Gemini (32 page)

“I don’t think he’s being straight with
me
. What kind of answers would he give on some test for ADD? It’s something else.”

“What
else
? He hasn’t complained of pain in weeks. He grew an inch last month—of course things hurt.”

Raney rolled off the bed as far away from him as she could get, but he reached for her arm. “Look, I’ve never had kids of my own—Jake is probably as close as I’ll get unless . . .” His color deepened. He put his glasses on the bed and pressed his palms over his eyes. “Maybe ditching his report card in the trash is his way of asking for help.” When Raney didn’t answer, he added, “If he had diabetes would you refuse to give him insulin?” He could have hit her and it would have hurt less.

For a while David dropped the subject. Raney spent more time building models with Jake, slipping questions about his joints and his back in like they were just comments on the structure rising level after level from his floor. She tried to remember her own teenage years when she, too, had been willing to injure herself to gain an ounce of power. It made her sad that Jake was now too long and heavy to rock back and forth at her breast. Did all parents feel so baffled in the storm of their child’s adolescence? Maybe David was right. Maybe it was easier to cope with a physical problem than a mental one and she was the one in denial. But now and then she watched through the kitchen window as Jake climbed the ladder to his tree house and she saw him grimace with a hand at the middle of his back.

A month before school let out, the principal called David and Raney in for a conference. Jake had gotten into another scuffle. The only reason he wasn’t suspended was because he had clearly come out the loser. The next week David came home from work with the name of a doctor in Chimacum, just outside Port Townsend—a generalist who’d diagnosed a friend of a friend’s daughter with MS after three other doctors said there was nothing wrong. He could see Jake for any aches and pains and evaluate his school problems too. And be discreet about it, if that was what worried Raney.

—

Raney came home from the doctor’s visit with a prescription for something called Adderall. The next morning she put the first capsule in front of Jake with a glass of milk. They both looked at it for a moment, then he shrugged and popped it into his mouth. Raney had to bite her own tongue to keep from making him spit it out just before he swallowed.

His mood and habits stuttered for the next few weeks; some days
Raney thought she saw a difference in Jake and other days he seemed the same—cranky and slow at his homework. “Kind of the definition of an adolescent, isn’t it?” David said. Two weeks later the doctor doubled the dose, seeming pleased with Jake’s report on his progress, and at the third visit the dose went up again.

When they got back from the appointment, David was at home, though it was only two o’clock. “Did you come home for lunch?” Raney asked him.

“Yeah,” he answered. She glanced around the spotless kitchen. “Actually I picked up a burger. Taking the afternoon off.”

“You feel okay?”

“I’m fine. I’m not allowed an afternoon off?” He picked up his jacket and left the house, slamming the door.

She didn’t see him again until he tried to slip under the covers after midnight without waking her. Raney rolled onto her back. The moon was so bright it made shadows in the room, turning everything the shades of one of David’s favorite black-and-white movies. “Tell me,” she said.

After a broken sigh he said his boss Tom Fielding had cut his hours in half. Business was down and Tom was trying to economize “by laying off the very person who might find him a way to increase his profits, the son of a bitch.” Raney rolled onto David’s shoulder, felt his heart pounding through her own chest. She soothed him as if he were Jake run home from school by bullies.
There would be other work. Business would pick up again.
She was almost asleep when he said, “I’m losing my benefits, Raney. That’s where Tom plans to save the money—he’ll never take me back full time.”

—

Summer break began in early June. Jake started spending all day outside, in the woods, roaming the cliffs and inlets of the bay. Raney didn’t know where he was half the time. David said it was a good sign—Jake was doing what a twelve-year-old boy should be doing. “Probably climbing trees, chasing frogs . . .” He waved his arm around like that might help him recall more of his own boyhood activities. Try as she might, Raney could not picture David doing any of that as a boy. In fact, it was hard to imagine David as a boy—she kept seeing a slightly balding kid wearing a starched white shirt and wing tips, hoping to skewer a slippery minnow onto a hook without getting his clothes dirty. She knew Jake was outside only because David was inside—and
she
was the one who’d let him in. David was home half the time now, restless and looking for squabbles, it seemed.

