Gemini

by Carol Cassella

  “Get much done?”

  He shrugged. “Yeah. Except every new idea makes the book that much longer and the deadline further behind. I decided to add a chapter.” He lit a candle stub, poured two glasses of wine, and carried their plates over, sitting across from her and taking her hand, a habit he had of knitting their fingers together for a moment before starting to eat. Funny that all of a sudden it reminded her of her grandmother’s reliable preprandial prayer—a ritual so routine no one listened to it. “You look beat,” he said.

  Hearing Eric articulate what must show in her face made Charlotte feel beyond “beat”—like her last pocket of energy had suddenly deflated. She was too tired to think about explaining her day to him. “So what’s the new chapter?”

  “I keep coming across stories that spin out of some of these transplant cases: surprises from the genetic testing, unexpected consequences, weird symptoms.”

  “Such as?”

  “Oh, people who claim they inherit memories from their transplanted organs. Food cravings for things the donor ate—a lot of those. Twins who get the same cancer in the same kidney. Some pretty macabre stories, like a bone marrow donor who was accused of a rape when his blood showed up in the crime scene, but, of course, the rapist was the guy who’d gotten his bone marrow.”

  “Someone he knew?”

  “That’s the scariest part—he was a Good Samaritan donor; he’d been kind of a delinquent kid and wanted to make amends, but with his record nobody believed him. He almost went to prison for it. And then there was a girl with liver failure. Her dad wanted to donate part of his liver and the tissue typing showed that her real father was—”

  “The postman,” Charlotte broke in.

  “You wish. It was her mother’s brother.”

  “Oh, God. People love stuff like that, though. Maybe they’ll make it into a TV serial and we’ll be rich, rich and famous!”

  “Which you would hate,” he said, laughing.

  “The famous part, maybe. You’ve got the genetics credentials covered, after your genome article. Does your editor like the idea?”

  “I might write it into the book and see what he says after. I’m still tracking down one geneticist in Sweden who never answers his phone or his e-mail.”

  Charlotte listened, watching the way his fingers played over his wineglass and thinking of how much of her body they had touched. They had made her feel beautiful in a body she did not consider beautiful. She had been with Eric over the course of two other books and numerous articles in their three years together, and she had decided it was not possible to love a writer until you understood the cycle of his work. Each phase reflected a different part of the creator as much as it reflected the developing creation itself. He was always happiest, or at least the most talkative, in the research phase, the journey of investigation igniting him from one topic to the next until gradually, intuitively, he discovered how they should be connected. He had an inherent curiosity fueled by the promise that whatever puzzle he solved, another question always waited. In that regard he had the perfect job. She envied him that flexibility—medicine could also be described as a quest to solve puzzles, but doctors could not choose the problems they were required to untangle, nor abandon them when no solution could be discovered. As he wrote his last draft, though, Eric would get quieter, as if all his words had to be saved for the page, ideally distilling his research so that readers were not just enlightened, they were inspired. But then he would turn the project in, meet his deadline, and immediately swoop her off to a weekend in New York or San Francisco, as if he wanted to make up whatever ground they’d lost. He’d talked about Paris this time, if she could get some extra days off. Out of the blue she caught herself wondering if these intense celebratory weekends really moved their relationship any further ahead. Ahead of where? Where were they headed? She almost asked him, in a complete change of mood, but checked herself. She was tired. And tonight she sensed in him the restless energy of being ready to be done with the book without being done with it—trapped in his indecision. How appropriate, she thought, and then hated herself for thinking it.

  Eric sat back in his chair holding his wineglass halfway to his mouth. “Something’s bothering you. Things okay with your parents?”

