Gemini

by Carol Cassella

  Grandpa laughed, but Raney wanted to run; some irrational part of her mixing up the smell and the decay and an image of how her hair must look ballooned over the tied handkerchief. All of it jumbled into that unwelcome diffidence she felt when she saw Bo’s jeans slung low on his hips or his shirt pulled tight across his shoulders.

  “Go get him a kerchief, Raney,” said Grandpa.

  The three of them were able to pull the carcass over the bank and through a patch of woods to an open pocket of higher ground with good sun. Grandpa said the birds would spot the deer quick, promising that within a few days it would go to its sky burial. He rolled the deer off the plastic and arranged its dismembered legs like it was just asleep, then he folded the tarp into a square, bound and knotted by the bloody rope. He stood straight as a soldier by the body with his head tucked down, and Raney felt Bo’s eyes watching her, looking for a sign about what he was supposed to do. Then Grandpa pulled out his camp knife and sliced a rectangle of flesh out of the buck’s shoulder. He craned, searching the treetops, and then flung the meat skyward, whistling low when a blue-black wedge transformed into a raven, which in one perfect arc carried the first bit of that dead deer to heaven.

  Bo’s head turned and followed the bird so far he wobbled and righted himself against a tree. Grandpa wiped his knife blade on a fern bough and walked around the pond to disappear inside the barn. A minute later Raney and Bo heard the creak and whump of the bunker hatch hitting the floor, and the smoke of hay dust swirled and settled beyond the barn doors.

  Raney saw Bo press his fingers to his temples. “You’re not going to throw up again, are you?”

  Bo ignored the question and walked out of the clearing toward the bluff. The light breeze trailed over salted sand and tide pools; Raney took a deep breath and wished she could force the clean air through her skin, turn herself inside out and be rinsed pure. After a minute or so Bo sat cross-legged on the ground, took out his pocketknife, and started whittling at sticks like he buried rotting deer every day in Seattle. “I bet your grandpa was sure the world was ending when Chernobyl blew up.”

  “You shouldn’t laugh at him.”

  “He did, though, didn’t he? I bet he made you spend the whole day in the bunker.”

  Raney started to deny it but couldn’t stare Bo down. He had an edge about him today that kept getting in her way, making her hear her words before she said them, see her own face, her shape when she moved. “It wasn’t so bad. I learned how to play poker.” But Bo looked like he’d scored a point on her, and Raney’s mind raced, looking for a way to get back at him, a name for whatever game this was. “You stayin’ out here the whole summer? Seems like your mom would want to spend some time with you before you fly halfway across the planet back to that boarding school,” she said.

  “My mom’s in Mexico hunting ghosts or angels with her boyfriend. So what’s a ‘sky burial’ anyway?”

  “That’s how the Buddhists bury each other. Buddhists don’t believe the body matters, once your soul has left. They carry you to a mountain and chop you up for the birds to eat.”

  “You believe that?” he asked.

  “That I want to be fed to birds after I die?”

  “That you have a soul that goes on. Something that outlasts you.”

  Raney looked up at his face. The sun was directly behind him and her eyes stung. “Grandpa says Buddhists believe in karma. That you come back in another lifetime, better or worse depending on if you’ve been good or bad. You could come back rich, or a beggar. Or not human at all. Maybe a dog. That’s why Buddhists don’t kill animals. Even an ant. It could be your own kid from a past life.”

  Bo was real quiet for a minute. Then he said, under his breath, “Wonder what the hell I did.”

  Raney couldn’t help herself. “Yeah. Your life is so terrible you have to choose which mansion to live in, your mom’s or your dad’s.”

  “You can be a b-i-t-c-h sometimes, Renee Remington.”

  “And you can be a stuck-up pain in the neck. I haven’t seen my mom since I was six—for all I know that dead deer was my mom, working her way down the ladder of bad deeds. How should I know what happens when you die? I thought your parents made you go to church. Didn’t they give you all the answers?”

