Brass Ring

by Diane Chamberlain

  “Because Garrett is where the retarded kids go,” Claire said. “Just because he’s handicapped doesn’t mean he’s not smart.”

  “How do you know he’s smart?”

  “I don’t know that. But you’re assuming he’s not just because he can’t walk.”

  “Paralyzed from the waist down,” Ned said with a snicker. “Walking’s not all he can’t do.”

  Claire threw her empty milk carton at him, and he laughed. Ned was a big, good-looking boy, with white-blond hair and pale eyelashes. He was vice-president of the class and quarterback of the football team. Claire thought she was in love with him and had recently contemplated losing her virginity to him. Sometimes, though, Ned’s thick-headed insensitivity bothered her.

  “It’s not right.” Ned’s eyes were on Jon. “I mean, nothing against him—I’m sure he’s a great guy and all—but how’s he ever going to fit in here? I’m talking about what’s fair to him. He should be with people like himself. You know, handicapped or whatever.”

  Claire was barely paying attention to Ned. She watched as another of the football players deftly cut in line in front of Jon, who actually backed his chair up a bit, doing nothing to regain his advantage.

  “Did you see that?” Claire asked. “Stu cut in front of him.”

  Ned shook his head. “Yeah, well, that just proves my point. No one’s going to treat him like he’s human or—”

  She was already out of her seat and walking toward the food line. She tapped on Stu’s arm. The big blue-eyed halfback looked down at her, draping an arm across her shoulders. “Hey, babe, what’s up?”

  “Maybe you didn’t realize it, Stu, but Jon was ahead of you in line.”

  “Who’s Jon?” Stu looked down at Jon, who stared straight in front of him. “Oh, are you Jon?”

  Jon said nothing. Claire saw blotches of color forming on his cheeks.

  “Get behind him, Stu, come on.”

  Stu laughed but didn’t put up an argument. He stepped behind Jon’s chair. “There, bleeding Harte, you satisfied now? No wonder Ned’s so pussywhipped these days.”

  She touched Jon’s arm. “Please excuse his rudeness. Not everyone here is like him. Most people are really nice.”

  Jon looked up at her, his big brown eyes stormy. “Thank you,” he said, and even in those two small words she couldn’t miss his sarcasm. “You just made me look ten times more helpless than I already am.”

  She watched him numbly as he wheeled past her, and Stu chuckled. “Nice going, Claire,” he said.

  She returned to her table, where Ned was engrossed in conversation with a couple of other students about next week’s game against Mount Vernon, and watched Jon make his way toward the food. Someone else cut in front of him, and two boys had a brief food fight in an arc above his head, but she didn’t budge from her chair.

  After school that day, she asked Mrs. Wexler to assign him to her.

  “Assign him to you?” Her gray-haired homeroom teacher looked confused by the request.

  “Yes. Pretend we do it all the time. Pretend like, whenever there’s a new student coming in midyear, you assign someone to help them get a feel for the place. Not a bad idea, anyhow, right?”

  “I suppose—”

  “Great! Thanks.” And she was off. She had cheerleading practice.

  The following day, she told Jon he had been assigned to her and that they would have to eat lunch together. He didn’t seem pleased. Neither was Ned, who looked at her with sympathy when she told him why she couldn’t eat with him that day. She tried to talk to Jon in the food line, but it was awkward, him being so much lower than she was. Besides, he wouldn’t look at her and seemed to have nothing to say.

  “You know, I’m sorry about yesterday,” she tried. “About the food line. Stu made me so furious, and I thought I was helping you.”

  Jon gave a slight nod of his head. “You meant well,” he said. “But that sort of thing is my problem to figure out, all right?”

  There was no hostility in his voice, and for the first time he was looking directly at her. She wondered if it hurt his neck to look up that way.

  “All right,” she said.

