Gemini (25 page)

Raney retorted, “Look at it this way. My house doesn’t have any stairs.”

“Your house doesn’t have any room!”

“More than your ground floor—all you can use here. You can sleep in a real bedroom and get yourself into the kitchen without any help.” He didn’t answer and she leaped into the pause with her last bribes. “Beer in the fridge, Grandpa. And the food will be better—I’ll try some new recipes.”

Now his face contorted, and even through his thick stubble and smoke-crinkled skin she saw him turn red, which got her worrying about his heart more than his temper. “Goddamn, child. Is this really what you’ve learned from me after thirty-seven years?”

She could hear him verging from anger into hopelessness. But the full impact of it didn’t hit either of them until the sale closed. Grandpa refused to leave his house until the boys Raney hired to move the furniture took everything but the wheelchair he was sitting in. When Raney came back from dispersing the last load, Grandpa was nowhere to be found, his wheelchair butted up against the stairs and his walker missing. The kitchen, the living room, the front porch, and his upstairs bedroom were all empty. She searched the yard, the near woods, even looked for tracks in the shallow mud at the edge of the pond. On a second pass through the barn she found his walker under a tarp and scuff marks leading to the bunker lid. There were guns inside the bunker, she knew. The fact that he’d gotten the trapdoor open was proof he had the strength to use one.

She called his name and heard nothing. She gulped one huge breath before she pulled up the door. Through the gloom she could see his swollen feet poking out from the bunk. After an unbearable second of silence she heard his ever-present wheezing. When her eyes cleared she climbed down and sat opposite him. “Why are you here, Grandpa?” Her voice broke in the middle, which made it sound more like a challenge than an offer to talk, but in truth that was how she felt. Challenged and angry at him even as she started to cry.

“I came in here to get some things.”

“What? Cigarettes? I guess you could make a bomb out of your oxygen tank. You’re lucky you didn’t die falling down the ladder.”

“Or not.” He gave her a minute to calm down. “You know why I built this bunker?”

“Sure. The end of the world—TEOTWAWKI. Or a place to prove you saw it coming first.” He was quiet, as if waiting for her to get closer to the truth. “When I was little I thought you’d built it to be my playhouse. Grandma said you built it to forget my mother.”

“I built it so I would be in control in the end. Of my own end, at least.”

Raney’s face was wet with tears now, but her voice was steady. “So why didn’t you do it?”

“Because I knew Jake would eventually come hunting for me and open that trapdoor. Jake or you.” He looked around the room, or maybe just showed enough compassion to look away from her for a moment. Finally he said, “Let’s get started home. You’re gonna have a helluva time getting me up that ladder.”

—

The buyer was a development company that had offered 40 percent less than the ask, but the deal was so clean, the Realtor said Raney should take it. The market was only going lower. Raney knew they would tear the house down and build some ticky-tacky look-alikes, even though the rep had talked like he was hoping to salvage the old house as part of Quentin’s legacy.
Legacy!
Quentin had barely justified its present, much less its past.

She made a last walk through the rooms; there were pale patches on the floor where furniture had sat in the same spot for fifty years. Dust balls the size of rats. If ghosts were real it was clear why they haunted abandoned houses—the rooms reeked of loneliness now that they had no purpose. The last door she opened was to the living room, where twenty-eight years of her own collected paintings were stacked against or hung upon every wall. She hadn’t asked the boys to move them, thinking she would move them herself with Jake’s help. Or that she’d ask Sandy to store them. Or maybe not thinking at all. Maybe knowing what she was going to do with them for days and weeks, maybe even years before she started taking them down.

One by one she piled and hauled them through the kitchen and out the back door to the swath of raw, packed dirt next to the pond. She got a shovel from the barn and scraped away the duff and weeds within the bare patch and well beyond. Then she balanced frame against frame in climbing concentric rings, a nautilus shell of where she had started and who she had become. Only four small paintings did she save for Jake, including a charcoal sketch of a pale, haunted-looking twelve-year-old boy, less than two years older than her son was now. When the entire structure was five feet high and ten feet in diameter, she went into the bunker and came out with books and magazines and stacks of Grandpa’s saved newspapers along with two butane lighters, one as a backup. She twisted a yellowing
Seattle Times
into a stem and lit it on fire. “So,” she said, holding the growing flame in front of her face, “see you in the afterlife.” She cupped one protective hand around the light and guided it into the open heart of her house of art, setting the pile ablaze.

