Gemini (38 page)

“You have a short memory, Raney. Remember how I found you? On the brink of losing your house? Your son flunking out of school?”

She could hear him winding up, knew he was probing for a way into her—anger followed by apologies followed by hopelessness, circling back to anger again. Any button he could push. Funny she had never realized before now—at this late age—that an argument could still connect two people after tenderness had worn itself out. She decided to say nothing, tried to soothe herself by imagining the bus trip tomorrow. Maybe the hospital could help her find a place to stay, maybe they’d have a job . . .

“Are you listening?” he said.

“I’m listening.” Maybe Jake’s schoolwork had been affected by his back pain. Seattle would have more choices of schools anyway. Maybe he’d never needed any medicine—she’d never seen any difference in him, off or on. Couldn’t tell from his behavior which days he’d taken it and which he’d forgotten. Or when he’d run out. She looked at her husband’s profile—rigid, scowling, likely mulling the next taunt. Had it ended this way with Shannon, his last wife? She knew nothing about him, did she? Nothing at all. This was how he did it, she realized. This was his malignant gift. Someone with no conscience can tell any lie and never be detected—no blush, no averted eyes. “What do you know about Jerrod and Jake?” she asked. “Why would Fielding cover up whatever happened in his office that night? You said he wouldn’t go to the police. What was going on with his books?”

David’s brow twisted into an expression of mock pity. “Is this how it went with you and Cleet? You finally made him feel worthless enough to . . .”

“At least my dead husband isn’t alive and well in Florida. I want to leave tonight. Get Jake. We’ll sleep in the bus station. We’ll sleep on the road.” She twisted her wedding ring off her finger and flung it at him.

“That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Shannon. No matter how much I explained. This isn’t about Jake. This is about revenge for a lie I only told to protect you.” David’s jaw clenched hard between his sentences. The road leaped faster under the hood of the car, curving as they neared an empty intersection and the sky was blotted out by a copse of sea-stunted trees. “You’re above a lie, Renee? The poor widowed mother? Lost her husband in a ‘freak boating accident.’ ” He had one hand off the steering wheel now, stabbing his finger toward her face.

—

The rest of Raney’s conscious life flashed like a strip of film with missing frames, jumbled and distorted. She saw a deer at the boundary of their headlights, and screamed; David must have thought it a howl against his rage. Then she was out of the car, kneeling on cold concrete holding a doe’s massive head, her great neck twisting in fear, the black pool of her eye so close, so huge, Raney saw the dome of the night sky there, the black orb of unending time. There was an agonal scramble of hoof against pavement and then the fawn—there was a fawn—poised to spring after its mother despite Raney’s own cry, the shouts of a man, the gunning of an engine. Something solid landed in the nearby marsh with a splash and Raney saw taillights. But then headlights again, a rocket of white light . . . when? A second later? Moments? The fawn, locked in the blinding glare, so close, almost inside her reach . . . We expect so much more, don’t we?
she thought. How funny that we expect so much more.

•
22
•

charlotte

Raney was readmitted to Beacon
Hospital in less than a week. Charlotte was at home; Felipe called and asked if she wanted to come in. Raney’s chest was gradually filling with fluid—an aggressive, drug-resistant pneumonia—some bug almost certainly spawned in the bacterial miasma of Beacon’s own ICU, which had flourished with exponential reproduction in the soup of her damp lungs. “Her saturation is eighty-four percent,” Felipe told her. “I thought you’d want to be here.” She knew what he was saying. They would need to put her back on the ventilator and put in a chest tube to save her life.
To save her life
, she repeated to herself. Words so loosely defined.
Save
—implying kept for later? Rescued from a known and terrible fate?
Life
—that one was easily enough defined by those who were living, perhaps analogous to prisoners describing the mind of God as a locked cell.

Eric was carrying another load of books to the attic room he was converting into his office; he saw Charlotte in her white lab coat, fumbling through the drawer for her keys, her wallet. Usually by the time she had that coat on she was already transformed into the confident, collected clinician—as if the coat itself held transformative properties. Instead, she was clearly distressed, tearing her purse apart in her search for the keys. He waited, the box of books balanced on his shoulder, until she looked up at him. “I can’t do it,” she said. “Find them, I mean. I can’t . . . Would you come with me to the hospital?”