  Over the next few days, she barely left him alone. She knew she was forcing herself on him. It was hard for him to retreat from her because of his chair and because he had no other friends to turn to. She told herself that he needed her to persevere. Besides, she had decided that he was the most beautiful boy she had ever laid eyes on. When she reported her infatuation to her two best friends, they looked at each other incredulously. “Better than Ned Barrett?” one of them asked.

  Claire nodded. She didn’t understand her reaction herself. Ned was Adonis perfect. Girls lost their concentration when they walked past him in the hall. But there was something about Jon’s soulful eyes, those sexy, gaunt cheeks, and that slender, battered body that held enormous appeal for her.

  At first, she had to badger him with questions. After a week, though, he seemed to loosen up and started talking on his own. He didn’t want to be there, he told her one day in the cafeteria. He hadn’t wanted to leave his rehab program, where he’d attended school with other kids like himself. Here, he felt like a freak. He had to use the service elevator in the rear of the school to get from floor to floor. And there were two steps between the hall and the cafeteria that seemed an insurmountable obstacle to him. She strained her neck to see the entrance to the cafeteria without success. She couldn’t picture the steps.

  “You’ve never noticed them because they’re not an obstacle to you. Try being in a chair for a day. The security guard has to help me up the steps. It’s humiliating.” He shook his head. “God, I want out of this place!”

  He told her that he’d played tennis before his accident, that he’d been pretty good at it.

  “I was supposed to play for UCLA next year,” he said, and it hit her suddenly how his well-ordered, well-planned future had been snatched from him. It made her reach across the table to rest her hand briefly, lightly, on his, and he didn’t pull his own hand away.

  He’d skied, too, he said. His family had flown to a resort in Colorado several times a year. He had loved skiing. She caught the tears in his eyes when he talked about it, even though he quickly turned his head away from her.

  They fell into a pattern of eating lunch together, Jon talking about his past and complaining bitterly over what fate had handed him for the future.

  “Why, that boy is spending all his energy feeling sorry for himself,” Mellie said when Claire told her about her conversations with Jon. “You should start telling him about you. Let him think about someone other than himself for a while.”

  It seemed almost rude to talk about her own perfectly wonderful life when his was such a disaster, but she tried it.

  Over lunch, she told him about cheerleading and Mellie and Ned.

  He smiled at her. “Life’s a bowl of cherries for you, huh?”

  She shrugged, embarrassed. “It’s pretty good.”

  He lifted the bun on his thin, dry hamburger and seemed to be studying the meat as he asked, “So, tell me more about Ned.”

  She told him about the various scholarships Ned had been offered, his skill on the football field, and his landslide victory in the vice-presidential election. Jon appeared bored by this information. She was bored herself.

  One snowy day in late November, Jon didn’t come to school. Claire collected his homework assignments for him and drove to his aunt’s house after school. Seeing the shabby-looking house from the street, she felt certain that his wealth had somehow died with his parents.

  His dour-faced aunt let her in. Jon was sitting in front of the TV in the den, and he didn’t look sick. Perhaps he hadn’t been able to get to school in the snow? He seemed embarrassed to see her there. She should have called first, but she’d been afraid he would tell her not to come.

  “Are you sick?” she asked.

  “Not really. It’s just a…uh, a problem I have eve
ry once in a while. I’m fine now. Just needed to get it taken care of this morning.”

  Whatever it was made him blush wildly, and she didn’t push for details.

  “And you’re really feeling all right now?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then let’s go out.”

  He looked surprised by the suggestion but followed her to the door, where he reached into a closet for his coat and gloves and hat.

  She helped him into her car and wrestled the seventy-pound chair into her trunk. Then she drove to a nearby park, pulling her car into the small lot at the top of a snow-covered hill. She freed the chair from her trunk, bruising her right arm and left leg in the process, and then lifted out the two enormous metal trays that had been beneath it. Ned had stolen the trays from the cafeteria the year before.

  “You used to love skiing, right?” she asked as he transferred from the car to his chair. It was getting dark out, but the moon was full and very bright, reflected off the white ground and trees. She and Jon had the hill—the entire park—to themselves.

