Gemini

by Carol Cassella

  His mouth pinched tight and Raney shot him a challenging look, ready to tackle him if he so much as smiled. After a long minute he said, “My parents aren’t on a trip to Europe. They’re getting a divorce. They didn’t tell me that—nobody wants to tell me. But I know it anyway.”

  Raney wanted to know if he got to choose where he’d live, with his mother or his father, but she looked at his face and knew not to ask. “You want to see the rest of the house?”

  —

  The living room was dark. Her grandmother had decorated it, but Grandpa and Raney almost never used the room, so the smell of mold came through like abandonment and the furniture looked more like the props used in school plays than anything a person might actually sit on. Bo asked if they could watch MTV and Raney said Grandpa didn’t believe in TV, thought it was the government’s way of stupefying the population so no one would rise up. There were two pink velvet–covered armchairs, a matching pink sofa, and a dark wood coffee table with glass over the top that Raney had tripped and split her chin on when she was five. There was a bookcase with some war medals and books about Korea and Vietnam and one oversize book with pictures from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which had belonged to Raney’s grandmother.

  Bo kept his hands in his pockets, as if he was cold, moving his eyes from one dusty object to the next without a word. Raney felt like she was supposed to be telling him something about this room where time seemed to have stopped, but she couldn’t identify what.She started to wish she had not brought him here. Then his eyes settled on a photograph of her mother, Celine. She was about fifteen in the photograph, wearing a turquoise sweater with a big gold pin in the shape of a rose—Raney still had that actual pin in her underwear drawer. Celine was looking right at the camera, which meant, of course, that she was looking right at Raney, and her mother’s eyes were a complicated mix of brown and rusty gold and green, the same green Raney saw in her own eyes. The photograph was actually a black and white, but Raney saw those colors rich and saturated and they never faded, no matter how old that picture got year after year. Bo stood in front of it for a long time. He didn’t ask who the woman was, but Raney saw him look at the picture and then look at her and it was pretty obvious.

  “I can’t show you my room. Grandpa wouldn’t like it.” Bo looked a little relieved, which for some reason made her want to take him upstairs and show him the quilted twin bed where she slept, the wooden desk Grandpa had built for her under the window that, in wintertime, let her watch snow pile up on the Brothers peaks. Then the dogs started barking and she got scared for a minute that Grandpa might be driving in, but then she did the math of miles from here to Shelton and back and knew it was just rabbits or one of the barn cats. “I’ve got another place I can show you. But you have to promise me you’ll never tell a soul. It’s outside.”

  Rex, their pointer, must have decided by then that Bo was no threat. The dog danced around the boy’s legs as they went out into the yard, running to grab sticks for them to throw, bowing down on his front paws to drop them at Bo’s feet like he was making offerings to a king. Raney could tell Bo didn’t own a dog—he’d reach tentatively for whatever Rex dropped, like the dog might change his mind again and bite. But she granted that Bo had a pretty good arm for a boy who was so pale and skinny you wondered if they let children play outside in Seattle.

  The sun had broken through the clouds and the yard was alive with jays and crows and the hum of dragonflies. A cluster of hot-pink hollyhocks seeded ages ago by Raney’s grandmother swayed with blooms as big as saucers. Grandpa’s long-dead Mercury rusted in a patch of morning glory at the edge of the woods and the faded red paint and twisting vines with their white trumpet-shaped flowers, all illuminated in a beam of sunshine, looked more glorious than decrepit to Raney. This was how she saw her house, their land, and felt acutely awkward to know she hoped Bo could see it the same—brilliant and vital and not at all lonely. And Bo was lit up, too, pitching rocks and plastic bottles for the dog, loosening his body more with every throw like the sun had oiled his joints, whooping at that hunter as if he needed any encouragement to race and retrieve. Later, Raney wondered why she couldn’t just enjoy the moment as long as it lasted. Instead she did it to him again. She slipped inside the barn and disappeared from Bo’s sight.

  • 3 •

  charlotte

  Felipe Otero, one of Charlotte’s partners, rapped on the metal frame of Jane Doe’s sliding glass door before stepping inside—a small gesture of courtesy uniquely his own, Charlotte thought. Most of the other doctors breezed in and out of the ICU cubicles, barely pausing unless family members were present, subconsciously claiming this property as their own, this time their own, even the moment it took to pause at the doorway too valuable to squander.

