Blood Rubies

by McDowell, Michael

  She ran until her legs ached and she was forced to pause to calm the beating of her heart. She wiped the perspiration from her forehead, then saw that she had badly scraped her left hand; it was bloody. She crouched behind a holly bush and looked toward the house. She could no longer see the lights, but she heard voices, strident and unintelligible. She waited to hear the sound of the car doors slamming, but it did not come.

  She realized then that the inhabitants of the house, who had no reason to protect her, would tell the police that she was upstairs; they would see the open window and figure out that she must have escaped into the forest. They would soon be after her. She turned and ran toward the dim noise of traffic on Route 128, desperately praying that she would be able to hitch a ride before the police captured her. With each pounding step she cursed Jack and her own stupidity.

  27

  When Andrea fled from the house in Dedham and made her way to Route 128, she clambered over the chain-link fence and climbed up the embankment. She ran along the shoulder of the highway, shuddering as each of several passing cars blew its horn at her. At last she took up a station beneath a tungsten light. She stuck out her thumb and attempted a stance of insouciance. She got a ride almost immediately, with a black-bearded man about thirty wearing much-faded jeans and a black leather jacket. “I don’t usually pick people up,” he said in a surprisingly soft and cultured voice, “because one hears stories . . . But I saw you out there alone, and at this hour I thought it might be best if I picked you up, rather than someone else, if you know what I mean.”

  Andrea nodded dumbly and stared down at her hands. They looked black, and she suddenly realized that they were scratched and bloody. She thrust them into her pockets.

  “Thank you,” she faltered.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered automatically.

  The man suddenly lifted his foot from the accelerator. “Wait a minute—” he began, and Andrea saw that she had alarmed him.

  “Boston,” she said quickly, “I’m going to Boston.”

  “Where in Boston?”

  “Downtown. The Hill.”

  He nodded, reassured. “All right. I’m going to Copley Square. The bars’ll be hot tonight.”

  Andrea continued to talk to the man. The little pretense of conviviality helped to remove her mind from the terrifying events that had just taken place. Every minute in the car, every word that she spoke and every word she attended to, took her farther from Jack and Sid and Morgie and Dominic and Rita and Marty and Donna-Louise—and the police.

  She was let off at the corner of Charles and Beacon Streets and thanked the man profusely for the ride. She was indeed very grateful to him, for she had realized that she might easily have been not so fortunate in hitchhiking, When the man’s car was out of sight, Andrea lingered near the Arlington entrance to the deserted and dark Public Garden. The Trailways bus station was no longer located just two blocks away, but, in a recent wave of urban redevelopment, had been relocated to South Station Terminal. Andrea glanced at a clock and saw that even with a fast taxi, she would never catch the last bus of the night that went near the college.

  She had several dimes in her pocket, and from a telephone booth outside the Ritz she dialed Joanna Liberman’s number. There was no answer. She called Wordsworth Hall, but was told that Marsha had already left for the holidays; calling the Liberman’s house, she discovered that Marsha hadn’t arrived there yet either. There was no message that she could leave that wouldn’t alert Marsha’s mother to something’s being wrong. Andrea wondered if she shouldn’t take the risk of telephoning her parents, making up some story about having come to Boston with Marsha, being separated and lost—but decided that this would require more substantial detailing than she was prepared to give just now. Having narrowly escaped arrest on major drug charges, Andrea didn’t yet feel herself up to lying convincingly to her parents.

  She went into a garishly lighted coffee shop and nursed a cup of coffee for twenty minutes, trying to decide what to do with herself. The man who had picked her up on Route 128 had said that the bars would be hot tonight; perhaps she ought simply run over to the Brimmer House and hope to get asked home by someone. She had twelve dollars in her pocket; that was certainly not enough for a taxi back to the college, and the first bus wouldn’t leave until seven the next morning.

  She went to the ladies’ room, brushed her hair, straightened her clothing, and hurried out of the coffee shop, headed for the Brimmer House. It was already one o’clock; the bar would close at two, and so she had little time. She felt soiled, going so coldly about the process of offering her body to practically any man who looked presentable. But she had no relish for waking her parents and having them make the half-hour drive into Boston; and if she did call, where would she wait for them once the bars had closed?

  Andrea blamed only herself for her predicament. She’d been a fool to climb onto the back of Jack’s motorcycle, she’d been a fool to have spoken to him at all. Of all that had happened that evening, she could be glad of only one thing: that she had not removed her jacket in the house—for she would be very cold right now without it. And, it suddenly occurred to her, the police would have found out her identity by the label in the lining. She wondered anew at the narrowness of her escape. Two summers of adventure in Europe had not prepared her for the excitement of climbing out windows and running through forests to avoid arrest; and, she reflected, she would be just as pleased not to have had the experience at all.

  The Brimmer House was quiet on the night before a holiday. Of the dozen men there, most were already partnered, and all were drunk. She ordered a scotch, double on the rocks. She sipped slowly and looked around. The men who noticed her quickly looked away, uninterested.

