Gemini (10 page)

“No relatives yet?”

Charlotte shook her head, absentmindedly reached across the table, and pinched out the candle. “I met the sheriff’s officer on the case today. They don’t have much to go on. Nobody’s come looking for her. How can you make it this far in life, our age, and have no one who cares enough to notice you’ve disappeared?”

“Unless she wasn’t expected anywhere yet. Maybe she was headed off for a camping trip in the Olympics.”

“Alone? For ten days? And she wasn’t dressed for any weather.”

“Is she getting any better?”

“On the best of days she’s stable—or maybe I should say, stuck.”

“Do you think she’s brain-dead?”

“We can’t even test for it now. Which I’m glad about—she needs more time.” There was the edge of a challenge in her voice.

“So what’s the collision course?” Eric asked. Charlotte looked at him questioningly and he added, “You said she was on a collision course.”

“The hospital has filed for a guardian ad litem for Jane. Next step, the court will assign her a certified professional guardian—someone to act as her next of kin.”

“Well, she needs one, doesn’t she?” He sounded puzzled; Charlotte knew the distress in her voice was bigger than the facts sounded. It was curious to her as well, this defensiveness she felt, but she was too exhausted to sort it through, or even filter what she should or shouldn’t share with Eric.

“Of course, eventually. But Jane has a family out there. Somewhere. And my job, Beacon’s ethical duty in my opinion, is to do everything possible to keep her alive until her family finds her and tells us what she would have wanted.”

“Even if she’s irreversibly brain damaged?” Eric asked.

Charlotte felt angry now, and even though she knew her conflict was with Helen Seras and Beacon’s ranks of legal advisers and administrators, she let Eric feel her heat. “Yes. Even then. Maybe she has a living will. How can Beacon be objective about any decision when keeping her alive is costing them twenty thousand dollars a day in free care? But it shouldn’t be decided by some court-appointed stranger either.”

Eric had seen Charlotte struggle with patients in their final hours. It was part of an intensivist’s job. He’d asked her once if she was worried that letting someone go might be construed as a lack of either skill or compassion, particularly since she admitted that she was not an absolute right-to-lifer, even questioned the existence of God. But rather than being either offended or conflicted, Charlotte had readily answered, “My job is to keep people alive as long as possible. Whatever they find on the other side will still be there waiting.”

He leaned across the table and put his hand on her arm, a gesture that usually ended with their hands clasped, but tonight, as more often lately, she did not move. “I said it before. She’s lucky to have you.”

“Well, I’d rather she have a husband. A mother. A child.”

He was quiet a minute. “It’s something else, Charlotte. You’re angry at me.”

“Why do you say that? What have you done? Nothing. Made me dinner. You’re the perfect boyfriend.”

He let out a short, bitter laugh. “Except for my one fatal flaw, you mean.”

Suddenly she felt like she might start to cry. It was ridiculous, this outburst. He
was
the perfect boyfriend, despite his occasional moodiness. Despite his preference for gluten-free, preservative-free, suspiciously vegan food. In spite of or maybe even
because
of his “one fatal flaw.” Every day with him was perfect—yesterday, tomorrow, next year, next decade. The only thing not so perfect was that time kept moving—a grinding mudslide shoving everything and everyone onward, ready and willing or not. Eric saw her face and dropped his head into his hands, and now the only thought she had about time was a futile desire to take the last five minutes back. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m . . . I’m just stressed. You all right? It’s not your head, is it? Does your head hurt?”

He took a moment to answer and she could see the pain in his eyes—nothing any medicine could fix. “No. My head doesn’t hurt. Let’s go to bed. Okay? Let’s get some sleep.”

•
8
•

raney

Bo didn’t come back to
Quentin the next summer, or any summer after that. In an age before e-mail, before Facebook, before every child over four had a cell phone, his physical absence had to be explained by Raney’s imagined tragedies or intentional rebuffs: his mother had moved him to an ashram; his father had sent him to school in England; he had walked in front of a car; jumped off the Aurora Bridge; been hit over the head by a mugger and had amnesia, forever tortured by the image of her own nameless face.