Every night Raney sat on the edge of Jake’s bed and talked to him about her day, who’d bought something in the gallery, what she’d paint once she had some free time—things he used to like hearing. But when she asked him where he’d been and what he’d done and who he’d played with, his answers cut her off:
Around. Stuff. Some guys . . .
Getting even with her, it felt like. She consoled herself that Jake was finally playing with other kids. She’d seen Tom Fielding’s son Jerrod walking with him on the road—not her first choice of friends but a friend nonetheless. So she let him be. She went off to work with his lunch ready in the fridge, a kiss on his forehead, and a promise to make good choices.
Good choices.
Good God, she thought—was there a better way to be sure your son
didn’t
tell you what was really going on? And then she left. She drove to the gallery in Port Townsend and left Jake alone the whole day. With David.

Then Sandy closed the gallery for two weeks, supposedly to take a vacation, but Raney suspected the bills for keeping the gallery open had tipped the scales against even Sandy’s impractical love of the art. When Raney told David, he walked to the window and stared out toward the muddy yard and tangled woods. After a long minute he let the blind fall closed with a metallic clap. “We can’t make our mortgage payment this month,” he said, like that was a simple asterisk at the bottom of their spreadsheet, and left the house.

Half an hour later she heard a knock at the door and Raney hoped David might have come home with either an apology or a plan. But instead it was the neighbor girls, Amelia and Caroline Wells. They looked so startled to see Raney answer her own door, she half expected them to shriek and run off.

“Are you looking for Jake?” Raney asked. They nodded their identical heads in unison. “I think he’s asleep. Do you want to come inside?”

One of them started to giggle, less like nervous laughter than a mean inside joke. They were three years older than Jake, already blossomed into curves Raney had never had—did Jake have a crush?

Amelia and Caroline looked at each other; one of them shrugged and started walking away. The other said, “Nah. Just tell him . . .” She looked back at her sister, who was waiting halfway down the gravel drive. “Tell him Jerrod Fielding is waiting.”

“Waiting where?”

The girl was off the porch by then, sassier with every step. “He’ll know.”

Jake was at the table when Raney came back into the kitchen, his thumbs flying over a cheap handheld game machine. “The Wells twins were here. I’m supposed to tell you Jerrod is looking for you.” She took a box of Cheerios out of the cabinet and sat down before she noticed Jake’s expression. “Jake? What’s up?”

He shrugged and scootched out from behind the table. “Nothing’s up.” A few minutes later he came out of his room dressed in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, heading for the front door.

Raney called out, “Did you eat?” He came back long enough to stuff two cereal bars into his back pocket, and then he was gone.

She didn’t see him again until well after dinner had been served and gone cold, been wrapped up and put away. David hadn’t come home either, and Raney was angry she’d bothered to cook for either of them. When Jake tried to sneak in the front door with his hoodie up over his head, she lit into him. “It’s after ten—I was about to call the police.” He was hunched in his sweatshirt with his hands stuffed in the front pocket like some street thug. She remembered the snide laugh Caroline or Amelia had tossed off . . .
Jerrod Fielding is waiting.
“Jake, what’s going on?”

He tried to bolt to his room, but she blocked his way. He stood hunched inside the hoodie as if he wanted to hide, wanted her to see. She pulled the sweatshirt off his head and felt her gut go hollow—a suffocating vacuum of breath. The left side of Jake’s face was so swollen his eye was buried in a puffy red slit. Blood leaked from his nose. “Oh, my God! Jake . . . Baby . . .”