  “Full house today. You had a busy night.” He nodded at Jane, still unconscious and immobile, and spoke in a half whisper barely audible over her ventilator and the bustle in the hallway and nursing station, filled with personnel as the nurses changed shift. “Want to sign out? I can take over.”

  Charlotte glanced at the clock. “You still have time for breakfast. Why so early?”

  “Easier to be here than at home some mornings.” He grinned at this reference to his teenagers, who Charlotte knew had been giving him hell. “Ethics board had a meeting this morning. I heard about the new patient.”

  “The ethics board is already discussing her?”

  “No. Helen Seras asked me if I’d seen her yet. KING-TV called her.”

  “The accident was five days ago.”

  “Yes, but there’s no TV station in Forks.”

  “West Harbor. Do us all a favor and keep Helen out of my way this morning. You know the whole story?” Felipe shook his head. “Hit-and-run pedestrian found beside the highway. No ID—”

  “That much I know,” Felipe interrupted.

  “She was alert when the medics got her to the ER. Arm and leg fractures. And now . . . this.” She looked at Jane’s pale, bloated body. “I think she threw a fat embolism in the OR when they were fixing her femur fracture.”

  “Just pulmonary or to her brain? She’s had an MRI?”

  “I’m sure it hit her brain. She never woke up after surgery. MRI is at nine o’clock this morning. Echocardiogram this afternoon when they can fit her in. Her lungs are getting worse by the hour. She’ll need a tracheostomy soon.”

  Felipe looked at the numbers on the flow sheet in front of Charlotte, then walked to Jane’s bedside and in one sweep of the monitors saw enough to know that Jane would be here for weeks before they could guess her ultimate outcome—if they could keep her alive that long. Then he turned his face to the woman lying on the bed, limbs arranged doll-like at her side in their casts and bandages and braces. Charlotte saw him smooth the folded edge of the thin cotton blanket that covered her torso. “She’s quite young,” he said when he came back to the desk.

  “Around forty.” She almost added, “around my age,” but it felt too personally referential—unprofessional to hint at any close identification with a patient even to someone like Otero, whom she considered a friend. As if he heard her thoughts, he smiled and looked Charlotte in the eyes. “Yes. Young. Lots to live for. Finish your note and go home to your garden. Call your boyfriend.”

  “Eric doesn’t get out of bed until ten.”

  “So, join him.” Felipe laughed at the face Charlotte made, a self-mocking grimace that summed up how she felt after being awake and working all night, her hair lank, her scrubs rumpled and smelling faintly of sweat. Felipe was twelve years older than Charlotte, his outside life consumed by one particularly wild son and a perpetually tempestuous marriage. But for four years they had shared patients and call schedules and a mutual skepticism of hospital bureaucracy, which proved to be the best possible stress relief in a job that was often all stress. Felipe had championed Eric even before Charlotte allowed herself to think about him romantically, when she was still too angry at her prior boyfriend to consider any man w
ith a forgiving heart. Or maybe Felipe just championed love itself, found its unsteadiness a seductive twist to its pleasure—all the more alluring when success was unpredictable and thus an ideal counter to his precision in the ICU, where Charlotte could sometimes see him silently tick through all practical options for a patient, weighing hard choices against statistical odds before setting a clinical course his emotions couldn’t impeach. Sometimes she envied him that.

  She flipped through the notes she’d made about Jane Doe over the last hours, looking for any missing test or order or medication—and Jane was only one of the twelve patients she was managing, albeit the sickest. Charlotte’s eyes felt sticky and she recognized the lag between her thoughts and her decisions that always crept in after long nights. “All right. I’ll go. Come out to the nurses station and let’s go over the charts.”

  —

  She called Otero twice on the way home, remembering details she hadn’t outright talked about even though she knew he’d handle them: remind the echo tech to look for a septal defect in Jane’s heart, get a surgical consult for her trach, make sure Infectious Disease sees her first thing today. It could be endless, this mental circling she did around complex cases, knowing how drastically things could change in one day. She stopped at Whole Foods for cat food, yogurt, and some fruit but left with an enormous frosted cinnamon roll—somehow they almost looked healthy sitting on their tidy brown paper squares in a wicker basket. She thought about driving to Swansons Nursery for more lettuce starts. She thought about going straight to Eric’s but decided to rent a George Clooney DVD instead, then circled the parking lot of the video store twice and decided to go home without stopping. The fog of fatigue, an entire, sparkling afternoon ahead with no obligations, it left her aimlessly wandering through a boggling plethora of options. She needed more hobbies, she thought. She needed sleep.