The obvious solution was to ask Bo’s aunt, who walked out the front door of Hardy’s Store every morning at seven thirty to sweep the walk, and remembered Raney enough to nod when she came inside the store to buy dog food or passed Mrs. Hardy in the pharmacy. If his aunt had any conscience or heart, Raney thought, she would have noticed Raney’s face going eight shades of red and offered some word about her nephew—it was her silence that convinced Raney that Bo stayed away from Quentin because he had found his place in the world and realized it held no room for bastards like Renee Lee Remington.

Raney’s best friend, Sandy, finally marched up to Mrs. Hardy and asked her outright where Bo was living and why he never came to visit. Sandy came back outside and said that Mrs. Hardy said, “If my sister and I were still speaking, I guess I could tell you.” And then she told Sandy to tell her mother that they had not paid their bill, which was three weeks overdue.

Raney dealt with the disappointment the same way she effectively dealt with the other desertions in her life. She decided that if Bo could forget her, she could forget Bo. She spent most of July flirting with a junior varsity basketball player who’d sat across from her in history class. But after six versions of his game-winning free throw, she spent August with mixed-media watercolors and charcoal pencil. Half the canvases showed a thin, sober-faced boy in various stages of blooming manhood, like an age-progressed image of a kidnapped child on the side of a milk carton.

She thought of Bo less over time, of course. High school ended with the letdown she had come to expect from most beginnings and endings in Quentin, a town that did best when it was allowed to linger in some lazy whirlpool of time, moving nowhere, progressing toward no particular goal. Once you embraced that, it was a decent-enough place to live, and Raney understood without naming it that the mountains and woods and water rooted her soul here as surely as the outside world tempted her away. But at eighteen most of her friends didn’t even stay around long enough for a graduation party. They flung their caps into the air and were on a bus to Seattle before they hit the ground. Even Sandy left, headed for Gonzaga University, where she would last sixteen months before she got married and bounced right back to Quentin.

Raney had her chance to leave. On her own eighteenth birthday her grandfather handed her an envelope with $7,000 he had saved working pickup shifts at the machine shop. He said if she was smart she would leave before moss grew over her north side and blackberry vines tangled up her feet. The envelope sat between them on the kitchen table, which had been scrubbed so many times by Raney, by Grandpa, by Raney’s grandmother, and probably by her mother, that the green paint had been polished down to the bare wood in places, the gaps chinked with grease and crumbs from a thousand meals. Grandpa’s smile looked painfully forced. “It’s yours. Go away to college if you want. Go to the Louvre in France. Go see that ‘Kadinsky’ fellow you like. Up to Vancouver to see that lady painter.”

Raney’s hands felt heavy in her lap, the distance between her and the money as wide as heaven itself. “There’s no need, Grandpa. I’m in no rush to leave you.”

“Raney, you’ve been leaving me since the day you were born. As it should be.”

“Be easier to leave if I knew where I was going.”

“Hell, stay in the same place and you discover nothing new. Not about the world. Not about yourself.”

“Look who’s talking. You’ll just hide in that bunker all day. Alone. Eating what? Canned beans? Waiting for what?”

“Aliens.” He winked at her. “I let the army give me my tour. I’d rather you take yours from me.”

But it is not so easy to spend money when you have spent your whole lifetime learning to do without it. She closed her bedroom door and put the envelope on her bedspread. She sat against her headboard hugging her pillow to her chest for a long time before she ran her finger along the seal and pulled out a thick stack of ten-, fifty-, and hundred-dollar bills. No bank check or plastic debit card for her grandfather—ever wary of putting any institution between himself and his money. Raney figured she was lucky he hadn’t converted it all to gold nuggets. She laid out the bills in various configurations—by denomination, then in five-hundred-dollar piles, then in interweaving spirals, and last in a single heaped mound she could toss in the air like Barbra Streisand in the movie
Funny Girl
. At last, when the house was quiet and dark, she resealed the envelope and put it in her underwear drawer. Unlimited choice can be as paralyzing as poverty or ignorance.

