8

VIENNA

ON TUESDAY, NEARLY A week and a half after her harrowing encounter on the bridge, Claire called the Fishmonger Restaurant in Arlington and asked for Randy St. Pierre. The woman who answered the phone didn’t respond immediately.

“You must mean Randy Donovan,” she said.

“Is he the owner?”

“Yes.”

“Then, yes. I’d like to speak with him, please.”

The woman left for a moment, and Claire paged idly through her appointment book where it lay open on her bed.

She heard a shuffling noise on the other end of the phone before a man said, “This is Randy Donovan.”

The first thing that struck her about Margot’s brother was his voice. Deep and rich and resonant.

“Excuse me for disturbing you,” she began. “My name is Claire Harte-Mathias. I wanted to get in touch with you because I saw your sister just before she”—Claire wished there were some euphemistic way to say it—”before she took her life. I talked to her on the bridge.”

Silence filled the line. Perhaps she hadn’t explained herself clearly enough. She was about to try again when he spoke up.

“Yes,” he said. “They told me about you.”

Claire walked to the bedroom window and looked into the darkening woods. “Well, I’m finding that I’m having a hard time forgetting about her. I was wondering if we could meet and talk. I’d like to understand her better.”

Randy Donovan cleared his throat. “I’m afraid you’re asking the wrong person. I didn’t understand my sister at all.”

“Please? Also, I have something of hers for you.” Claire looked across the room at the bed, where the framed photograph lay next to her appointment book.

He hesitated for a moment. “I suppose I could meet with you for a few minutes.”

“Great.” She walked back to the bed and sat down again, turning to that week’s calendar in her appointment book. “You can say when and where,” she said.

“How about tomorrow night?” he suggested. “It would have to be late. I’m rehearsing a play at the Chain Bridge Theater in McLean. Could you meet me there afterwards? Say about nine?” That voice. She tried to picture the man who would accompany it but failed to come up with a clear image.

She agreed to the time and place, and he gave her directions to the theater.

“And Mr. Donovan?” she asked.

“Yes?”

“I’m very sorry about Margot.”

THE DIMINUTIVE CHAIN BRIDGE Theater had once been a small chapel. It was built of fieldstone and stood alone on a street corner, its slim white steeple piercing the night sky. Claire parked near a few other cars in the small gravel parking lot and walked around the building to the broad front doors. Pulling one open, she stepped inside.

She was in a foyer, cool and dark. From beyond the closed oak door leading into the heart of the theater itself, voices echoed. A sandwich-board poster, barely legible in the dim light, stood in one corner of the foyer:

The Chain Bridge Theater of McLean proudly presents The Magician of Dassant—January 22-30.

Claire shivered against the chill in the foyer and pushed open the heavy oak door. Inside, she stood still, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness. The stage was brightly lit, a rectangle of white in the dark cave of the chapel. A man and two women stood near the center of the stage, arguing loudly.

Claire unbuttoned her coat as she moved slowly down the center aisle. The pews of the little chapel now served as seats for the theater, and all were empty except for the front row, where a man and a woman sat facing the stage. Claire chose a seat in the center of the theater, laying her coat on the cushioned pew as she focused her attention on the drama taking place in front of her.

The actor onstage was short and squat. She hadn’t pictured Randy Donovan fat; the boy in the photograph was slender. If he owned a restaurant, though, perhaps food was a ruling force in his life. He was in the midst of berating the two actresses, and his high, nasal voice was nothing like that of the man with whom she’d spoken on the phone.

A second man walked onto the stage. He was tall, solidly built, with medium brown hair and a beard and mustache so immaculately trimmed that from this distance it looked as though they had been painted on his face. The way he carried himself—his entire commanding demeanor—matched the voice on the phone. There was a self-assured dignity to him, and when he spoke, his voice swept across the theater and lingered in the dark corners. Claire sat up straighter. If there was indeed a magician in this play, Randy Donovan was it.

The squat man and two women listened raptly to his words, and Claire sensed that the scene was drawing to a close. After a moment, the other characters slipped back into the wings, and Randy Donovan stood alone, offering a soliloquy to his small audience, something about magic and community and loyalty. Claire was oblivious to the words themselves as she lost herself in his presence.

When Randy had finished speaking, the man and woman in the front row applauded. Randy walked down the steps at the side of the stage and spoke briefly to them before glancing in Claire’s direction. Picking up a coat and a canvas bag from the edge of the stage, he started walking toward her. He slipped into her pew, reaching out with his hand.

“You must be Claire?”

She stood to shake his hand. There was something familiar about him. Something in the clear blue eyes. The scent of pipe tobacco was agreeably strong in the air around him. She felt as though she’d met him before.