  “Not so great. It’s stressful to pack up thirty-eight years of your life,” she said, remembering she’d promised her mother she would help her wrap and box the contents of a china cabinet crammed with dozens of antique figurines her grandmother had passed down—dancing dandies and shepherdesses with porcelain lace frocks and pink-bowed lambs. Although she had been forbidden to touch them as a child, Charlotte would sometimes turn the skeleton key in the tall, glass-fronted doors of the mirrored cabinet and build a story set of these bisque-faced, rosy-lipped peasants. Sure enough, one day she dropped a coiffed lady in a bell-shaped dress and cracked her head clean off at the neckline. Charlotte had been terrified, but her mother, the least domestic of women, had propped the hollow head on a candlestick from which it reigned over their dinner table for years, decorated with tinfoil crowns for birthdays and Christmas. Her mother hated those figurines, though she wouldn’t confess it; just rolled her eyes and repeated, “I promised I would take care of them.” The burden would be Charlotte’s before long. “Hard to accept that all your junk won’t fit into the teeny-tiny suitcase they let you take to heaven. But they’re okay. Stuff at work isn’t so okay. I see a collision course ahead over my Jane Doe.”

  “No relatives yet?”

  Charlotte shook her head, absentmindedly reached across the table, and pinched out the candle. “I met the sheriff’s officer on the case today. They don’t have much to go on. Nobody’s come looking for her. How can you make it this far in life, our age, and have no one who cares enough to notice you’ve disappeared?”

  “Unless she wasn’t expected anywhere yet. Maybe she was headed off for a camping trip in the Olympics.”

  “Alone? For ten days? And she wasn’t dressed for any weather.”

  “Is she getting any better?”

  “On the best of days she’s stable—or maybe I should say, stuck.”

  “Do you think she’s brain-dead?”

  “We can’t even test for it now. Which I’m glad about—she needs more time.” There was the edge of a challenge in her voice.

  “So what’s the collision course?” Eric asked. Charlotte looked at him questioningly and he added, “You said she was on a collision course.”

  “The hospital has filed for a guardian ad litem for Jane. Next step, the court will assign her a certified professional guardian—someone to act as her next of kin.”

  “Well, she needs one, doesn’t she?” He sounded puzzled; Charlotte knew the distress in her voice was bigger than the facts sounded. It was curious to her as well, this defensiveness she felt, but she was too exhausted to sort it through, or even filter what she should or shouldn’t share with Eric.

  “Of course, eventually. But Jane has a family out there. Somewhere. And my job, Beacon’s ethical duty in my opinion, is to do everything possible to keep her alive until her family finds her and tells us what she would have wanted.”

  “Even if she’s irreversibly brain damaged?” Eric asked.

  Charlotte felt angry now, and even though she knew her conflict was with Helen Seras and Beacon’s ranks of legal advisers and administrators, she let Eric feel her heat. “Yes. Even then. Maybe she has a living will. How can Beacon be objective about any decision when keeping her alive is costing them twenty thousand dollars a day in free care? But it shouldn’t be decided by some court-appointed stranger either.”

  Eric had seen Charlotte struggle with patients in their final hours. It was part of an intensivist’s job. He’d asked her once if she was worried that letting someone go might be construed as a lack of either skill or compassion, particularly since she admitted that she was not an absolute right-to-lifer, even questioned the existence of God. But rather than being either offended or conflicted,
Charlotte had readily answered, “My job is to keep people alive as long as possible. Whatever they find on the other side will still be there waiting.”

  He leaned across the table and put his hand on her arm, a gesture that usually ended with their hands clasped, but tonight, as more often lately, she did not move. “I said it before. She’s lucky to have you.”

  “Well, I’d rather she have a husband. A mother. A child.”

  He was quiet a minute. “It’s something else, Charlotte. You’re angry at me.”

  “Why do you say that? What have you done? Nothing. Made me dinner. You’re the perfect boyfriend.”

  He let out a short, bitter laugh. “Except for my one fatal flaw, you mean.”

  Suddenly she felt like she might start to cry. It was ridiculous, this outburst. He was the perfect boyfriend, despite his occasional moodiness. Despite his preference for gluten-free, preservative-free, suspiciously vegan food. In spite of or maybe even because of his “one fatal flaw.” Every day with him was perfect—yesterday, tomorrow, next year, next decade. The only thing not so perfect was that time kept moving—a grinding mudslide shoving everything and everyone onward, ready and willing or not. Eric saw her face and dropped his head into his hands, and now the only thought she had about time was a futile desire to take the last five minutes back. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m . . . I’m just stressed. You all right? It’s not your head, is it? Does your head hurt?”