  Jon looked at the trays, wide-eyed. “What are you getting at?”

  “Well, this will be more like sledding, but it’s the best I can do.”

  Jon pointed to one of the trays. “You expect me to go down the hill on that thing?”

  She could tell that he wanted to do it. There was excitement in his eyes. He had done nothing fun for so long.

  She put her hands on her hips and looked down at him. “Chicken?”

  “Bring the damn thing over here.” He was almost trembling with anticipation, and she laughed as she helped him from the chair to the tray. She was worried about his legs and had to help him bend them into place. Then she sat down on her own tray and grinned at him.

  “Ready?”

  He nodded.

  “Go!” They pushed off with their hands and went careening

  wildly down the long hill, their screams cutting through the moonlit darkness. The trays spun, and Claire felt the ice-flecked wind nipping at her cheeks. Jon spilled out of his tray near the bottom of the hill, rolling like a rag doll the rest of the way down, and Claire was relieved to hear his laughter as she came to a slippery stop next to him. He pushed himself to a sitting position in the cold snow and grinned at her. The moonlight glinted on his white teeth and carved triangular shadows into his beautiful cheeks, and she thought of kissing him. No. It was better to simply laugh together. Have fun. Take it slow.

  She flopped back into the snow and spread her arms out to make a snow angel.

  “Uh, Claire?” Jon was still chuckling.

  “Yes?”

  “How am I going to get back to the car?”

  Claire stared up at the stars. “Hmm.” She hadn’t thought of that. She hopped to her feet. “I’ll figure it out. Wait here.”

  At the top of the hill, she lugged the monstrous chair back into the trunk, then drove the car onto a service road and down to the bottom of the hill, maneuvering it as close to Jon as she could get without leaving the pavement. She got the chair out again, dragging it across the snow to him. Getting him into it took muscles she had never used in her life, and neither of them seemed able to check their laughter. They sounded like a couple of drunks, she thought. She finally managed to get Jon and the chair back to the car, where she helped him transfer into the front seat. Then she lifted the chair and the trays into the trunk once again. Muscles trembling and lungs burning, she got into the car herself.

  Jon turned to face her, still wearing his grin. “Can we do it again?” he asked, and she laughed. She was exhausted, but she would have done it all night long if that’s what it would take to keep that grin on his face.

  She drove him home two hours later, and they sat in her car in his driveway. Claire looked at his house, small and crumbling in the unkind light of the moon.

  “The rumor is that you were wealthy,” she said.

  He looked at the house himself, but she couldn’t read his face. “I was.”

  “What happened?”

  “There’s still a ton of money, but it’s all put away for me until I’m twenty-five. Right now, there’s enough for me to use for college, but that’s it.” He made a wry face. “I don’t think my parents planned too well.”

  “Oh, they planned very well, don’t you see?” Claire folded her legs beneath her on the car seat, turning to face him. “If they’d left you a ton of money it would be just like having someone always around to beat up the guy who cuts in front of you in the food line. You’d never have to figure out anything on your own.”

  Jon smiled at her. “Is there any cloud you can’t find the silver lining to, Claire?”

  It was the first time she’d heard him use her name, and she was struck by the sound of it coming from his lips.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think there is.”

  He traced the outline of the glove compartment with his finger. “How serious is it with you and Ned?” he asked.

  She wrapped her arms across her chest. It was getting cold in the car. “Well,” she said, struggling with the answer, “my feelings about him are changing. Sometimes lately he seems pretty immature.”

  Jon turned his head away from her, then rested it on the back of the seat, his lips pressed into a tight line. “I don’t know how to do this anymore,” he said.

  “Do what?”

  “You know, start something. Ask a girl out. It used to be so easy. I saw someone I liked, I asked her, she said yes.”

  “Just ask.”

  He rolled his head on the seat back to look at her. “But Ned—”

  “Forget Ned.”

  “But…” He waved his hand toward his legs, and she shook her head.

  “I don’t care,” she said.