“Yes, I’m Claire,” she said. “You were excellent up there.”

“Thanks.” He motioned for her to take her seat again, then sat down himself. He rested his coat on the back of the pew in front of them, and she watched him brush an invisible piece of lint from the dark wool before he opened the canvas bag on his lap.

“I need some coffee,” he said, pulling a green thermos and two Styrofoam cups from the bag. “I have an extra cup. It’s decaf. Care to join me?”

“Yes,” she said.

He poured them each a cup of very creamy coffee. “Sorry,” he said, handing her one of the cups. “It’s about half milk. I prefer it that way and wasn’t thinking about anyone else’s taste when I made it.”

She took the cup and held its warmth between her palms. She sipped the pale coffee with a strong sense of comfort, unexpected and very welcome.

She should begin with small talk, she thought, not the probing questions she was longing to ask him.

“How long has this been a theater?” she asked.

“A decade.” He looked up at the pitched ceiling, white crossed with dark beams. “My home away from home. The building dates from the early nineteenth century.” He lowered his eyes from the ceiling and leaned back to study her. “Well,” he said after a moment, “you look perfectly normal.”

She laughed. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that Margot was my own sister, and I don’t think I would have had the guts to hang off the edge of that bridge in a snowstorm to try to save her. I figured you would look either like some muscle-bound superwoman or someone with a few screws loose.”

“Well, I only wish I could have succeeded in stopping her.”

“You were doomed to failure,” he said with a sigh. “One thing I had to admit to myself a long time ago was that Margot couldn’t be saved. Unfortunately, she was smart enough to know what an empty existence she had. Life must have been unbearable for her. I don’t really blame her for wanting to put an end to it.”

There was a coolness to his words. A certain detachment that had probably rescued him from years of guilt over not being able to help his sister.

Three women walked up the aisle toward the exit. Randy waved good-night as they passed and told them he would lock up. Claire heard the heavy doors close behind the women, leaving her alone with Randy in the dim theater.

He looked at his watch, holding it into the stage light, and Claire quickly began speaking again.

“I think about her all the time,” she confessed. “I’ve tried to tune her out, but my memory of that night seems to have a life of its own. That’s why I wanted to see you. If I understood why she did it, maybe I could finally let go of her.”

“I don’t think it’s possible to understand Margot,” Randy said. “A dozen doctors sacrificed an inordinate number of their brain cells trying to figure out what made her tick, with very limited success.”

Claire opened her purse and pulled out the framed photograph. “I brought this for you from her room,” she said, handing it to him.

“Is that the picture I gave her?” He turned to hold it up to the light and laughed. “Does this look like a screwed-up family or what?”

“I thought it looked like a nice family,” she said, although she hadn’t formed an assessment one way or the other.

“Which object does not belong in this picture?” he asked, as if he held a puzzle in his hands.

She leaned closer to look at the picture and stayed in that position a moment longer than necessary, breathing in the scent of his tobacco. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean, me. Two beautiful little blond kids, this lovely blond mother, this handsome blond man. And this spindly-legged, dark-haired, big-toothed kid.”

She studied the picture, knowing of course that he was right. She could see clearly that he didn’t fit in. He even stood a little apart from the rest of the family. A slice of the front door was visible between him and the other children, and she felt sorry for the dark-haired boy. His smile in the photograph looked strained.

“You were in the awkward age,” she suggested.

He set the picture upside down on the pew next to him and let out another sigh. “How can I help you, Claire Harte-Mathias?”

“Tell me about her. Tell me why this entire situation happened so I can make some sense of it and lay it to rest.”

He looked away from her, back to the dark wool coat, and she was not surprised to see him pick at another obscure fleck of dust.

“Would you rather go someplace else?” Talking about Margot, about this family he felt no part of, was clearly not easy for him. “We could go to a restaurant or somewhere—”

“Actually,” he interrupted, “if I’m going to talk about Margot, I’d prefer the darkness.”

Did he mean he might cry? Already she could see that the smile had faded from his face. His lips had taken a downward curve.

“All right,” she said.

“But I don’t want to know the details of what happened between the two of you on the bridge.” He raised his hands in front of him as if to thwart an assault. “Don’t tell me her last words or any of that stuff. Please.”

She licked her lips. “I’m sorry to put you through this,” she said. What gave her the right to ask him to divulge his personal life to her? She thought about withdrawing her request entirely when he began to speak.

“The woman in the picture was my mother,” he said, “but the man was not my father. My father had been a miserable shit—at least according to my mother. I don’t remember him at all. They were divorced when I was three. She told me he was a chronic gambler, a womanizer, a liar, and a drinker, and that I was the spitting image of him.”