  He took a moment to answer and she could see the pain in his eyes—nothing any medicine could fix. “No. My head doesn’t hurt. Let’s go to bed. Okay? Let’s get some sleep.”

  • 8 •

  raney

  Bo didn’t come back to Quentin the next summer, or any summer after that. In an age before e-mail, before Facebook, before every child over four had a cell phone, his physical absence had to be explained by Raney’s imagined tragedies or intentional rebuffs: his mother had moved him to an ashram; his father had sent him to school in England; he had walked in front of a car; jumped off the Aurora Bridge; been hit over the head by a mugger and had amnesia, forever tortured by the image of her own nameless face.

  The obvious solution was to ask Bo’s aunt, who walked out the front door of Hardy’s Store every morning at seven thirty to sweep the walk, and remembered Raney enough to nod when she came inside the store to buy dog food or passed Mrs. Hardy in the pharmacy. If his aunt had any conscience or heart, Raney thought, she would have noticed Raney’s face going eight shades of red and offered some word about her nephew—it was her silence that convinced Raney that Bo stayed away from Quentin because he had found his place in the world and realized it held no room for bastards like Renee Lee Remington.

  Raney’s best friend, Sandy, finally marched up to Mrs. Hardy and asked her outright where Bo was living and why he never came to visit. Sandy came back outside and said that Mrs. Hardy said, “If my sister and I were still speaking, I guess I could tell you.” And then she told Sandy to tell her mother that they had not paid their bill, which was three weeks overdue.

  Raney dealt with the disappointment the same way she effectively dealt with the other desertions in her life. She decided that if Bo could forget her, she could forget Bo. She spent most of July flirting with a junior varsity basketball player who’d sat across from her in history class. But after six versions of his game-winning free throw, she spent August with mixed-media watercolors and charcoal pencil. Half the canvases showed a thin, sober-faced boy in various stages of blooming manhood, like an age-progressed image of a kidnapped child on the side of a milk carton.

  She thought of Bo less over time, of course. High school ended with the letdown she had come to expect from most beginnings and endings in Quentin, a town that did best when it was allowed to linger in some lazy whirlpool of time, moving nowhere, progressing toward no particular goal. Once you embraced that, it was a decent-enough place to live, and Raney understood without naming it that the mountains and woods and water rooted her soul here as surely as the outside world tempted her away. But at eighteen most of her friends didn’t even stay around long enough for a graduation party. They flung their caps into the air and were on a bus to Seattle before they hit the ground. Even Sandy left, headed for Gonzaga University, where she would last sixteen months before she got married and bounced right back to Quentin.

  Raney had her chance to leave. On her own eighteenth birthday her grandfather handed her an envelope with $7,000 he had saved working pickup shifts at the machine shop. He said if she was smart she would leave before moss grew over her north side and blackberry vines tangled up her feet. The envelope sat between them on the kitchen table, which had been scrubbed so many times by Raney, by Grandpa, by Raney’s grandmother, and probably by her mother, that the green paint had been polished down to the bare wood in places, the gaps chinked with grease and crumbs from a thousand meals. Grandpa’s smile looked painfully forced. “It’s yours. Go away to college if you want. Go to the Louvre in France. Go see that ‘Kadinsky’ fellow you like. Up to Vancouver to see that lady painter.”

  Raney’s hands felt heavy in her lap, the distance between her and the money as wide as heaven itself. “There’s no need, Grandpa. I’m in no rush to leave you.”

  “Raney, you’ve been leaving me since the day you were born. As it should be.”

  “Be easier to leave if I knew where I was going.”

  “Hell, stay in the same place and you discover nothing new. Not about the world. Not about yourself.”

  “Look who’s talking. You’ll just hide in that bunker all day. Alone. Eating what? Canned beans? Waiting for what?”

