Gemini

by Carol Cassella

  —

  The day of Cleet’s memorial service Raney opened her jewelry box for the first time since he’d gone away and found a business card tucked into the lining of the lid. It was for a law firm, and at first glance Raney thought it was left from the arbitration and nearly tossed it away. She saw Cleet’s handwriting on the back of it and looked again—“The Jones Act,” he’d written. The card was for Boren, Stack and Jacoby, Maritime Law: Handling Maritime Injury and Wrongful Death.

  In a small town nobody gets to have secrets. Everyone accepted Cleet’s death as an ironically timed accident, or at least they did Raney the kindness of keeping any doubts to themselves. Sometimes she wished they would quit being so polite and just tell her what gossip they’d heard. She accepted casseroles and flowers left at her door, and hugs—usually sincere. But in the following months she saw their questions. A blush when they surprised her in the cereal aisle, a calculated dance of sympathetic words: He was a well-meaning man, when she wanted to hear Strong. Honest. Right. Or, worse, You stood so steady by him during that awful business, when she wanted to hear them scream what she knew now: It’s money that decides the law in this land. Money trumps right or wrong.

  Was it a gift to her that he put himself to rest in an ocean where she could stand and look over him always? No burial expenses required? She could only wonder if he had been warning her when his hand lingered at the small of her back while she washed dishes, or if she should have noted his momentary pause before he took Jake to task for some forgotten chore. The devil of a suicide, even when it is dressed so carefully as an accident, is the never-ending cry that you should have seen it coming. You should have been able to stop it. It tears you into two people, one unable to forgive the other, and the best you can hope for is some tolerant coexistence and a day when you might at least put your bloody hands over your guilty ears.

  —

  Sandy let Raney come back to work full time, even though the gallery barely earned enough for one half-time person. She knew her salary was being paid at the expense of Sandy’s own. The shared company of their friendship was hopefully worth something, but Sandy wouldn’t even stay in the room when Raney reminded her that she ran the cash register, after all, and it was obvious that what they earned did not equal what they spent.

  If she was careful—if she filled her mind with all the chores she had to do and the people who depended on her, if she spent each morning with Jake, all day with Sandy, every evening with Grandpa and Jake together—she could usually forget how terrifyingly lonely she was without Cleet. Some nights when she could not sleep the only thing that kept her sane was painting, even if she’d had to go back to using house paint and plywood most of the time.

  Jake, though—Jake remained her miracle. Her anchor. Her reason. She could still stand over his sleeping body like a newborn’s and be astounded that, for all the garbage in her life, this gift had come her way. He was growing into a leaner version of Cleet, with a narrower face shaped by strong cheekbones—movie-star cheekbones, Raney thought. His skin was a half shade lighter than his dad’s olive-brown, with shanks of almost-black hair as untamable as a live creature camouflaged on the crown of Jake’s sweet head. And bless his gorgeously odd eyes, one dark from Cleet and one light from her; it was like watching the two of them be alive and together in the living flesh of the boy they’d made. By the age of nine it was clear Jake would be taller than his father. He ate everything he could lay his hands on and seemed to only gain longer arms and legs, until he resembled one of his own construction-toy skyscrapers—all spindles and knobs, his feet as big and awkward as a swan’s. That part of his blueprint must have been inherited from Raney’s unidentified father, the wild card she’d passed along through her genes.

  By third grade it took the patience of saints to coach Jake through his homework, and Raney had quit trying to convince his teachers that maybe two and two didn’t always have to equal four. Maybe if they could slow down for one tax-paid minute and look at how much Jake already knew about geometry, about angles and space and the pull of gravity . . . it was all there—in the shapes he carved into wood and molded out of clay. But the best she could do was try to make Jake believe it about himself.

  —

  Three years after Cleet died, two things were becoming clear to Raney. First, she was likely to lose her house unless the Gateses and the Jobses of the world suddenly decided her paintings were collectible, and as Sandy couldn’t sell more than one or two a year, that was unlikely. Second, it was not safe for Grandpa to live alone anymore. The decade-old wound along his shin had reopened and needed dressing changes three times a day; his doctors were pushing him to have the leg removed. More and more often Raney came to Grandpa’s house and surprised him asleep in the kitchen because he could not make it up to his bedroom. She and Jake finally dragged the mattress and box spring downstairs and set Grandpa up in a corner of the kitchen with a marine toilet.

