Gemini

by Carol Cassella

  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.”

  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 intim
ate smell of her perfume. He still remembered feeling a rush of embarrassment as if some private part of Charlotte had been exposed 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.”