Gemini (5 page)

Over time she learned a few more facts. Grandpa had come into her room to wake her and found an empty bed, empty closet and drawers. He waited two days to call the police, a delay that was criticized by some, but given that it was the child’s own mother doing the taking, even the police were slow to call it kidnapping. And considering Grandpa’s view of anything resembling government, Raney never blamed him.

They were gone for nine weeks. They took a bus down through Oregon and across Idaho, and after a stay in Denver they switched to cars driven by a series of men who all had the same unshaven face and ponytail. Then a loop through Kansas and Oklahoma and north Texas until Celine landed in Las Vegas, where they stayed long enough in one motel that it acquired the imprint of a home for Raney—a routine of waking up alone to powdered doughnuts and a carton of milk set out on the desk beside the TV, which was already tuned to the
Sesame Street
channel. The room had a small refrigerator with Oscar Mayer cold cuts and peanut butter and jelly. Their days and nights must have got swapped around, so by the time Raney awoke it was after dark, and by the time she heard a key ratchet into the doorknob, it was nearly dawn. Celine would take Raney down a steep set of concrete stairs where a swing set and a merry-go-round sat in a field with grass so tall she had red whip marks across her bare legs after playing, as if no other child had trampled that ground.

The police never found them—likely handicapped by the nebulous legalities of Raney’s ownership. At the end of summer Celine drove her back to Seattle, and they crossed the sound on the ferry, a journey that stayed sharp in Raney’s memory because, even at the age of six, she knew it marked her last day with her mother. Her grandparents weren’t home when they arrived. Celine deposited Raney in the kitchen with a bag of dirty clothes and a brand-new Barbie doll, and drove away. For the rest of time Raney would catch a scent of Jean Naté perfume or clove cigarettes, or the mustiness of an old canvas tent, the metallic tang of a Greyhound bus windowsill, and be emptied of gravity and grounding by the rogue wave of an emotion she could not name.

—

Raney didn’t see Bo for three days after the race. She hung around Hardy’s Store, reading
Tiger Beat
magazine at the rack near the stairs leading up to the bedrooms. She bought five-penny candies so she could see Mrs. Hardy’s face up close, thinking that if her eyes were red it must mean something bad had happened to Bo. It never crossed Raney’s mind to just ask outright where he was. And then on the evening of the fourth day she was in her bedroom and heard a whistle, opened the window, and there he was, straddling his bicycle in her backyard.

After thirty seconds pretending she couldn’t care less, she went to the back door. “So where the hell were you?”

He squinted down the long drive. “My dad says girls shouldn’t cuss.”

“Well, I’ll remember that next time I want advice from a corn farmer in Seattle. I thought you’d gone home.”

“My dad took me camping in the park for the weekend. I didn’t know he was coming until he showed up at the store.” He looked down the drive again, and Raney realized he was checking for her grandfather’s truck.

“What? Did you hide in the bushes till my grandpa drove off this afternoon? He won’t be home for a couple of hours.” Bo swung his leg over his bike and they started toward the path that led through the woods to the bluff. Once the house was out of sight, he parked his bike against a fir. The path narrowed, so they couldn’t walk side by side, and Raney led him down a deer trail that skirted a clear-cut where the fireweed and yarrow grew thick and hummed with bees. She gathered a bouquet of the purple and cream flowers and showed Bo how to choose the ripest, bright-orange huckleberries from the top of the bush, still bittersweet this early in summer. Above the clearing a red-tailed hawk screamed and Bo searched the sky. “I heard a bald eagle,” he said.

“You’ve been watching too many westerns. Eagles sound like this . . .” Raney tried to imitate the high, broken
kre-ee
of an eagle, less imposing than the smaller hawk’s cry. “Well, not like that. But not like they sound in the movies.” She slapped his arm and he jerked it back. “Mosquito. They’re bad this time of night.” She pinched a feathery leaf from one of the yarrows still in her hand and rolled it between her fingers, then pressed the crushed greens on his mosquito bite. “I always wonder why so many animals hunt at dusk. Mosquitoes, snakes. Coons. Filling up without a worry in the world they’ll be alive and on the go tomorrow.”