In the elevator Charlotte talked without leaving any space for Eric to respond: “How could they have screwed up so soon? One week and she’s got an empyema! Were they looking the other way? Maybe it started before she was transferred—maybe we missed the first signs . . .”

Even from the ICU doorway, even with no medical education, Eric could see how wrong Raney’s color was—her skin was the blues and grays she had painted him with twenty-five years ago. Twenty-five. He counted the years again, was it possible? Her mouth and nose were covered with a misting green mask. The monitor above Raney’s bed showed lit-up numbers in blue and green and red, one flashing: 82, 80, 77 . . . Felipe was holding Raney’s wrist in his gloved hands, a small syringe aimed like a fine dart at the pulse just above her thumb. Charlotte went to his side and talked to him for a moment, too hushed for Eric to hear. When she came back, she explained that they were running out of time—the tube would have to go in now if they had any chance to save her. Charlotte picked up the telephone and dialed a number. Then, before she said a word, before anyone answered, she hung up. “I shouldn’t do it to her, should I?”

Eric held her eyes for a minute, enough time for her to make the call if she knew it was right. She waited, looking at him for confirmation now, or support, or just to know he would be there when it was done. Finally, when she was ready, he said, “Maybe it’s time to let Raney choose.”

•   •   •

The Jefferson County courtroom looked nothing like Charlotte had expected—a small room at the back of the old Port Townsend courthouse with no throne of a judge’s bench, no tiered box for jurors. The judge himself was a nondescript man of late middle age. The single impression Charlotte had was that his body type would always make him look a bit overweight unless he was a bit too thin. Theirs was only one of many cases on the docket that day—all manner of contested family combinations awaited. She passed part of the long delay studying the women and men and children milling around the waiting room and the grassy lawn that looked over the sound, guessing who might be related to whom. Then Jake walked into the room with Katherine and another woman—Jake’s lawyer, it soon became clear.

Suddenly, after so many dragging days and hours, it all moved too quickly.
This
should be the drawn-out part of it, Charlotte thought. Stamping every moment with the full weight of the lives in balance.

Jake barely glanced at her. She felt a rush of blood to her feet, a moment of panic—had she and Eric spent enough time considering it from Jake’s side? Eric tensed when Jake was led to the front of the room. He wrapped her arm in his and gripped her hand so hard the bones were pressed uncomfortably against the wooden bench. The judge paused between cases, read the papers handed to him by Jake’s lawyer, nodding once or twice, exchanging words. They spoke too low to be heard. Charlotte tried to read the judge’s face across the floor. Then, at last, the judge called Jake Remington Flores’s name. And then he called Robert Eric Bryson.

The judge looked at Jake. “Young man? You understand what we are here for?” Jake nodded. “You have to speak up, son. For the record.”

“Yes, sir. I do.” He wore khaki pants so new the creases across the thighs and calves were still crisp. Someone had combed his hair straight across his forehead with a neat part; illogically tidy for a kid. If he were mine, thought Charlotte, I would muss it up.

The judge continued. “If the court found reason to place you in Mr. Bryson’s custody”—he lifted the papers in his hand to indicate Eric—“would you be willing to go?”

Jake looked at Eric with the same solemn expression Charlotte had noted at the trailer in Queets and at Louise’s foster home in Port Angeles. It reflected his worldview, Charlotte decided. Appraising, considering—revealing nothing until he was ready. She was sitting so still the bench beneath her seemed to drift in space, gravity a matter of perspective. Finally, after a long moment of apparent consideration, Jake nodded again, and then said, “Yes.”

The judge sorted through the papers on his bench and unfolded a single sheet, smoothing it flat. He read the test result aloud and then, for the first time, he smiled. And when Charlotte saw Jake’s face, when she saw his own smile, she knew it would be all right. They would be all right.

“I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be.”

—ALBERT EINSTEIN

Acknowledgments

While the events and characters in this novel are fictional and drawn from my imagination, all the medical detail and genetics I’ve incorporated are scientifically factual.

