Gemini (6 page)

Raney pretended to be asleep when Grandpa came home. Overnight the weather shifted to the west, and then the northwest, and by morning the peninsula was cloaked in a cold rain so she could wear a loose sweater over her bandages. No one seemed to notice that she was suddenly more left-handed than right. By the time Bo was in Connecticut and settled into his new school, the wound had closed, leaving a bright-pink bracelet of scar, and Raney was sure her face had been forgotten behind the rich, pretty girls who went to a school like that.

—

One morning in early November she came down to breakfast and found the Rubbermaid box of paints and canvases she’d seen in the bunker that day with Bo. She sat down and ate her cereal, got up and washed the dishes, left the house for the school bus, and then turned around and walked back up the driveway to the kitchen door. “Why did you get me that?”

“It’s been a while since I’ve seen you paint. Thought maybe you were out of supplies.”

Raney opened the wooden box and ran her fingers across the row of untouched tin tubes. She didn’t know if she would have the heart to mar them with dents and smears, almost better to hold them, perfect, for some day when she was ready and deserving. After a long minute Grandpa said, “I met Joy, Grandmama, when she was fifteen. I never told you that, did I?”

“No. She probably did. Fifteen seemed like a long time away to me back then.” She looked at him. “Why are you telling me this now?”

He shrugged. “I’m sorry you don’t have a woman to raise you.”

“I like it the way it is. Us.” He didn’t answer. It was what it was with no changing it, after all. She could tell he believed her, despite the look of regret on his face that she couldn’t explain. She never told Grandpa about the swing; it made her happy to believe she’d spared him any additional worry. It would be another decade before she understood that the bliss and curse of adolescence is the capacity to lie better to yourself than to anyone else, especially your own folks.

•
5
•

charlotte

Charlotte got to the hospital
early the next morning. Felipe Otero had kept Jane stable over the day, and Helen Wong, a new doctor hired just out of fellowship, had managed the patient fairly well until about 3:00 a.m., when Jane’s vital signs had deteriorated again. Charlotte looked at the crossing numbers on Jane’s flowchart—the Neosynephrine dose going up and her blood pressure declining—and knew she was in for a rocky day again. It was like the child who plays happily at nursery school all day until she senses her mother’s approach and begins to wail, but as soon as Charlotte registered that thought, she consciously stepped back from the attachment. She’d been in this job long enough to know it did no one any good—not the family, not the patient, and certainly not herself.

Anne was on duty again—that was a relief. She saw Charlotte re-creating the night from the numbers on the chart and said, “Not out of the woods. Lower the dose and she tanks. BUN and creatinine are going up.”

“No surprise. We’re saving her heart and brain at the expense of her kidneys.” Even as Charlotte said this, she looked at Jane, who lay as inanimate as the day before, and knew they were possibly not saving her brain at all. She pulled the sheet down and rubbed her knuckles hard against Jane’s sternum.

“Anything?” Anne asked.

“Barely. Could be the high BUN, though.” Charlotte wouldn’t consider a diagnosis of brain death until Jane’s lab values were normalized. She read Otero’s notes and Wong’s notes, ticking off what test results to check and what tests were still to go. Then she read the nursing notes—brief, often rote phrases that filled in the continuum of hours between physicians’ assessments. Over the years Charlotte had discovered how much they added to her general sense of her patients’ progress, comments ranging from when they were bathed or how they responded to physical therapy, to what visitor had evoked some response no white coat ever witnessed. One note in particular stood out to her this morning. “Who’s Blake Simpson?” she asked Anne.

Anne flipped to the back of Jane’s chart and pulled out a card. “Police? He left this with Jody, the night nurse.”

Charlotte picked up the business card. “Jefferson County. Have they identified her?”

“Jody would have told me. If they told her. Call him.”

“After rounds I will. Has Orthopedics been by yet?” She went over her list of consults and orders with Anne, gearing up for the day. Her mission for this next phase of Jane Doe’s care would be to identify problems that could be solved. It sounded straightforward on the surface—what else would a doctor be doing? But the truth about her job was that much of medicine was still a mystery and a patient with multiple failing organs could overwhelm one’s capacity to be decisive and effective; it was easier to measure what was wrong—lungs that couldn’t suck enough oxygen out of the air, kidneys that couldn’t balance the blood—than to specify the cause. And even when the cause was obvious, there was often no obvious cure. So in the tangle of abnormal labs and scans and tests Charlotte found clarity in deciding what she was capable of fixing and going after it “with the fangs of a bulldog,” as Otero would say. Charlotte would say that she hoped he was referring to her medical acumen and not her body type, and she herself saw it as a way of buying time. Fix the problems you can fix, do your best not to cause any new problems, and buy time for the brain and body to heal themselves. Then Otero would usually try to begin a conversation about God and fate and Charlotte would spew that God better damn well wait in line for her patients, which Otero seemed to find the best joke of the day, no matter how often he heard it.

