all right? I like having you to share my rage with.”

  The room fell quiet again. The muscles in Jon’s arms were heavy and warm, and the scent of Pat’s hair surrounded him like a summer day. This time when he closed his eyes, he fell asleep in the arms of a friend.

  36

  SEATTLE

  THE NEAREST NEWSSTAND THAT carried the Washington Post was a half-mile from the hospital, so Vanessa took a walk on her lunch break each day to buy a paper. Zed Patterson’s molestation trial had started, and the Seattle papers didn’t cover it in the sort of detail she craved. Of course, there were no pictures of Patterson’s young accuser, but Vanessa had a clear image of the girl. She was slight and scrappy, her body still that of a child. Her legs and arms were long, her knees knobby and covered with scrapes from one adventure or another. Her nearly white-blond hair was cut boyishly short. Her nose was upturned, her eyelashes so pale as to be nearly undetectable. Where this image came from, Vanessa couldn’t have said. Yet from the moment she’d read the original article detailing the allegations against Patterson, the girl had appeared to her in this form.

  Even when Friday’s paper stated that the girl and her mother had immigrated to the United States from El Salvador five years earlier, Vanessa couldn’t lose the image of her mischievous blond waif.

  And the waif was not being believed. By the second week of the hearing, the girl’s own mother reluctantly testified to the trouble she’d had with her daughter. She’d been caught stealing, the mother admitted, and she lied frequently. The girl’s aunt went so far as to pronounce her niece “evil.” “She’s not like the other kids in the family,” the aunt said.

  Vanessa read the testimony of the mother and the aunt and was convinced that this wasn’t the first time the girl had been abused. She didn’t believe for an instant that kids were born bad.

  Women’s rights groups were conspicuously silent, and Vanessa guessed they felt as Terri Roos did—it would be a mistake to topple Zed Patterson from his throne of power. In the long run, women could only suffer from his downfall. The articles in the paper brimmed with his work on victims’ rights and with his compassion for his accuser.

  “This is a young girl clearly in need of counseling and guidance,” Patterson was quoted as saying, “and our first priority must be to see that she receives the help she needs.”

  Pictures of him in the paper showed him smiling with an easy self-confidence. “I have complete faith in this country’s system of justice,” he stated on at least three separate occasions. Vanessa could only glance at the photographs. Any lingering over that face made her head throb and her stomach churn.

  Apparently she was not alone in having that reaction to the senator from Pennsylvania. On day ten of the hearing—the day she was to take the stand herself and face Zed Patterson across the courtroom—the girl had to be hospitalized with gastritis. A hospital spokesman said she was reacting to the stress of the hearing, but it was clear that those in Patterson’s camp read her sudden illness as backpedaling on the girl’s part. She hadn’t known what she was getting into when she made her accusation.

  In other articles in the paper, Vanessa would see Patterson’s name bantered about on this bill or that as though he were simply another senator wit
h nothing else going on in his life. Innocent until proven guilty. Vanessa wondered if she was the only person in the country who was taking this hearing seriously. Why did no one seem to be helping this kid? Why was everyone wishing she would simply go away?

  The paper printed the article about the girl’s illness on a Tuesday. That Wednesday, Vanessa found herself sitting in one of the pay phone booths of the hospital lobby, dialing the number of the girl’s Washington, D.C., attorney, Jacqueline King. Her hands shook as she pressed the cool square keys on the phone. She was able to reach a partner of the attorney, who was in court that morning. Vanessa didn’t identify herself but got right to the point of her call.

  “If I had information on an old case regarding Walter Patterson, would it help?”

  The woman on the other end of the line didn’t respond right away. “What do you mean, ‘an old case’?” she asked finally.

  “I mean, if someone who had once been molested by the senator were to come forward now, would it do any good?”

  Again the hesitancy on the other end of the phone line. “Are you saying this happened to you?”

  Vanessa closed her eyes. “Yes.”

  “Jesus. Hold on.”

  Vanessa felt perspiration break out on her forehead. She gripped the phone in a panic. “You’re not going to tape this, are you?”

  “No. Just needed to get something to write with. Can I have your name?”

  “No. I have to understand—”

  “How long ago are we talking about?”

  “Thirty years.”

  She could feel the woman’s disappointment. “You’re kidding.” Her voice was flat.

  “Are you saying it’s too long ago to be of any help?” Vanessa heard the hope in her own voice. Please tell me there is nothing I can do.

  “Jesus. Thirty years? How old were you? What did he do to you?”

  “Are you saying you can’t use the information?”

  “Look, I have to talk to Jackie,” the woman said. “We’ll use it somehow. The truth is, we need something to save this case. No one believes this kid except Jackie and me. And you just made me a whole lot more certain. Please give me a number where I can reach you once we figure out how to use this.”