No acknowledgments is complete without a huge shout of thanks to
you, readers! It is the dynamic confluence of readers, knowledgeable
booksellers, and libraries that keeps novels a living part of our culture.

For all that the author’s name is the one on the cover, no novel gets published without the work of many minds, and I am indebted to the entire Simon & Schuster team. My editors Marysue Rucci and Jonathan Karp have been true partners on
Gemini
. How often you saw the forest when I was lost in the trees. Jonathan Evans and Emily Graff, your meticulous attention to detail was my life raft through those final drafts. Thanks also to my agents, David Forrer and Kimberly Witherspoon at Inkwell Management. You know when to hold my hand and when to push me harder.

It took three years and months of research to wrestle this book to a final draft. I depended on the expertise of many people without whose generous gifts this fiction would have none of the solid weight of facts. Thanks to Dr. Anna Beck for her general medical expertise and wisdom in hospice care and oncology; Dr. Karen Hanten for her wealth of pediatric advice and experience; Dr. Lorrie Langdale for details on intensive care and trauma; and Drs. Michael Souter and Lynne Taylor for those first illuminating conversations. For their unending patience explaining details of genetics and neuroscience, I thank Drs. Kurt Benirschke, Manuel Ferreira, Clement
Furlong, Stan Gartler, Sidney Gospe, Lee Nelson, and Virginia Sybert.
Additional medical details were contributed by Drs. Terry Clark, Farrokh Farrokhi, David Feldman, Bernard Fikkers, Terri Graham, Anna Harvey, Bill Healey, Chris Kuhr, Dana Lynge, Tom Malpass, Mette Peters, Peggy Sargeant, Sam Sharar, and Brad Watters.

All the Googling in the world could not replace the legal details provided by Deputy Gary Simpson; also Lieutenant Mark Hanten, Sergeant Roy Frank, Criminal Identification Specialist Kaycee Leaonard, and Crime Analyst Sandy Curry. Mr. Keith Thomson, King County guardian ad litem, put up with infinite questions with the best humor, as did Heath Fox, GAL Paula Martin, Debra Madsen, LuAnne Perry, and Briana Rogers of DNA Identifiers.

Paul Svornich, thank you for your intimate familiarity with commercial fishing. Other facts included in
Gemini
are thanks to Barbara Blackie, Elena Giorgi, Gloria Sayler, Joan Hanten, Carole Ober, Jennifer Olanie, Shawn Otorowski, Nancy Johnson, and Rhona Jack.

Many dear friends read early drafts of this work and their forbearance, faith, and forgiveness led to a far better book. Thanks to Erica Bauermeister, Randy Sue Coburn, Claire Dederer, Anne Gendreau, Sherry Larsen-Holmes, Martha McLaughlin, Zan Merriman, Suzanne Selfors, Jennie Shortridge, Gail Tsukiyama, and, for her brilliant painter’s eye, Martha Burkert. And to the most fabulous writing group on the planet and their commitment to supporting literacy, thank you Seattle7Writers!

This book was born, revised, and completed at Hedgebrook Writer’s Retreat on Whidbey Island. I am forever indebted, and so grateful to be one voice in your phenomenal community of radical hospitality.

My research included conversations with intensive care physicians, oncologists, hospice caretakers, cancer-stricken friends, biblical scholars, spiritualists, and books ranging from neuroscience to
Proof of Heaven
to
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
. In all of them, perhaps not surprisingly, I found more similarities than differences. A special note of remembrance is offered to my friends whose lives came prematurely to their physical end during the course of writing this novel. Anna Harvey, you are remembered, and some of your words are in these pages. As you once said, “Death is the ultimate act of our humanity, because it is the last thing we do as humans.” Kay Monahan, Annette Moser-Wellman, Marta Wagner, Chris Bernards, Susan Thompson, and Lucie Rose Gendreau, we miss you.

And last, first, and ahead of all else, thanks to my family: Kathie and Ray Wiley, Ellen Bywaters, and Marilyn Wiley. My children, Sara, Will, Julia, and Elise—in you I witness miracles every day of my life. Steve Cassella: twenty-two years and counting, plus all the love that’s at the heart of this book.