  Bo was silent and Raney was already wishing she could take her words back. She felt too aware of his body next to her, like he was running a fever, the heat of his skin radiating into her own. She wanted him to stab that stupid knife into his arm. She wanted him to go home, all the way to Seattle. All the way to Connecticut. She wanted him to sit closer on the smooth warm rock, to feel the length of his arm matched alongside hers and discover exactly where her shoulder would fall below his. She wanted him to take two wrong steps and fall off that cliff.

  After a long minute Bo hurled the stick out over the water, and they both watched it spin end over end, until it fell below the line of sight and they were still, as if listening for the far-off splash. His back was to her now and suddenly Raney heard, or convinced herself that she heard, her grandfather calling her name. She stood to take the path home, but her foot twisted under a rim of the flat rock and she stumbled, reaching for the only thing within her grasp—Bo. He turned and caught her arm, righted her, and there they were, her eyes just at the level of his mouth, and he did not let her go. She turned her face up—it was an instinct—and now she could see him clearly, his eyes, his thin, angular cheeks, streaked and damp. Bo was crying.

  —

  Bo didn’t come around much for a few weeks after that. Then, near the end of August, his aunt had to drive to Port Townsend to meet with a banker. Bo suspected his aunt and uncle might be selling the store—just a guess, but his aunt did seem even more taciturn than usual. She wanted Bo to accompany her, and when Raney rode her bike past the Chevron station and saw them gassing up the scuffed red car, Bo invited her along. It was only a twenty-minute drive, but by the time they got to Port Townsend, Bo and Raney were joking in the backseat, listening to Cyndi Lauper and Prince on Bo’s Walkman, trading the headset back and forth as if no awkwardness had come between them.

  Mrs. Hardy drove up and down Water Street looking for the right building until, with an exasperated sigh, she parked and got out, allowed they could walk out to the beach if they caused nobody trouble.

  Being a weekday, the beach wasn’t crowded, but it was still noisy and smelled of hot dogs and Coppertone, so it felt like a resort compared with Quentin. While most of the beaches on the peninsula were half rock or half mud, the sand here was fine-grained and silky and so hot they had to dig their feet into the darker sand underneath, still damp from the last high tide. Raney twisted her hair up and pinned it with a driftwood stick, bent over a clear pool, and let the water pour into her cupped palms to wash over her throat and the divots and curves along her collarbone. When she stood up, Bo was watching her. She turned and started down the beach. They came across some kids building a sand castle, and when Bo fell behind she looked back to see him digging away right alongside them. A wave washed in and the entire fortress, at least two feet high, collapsed. One of the kids started crying; Raney laughed until a parent stood up and Bo and Raney took off running. Soon the beach was well below them and it became a game of chase, her after him, then him after her. Raney cut up the asphalt drive and across the stubbled lawn until, nearly winded, she came to the concrete gun batteries built to defend Admiralty Inlet from the Japanese. Bo was far enough behind she only had to duck to lose him beyond a small hill, then circle back into the dark tunnels and wait.

  One heard stories about these abandoned military caverns, a maze of dank, underground rooms and hallways—hideouts for killers and thieves, and the spirits of soldiers who’d shipped out and never come home. Certainly more than one girl in the Quentin high school had lost her virginity in here. Raney’s footsteps echoed against the walls. She heard Bo running toward her and froze, holding her breath until it hurt. He stopped somewhere near the entrance, then turned in another dir
ection. She waited until it was quiet and stepped around the corner, so far removed from daylight her eyes could not adjust and the blackness made her dizzy, as if gravity, too, had been altered by this midnight in the middle of the day.

