In Self Defense (2 page)

Clare closed her eyes and for the first time felt tears trickling down her cheeks, tears that were warm against cheeks that were cold.  She was no longer alone.  She was going to be all right.  Somehow she knew that the men with Richard weren’t going to let her die.

Using a rope and pulley system meant for just such emergencies, two of the park rangers rappelled down to Clare in a matter of minutes.  One of them took hold of her while the other pried her locked arms loose from their grip on the rock.  She groaned from the pain.  Carefully, the rangers placed her in a wire basket manipulated from above by the third member of their team, covered her with a blanket, and then slowly brought her back up the mountain.

“Well, sir, this must be your lucky day,” the park ranger working the pulley told Richard.

“She just slipped and fell,” Richard kept repeating, wringing his hands.  “There was nothing I could do.”

“This can be a very tricky trail if you’re not experienced,” the ranger said.

“I didn’t realize,” Richard murmured.

The rangers carried Clare down the rest of the path, doing their very best not to jostle her unnecessarily.  They needn’t have been so concerned.  Only half-conscious, she barely felt a thing.  A cursory glance told the rangers that there was little they could do for her at the park’s first-aid station, so an ambulance was summoned to take her to the nearest hospital, Olympic Memorial in Port Angeles.

“My goodness, and what have we here?” a sympathetic Emergency Room nurse asked.

“She slipped and fell off the mountain,” Richard explained.  “She was right in front of me, but it all happened so fast, there wasn’t a thing I could do.”

“Oh my,” the nurse said, sympathetically.  “Well now, why don’t you take the children and go on down to the big room at the end of the hall and have a seat.  There are vending machines down there, if you’re hungry or thirsty.  Meanwhile, we’ll have the doctor examine her, and then, as soon as we know something definitive, someone will come on out and talk to you.”

Richard took Julie and Peter into the waiting room, where the vending machines supplied enough sodas and cookies to keep them quiet.  He looked at his watch.  It was almost five o’clock.  He moved away from the children, far enough to be out of earshot, while still close enough to keep his eye on them, and then he pulled out his cell phone to make a call.

The Emergency Room was filled with its usual share of holiday mishaps, but perhaps none was as serious as this.  An orderly wheeled Clare into a curtained-off cubicle, and then a nurse came in to remove her tattered clothing and cover her with a sheet.  She hardly noticed.

“So, your husband says you slipped and fell off the mountain,” the emergency room doctor said, it could have been a moment or an hour later.  “It doesn’t sound like you had much fun, and it probably wasn’t what you had in mind to do on Father’s Day, now was it?”

Clare did not respond.  She was too dazed to understand that both of her legs were broken, that her left elbow was shattered and her shoulder dislocated, that three of her ribs had pierced her left lung, or that she was bruised and battered from top to bottom and bleeding from a deep gash on her head.  It wasn’t clear to her how she had gotten off the mountain, much less how she had gotten to this place -- or what this place even was, for that matter, or what was going to happen to her next.

Nor could she remember having slipped.

***

Clare spent the better part of a week in the Port Angeles hospital, frightened of every sound, every motion, while the doctors set her leg and elbow fractures, immobilized her shoulder, taped her ribs, sutured the gash in her head, bandaged her raw hands and other lacerations, and waited for the punctures in her lung to seal themselves.  Then she came home, to spend six more weeks lying in the king-size bed she shared with her husband, waiting for her injuries to heal, waiting for the casts to come off, waiting for the nightmares to go away.  And during those six weeks, something changed.  Something in her manner, something in her color, something in her eyes.

In the beginning, she tried to remember what happened.  After that, she tried to forget.  Questions confused her.  Sudden movements startled her.  Once cheerful and self-confident, she began to look at the world around her with apprehension rather than confidence.  Things she used to be sure about were now cloaked in uncertainty.  Relationships she had always taken for granted now had to be reevaluated.  Those who understood stayed close, those who didn’t drifted away.

Richard was never far from her side.  Except for what he could do by telephone, he all but abandoned his work while Clare remained in Port Angeles.  Even after she was finally released from the hospital, and an ambulance had brought her home to the sprawling Tudor style mansion in the exclusive Seattle suburb of Laurelhurst, he went to the office for only a couple of hours each day.  At all other times, he could be found at his wife’s side, feeding her, plumping her pillows, arranging her bedding, massaging her temples, reading to her, or just sitting quietly by the bed, loathe to leave her for so much as a moment.

Seeing him, Doreen Mulcahy, the housekeeper, wagged her head back and forth.

“That man is carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders,” she was heard to mutter.  “Why, you’d almost think he was to blame for what happened.”

“He
does
blame himself,” Richard’s sister, Elaine Haskell, told her.  “You know him -- he prides himself on always being in control of everything.  He thinks that somehow he should have been able to prevent what happened to Clare.”

After a week, however, Clare had had enough.  “Please, Richard, go back to work,” she begged.  “You don’t have to hover.  Really, I’m going to be all right.”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“I’m sure,” she told him.  Her legs were in casts, as was her arm, her shoulder was immobilized in a sling, her punctured lung and cracked ribs were slowly healing themselves -- as were the cuts and bruises all over her body, and the gash on her head was repairing itself beneath its sutures.  She was physically exhausted and emotionally drained.  What more could happen to her?

“Well, if you’re sure,“ he said.  He didn’t have to be told twice.  He was gone in a matter of minutes, like a recalcitrant schoolboy released from detention.

Clare breathed a big sigh of relief. Despite heavy medication, she was in constant pain and discomfort, and she was frightened -- more frightened than she had ever been in her life.  She could put on a brave face for a few minutes at a time, for friends and family who insisted on coming to visit, but it was far too great an effort to do it twenty-four hours a day in front of her husband.