  Puck, the tiny gray kitten rescued from a Dumpster and now grown into an enormous, belligerent hair ball, stood on his hind paws clawing at the glass door and pushed between Charlotte’s legs before she’d even stepped into the kitchen. She dropped her purse and groceries on the table and opened the first section of the newspaper while she finished the cinnamon roll. She should sleep now, she knew, let her brain reorder itself so she could get something accomplished later. But the sun looked so nakedly yellow this morning, and the petunias she’d put into pots on the porch just beyond the open kitchen door gave off a pungent smell of earth, shouldering their fat purple and pink blossoms like they intended to take over the whole garden. And there was a certain luxuriance in being so thoroughly fatigued; an excuse to let her mind roll into whatever corners it chose, a day off from life as much as a day off from work.

  She got a pot of coffee going and took a shower, and by the time she came back into the kitchen, Puck had returned and slumped onto the newspaper for a nap. He jumped off the table as soon as he heard Charlotte rattle the box of cat food, the top sheet of newsprint clinging to his fur so that it sailed to the floor. She stopped halfway to picking it up when a headline and a pencil sketch of a woman’s face caught her eye: “Unconscious Jane Doe Still Unidentified.” Charlotte was wide awake now. She skimmed the few paragraphs so quickly they hardly made sense and then sat holding the page in front of her, reading it line by line until it was clear that yes, this was Beacon Hospital’s Jane Doe. Her Jane Doe, though the sketch was so generously ambiguous it could have been a thousand Caucasian middle-aged women. The article read more like a tantalizing “if it bleeds, it leads” than a plea for Jane’s relatives to find her, which made Charlotte irrationally angry, strangely possessive—as if one of her own family members had been exposed just to sell copy. But when she calmed down and read it again, she realized that what she really felt was protective, as though bad press was as threatening as bad bacteria and it was her job to guard Jane against it all.

  The paper told Charlotte only slightly more than she already knew, but the fact that it focused on the nonmedical questions—Why had no one reported her missing? Where had she lived? What were the police doing to find her relatives? Who had run her down and driven away?—made Jane seem even more vulnerable to Charlotte; more human, she was embarrassed to admit. She tore the article out and put it in a drawer with loose recipes, plastic spoons, and crayons she kept handy for her nephews. She stood outside with her coffee watching morning commuters stalled on the 520 Bridge, plucked a few faded blooms from the wooden flower boxes, then got the article out of the drawer, read it for the third time, and opened her laptop.

  A Google search didn’t tell her much more. No serious investigation had been started until three days after Jane’s surgery, probably because they’d kept expecting her to wake up and tell them her name. It was as if her conscious, relatively stable status when she’d hit the emergency room had lulled them into taking their time about identifying her. They seemed to have few clues about the car that had struck her. No wonder Helen Seras was already asking about Jane; as the vice president who did most of the public speaking for the hospital, she’d be left to explain things if this turned into a bad PR trip.

  —

  Charlotte leaned toward the floor and rubbed her fingers together, tempting the cat to sidle near; he sniffed once and, discerning nothing edible, slunk beneath her attempted caress and wandered away. She loved the diffidence in that animal, quite irrationally; Eric teased that he’d be gone in a heartbeat the day she neglected to fill his bowl. Eric would probably still be asleep; she would call later and tell him about her night, hear what turn his book revision was taking. The closer he got to a deadline, the more he reversed his days and nights, often writing until nearly dawn. So they would both be exhausted, Charlotte figured. He got so immersed in the final stages of a project, she’d come to accept a temporary sense of distance—knew better than to take it personally and knew the same passion would be focused on her once the book was done. But this time felt different to her—not as clearly rooted in his work. Not as clearly rooted in him.

  She thought of another three suggestions for Jane’s care and called the nursing station in the ICU. But as soon as the secretary answered, she reconsidered—Otero was the best intensivist at Beacon, better than herself, in her own opinion. If he was half as busy today as she’d been last night she should give him some peace. Instead she asked the secretary if Jane Doe was still in cubicle 6, which meant that she was still alive. She repeated the same call every four hours that entire day, hardly aware she was holding her breath until she heard the reaffirming answer followed by her own relief.