  Andrea went into the ladies’ room, and stared dismayed into the mirror at her appearance. She washed her face clean of makeup and trusted to the natural look through her second drink.

  Nothing came of the natural look, and last call was announced. Andrea didn’t want to waste the little money she had left on a third drink—most would be needed for the bus ticket—and no one offered to buy her one. She was one of the last seven persons in the bar; no one appeared interested in her. She ate the ice in her glass, and at five minutes before two she walked, angrily and a little unsteadily, out onto the street.

  Outside the Brimmer House, several men and women lingered sheepishly. Andrea came upon a tall, slender man in a light tan jacket, not drunk at all, leaning against an MG. He glanced at her up and down. She returned the gaze.

  “Need a ride?” he said softly, mockingly.

  Andrea shrugged, with a smile.

  “Going anywhere particular?”

  She shook her head no.

  “That’s good,” he said, “because I don’t have a car.”

  Andrea got back to college safely and, when she next talked to Marsha, told her friend merely that she had returned very late that night, that she had not slept with Jack, and had no intention of seeing him again ever. She went home on Wednesday, and although her parents commented on her nervousness, she said it was merely the result of overwork. As the days passed, Andrea thought less and less of Jack and his friends. She supposed that they had been arrested, but whether they were out on bail she had no idea. There had been a notice of the raid in the papers, and she read with interest that Rita and Dominic had both given false names to the police. But she had no idea what had become of them: possibly they were all in jail. Suburban police didn’t take kindly to heroin, she knew. Evidently they hadn’t betrayed her, for the police never appeared, and Andrea allowed herself the luxury of believing that they never would. And even if they did, what could happen? Andrea would simply deny having been there, and there was no proof of her presence.

  Over the next few weeks, Andrea studied hard. Her most important project o
f the semester was due on December twenty-second, a literary and sociological study of Père la Chaise Cemetery in Paris, which she and Marsha had visited two years before. She completed it fully a week in advance of that deadline, and when she handed it in, she returned to her dormitory with an enormous sense of relief and freedom.

  That day in her dormitory mailbox she found a short note from her mother explaining that she and Cosmo would be travelling to Quebec City on the day after Christmas and staying until New Year’s Eve. Cosmo was to attend a contractors’ conference there. There was a terseness about the wording of the note that pained Andrea, but she realized that her mother was only mirroring the coldness that Andrea had displayed toward her parents in the past several months.

  In one searing moment Andrea realized her true motive in punishing her parents with distance and cruel words. It was not that they had lied to her—it had nothing to do with them at all. Andrea was merely ashamed at having been the product of unknown parents, parents who had abandoned her: parents who might well have been vulgar, diseased, criminal, or achingly poor. The revelation that she had not been borne in Vittoria LoPonti’s womb had cast Andrea adrift, but instead of falling back on her adoptive parents for their support, she had repudiated them. Now she saw that she was in danger of losing them altogether.

  She determined not to let that happen.

  Andrea returned to Weston two days before Christmas. There were parties for Vittoria and Cosmo to attend, and Andrea spent the days shopping or in Marsha’s company. Andrea was polite, but still reserved; she needed time to observe her parents, and sort out her real feelings. In watching them, Andrea saw to what extent they had always loved her; loved her now. And she saw what pain she had caused them.

  On Christmas morning Vittoria and Cosmo were astounded when Andrea appeared at the top of the stairs, straightening the cuffs of her sweater, just when they were about to leave for morning mass. “May I come too?” she asked.

  She sat between them and clasped their hands during the prayers. The family sang out of one hymnal. Nothing had to be said.

  When they returned to the house, Andrea distributed the gifts, insisting that her parents open first their gifts from her. Vittoria gasped dramatically when she turned aside the paper inside the box, which contained a finely wrought gold bracelet. “Wait, Mother,” said Andrea, when her mother started to snap it on her wrist, “look inside, there’s an inscription.”

  “ ‘With a Daughter’s Love,” ’ whispered Vittoria, and leaned far forward to embrace her daughter. “Andrea, I’ll never take it off again.”

  Cosmo opened his gift with agonizing slowness, carefully preserving the ribbon, the paper, and the tissue inside; this was a deliberate tease of both his wife and his daughter. When at last he pulled the chased and enamelled dagger from the box, however, it was with genuine admiration. He took Andrea to task for spending so much money on him, but he blushed with pride over the gift. He was so proud of it, he said, he would never use it once in his life.

  “No, Daddy!” laughed Andrea, “I bought it for you to open all your mail with. I want you to use it!”

  “Well, don’t you want to see what Santa Claus brought you this year?” said Vittoria. “Open your presents, Andrea.”

  There were fifteen of them, in small boxes and large, each beautifully wrapped by Cosmo. As Andrea took apart the first, Cosmo gathered up the ribbon, paper, and decorations as she discarded them. In this, the largest of the boxes, and surprisingly light, she was startled to find nothing but tissue paper—there was no gift inside.

  Puzzled, Andrea went more carefully through the tissue paper and found a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill. She laughed in amusement, and Vittoria clapped her hands.

  In each of the other fourteen boxes, all exquisitely wrapped and all suspiciously light, Andrea discovered just another such gift.