A little after nine she called the number on Blake Simpson’s card. A woman answered, “Sheriff’s office.” But when Charlotte asked for Sheriff Blake Simpson there was a pause and the woman asked, “You mean Deputy Simpson? Out in the field. Would you like his cell number?”

Charlotte looked at the card again. “Yes. Sorry. Deputy Simpson,” but in the pause that followed, Helen Seras walked into Jane’s room accompanied by a photographer and a journalist from the
Seattle Times
. Helen lifted her eyebrows enough to signal that she was all PR mode now, so Charlotte took the number and hung up the phone.

“A moment?” Helen asked, though it was more a statement than a question. “They’re running an article about our Jane Doe.”

For the next twenty minutes Charlotte fielded questions for which she had few answers—at least not any answers that made the reporters go away. She vacillated between hoping publicity might find out who belonged to Jane (or vice versa), and suspecting these people were niggling her only for some lurid headline to sell more papers. When the photographer focused his camera on Jane, Charlotte grabbed at his arm, startling both of them, and he hesitated, embarrassed, until Charlotte raised her eyebrows and held her hands up in a plea for respect. She whispered, “She’s here, you know”—she nodded her head at Jane—“in this room with us.”

“So . . . you’d like her to sign a waiver?” the photographer asked, only half sarcastically.

Helen stepped in and said, “They have my permission, Dr. Reese. Drop by my office when you have a minute?”

When she had a minute she certainly would, Charlotte thought. Fortunately, she knew her day would be packed.

—

The plan was for Charlotte to meet Eric at Flying Fish at seven. He had long ago learned to bring a newspaper or even his laptop with him; he didn’t want to add up all the hours he’d spent sitting at the bar with a beer and shooters while Charlotte finished rounds at the hospital. He had learned to make the waiting an exercise in mindfulness—a pocket of uncommitted time to read, to watch the crowd. To be present. It didn’t always work—tonight being a case in point. He took a seat at the end of the bar and ordered a beer, but before the bartender turned away, Eric changed it to a manhattan. He skimmed the first few pages of the
Seattle Times
, but his own writing was too much on his mind and every headline seemed either connected or contradictory to his research. Twice he stopped to send an e-mail to himself with a note about the manuscript. The topic of this, Eric’s fourth book, was organ donation and transplantation and he’d believed, or fooled himself into believing, that if he mapped out the structure well enough in advance, it should practically write itself. But every time he thought he had broken the damn thing’s back, it got away from him again. It had started much like his other books and articles, as an engaging, narrative explanation of a scientific subject for a lay audience, filled with plenty of personal stories so readers could forget they were being educated while they immersed themselves in someone else’s drama, sending up thanks to God their own life might be bad but it would unlikely ever be
that
bad. The deeper he explored this current topic, though, the more he became both fascinated and alarmed by the tangled and potentially malicious influences of money over medical ethics and law. He had finally retitled the book
Buy This Body: The Billion-Dollar Business of International Organ Donation
. His publisher loved it. But while Eric was an increasingly lauded travel and science writer, he was jittery about venturing closer to political journalism and understood this book could change the course of his career—not for the better if he blew it—and the sheer awareness of consequence undercut his focus.

The restaurant was filling up, and he remembered it was Friday and that people, who worked in offices with cubicles and managers, who could take Saturday off because someone told them to stay home and weed their gardens or coach their kid’s T-ball games—these people knew work as a thing that could be separated from other parts of their life. The work of a writer was too portable sometimes, giving him the freedom to work anywhere anytime, and the attendant curse of never really being free at all. He was always working on the book in some corner of his mind. On that score he envied Charlotte, who kept her pager on but could at least physically walk away from her patients.

At eight twenty he pulled out his cell phone to call her, but at nearly the same moment she put her arms around his shoulders and said, “We have a table,” and his book and his looming deadline were temporarily forgotten when he pulled her arms tighter, letting himself remember her face before he turned to look at her.