—

“He won’t tell me who hit him,” Raney repeated to David when he finally came home, long after she’d put Jake to bed with Tylenol and an ice pack. David was pacing the kitchen, his hands jammed into his pockets like he might tear into something if he let them loose. Raney was glad Jake wasn’t awake to witness it, even if his stepfather’s temper was roused for Jake’s own defense. “I went to the Wellses’ house to talk to Amelia or Caroline. Trina said they were asleep and she didn’t want to wake them.”

“Do you have to pull the whole neighborhood into it?”

“Well, the girls obviously know something. Their dad used to be a policeman—I thought he could help. If Jake’s in some kind of trouble . . .” She stopped, reluctant to make David even madder by repeating what Trina Wells had said. But he halted in his pacing and
faced her, hearing the unfinished warning in her voice. How to put it?
“Trina said . . . It made no sense. She called us a ‘bunch of drug pushers’ and said she didn’t want Jake near the girls anymore.”

David’s face went white. He started down the hallway, but Raney pulled him back. “It doesn’t mean anything. If Jake won’t tell me the truth, then he won’t tell you. Let him sleep. Maybe he’ll say more in the morning.”

“It’s an insult to this whole family. All of us.”

“It’s kids. Mean kids picking on someone who’s different.” Raney knew David had had his own turn with bullying as a child, the humiliation made worse by the fact that his brother was the bully and his parents did nothing more than tell the boys to work it out between themselves.

He held his fists clenched together as if they might strike out blindly. “You know who hit him. We both know.”

“You can’t be sure, David. There are other kids who . . .”

“I don’t give a shit about Tom Fielding right now—who he is or who he knows or if he fires me.”

David left the house and drove away angrier than Raney had ever seen him. When he had not come home by midnight, Raney called Sandy and told her about Jake. “Why would Jerrod Fielding hit him?” Sandy asked, still groggy from sleep. “He’s looking at a football scholarship. Why would he risk it by hitting a kid two years younger than himself?”

“I don’t know. Because Jake is . . . different? Dark, for one thing. Or maybe just because Jerrod is his father’s son. David ran out of the house so mad I almost called Tom Fielding to warn him.”

Sandy didn’t say anything for a minute; then, sounding more awake, “David came by my house around eleven, Raney. I could see he was upset but I thought maybe you two . . . He picked up your paycheck.” She hesitated, then asked, “Is he on the run?”

Raney sat down with the phone held tight to her ear, her pulse roaring. The house felt empty and unsound, the walls expanding and contracting. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Well, to hear that from you is to wonder what this marriage has damaged. You and Jake can come here, you know. You can have my house.”

Raney rocked back and forth, wanting any place of calm. “Thanks. It’s okay. I know you don’t like David, but he has a lot of good in him. He wouldn’t hurt us.” Even saying it she wasn’t sure she believed it anymore. She finished with the one thing she knew was true: “David’s either left us or he’s got a plan that includes us.”

“I should tell you this now, just in case. I’m selling the gallery. I talked to the buyer and you can have a job—for a while at least.” A sad laugh escaped her and Raney could hear the years of cigarettes and wine. “Until
he
goes broke too.”

“What will you do?” Raney asked.

“Go away. South. Another country, maybe. I need a change—before my money runs out. I’m keeping the house, though. It’s yours if you need it.”

—

Around 3:00 a.m. Raney saw headlights sweep the wall and heard the Tahoe, the ping-ping of the alarm before he finally shut the door. He took a long time to walk up to the porch and come inside. Slow, heavy steps. He went straight to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. She heard the cap pop off a bottle of beer. He might not have seen her on the sofa, waiting. But after a while he came into the dark living room and sat down next to her. Too quiet. Too controlled. “You went to see Tom, didn’t you?” she said.

He set his beer on the coffee table with a paper towel folded neatly around the bottom of the bottle. “How could I not, Renee? How could I sit in that man’s office for the last year, tallying up his money and listening to his jokes about blondes and Jews, bragging about Jerrod making first string and how much the Fielding family donated to his church’s capital campaign? How could I know that about him and know what his son did to Jake—to our son—and not make him own up?”