  Jake spent almost every afternoon there, reclaiming an interest in the plywood tree fort he and Cleet had built together. Now it was Jake and his great-grandfather. Grandpa would sit in the folding aluminum lawn chair with his leg propped up and call out instructions to Jake, fourteen feet overhead with a collection of hammers, nails, and scrap lumber scavenged from the barn. In the course of a few weeks the fort had a roof and two walls. Raney could hardly bear to look up at it wondering when the boughs might reach their limit, though she trusted that a man who could engineer an underground room strong enough to outlast all of mankind could engineer a tree house. She wondered if this room in the sky was his last-minute pitch at optimism.

  At every doctor’s visit Grandpa got a new pill—one to open his lungs, one to thin his blood, one to relax his blood vessels, one to regulate his heartbeat, his thyroid, his urine flow. At least nobody was foolish enough to try to regulate his temper. When his latest doctor, who looked too young to be out of high school, started writing out another new prescription, Raney rapped her knuckles on the desk. “This is not what he needs.”

  The boy-doctor blushed and said with faltering confidence, “I understand your concerns, but your grandfather has Class Four congestive heart failure and atrial fibrillation, hypertension, COPD, renal insufficiency, and . . .”

  “No. You do not understand my concerns. If you did, you would write out a prescription for decent bus service so he could still have a life. A prescription for a house with doors wide enough for his wheelchair. A ramp to his bedroom. Or if nothing else, a prescription for a visiting nurse because things are getting kind of dangerous.” Even if she felt a little mean about her sarcasm, the expression on the young doctor’s face was worth it. “Tell you what,” she went on more softly. “I’ll buy him a bigger pill box if you’ll make us an appointment with somebody who can help with all the rest of it.” All the stuff that might make him want to stay alive, she thought.

  —

  The eventual meeting with the medical social worker was both good and bad. Good because he helped Grandpa admit that maybe he did need a little extra help now and then, and maybe it was hard for Raney to do it by herself—a turnaround that made Raney want to suggest the social worker switch into diplomacy and focus on Afghanistan or Iraq. But bad because he helped Raney admit they would need to sell either the farm or her house to pay for a home health aide and Grandpa’s rising medical bills. She hardly needed to talk to all three Realtors in town to know they would be listing the farm. Raney’s mortgage was so high she might as well be renting her house from the bank. When she broke that news to Grandpa, he didn’t speak to her for a whole day, then lashed out that he should never have kept that rifle in the attic. Too many stairs between him and it.

  Raney retorted, “Look at it this way. My house doesn’t have any stairs.”

  “Your house doesn’t have any room!”

  “More than your ground floor—all you can use here. You can sleep in a real bedroom and get yourself into the kitchen without any help.” He didn’t answer and she l
eaped into the pause with her last bribes. “Beer in the fridge, Grandpa. And the food will be better—I’ll try some new recipes.”

  Now his face contorted, and even through his thick stubble and smoke-crinkled skin she saw him turn red, which got her worrying about his heart more than his temper. “Goddamn, child. Is this really what you’ve learned from me after thirty-seven years?”

  She could hear him verging from anger into hopelessness. But the full impact of it didn’t hit either of them until the sale closed. Grandpa refused to leave his house until the boys Raney hired to move the furniture took everything but the wheelchair he was sitting in. When Raney came back from dispersing the last load, Grandpa was nowhere to be found, his wheelchair butted up against the stairs and his walker missing. The kitchen, the living room, the front porch, and his upstairs bedroom were all empty. She searched the yard, the near woods, even looked for tracks in the shallow mud at the edge of the pond. On a second pass through the barn she found his walker under a tarp and scuff marks leading to the bunker lid. There were guns inside the bunker, she knew. The fact that he’d gotten the trapdoor open was proof he had the strength to use one.

  She called his name and heard nothing. She gulped one huge breath before she pulled up the door. Through the gloom she could see his swollen feet poking out from the bunk. After an unbearable second of silence she heard his ever-present wheezing. When her eyes cleared she climbed down and sat opposite him. “Why are you here, Grandpa?” Her voice broke in the middle, which made it sound more like a challenge than an offer to talk, but in truth that was how she felt. Challenged and angry at him even as she started to cry.

  “I came in here to get some things.”

  “What? Cigarettes? I guess you could make a bomb out of your oxygen tank. You’re lucky you didn’t die falling down the ladder.”

  “Or not.” He gave her a minute to calm down. “You know why I built this bunker?”

  “Sure. The end of the world—TEOTWAWKI. Or a place to prove you saw it coming first.” He was quiet, as if waiting for her to get closer to the truth. “When I was little I thought you’d built it to be my playhouse. Grandma said you built it to forget my mother.”