—

A year later Raney was working as a receptionist at the marina in Port Townsend, a job she took only because the office window framed the boatyard and docks; the manager had made his offer just as the sunlight caught the angled spires and wedges of a hundred masts and keels, so she said yes. One early summer day she walked by the bookstore on her lunch break and saw a coffee table–sized book on the postimpressionists. She bought it and the next month she enrolled at the Art Institute of Seattle.

On the last day of the first term she planned to find a Christmas gift for Grandpa, then take the six-twenty ferry to Bainbridge Island and from there a bus out to the Olympic Peninsula. It wasn’t four thirty yet, but already dark; a billion tiny Christmas lights coated the barren trees along First Avenue—one last blaze before an endless gloomy winter. The shops along the avenue sold useless things: tourist souvenirs and doodads for people who craved much but needed nothing or, like her grandfather, needed much but craved little. The light changed at Union and the wind was fierce with a pelting slurry of rain and sleet. Raney ducked into the closest store—because it was warm, dry, convenient, lit like a jewel box . . . no other reason. She picked up and put down a Tlingit raven’s head key fob, a set of etched shot glasses, a discounted Windbreaker with a Seattle Mariners emblem that Grandpa would hate but Raney thought would do, if she scraped off the logo.

She saw him standing across the room on the opposite side of the display cases, half turned away. His hair was cropped short and his nose and cheeks were pink from the cold night—that white skin had never shown mercy. She didn’t need to see any more to know it was Bo. Even in a winter coat he was still too skinny, too long-limbed. He was holding a trinket box, flipping the lid open and shut with those long, articulated fingers that she remembered examining starfish and river stones. They still looked out of proportion. Beautiful Frankenstein hands thieved from a woman’s grave for a man’s body. He was showing the box to a girl; he said something that made her laugh and she smoothed her perfectly smooth hair behind one perfect seashell ear and turned in Raney’s direction. Raney moved behind a mirror next to the jewelry rack, which unfortunately gave her a side-to-side comparison of their two faces. As soon as the girl turned away, Raney pulled her collar up and left the store.

The street was crowded now, people clumsy with armloads of Christmas presents, balancing umbrellas over shopping bags so they tangled together and caused pedestrian traffic jams along the sidewalk. She made it two blocks down to Seneca, but when the light turned green, she felt as if all the air had been sucked out of the city. She stood at the curb with the crowd bumping past until the light turned red again. After another missed light she knew she was going to turn around. Considering all the accidents that alter a life, Raney wondered if the agony people put themselves through over every single choice made as much sense as trying to paddle up a waterfall.

Bo and his girlfriend were gone when she went back. The jewelry box was still on the counter; it was quite lovely—covered with tiny cowrie shells. For some reason it made her feel better to know he hadn’t bought it for the blond girl with the perfectly smooth hair and the perfectly shaped ear. She opened the lid expecting the tinkle of music or a spring-loaded plastic sea horse. Nothing. Only the private joke he’d told the girl that Raney would never hear. The shopkeeper had his eye on her, apparently waiting for her to filch something. She picked up a large, candy-swirl glass marble and asked him to wrap it up.

—

All the years of forgetting someone can backfire, Raney discovered that night. All the years of thinking you were not thinking about how he had changed, where he was living, who he was loving; it gave your subconscious free license to build an entire parallel life of might-have-beens. An imagined twin. You don’t even realize how much space you’ve given it until the invented life is blown to bits.