  “But, a girl like you…You’re probably used to having, you know, a physical kind of relationship with—”

  Claire laughed. “Thanks a lot! Why don’t you just say, ‘Well, Claire, you look pretty fast to me.’”

  “I just assumed that you and—”

  “I’m a virgin.”

  “Oh. Sorry. I mean, I’m not sorry that you’re a virgin, just that I made you say it.” He laughed, but quickly lost his smile. “Wish I was one too. I mean, I wish I’d never had sex. I was just, you know, mastering it”—he laughed again—”when this happened.”

  For some reason, the word “mastering” sent a charge through her body.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I mean, not being able to walk is one thing, but not being able…Shit. I’m preoccupied with it, with wondering if I can ever do it again or if I should become a priest or what.”

  She couldn’t believe he was saying all this to her. “You’re a seventeen-year-old boy,” she said. “I think you’re supposed to be preoccupied with it.”

  She stopped telling her tale to Randy there, abruptly. She had probably told him much more than he wanted to hear. Certainly he didn’t need to know that it was Jon with whom she’d lost her virginity, in her mother’s bed, while Mellie worked late at her waitressing job. Yet after Randy fell asleep, she couldn’t stop herself from remembering that night. Through the combination of her inexperience and Jon’s fear, their lovemaking was careful and stumbling, giggling and solemn, and ultimately, they agreed, perfect. If she hadn’t loved Jon before that night in Mellie’s bed, she did afterward, and she loved him with an intensity that swept all others from her heart.

  41

  SEATTLE

  JORDAN WILEY DIED IN the early-morning hours of the fourteenth of April, suddenly but not unexpectedly When Vanessa arrived at the hospital, she found the unit quiet, the nurses teary and subdued. She kept her own tears in check, offering words of consolation to Jordy’s family, praise to the nurses, and hugs to the devastated young female intern who had grown attached to the boy. Even Pete Aldrich was reticent and red-eyed at rounds, and she knew he would never forget Jordan Wiley. Jordy had taught him a few lessons about the human side of medicine.r />
  She moved woodenly through her day, thinking of Jordy only when her defenses were down. She’d remember his fear and his courage but would quickly brush the thoughts aside before they could interfere with her work.

  The tears found her that night after she’d gotten into bed. She lay close to Brian. The small TV on the dresser was tuned to the news on the chance there might be something about Zed Patterson’s trial—the case was in the hands of the jurors now—but she wasn’t listening. Her eyes were closed, her cheeks wet, and she relished the warmth of Brian’s arms around her.

  “Think of all the good you do,” Brian said, attempting to comfort her. She knew that her crying upset him. He didn’t understand that after a day of fighting the tears, they were welcome. She knew she did a lot of good, but she never wanted to lose her ability to respond to a loss.

  She had nearly fallen asleep when he jostled her.

  “The verdict,” he said, and she bolted up in the bed and hit the volume control on the remote.

  She had missed the commentary of the newscaster but caught the words “not guilty.” Then Zed Patterson’s grinning face was on the camera. He stood outside the Capitol building, surrounded by reporters and microphones. Vanessa forced herself to look at him. Oh, he was smooth. He was a thin man, his graying blond hair receding, and there was a slick handsomeness about him that made the hair rise on the back of her neck. She squinted at the TV screen, wondering if she would have recognized him if she hadn’t known who he was. She wasn’t sure. Yet if she bumped into this man on the street, she would still be frightened by his burning blue eyes. She’d seen them often enough in her nightmares.

  Zed Patterson half smiled to the camera. “We must have compassion for her,” he said, “and I hope you folks from the media will keep that in mind. It does no good to tear a young girl like that apart and ruin her future any more than she’s ruined it for herself. Justice has been well served in my case, and I want to move on with my life knowing this girl will get help, not harm, from those around her.”

  The news program moved on to another story, and Vanessa lay down again, closing her eyes. Brian slipped an arm across her stomach, and she felt his lips on her shoulder.