It wasn’t long before Richard slipped back into his old habit of leaving early in the mornings and returning late in the evenings, sometimes as late as midnight.  To make up for his absence, or perhaps to assuage his guilt, he sent his assistant to Laurelhurst as often as possible.  Clare smiled to herself.  She knew her husband so well.  But she didn’t mind.  She liked James Lilly.  He was perhaps two or three years younger than she, actually much brighter than he let people know, and although somewhat shy, he had a devilish sense of humor.  He sat by her bed and made her want to laugh instead of cry.

It was James who finally got her out of bed.  “You can’t hide in there forever,” he declared, six weeks after her release from the hospital.  “The doctor says your elbow and your shoulder are healing nicely and they’re strong enough to use, so it’s time for you to get up and rejoin the world.”

Were it anyone but James saying it, she might have said no, but he was so sweet and so caring and so funny, she didn’t have the heart to refuse.  He made light of the crutches, showing her how to maneuver with them without looking too ungainly.

“These things may seem awkward to you, but they have a multitude of uses,” he told her.  “Among other things, they make great weapons.”  And he showed her how to brandish them as though she were engaging a foe.

“I have only one question,” she said.  “How am I supposed to stay standing while I’m using these things to smite my enemy?”

“Don’t bother me with minor points,” he said.  “You’re here to learn from the master.”

“The master, eh?” she said with a chuckle.  “And how many broken legs have you survived?”

“Well, at least one more than you, in my lifetime,” he declared.  “So, back to walking.  The first thing you do is you take your time.  After all, how would it look for you to survive falling off a mountain only to trip over your crutches and break your neck?”

She practiced by going up and down the second-floor hallway, swinging her cast-heavy legs, letting the crutches carry her along.  By the third week of August, although her armpits were aching, she was able to negotiate the stairs, and surprised the children one evening by coming downstairs for dinner.

“Gee, Mom,” Peter said his whole face lighting up.  “Look at you go.  When did you get so cool?”

“While you weren’t looking, I guess,” Clare declared, quite pleased with herself.

“I like Uncle James,” Julie said with a giggle.  “He’s funny sometimes.”

“I like him, too,” Clare told her.

Unfortunately, Richard missed the big event.  He called to say he was stuck in a late meeting.

Soon enough, Clare began to think about going back to work.  For the past four years, she had been an editor at Thornburgh House, a small but prestigious publishing firm, one of a handful that, some thirty-five years ago, had defied common wisdom about publishing houses needing to be located in New York City and set up shop in Seattle.  Although Glenn Thornburgh, the head of the firm, had been more than solicitous, she knew things were piling up, and she also knew she was not indispensable.

Not that Clare had to work.  In fact, it was well known to everyone that she did not.  She was just not the kind of person who was content to stay at home.  She worked because she wanted to.

Her leg and elbow casts were due to come off in another couple of weeks, and although it would be a while before she could get behind the wheel of a car, there were always car services that, for a fee, would be only too happy to take her from Laurelhurst to Pioneer Square and then return her to Laurelhurst each day.

It would be good to get back to work, she decided.  It would be good to get involved, to be productive again.  It would give her something to think about other than herself.

“I don’t like the way Julie’s acting,” Doreen declared a few days after Clare’s debut at dinner.

“What do you mean?” Clare asked.

“She put up a good front at supper the other night,” the housekeeper said, “but that’s all it was -- a front.  If you look closely, you’ll see there’s something very wrong going on inside.”

“Do you know what it is?”

Doreen shrugged.  “I don’t know as I can say,” she said.  “I know it started right after your accident.  And it’s been getting worse since you came home from the hospital.”  She opened her mouth as if to say something else, and then changed her mind.

Clare frowned.  It was true that she had been pretty self-absorbed since the accident, but if there was something going on with her daughter, she needed to know about it.

It took only a little bit of careful observation to see exactly what Doreen was talking about.  Julie seemed to have retreated into herself.  Her cheeks were pale and her eyes had a hollow, almost haunted look to them.  She hardly laughed anymore, and rarely spoke unless spoken to.  At meals, she did little more than push the food around her plate.  Like a shadow, she hid in corners and behind doors, watching, waiting, seemingly unwilling to let her mother out of her sight, as though afraid, if she did, something awful would happen.

Now that Clare was paying attention, it was obvious that Julie was well on her way to making herself sick.

“I’m going to be all right,” she assured the twelve-year-old.  “What happened on the mountain -- well, you know, things just happen sometimes, and there’s nothing we can do about it.  But I’m home now.  I’m safe.  And I’m getting well.  You don’t have to worry about me anymore.”

“Yes, I do,” Julie said stubbornly.

Clare put her arms around the girl and pulled her close, holding her as tight as her injuries, and her daughter, would allow.

“I love you very much,” she said.  “And you can believe me when I tell you not to worry.  Everything is going to be all right.   I’m not going to leave you.  I promise.”

***

August 29
th
was Clare’s thirty-eighth birthday.  On that morning, her leg casts came off, and she had her first session with the physical therapist that was going to teach her how to walk all over again.  That afternoon, Doreen baked a cake, a double chocolate fudge cake, Clare’s favorite, in preparation for a celebratory dinner.  That evening, Richard came home from work early.

“Come with me,” he said, tossing away her crutches, sweeping her up in his arms, and carrying her out the front door and down the stone steps.  Parked in the curve of the circular driveway was a shiny new red BMW.

“Happy birthday,” he said, setting her down beside it, and breaking into a huge smile.

“Richard, how extravagant,” she exclaimed.  Clare knew little about automobiles, but she knew enough to know there was over a hundred thousand dollars sitting in front of her.