She walked up and down the street pretending to look for a gift but really looking for a tall, ghost-pale young man and his prep-school-pretty girlfriend, whose hair was getting blonder and whose skin was getting peachier by the minute. She saw the girl’s face clearer than Bo’s, his was mixing up with the long-haired boy of caves and woods and tree swings. After an hour she looked at her watch and saw she’d missed the ferry and bus, called Grandpa from a corner phone booth, and told him she’d come tomorrow or the next day. She walked north against the rain and sleet toward her apartment, through the Pike Place Market, where the stalls were closing; the crash of their rolling metal doors sounded harsh and personal. A block farther up to Starbucks and the smell of hot coffee finally made her more conscious of how cold and hungry she was than how fast a person could disappear in a city the size of Seattle. So she went inside. And there he was. Without the girl.

Raney discovered another lesson that night: in the split-second shock of unexpected meetings you can tell a lot about what a person thinks of you—if you’re prettier or uglier than he recalls, if that secondhand coat you’re so proud of just makes you look poor, if the sight of your face is a cause to celebrate or a reason to run. You can even make a good guess about whether five long years of silence was an act of disenchantment, dislike, or, worse yet, disinterest. In Bo’s face she saw trepidation. As if seeing her again opened a door to problems bigger than he was ready to tackle.

He stood up. “Raney? God, it’s you, isn’t it? What are you doing here?”

She shrugged as if she could barely remember his name, wondering if she would ever be willing to take her eyes off his own slate-blue ones again. “Christmas,” she said, the first word that popped into her head. Her hand closed around the gift-wrapped marble in her pocket and she held it out to him. “Merry Christmas.”

He took it hesitantly. Turned it over in his hand and put it into his pocket. “How’d you . . . ? Thank you.”

“Open it.” She sat down at his small table with his half-finished espresso, the burnt-umber liquid swirled with foam. She never could fathom how people paid so much for something gone in two swallows. She watched him unwrap the present, careful not to tear the paper. Not like a boy, she thought. But most boys would have laughed at the gift of a glass marble. Instead, Bo put his elbows on the table and held it in both hands, balanced on the ends of his fingers so they made a little altar like that marble was the flame of life. He turned it around so the light from the pendant lamp above the table danced along the ribbons of colored glass.

“It’s like there’s a whole planet inside it,” he said, bringing it close to his eyes so it must have looked equally huge.

She leaned over to touch the marble, spinning it on the pedestal of his fingers. “Look there. The way the red and the indigo streamers twist around each other.” But he was looking at Raney now, in a pensive sweep over her face.

“Indigo,” he repeated.

She pulled her coat closer about her throat and sat back in her chair, crossing her arms. “You quit wearing your hair long.”

He rubbed his hand over his close-shaved head. “Yeah. Growing it out again.”

“It’s not bad short. So are you in school? I always expected you to go away to someplace fancy. Out in New York or something. Yale or something.”

“Duke,” he said. “Duke University, in North Carolina,” adding the state, Raney understood, because he did not expect her to know.

“I’m at the institute.”

“The institute?”

“Yeah. The mental institute.” He looked almost taken in and she laughed. “The Art Institute. Just up the street. Studying design.”

“Painting too? You have to paint all your life, Raney. You have to promise me.”

Promise him, she thought. It sounded like something you would put at the end of a good-bye letter.

He was spending Christmas at his mother’s house in Laurelhurst; his father had sold the family home on Queen Anne, remarried, and had a new baby on the way, a fact Bo relayed with odd dissociation, like it was irrelevant to his own life. He had traveled a lot, and Raney tried to act like she was plenty used to friends dropping snippets about their semester in Spain or spring break in Greece. Seattle was still Paris to her. But overall he kept skirting questions, turning the conversation back to Raney, and she couldn’t decide if that was out of curiosity or because he did not want to be cornered into saying why he never once sent a letter or phone call back to Quentin. Either way, after half an hour they were easing into each other, settling into a common space where they talked as unfettered as when they were fourteen and fifteen.