“That is just the kind of thing you would say, Raney.”

“What does that mean?” She let the flowers fall to the ground and started back toward the house.

“But he’s okay, isn’t he?”

“I was just talking, Bo. You’re the one who’s making a big thing about it. My grandfather’s fine. That was indigestion.”

Bo hop-skipped till he caught up with her. “Does your grandfather hate me?”

“As a matter of fact, I asked him that. He said he likes you fine. He just likes me a lot better.”

Bo closed his mouth in a tight line and considered. “So I can keep coming around?”

“Yeah. If you can get over being scared of both of us, you can keep comin’ around.”

—

For the rest of that summer they lived in the woods and the ravine and the cove, running wild as hares. For Raney it was little in the way of new, but Bo was a prisoner set free, starting that summer off in a tight fist and every day between him and his parents’ fights letting a little more light inside. His pale, blue-white skin became blushed in days of sun. Someday, Raney decided, she would invent paints that came with permanent scents: greens that smelled of fish and seaweed; yellows that smelled like lightning strikes and crushed cedar and wet bark stripped from hundred-year-old firs; creams and whites that smelled like sand sifting through your fingers. By the end of that summer Bo’s portrait would have smelled like all of those. Even his body changed. His muscles began to fill his lean height, which had seemed like a cumbersome gift he couldn’t coordinate.

Bo had a whole list of books he was supposed to read that summer, and when the rain kept them inside he’d pull one out of his pack. They might have been assigned, but Raney could tell he liked reading them. Often she found them left behind in the bathroom or on a kitchen counter, and he made no effort to reclaim them, pointedly leaving
The Catcher in the Rye
a second time and asking if they read “that kind of book” at her school. She was stung at first, but the books collected on her shelves and slowly she began to read them.

Raney’s school started before Labor Day, but Bo stayed around another week until his father came to take him to his new boarding school in Connecticut. His last weekend in Quentin was over a full moon, a tide high enough to swell the brackish lagoon near the mouth of the river. At its crest the flood of fresh and salt water in the pool was more than eight feet at the deep spot. Years before, kids now full grown had strung a rope off the angled branches of a big madrone. The bound knot was as thick as a thigh and so weathered it had petrified into a solid mass—impossible to trace one lap of rope around another. No grown-ups ever checked it, but the town was small enough that any broken necks or backs would have been famous, and so the swing was universally accepted as safe. Most things are until a disaster occurs.

In late July, Bo had tried the swing once on Raney’s dare, but he’d dropped a single second too late in the arc of fall and his gangly legs had struck hard against the bottom; the shock jerked his breath away and zinged through his spine. Raney had waited for him to inhale, made a shallow dive, and pulled him to the ladder of roots that climbed the steep, muddy bank. After that, somehow the tide was never high enough, or the day warm enough, or the mood right for them to try the swing again. It became an event they both remembered and pretended had never happened, which made it as much a pact of loyalty as slicing their fingers open and touching blood to blood. Maybe it was that bond, or the full moon, or knowing Bo was heading to another world two thousand miles away. Or maybe it was the combined force of all. On his last full day in Quentin, Bo looked at the tidemark on the cliff and said, “The lagoon is right for the rope swing if we go now.”

There was a wind driving in from the southwest so strong even the walls of the ravine made no shelter; branches tossed and cracked over their heads. The swing was hitched around a smaller branch as always, a tacit rule of its use. Someone too short or too frustrated by the wind snatching the rope away had added a tether to the end: two feet of braided nylon tied to the knot that served as a handhold. Bo stepped up to go first, as if to prove himself. He didn’t look at Raney; he hardly even looked down at the water. He unloosed the rope and pulled it as close as it would come, stretching the line nearly straight. The limb swayed, a band of bark polished to a gleam by a thousand jumpers, the rope nearly grown into the wood. He locked one fist on top of the other, just above the thick swell of the knot. Raney could see dark coiled hair under his arms. She was about to remind him not to make the same mistake again, not to let fear keep him holding on until he passed the moment of safe release, but he was already off—one low grunt as he leaped away from the earth and swung out and down, the weight of him stretching the rope, moving impossibly slow, his knees flexed to his waist until he keened and let go at the perfect, perfect point where physical law carried him just enough forward and then down, down to the deepest point of green-black water. His head disappeared for a moment and then popped up, laughing with the ecstasy of defying death. “All right, little girl,” he called out. “Your turn.”