  The next day Andrea drove her parents to the airport and said she would pick them up again on New Year’s Eve. “Well,” said Andrea softly, as she hugged them good-bye, “I guess we’re a real family again.”

  “Come with us,” pleaded Vittoria.

  “No,” said Andrea. “You two will have a better time without me. Second honeymoon and all that.”

  Cosmo smiled. “Remember how much we love you,” he said.

  Vittoria rattled the bracelet on her arm. “I love this,” she said, “but your coming back to us is much more precious to me. Thank you, darling!”

  On her way back to Weston, Andrea stopped at Marsha Liberman’s and asked her friend to keep her company at the house for the evening. The two young women planned to attend a film, but the hours passed so pleasantly in conversation and laughter that they never gave another thought to leaving the LoPontis’ house.

  It was when she put on her pea jacket and walked Marsha out to the VW parked in the driveway that Andrea first became nervous about being alone in the house. She had asked Marsha to stay over, but the Libermans were all leaving early the next morning to visit relatives on Long Island. Marsha honked twice and backed drunkenly into the street.

  Just as Andrea turned toward the house, she heard the roar of a motorcycle engine near by. She stiffened at the sound.

  The motorcycle came nearer. Andrea slipped around the edge of the house, staying in the shadows, and hid herself behind the manger her father had set up in front of the living-room windows. A Harley passed beneath the street lamp, but she could not identify the man riding; the light reflected brightly from his mirrored visor.

  Andrea did not stop to right the plywood lamb she knocked over in her haste to get back inside.

  Over the next two days, she did not leave the house. She slept each morning until noon, drank coffee for the next couple of hours as she caught up on old reading assignments, and spent the rest of the afternoon working on the proposal for her senior honors thesis. This lassitude itself numbed her, and she felt she hadn’t even the energy to deposit at the bank the fifteen one-hundred-dollar bills she had received for Christmas. She had placed these in a deposit envelope in the inside pocket of her pea jacket.

  She had grown used to being in the house alone and was no longer frightened. After living four years in constant proximity to ninety-four other young women, each of whom possessed a stereo, a hair-dryer, and an electric typewriter and kept one or another going at all times, she relished the silence.

  Early on Friday evening, the twenty-ninth of December, Andrea put aside her Russian book and went into the kitchen to prepare her dinner. While she was eating, she decided that she ought to get out of the house. There was the possibility of going to one of the bars in Boston, of course, but Andrea remembered with great distaste what her last exploit, at the Brimmer House, had been, and decided that she’d just as soon make a short evening of it. She would go to a film, get to sleep early and get up early, and go shopping downtown. After changing into jeans, a blue-and-white reindeer sweater and her new lizard-skin boots, she sat at the kitchen table and leafed through the newspaper to see what films were playing near by.

  Just as she had determined on Rebecca over Scenes from a Marriage, the doorbell rang. Andrea sighed with relief: she was certain it was Marsha, who had been due back late that afternoon. She realized in that moment just how eager she was for company; in fact she could not now remember having been alone for so long a time in her life. She hadn’t spoken a word aloud in two days.

  In the foyer, she flicked on the outside light and pulled open the door.

  The glare of the overhead light made deep hollows of Jack’s eyes and erased any pleasantry from the crease of his smile. The glass storm door was open and rested against his back.

  “Merry Christmas,” he said casually, and stepped fully into the light. His half-lidded eyes glittered.

  Andrea’s fingers were wrapped tightly about the brass knob. “What do you want?” she asked sharply.
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  He laughed shortly and nodded his head. “It’s Christmas,” he said. “Old friends get together and they talk about old times.”

  “My parents are here. You can’t come in.”

  “No, they’re not. They left the day after Christmas.”

  Jack stepped deftly past her, allowing the storm door to slam behind him. After snapping off the outside light, he moved across the marble foyer and ascended the short flight of wide steps to the living room. His movement was unsteady, and Andrea wondered whether it would help or hinder her that he was so stoned. Before she followed him, she peered out the window and saw the jeep parked halfway up the drive.

  “Not bad,” said Jack, looking around him from the middle of the living room. “Outside looks like a French whore’s carnival, though.”

  He slumped into a chair, slinging one leg over the arm. The heel of his black boot left a streak of grease across the material. Taking a pack of cigarettes from the inside of his leather jacket, he extracted one and lit it. Andrea set a large ceramic ashtray beside the chair, but he deliberately flipped the smoking match into the high pile of the carpet.

  Andrea leaned silently into the corner of the sofa. She was cold, and held her hands tightly together to keep from shaking. Her fingers were entwined between her knees.

  Jack drew the smoke deep into his lungs and exhaled it with a sigh. “You were always glad to see me before.”

  “What is it you want, Jack? I’ve got a friend on her way over. We’re going to a movie—”

  “I wanted to talk to you for a few minutes, that’s all.”

  He righted himself in the chair and stubbed out his half, smoked cigarette. From his pocket he took a plastic bag of grass and a pack of rolling papers, set them on the end table, and began to roll a joint.