  She listened for a long time and then gingerly walked forward with her arms extended to find the wall. Even with so much care it still shocked her when she hit it, maybe just to realize the blackness was that profound—her own fingertips beyond her sight. She stepped her hands along the wall in the direction she thought led outside, cringing at a plasticky knob of dried gum, a slick patch of moss. And then a corner, another slab wall—not where she expected it. Her pulse jumped. She didn’t know if she should go back or go forward or turn around in open space and stumble in a new direction. It was not a closed box—she had come in through an opening and there was no logic to the terror that someone or something could have shut it off, shut her inside a concrete cell. She turned around and pressed her back against the wall, tried to will her eyes to suck in any point of light, but she might as well have had no eyes. She started to call out—Bo was almost certainly out there, somewhere. Or someone was. She heard shuffling, a subtle quake of movement over the ground, but it had no origin or arc she could make sense of. It moved again, close—very close. A brush of two hard surfaces. An instant later she shrieked when something warm rubbed against her arm and, as if the shriek had told her attacker precisely where she was standing, two hands grabbed her around her waist. She heard another voice shriek then bust up laughing.

  It was Bo, goddamn him. Goddamn him! He took off, though no faster than any blind person could move, and Raney grabbed his shirt and hung on until a dim gray showed in front of them and, as they neared a corner, full sight returned. She started hitting him, beating him over the shoulders and chest, and would have beaten him directly in the face if he weren’t so tall. She wanted to break his nose and send him out into the world with a permanent crooked scar like a branded criminal. And goddamn it, he would not stop laughing. And he looked so cool there in the half-lit room, his black hair splaying in every direction and his shirt pulled half off, holding her flailing arms at bay. He just looked so . . . good. She stopped hitting him, but he didn’t let go of her. She didn’t want him to let go of her, which must have been obvious because he slowly pulled her closer and she was still laughing but it was different now, a nervous laugh, not a little-kid-playing-games laugh but something else. Something she wasn’t used to, but she liked it. She liked how his arms were more muscled than hers, and that his head was above hers, leaning over her. And then it happened. He kissed her. Soft and hesitant at first and then more sure of himself, pressing into her mouth and pulling her body against his. Raney didn’t know if she was supposed to breathe, and after a minute her head started to spin; she pressed her fists against Bo’s chest. He moved away just enough to smile at her—he had the best smile, she thought. He always had, even when she hated him.

  It was hard to recall, later, the order in which things happened after that. Raney remembered the look on Bo’s face changing, more serious at first and then just odd. Scary odd. His breathing grew short and shallow, more a pant than a breath. He seemed to buckle, his knees bending slowly and his hand reaching toward the floor until, all at once, he was down. Hard. Rigid hard. His legs and back arching and his arms held tight to his chest, his head turned awkwardly to one side and then everything, all of him, all at once in a spasm that seemed to go on and on and Raney was screaming and then running out toward the sun into the open field, blinded by the light now and crying for help.

  She was a child again, instantly, wanting any grown-up to rescue them. People started running toward her. It seemed to take forever before one man sprinted to his car and got to a pay phone, and then forever for the ambulance to get back. Two people had gone into the concrete battery to help Bo, and a woman was holding on to Raney, pulling her down into the grass and smoothing her hair, crooning to her like a mother. Raney tried to tell the medics what she’d seen—they didn’t seem scared, which made her feel only a little less terrified. She couldn’t remember what bank Bo’s aunt was in and the woman drove her through town until she recognized it. The woman went in to give Mrs. Hardy the news, seeing that Raney didn’t have that courage left in her.

  —

  A policeman drove her home. He said it was just a seizure—Bo would be fine. Later Raney heard they took Bo to the hospital nearby, Jefferson General, and from there he went straight back to Seattle. It was near enough the school term she didn’t really expect him to come back to Quentin. But she didn’t expect to hear nothing from him at all, she had to admit. No answer to the letters she left at Hardy’s Store. Not that summer or any other summer. It was like Bo had been snatched back into his natural world and left Raney’s completely behind. Forgotten. Best forgotten—the way she wanted it too—she finally convinced herself.