*   *   *

Spring came on in languid gasps that year, a week of chill that left everyone despondent and then a few days of rich warm sun that worked its fingers into new leaves of the alder and river birch along the Little Quentin so they at last unfurled into unabashed greens. The sharp break between sunshine and shadow made Raney feel absurdly hopeful, as if she had been holding her breath, waiting without admitting it. The house felt full now, with Jake, Grandpa, and Jenny, the aide who came when Raney was at work plus two evenings a week to help muster Grandpa into the tub. As his muscles wasted, his weight seemed more like misplaced ballast; his bursts of determined effort invariably pulled them both off balance. Jake was good help, too, but he’d begun to complain of new aches and pains—his knees, his shoulders, his back—and Raney sent him off to other chores when it was time to lift Grandpa in or out of bed, in or out of his chair, in or out of the car for one of his many doctor’s appointments. She suspected Jake was pained more by witnessing the infirmities of his once imposing great-grandfather than by any growth spurt of his own. Three and a half years out from Cleet’s death she still didn’t know how to be both mother and father to Jake. Every physical complaint and disobedience felt like a cry for his dad, though she had witnessed few actual tears.

Maybe for that reason she knew the exact day she first remembered seeing David. New faces were sometimes the only entertainment in Quentin, but there was nothing unusually attractive about his—his jowls too full and his eyes too buried between the high ride of his cheekbone and the low set of his brow. He did have a solid, self-assured smile with even, ivory-colored teeth that made people want to smile back, then stop to hear why he was smiling in the first place. His clothes stood out too. Just blue jeans and a button-down shirt—but the jeans were pressed stiff with deep blue crease lines running straight down the fronts of his legs, and the pressed white shirt looked starched. Those were not Quentin clothes. Regardless, if she’d seen him before, it hadn’t stuck. The first time Raney
remembered
seeing David was when Jake first saw him.

It was a Friday and Raney planned to leave the gallery early for a date with Jake. With every passing month he seemed to spend more time by himself. The only thing he could concentrate on was what he made with his hands, some vision he couldn’t share until it was finished by himself alone. So on Friday she would pick him up after school and take him skateboarding or fishing, or to Dairy Queen and a movie at the Rose, just the two of them, while Jenny stayed with Grandpa. She told Jake to wait for her in the playground behind Peninsula Foods.

She got there less than an hour after school let out, but Jake was nowhere in sight. It was a small playground—a jungle gym made out of plumbing pipes, a sandbox that had been more dirt than sand for years now—not enough to hold an eleven-year-old boy’s interest for an hour. She looked up and down the street, went inside the small grocery, and checked the comic book rack, the candy aisle, the bathroom at the back of the store. No Jake.

Lena, the cashier, was making hot dogs for a city family heading
home from the national park, three kids with sturdy new hiking boots
and Patagonia day packs with pockets and clips and zippers everywhere, their mother with a perky blond ponytail sprouting through the hole at the back of her pink sun visor. How did these women always look so perfect after a day on the trails? They didn’t sweat? Lena caught Raney looking and rolled her eyes in solidarity, chasing a hot dog across the greasy cylinders rotating under the heat lamp. “Hey, Raney. What’s up?”

“Jake. Has he been in?”

“Jake? Some other kids were here.” The hot dog slipped out of the bun onto the floor. “Shit!” Lena exploded, then shrugged at the waiting family. “It’ll be a minute,” and seemed just as happy when they walked out. She wiped her hands on her stained apron. “Want to use the phone?”

He wasn’t at home when Raney called. She checked the aisles again, half expecting him to pop out and surprise her—hoping to scare her into a Coke or a jawbreaker. He wasn’t in the car or at his school. She was running out of places to look after half an hour, short of combing the woods and the beach, when she heard Lena call to her, “Raney! He’s here.”