Perhaps it was that “little girl” business. Without that, it might have gone differently. Raney might have stuck with the common sense she had always used in these woods and this water, and considered how this rope was changed by the nylon tether. The wind was channeling down the ravine in great bursts strong enough to knock her off balance, and the rope kept trying to lurch away, so she had to hold it by the added tail. She stepped onto the highest root and stretched for the knot, waited for a calm in the wind. Bo squatted on the opposite bank tossing pebbles at the base of the tree crooning her name in a catcall. She could hear the next roar of wind coming, a great whipping in the green crown above and the litter of leaves and small branches rattling toward her along the water, moving so fast the temperature dropped and she began to shiver. She kept one arm locked around the tree until the last second, blocking out Bo’s teasing jeer, and then, finally, shoved off in sheer defiance, defying the storm and Bo and the voice telling her this was
not
the perfect, safe moment. She was
not
ready.

The instant of free fall before the rope stretched taut was usually the best—exhilarating and terrifying and dangerously reckless. That few seconds of time stretched into a crystal-clear memory you could use to mark that day in that summer in your life, distinct from all the billions of pointless seconds that blurred into background. But this time Raney began her fall at the instant the wind hit, stinging and wild, pelting her with sticks and leaves so she fumbled and took off spinning. The hard braid of the nylon tether whipped around her arm and doubled over itself and now,
now
was the instant she had to let go or miss the deep pool. She couldn’t see Bo, couldn’t see the water, but she knew the arc and stretch and plunge so well she let go by instinct, not connected to the part of her brain that sensed the nylon rope coiling around her arm like a venomous snake. Her body fell, then caught and jerked back toward the tree, locked to the rope by the tether until the weakest link, her skin, broke free.

She heard Bo scream. She was lying on her back and Bo was over her, screaming her name, open-mouthed and twisted in excruciating pain—it took a full blessed minute to realize it was her own pain. Fire, worse than fire, seared her arm from her elbow to her shoulder. It scorched down her spinal cord and up her neck like hot poison. She couldn’t breathe and then she couldn’t stop panting, every muscle rigid with pain.

“I’ll go get help,” Bo said. “Your granddad. Where’s your grandfather?”

Raney opened her mouth and heard a sound come out that wasn’t words at all. It sounded like an animal. Bo started to cry. He wadded his T-shirt under her head and stood up.

“No! Don’t leave me here.” He knelt down again, and for the first time Raney looked at her arm, a bracelet of oozing raw flesh wound in three crossing rings. She remembered a hunting trip with her grandfather, a .22 propped in a notch tracking a raccoon waddling up the riverbank like a broken-hipped cat, Grandpa leaning over her shoulder whispering, “Wait, wait . . . Okay. Now!” Seeing the coon turn a somersault from a standstill and not believing she’d done it. Grandpa had skinned it while she watched, showing her how to work the point of a knife through the fur and in between the skin and muscle to the clean plane of fat and sinew, then use bare hands to slip the sheath of fur and flesh off like a glove. That was how her arm looked.

She grabbed on to Bo’s leg. “Don’t go. Don’t tell him. It won’t kill me, not if I don’t let it get infected.”

“You have to tell him. You need to go to a doctor.”

“Just stay here with me.” After a while Raney stopped shivering and sat up, holding her arm away from her body so nothing could touch the raw stripes. “What’s a doctor going to do? Put Neosporin and a clean bandage on it. Help me up. He’s away from the house till at least nine. There’s a whole emergency room of supplies in the bunker. He won’t notice. Not if I’m careful.”