  • 4 •

  raney

  From underneath the barn floor, Raney listened to Bo hollering for the dogs, listened to his low grunt as he heaved the stick for them again, the pause of its silent sail through the air, and then the thud of wood against packed earth. She held the trapdoor of the bunker cracked only a few inches open; dust and bits of hay picked up slits of daylight coming through the old walls and chinks in the roof. She heard Bo’s footsteps change pace, circle back around, closer, and she let the hatch down with a soft thump. A few minutes later she heard his voice calling for her, echoing through the metal air shaft hidden behind a mock orange planted just for that purpose. Then he was inside the barn, though judging by the rising pitch of his voice and the pace of his Converse sneakers crisscrossing the floor, Bo didn’t start to panic until he’d checked every corner and the hayloft to boot. Even then she waited until his steps came to a halt nearly over her head. When it got so still she wondered if he might be crying, Raney threw the hidden hatch open and popped out of the ground like a ghost springing from the grave. Bo dropped to his knees with his arms across his stomach. Raney would have climbed out to comfort him if she hadn’t been laughing so hard.

  “You going to puke?” she asked.

  “No,” he said, wiping his eyes and mouth. “But if I were I’d make sure to hit you in the face.”

  “Come inside. Watch the ladder—there’s a weak step on the third rung.” She sat on on
e of the two cots, watched Bo’s feet feel for the steps until he was on the ground letting his eyes adjust to the low light.

  “What is this? Your playhouse?” His voice was still shaky, but he had his thumbs crooked in his pockets like he was totally cool.

  Raney let out a laugh, not that it was a ridiculous question. It was a house, of sorts. “It’s a bunker. My grandpa built it.” She turned on a lantern and settled back on the cot.

  Bo walked deeper into the room and let himself down on the other cot, their knees close enough to tangle. “What’s he use it for?”

  “Survival. It’s like a bomb shelter. Where you go if there’s a war or something.”

  Small as it was, Grandpa kept this room meticulously organized. All four walls were lined with plank shelves that held stacks of alphabetically arranged cans: artichoke hearts and asparagus and beets and Boston baked beans and carrots. Hundreds of them. Raney had argued that it made no sense to stick to the alphabet, as when you are hungry you think with your stomach: meat first, then vegetables, and eventually Hostess Ding Dongs for dessert. But Grandpa took so much pride in his system she let it be.

  Under each cot were tanks of water and oil and gasoline and kerosene, and under the shelves were packages of batteries and a gas stove, a sun shower and more water; plastic bins with blankets and tarps, a big metal can filled with packs of Burpee seeds and a sealed metal box of medicines—aspirin and Tylenol and Imodium and Pepto-Bismol, iodine tablets and alcohol and bandages and even some skin suture and needles he’d pinched from the Jefferson General emergency room once. He had hooks screwed into the wall holding ropes and hoses and an axe and maul and a shovel and trowel, various-sized lanterns and a fire extinguisher and a hunting rifle with shells in a waterproof case and several skinning knives. There was one shelf of books: a History of War, Wilderness First Aid, three Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and a complete volume of Shakespeare’s plays. One copy each of the Bible and the Qur’an, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Communist Manifesto, and a partial set of The World Book Encyclopedia he’d picked up at a garage sale. Also Gone with the Wind (which Raney had requested) and a spiral-bound Boy Scout Campfire Cookery. There was an unframed photograph of Raney’s grandmother, Joy, tacked to the wall and beginning to curl at the edges. For the first time Raney was struck by her grandmother’s awkwardly wide mouth and thick eyebrows and saw more of her own face there than her mother’s. And just today, waiting for Bo to panic, she had discovered two new additions to the bunker: a Costco-sized carton of Kotex and a shallow Rubbermaid container Grandpa had filled with tubes of paint and various brushes and a few prestretched canvases. Genuine oil paints, with names like magenta and titanium, intended for canvas instead of a sheet of drywall. Raney had stroked the smooth paint tubes like they were bolts of fine silk. She wondered if he was hiding them here for her birthday or if he was thinking the end was coming sooner than expected.