Jake was crouched in the corner of the store with his arms locked around knees pressed hard to his forehead. A skin-and-bones fortress. Raney sat on the dirty floor and put her arms around him; he shoved her off at first, then leaned into her shoulder.

“He was in the storage closet. I was getting out the mop and there he was,” Lena said.

A group of teenagers jangled through the door—Amelia and Caroline Wells prancing their new figures like they alone knew what was what, Jerrod Fielding and his pimply football buddies—all of them louder and braver once they saw Jake. Someone whistled his name low and mocking; Jake wiped his mouth on his sleeve and turned his face into a mask.

When they left, Raney asked, “Hey, Buddy. What’s going on?” Jake broke then, hurling a crumpled mess of yellow-and-black plastic onto the floor. It took a moment for Raney to recognize it as the toy dump truck Cleet had bought for Jake’s third birthday. For two years he had taken it everywhere—beside him at meals, under his pillow when he slept, the only bath toy he would have. He had almost lost it when he took it to kindergarten, and after its rescue he’d left it on his bookshelf most often. But always on the top shelf, just beside his bed. The last day she’d seen it was around the time Cleet died.

And then Raney became aware of David. He was standing at the counter waiting to pay for something, apparently not impatient with Lena’s distraction. He nodded at Raney, and Jake looked straight at him. David smiled at them both. Such a comfortable smile. Lena took his credit card and put his things in a brown paper bag. Raney noticed, she remembered later, that he’d bought a half gallon of milk. Why would that stick in her mind? Because milk is not what a single man would likely drink? Or that a single man might only eat cold cereal for supper? Did she think about him that way, even that first time?

He asked Lena for an extra paper bag, dropped something into it, and walked over to Jake and Raney, leaning forward slightly so that it was clear he was focused on Jake. It would have made Raney nervous if he hadn’t looked somewhat embarrassed about it himself. He rolled the top of the bag down and creased it to make a tidy package, then held it out to Jake. “I have something for you. Looked like you could use it—if it’s okay with your mom.” Jake looked at Raney and she gave him an equivocal nod, which, to a child offered a gift, could only mean yes. David left with a quick good-bye as soon as Jake took the bag. Raney unrolled the top, opening it just enough to glimpse inside. It was a toy truck. Not yellow. And not a dump truck. One couldn’t be too picky in a town with no toy store—he’d had only the six aisles of Peninsula Foods to choose from. A red plastic pickup truck.

She fell a little bit in love with David that day. Before she knew his name, before she knew his work or habits or history. She was old enough to know that once you let the possibility of love slip past the radar of mature reason, it can be hard to go back. On the other hand, what love didn’t begin as an illusion, the outcome hinged on lucky or unlucky guesses? Maybe we are all best loved depending on how well we keep our secrets.

A few weeks later, Raney drove to Port Townsend to pick up some things at the hardware store and buy Jake a new pair of sneakers. They were done by eleven so she bought him an ice cream, then they walked out to the rocky tide flats at the foot of the pier and threw Saltines up to the seagulls, following them high above and over and behind their heads until they were both dizzy and laughing and the ice cream teetered precariously on its waffle cone. On the drive home she kept glancing at Jake in the rearview mirror. He looked like such a normal kid, chasing every bubble-gum-blue drip along the side of the cone with his tongue. Appropriately dirty and windblown. Why was it so hard for him at school? Who wouldn’t want to be his friend?

“Hey, I know a great beach near here. A sand castle beach. Want to go?” She turned the car around and in ten minutes they were parked and shoeless and using coffee cups scrounged from a garbage can to build a castle with a moat and a canal leading all the way to the water’s edge. Jake was so focused he didn’t mind when his mother brushed the sand from her knees and sat on the log railing along the parking lot, watching waves and sandpipers and lovers. She saw Jake surveying his fortress, narrow-eyed and calculating, his near-black hair cutting at all angles across his face, and suddenly she thought of Bo. For the first time in so long. This was the beach she and Bo had been to the last day of the last summer he’d spent in Quentin, when they were teenagers. It hit her so unexpectedly she thought she might look up and see him. Right there, just near Jake. Piling sand onto the same castle they’d made over twenty years ago. Her first kiss was just across that hill, inside the black caves of the gun batteries.