  “Aliens.” He winked at her. “I let the army give me my tour. I’d rather you take yours from me.”

  But it is not so easy to spend money when you have spent your whole lifetime learning to do without it. She closed her bedroom door and put the envelope on her bedspread. She sat against her headboard hugging her pillow to her chest for a long time before she ran her finger along the seal and pulled out a thick stack of ten-, fifty-, and hundred-dollar bills. No bank check or plastic debit card for her grandfather—ever wary of putting any institution between himself and his money. Raney figured she was lucky he hadn’t converted it all to gold nuggets. She laid out the bills in various configurations—by denomination, then in five-hundred-dollar piles, then in interweaving spirals, and last in a single heaped mound she could toss in the air like Barbra Streisand in the movie Funny Girl. At last, when the house was quiet and dark, she resealed the envelope and put it in her underwear drawer. Unlimited choice can be as paralyzing as poverty or ignorance.

  —

  A year later Raney was working as a receptionist at the marina in Port Townsend, a job she took only because the office window framed the boatyard and docks; the manager had made his offer just as the sunlight caught the angled spires and wedges of a hundred masts and keels, so she said yes. One early summer day she walked by the bookstore on her lunch break and saw a coffee table–sized book on the postimpressionists. She bought it and the next month she enrolled at the Art Institute of Seattle.

  On the last day of the first term she planned to find a Christmas gift for Grandpa, then take the six-twenty ferry to Bainbridge Island and from there a bus out to the Olympic Peninsula. It wasn’t four thirty yet, but already dark; a billion tiny Christmas lights coated the barren trees along First Avenue—one last blaze before an endless gloomy winter. The shops along the avenue sold useless things: tourist souvenirs and doodads for people who craved much but needed nothing or, like her grandfather, needed much but craved little. The light changed at Union and the wind was fierce with a pelting slurry of rain and sleet. Raney ducked into the closest store—because it was warm, dry, convenient, lit like a jewel box . . . no other reason. She picked up and put down a Tlingit raven’s head key fob, a set of etched shot glasses, a discounted Windbreaker with a Seattle Mariners emblem that Grandpa would hate but Raney thought would do, if she scraped off the logo.


  She saw him standing across the room on the opposite side of the display cases, half turned away. His hair was cropped short and his nose and cheeks were pink from the cold night—that white skin had never shown mercy. She didn’t need to see any more to know it was Bo. Even in a winter coat he was still too skinny, too long-limbed. He was holding a trinket box, flipping the lid open and shut with those long, articulated fingers that she remembered examining starfish and river stones. They still looked out of proportion. Beautiful Frankenstein hands thieved from a woman’s grave for a man’s body. He was showing the box to a girl; he said something that made her laugh and she smoothed her perfectly smooth hair behind one perfect seashell ear and turned in Raney’s direction. Raney moved behind a mirror next to the jewelry rack, which unfortunately gave her a side-to-side comparison of their two faces. As soon as the girl turned away, Raney pulled her collar up and left the store.

  The street was crowded now, people clumsy with armloads of Christmas presents, balancing umbrellas over shopping bags so they tangled together and caused pedestrian traffic jams along the sidewalk. She made it two blocks down to Seneca, but when the light turned green, she felt as if all the air had been sucked out of the city. She stood at the curb with the crowd bumping past until the light turned red again. After another missed light she knew she was going to turn around. Considering all the accidents that alter a life, Raney wondered if the agony people put themselves through over every single choice made as much sense as trying to paddle up a waterfall.

  Bo and his girlfriend were gone when she went back. The jewelry box was still on the counter; it was quite lovely—covered with tiny cowrie shells. For some reason it made her feel better to know he hadn’t bought it for the blond girl with the perfectly smooth hair and the perfectly shaped ear. She opened the lid expecting the tinkle of music or a spring-loaded plastic sea horse. Nothing. Only the private joke he’d told the girl that Raney would never hear. The shopkeeper had his eye on her, apparently waiting for her to filch something. She picked up a large, candy-swirl glass marble and asked him to wrap it up.