  • 7 •

  charlotte

  The second time Charlotte saw Eric it was equally an accident. Pamela, Charlotte’s sister-in-law, had delivered Charlie just eight weeks earlier and Hugo, then two, had turned into a shipwreck of jealous, inarticulate misery. Charlotte stopped by their home on her way to a nearby birthday party and could hear the competition of wails all the way from the street. Pamela opened the door in her bathrobe, one red swollen breast half-exposed, and Charlotte realized there were three people crying inside the house. She reached over to rub Charlie’s back and Pamela put the child into her arms. “I have to find Hugo . . .” and she was up the stairs.

  Charlotte danced the screaming baby around the living room in a slow bob until Pamela came back with Hugo arching backward in anger, trapped in her arms. It was overall, Charlotte thought, a Rockwell-perfect portrait of family dysfunction. “Where’s Will?” she asked.

  “At work! Where I wish I was! Taking care of other people’s children! They both screamed all night and Will was at the hospital on emergency call.” Hugo twisted his way out of her grasp and ran back to the staircase, throwing himself against the baby gate until he gave up and collapsed on the floor with a cry that sounded so hopeless Charlotte wondered how that much dejection and angst could accumulate in two short years.

  “Are they sick?”

  Pamela sat on the couch, looking almost as dejected as her son. “No. That’s about the only thing I feel qualified to know. God sent me this day to punish me for all the times I’ve told mothers how to manage tantrums.”

  “Let me watch the baby for a bit.” Hugo had given up the fight by now and looked like he was minutes away from falling asleep on the rug. “Go take a nap. I’ll be fine with him.”

  “Sure. Spit-up would do a lot for that silk blouse. Why are you dressed up?”

  “Birthday party. Friend of a friend just a few blocks from here. I can be late.”

  By this time Charlie had become fixated on one of Charlotte’s earrings and was quiet, appearing to contemplate how he might master the feat of getting his hand locked onto his target. The sudden peace had the effect of a sedative on Pamela. “You want to take him with you?” she asked. “He’ll take a bottle now. Sort of.”

  —

  It had been ten months since Eric picked up Charlotte’s mud-splattered coat and stood apart from the crowd while he witnessed her ministrations over the seizure victim. He had called her three or four times in the weeks that followed, but she was always busy. She was on call, she had too many patients, too little sleep, she had meetings . . . When she told him she couldn’t go sailing one Saturday because the dishwasher repairman was coming, he quit calling. He almost didn’t recognize her when he opened the door at the birthday party—her auburn hair was longer and blown into a sleek scoop around her face. She had more makeup on. In some ways, he thought later, he’d been more immediately attracted to the drenched and mascara-streaked mess she’d been when they first met.

  Oh, yes. And there was the baby in her arms. She had a baby.

  —

  “It’s you,” he said.


  “It’s who?” she answered, and then, looking at him closely, “Oh. You. The writer—I’m sorry . . .”

  “Eric Bryson. And who’s this guy?” But then Charlie cried out in his half sleep and Charlotte bumped him onto her shoulder so she could take off her scarf and gloves, dropping one on the floor as she moved past Eric into the hallway, where her friend Elizabeth swept Charlotte and the baby into the party amid much cooing as Elizabeth made a nest for Charlie in an overstuffed chair. Charlotte didn’t intersect with Eric again until she went into the kitchen to put Charlie’s milk in the fridge, catching Eric propped against the sink holding a full bottle of beer with the cap still on it and watching her like he was trying to figure out the punch line of a puzzling joke. It was the first time she’d seen him without a sweater, and as lean and tall as he was, she saw now that his middle had the soft fullness of a body surprised to find middle age sneaking up on it. The fluorescent lights bled all the color out of his skin, or perhaps just intensified the color of his eyes, the deep black of his hair. It made her feel awkward, the way he was looking at her. Like she owed him something, and maybe she did. How long had it been since he’d called her anyway? Had she said she’d call back?

  “How’ve you been? You’re still writing?” she asked.

  “Sure. How ’bout you? You were working at Swedish?”

  “Beacon. How do you know Elizabeth?”

  “I don’t. I came with a friend.” He tipped his head to one side and saluted Charlie with his unopened beer. “So. Cute baby.”