The place was crowded now. By the time they sat down, the heat of so many bodies had penetrated his light wool jacket, her raincoat. Charlotte pulled off the gloves she wore until Seattle’s summer fully arrived in July; her hands were small, perhaps her only delicate physical trait, and perpetually cold. She laid the gloves in the middle of the table and Eric idly picked one up—black leather, lined with fine white rabbit fur. She had been wearing them, or some like them, on their second chance meeting at a friend of a friend’s birthday party. She had dropped one and he’d picked it up, mindlessly brushing the downy fur inside the cuff across his lip, and been almost startled by the intimate smell of her perfume. He still remembered feeling a rush
of embarrassment as if some private part of Charlotte had been ex
posed to him. The next day he had detoured through the cosmetics area at Nordstrom pretending he was buying perfume for a girlfriend, disturbed that the confusion of samples left him unable to remember Charlotte’s exact scent, which had stayed so pure in his mind all night.

The restaurant was lit with sconces and a few chandeliers that gave off a soft yellow light. Charlotte studied the menu. “I want a beer,” she said declaratively.

“You never drink beer.”

“I know. Advise me.”

“Hefeweizen. Try the Blue Moon.”

She scanned the menu for no more than a minute. “Let’s split. Whatever you want. Lily Allen is coming to the Paramount next month. Should I get tickets?”

“Sure,” he answered. He ordered crab cakes and slaw, caught Charlotte’s brow furrowing, and asked if she wanted something else.

“What?”

“You’re frowning. No crab?”

“I wasn’t listening. Crab is fine. But honestly I’d rather have a bacon cheeseburger. How’s the book coming?”

He shrugged, reluctant to detail how stymied he felt in this final draft, especially when she seemed so distracted. “Stalled.”

“Still worried about controversy? What’s the worst that could happen?” she asked.

“The Chinese mafia could gun me down on the streets of Seattle. That sort of thing.”

Charlotte looked up, fully focused on the conversation now. “Seriously?”

Eric was tempted to say yes, just to hold her attention. More and more lately it seemed like her mind was elsewhere. Her patients absorbed her, he knew, particularly when she had one in limbo, not clearly going to survive but not clearly hopeless—and Charlotte was always the last to abandon hope. Plus, her parents had announced they were moving out of the house where Charlotte was raised, which had stirred up a bit of turbulence in her whole family. Sometimes, though, he suspected it was the two of them, their own relationship, that had begun to turn, but every time he thought of some way to flat-out ask her, he wondered if the question alone could derail them. Were they that fragile? “No. They’ll probably just throw me into a cell in Mongolia for a few decades. You seem tired. Your new patient doing better?”

“She has a lot of worse to go before we hit better. If we ever hit better. The
Times
was there today.”

“So that was her? Hard to believe anyone will recognize her photo, though.”

“It’s already in the paper?”

Eric pulled the creased newspaper out of his laptop bag and put it on top of Charlotte’s empty salad plate. The photograph of Jane staring up at her was worse than the sketch she’d seen the day before. The sketch, oddly, had looked more alive, given that the artist had presumed what Jane might look like without an endotracheal tube. In this grainy portrait Jane’s puffy eyes were glazed with lubricant, her bruised and swollen mouth distorted by bands of tape and gauze anchoring the plastic tube that connected her to the ventilator. She looked quite dead, really. Like one of those Victorian memento mori photographs of dead people.

Eric saw the look on Charlotte’s face and took the paper back, reading the article below the headline closely for the first time. “You’re in here! They quote you.”

“Not all of it, I’m sure.”

“ ‘Doing everything possible . . . Hope to find her family . . . Time is her best hope.’ Jeez, Charlotte. Come to me for copy next time.”

She had to laugh. “What could I do? Helen Seras was ready to take my badge and escort me to the street if I didn’t behave.”

“But you
will
do everything possible. She’s lucky she landed at Beacon. Will she make it?” he asked, lowering his voice.

Charlotte shrugged, somber again. “Miracles happen.”

“Do they?” Eric lifted his eyebrows and the light caught a look of innocence in him that belied the gray at his temples. In that moment, in that half light, Charlotte remembered the face she had fallen for, when she had first allowed herself to believe they could build a reliable world together. Would that take a miracle too? she wondered.

“Sure,” she answered. “Well, no. But if we hook all our machines up to her we might salvage enough of her brain to tell us who’s looking for her. Or who ran her over.” She thought of the message she’d left for Deputy Simpson and was tempted to check her cell phone for any missed call. Suddenly none of it seemed even mildly humorous—her distress over the photograph and her quotes, her frustration with Helen Seras. She was worried that she would lose this woman, that it might take an actual miracle to save her and she herself was not miraculous. All of it tumbled into a sad, overwhelming fatigue. “You know what? Let’s take dinner to go.”