“Oh,” Claire said. “And that’s where the name ‘Donovan’ came from?”

“Right. I was a constant reminder of someone who had messed up her life. So, then she met Guy St. Pierre, who was God in her eyes. He was a classical pianist who had toured with different orchestras before he developed arthritis and had to retire. They got married and had twins, Margot and Charles, who were, to be fair, incredibly gorgeous kids.” He tapped the picture at his side. “Everyone fawned over them. They were weird though. My parents never treated them like children. Right from the start, they were tutored in reading and music. They were little robots. Articles were written about them. Life magazine did a story on them. And there is no doubt that they were gifted when it came to music.”

“Excuse me.” Claire interrupted him. “I don’t understand why children who were this talented and about to go to Juilliard would live in Harpers Ferry.”

Randy nodded his understanding. “Guy had come back to Harpers Ferry because his parents and sister were there. He met my mother, and kind of got stuck there, I guess. We were planning to move to New York, though. At the time of the accident, the house was on the market.”

“I see.”

“So, as I said, the twins were not normal.” Randy pursed his lips. “Now I, on the other hand, was a normal kid.” He let out a small chuckle. “My only gift was for screwing up and getting in trouble. The articles always mentioned me in a little aside: ‘And the twins have an older brother, Randy.’”

There was a long pause before he spoke again. “I loved them, though,” he said. “They were my baby brother and sister. They got bullied a lot because they were soft, and I protected them.” He shook his head. “I once broke a kid’s nose for tripping Charles on the sidewalk.”

Stillness filled the theater again, and the air was growing colder by the minute. Someone must have turned down the thermostat on his or her way out. Claire thought of lifting her coat to her shoulders, but she didn’t want him to think she was ready to leave.

She looked at the empty stage, wondering how to word the question she couldn’t leave without asking. “Would you mind telling me what happened on the bridge twenty years ago?” she said finally.

Randy swept his hand over the wool coat one more time. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “but that’s it, all right? I’ll talk about it this one time, and then I don’t want to think about it again.”

“Yes. Fine.”

“I was fifteen at the time,” he said. “The twins were ten. My mother had asked me to walk over to their piano teacher’s house— they’d spent the night there because a big snowstorm hit during their lesson. It was about a mile from our house, across the bridge. So, I met them at their teacher’s house, and we started walking home.” He looked up at the beamed ceiling. “The bridge was covered with snow,” he said. “It was beautiful.”

“Yes,” she said.

“We started throwing snowballs at each other. They were playing like normal kids for once. Charles got carried away, though. He was chasing Margot with snowballs and horsing around like an honest-to-goodness kid. But then he climbed over the guardrail. I have no idea why. I think he wanted to slide along the platform out there while he was holding on to the railing.”

Claire caught her breath, remembering again the vertigo she’d felt on the bridge.

“We were yelling at him to come back, but he ignored us. Then suddenly, he was gone. He just fell out of sight. It happened so suddenly that, for a minute, I thought he was still joking around. We ran over to the side of the bridge and could hear him screaming, although we couldn’t see him. We were too far from the edge of the bridge.” He hesitated a moment. “I’ve always been glad of that. That I couldn’t see him.”

Claire nodded, although Randy wasn’t looking at her.

“Margot flipped out,” he continued. “She thought she could get to him somehow. She ran over to the spot where the bridge is built into the embankment and tried to climb down, but she fell and hit her head. Knocked herself unconscious and tumbled a few yards down to a rock.”

“How terrible.”

“I felt as if, in the space of a few seconds, I’d lost both my little sister and brother. And I was supposed to be walking them home to keep them safe. Terrific job I did, huh?” He glanced at her but didn’t wait for a response. “Anyhow, I climbed down the embankment and got to Margot. She was still breathing, but her head was covered with blood and she was unconscious. I half carried, half dragged her all the way home.”

Randy suddenly let out a growl and rested his head back against the pew, squinting at the ceiling. “That damn bridge,” he said. “I still can’t drive over it. I hate that thing.”

For the first time, Claire could see the pain inside him. He was circling it, edging closer. She had no desire to push him headfirst into it, but she needed to know the rest of the story.

“Margot was in a coma for a while?” she asked.

He sat up straight again and seemed to regain his composure. “She was unconscious for a couple of days,” he said, “and when she came out of it, she was different. She couldn’t handle losing Charles. He was her alter ego. She was extremely depressed, and afraid to leave my mother’s side. Literally. My mother couldn’t use the bathroom without Margot sitting right outside the door, waiting for her to come out.”

“Could she go to school?”

“No, but she’d never gone to school in the first place. My parents taught her at home. Margot eventually wrecked my mother’s marriage to Guy. If they tried to kick her out of their bedroom, she would sneak in and curl up in a ball and spend the night on their floor.

“My mother died of cancer three years ago, but Margot had lived with her until then. Once Mother was dead, it was obvious that Margot couldn’t take care of herself. She would get into bed and stay there, not eating, sometimes not even getting up to use the toilet.” Randy sighed again. “So Guy, who was living in D.C. at the time, and I got together to try to figure out what to do. He had remarried and had a new family and essentially wanted no part of her. I felt guilty about institutionalizing her, but I couldn’t see taking her in—she needed round-the-clock care. So we committed her. I’m still not sure that was the right thing to do, especially now, knowing she was able to get out and kill herself.” He spread his broad hands flat on his knees. “Maybe I could have done more for her,” he said. “I don’t know. She was my sister, but sometimes I pretended she didn’t exist. It was easier that way.”

He fell silent, but Claire was too lost in her own thoughts to notice. Something he had said struck a chord in her.

“I have a sister, too.” Her voice was as soft as a whisper in the cool, dark air of the old chapel.

Randy waited.

“She’s two years younger than me, and I haven’t seen her since I was a child.”

“Why not?”

Claire shrugged. “Our parents divorced, and she went to live with my father in Washington State.” With the entire country between them, it had required little effort to pretend she had no sister. Randy was right. It was easier that way.

Suddenly, an image passed before her eyes: a smooth, white surface—porcelain, perhaps?—smeared with blood. Claire’s breath caught in her throat. The image disappeared as quickly as it had come, but she stood up abruptly, panicked.

Randy looked at her in surprise.

“I didn’t realize it was so late,” Claire said, although she had no idea of the time. “I have to go.”

The theater was spinning, and she clutched Randy’s arm as he stood up. Her stomach churned with the threat of nausea as he reached out to steady her, one hand on her shoulder.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “You’ve gone white.”

She nodded, letting go of him. She felt his eyes on her. “Yes, I’m fine,” she said, lifting her coat to her shoulders. Her legs trembled as she walked out of the pew, but once she reached the aisle, the vertigo had subsided, and she felt well enough to be embarrassed.

“I’m sorry,” she said as they walked toward the foyer. “I guess I stood up too quickly.”

“No problem.” He held the heavy door open for her, and she stepped into the foyer. The poster announcing the opening of the play faced them from the corner.

She hugged herself through her coat. “You’re playing the magician?” She nodded toward the sign.

“Uh-huh.” He put on his long black coat and quickly regained that distinguished, sanguine demeanor he’d had onstage.

“And just what does the magician do?”

“Essentially nothing.” Randy pushed open the outside doors and a cold and welcome gust of air swept across Claire’s face as they stepped onto the sidewalk. “He’s not a magician at all, you see, but everyone thinks he is, and that’s all that matters. He only has to stand back and watch the magic happen.”

“Oh.” She raised the collar of her coat up to her chin as Randy turned to lock the door. “I see, I guess.” She looked toward her car, the only one still in the parking lot. “Do you need a ride?” she asked.

Randy pulled a pouch from his coat pocket. He removed a pipe from the pouch and slipped it into his mouth. Claire was mesmerized by the way he cupped his hands around the bowl as he lit it, and fragrant puffs of smoke rose into the air above his head.

“I prefer walking.” Randy took the pipe from his mouth. “I don’t live far.” He motioned north of where they stood. The streetlight caught the blue of his eyes, and Claire had that sense of familiarity again, as if she had known him for a long, long time.

“Listen, Claire,” Randy said. “I really am grateful to you for what you tried to do. It renews my faith in humankind that there are people out there like you. But forget about Margot. It’s obvious that you’re beating yourself up over something that was in no way your responsibility. Or your fault. You couldn’t possibly have saved her.”

“Thank you.” She wanted to put her arms around him and bury her head in the brushed wool of his coat while he said those words to her over and over again.

Randy smiled and took her hand, holding it between both of his. When he let go, he turned and started walking away from her along the sidewalk. The street lamp cut an angle of light across the back of his coat, and she held her eyes fast to that silver light, watching as he crossed the street. He walked briskly, and soon all she could see was the white patch of his cheek moving through the darkness. Then, nothing. She stood numbly under the street lamp, her eyes still riveted on the distant point where he’d disappeared, and felt an inexplicable sense of loss and longing, as if he’d given her a chance to learn something she desperately needed to know, something she could never hope to learn without him.