  “I built it so I would be in control in the end. Of my own end, at least.”

  Raney’s face was wet with tears now, but her voice was steady. “So why didn’t you do it?”

  “Because I knew Jake would eventually come hunting for me and open that trapdoor. Jake or you.” He looked around the room, or maybe just showed enough compassion to look away from her for a moment. Finally he said, “Let’s get started home. You’re gonna have a helluva time getting me up that ladder.”

  —

  The buyer was a development company that had offered 40 percent less than the ask, but the deal was so clean, the Realtor said Raney should take it. The market was only going lower. Raney knew they would tear the house down and build some ticky-tacky look-alikes, even though the rep had talked like he was hoping to salvage the old house as part of Quentin’s legacy. Legacy! Quentin had barely justified its present, much less its past.

  She made a last walk through the rooms; there were pale patches on the floor where furniture had sat in the same spot for fifty years. Dust balls the size of rats. If ghosts were real it was clear why they haunted abandoned houses—the rooms reeked of loneliness now that they had no purpose. The last door she opened was to the living room, where twenty-eight years of her own collected paintings were stacked against or hung upon every wall. She hadn’t asked the boys to move them, thinking she would move them herself with Jake’s help. Or that she’d ask Sandy to store them. Or maybe not thinking at all. Maybe knowing what she was going to do with them for days and weeks, maybe even years before she started taking them down.

  One by one she piled and hauled them through the kitchen and out the back door to the swath of raw, packed dirt next to the pond. She got a shovel from the barn and scraped away the duff and weeds within the bare patch and well beyond. Then she balanced frame against frame in climbing concentric rings, a nautilus shell of where she had started and who she had become. Only four small paintings did she save for Jake, including a charcoal sketch of a pale, haunted-looking twelve-year-old boy, less than two years older than her son was now. When the entire structure was five feet high and ten feet in diameter, she went into the bunker and came out with books and magazines and stacks of Grandpa’s saved newspapers along with two butane lighters, one as a backup. She twisted a yellowing Seattle Times into a stem and lit it on fire. “So,” she said, holding the growing flame in front of her face, “see you in the afterlife.” She cupped one protective hand around the light and guided it into the open heart of her house of art, setting the pile ablaze.

  * * *

  Spring came on in languid gasps that year, a week of chill that left everyone despondent and then a few days of rich warm sun that worked its fingers into new leaves of the alder and river birch along the Little Quentin so they at last unfurled into unabashed greens. The sharp break between sunshine and shadow made Raney feel absurdly hopeful, as if she had been holding her breath, waiting without admitting it. The house felt full now, with Jake, Grandpa, and Jenny, the aide who came when Raney was at work plus two evenings a week to help muster Grandpa into the tub. As his muscles wasted, his weight seemed more like misplaced ballast; his bursts of determined effort invariably pulled them both off balance. Jake was good help, too, but he’d begun to complain of new aches and pains—his knees, his shoulders, his back—and Raney sent him off to other chores when it was time to lift Grandpa in or out of bed, in or out of his chair, in or out of the car for one of his many doctor’s appointments. She suspected Jake was pained more by witnessing the infirmities of his once imposing great-grandfather than by any growth spurt of his own. Three and a half years out from Cleet’s death she still didn’t know how to be both mother and father to Jake. Every physical complaint and disobedience felt like a cry for his dad, though she had witnessed few actual tears.

  Maybe for that reason she knew the exact day she first remembered seeing David. New faces were sometimes the only entertainment in Quentin, but there was nothing unusually attractive about his—his jowls too full and his eyes too buried between the high ride of his cheekbone and the low set of his brow. He did have a solid, self-assured smile with even, ivory-colored teeth that made people want to smile back, then stop to hear why he was smiling in the first place. His clothes stood out too. Just blue jeans and a button-down shirt—but the jeans were pressed stiff with deep blue crease lines running straight down the fronts of his legs, and the pressed white shirt looked starched. Those were not Quentin clothes. Regardless, if she’d seen him before, it hadn’t stuck. The first time Raney remembered seeing David was when Jake first saw him.

  It was a Friday and Raney planned to leave the gallery early for a date with Jake. With every passing month he seemed to spend more time by himself. The only thing he could concentrate on was what he made with his hands, some vision he couldn’t share until it was finished by himself alone. So on Friday she would pick him up after school and take him skateboarding or fishing, or to Dairy Queen and a movie at the Rose, just the two of them, while Jenny stayed with Grandpa. She told Jake to wait for her in the playground behind Peninsula Foods.

  She got there less than an hour after school let out, but Jake was nowhere in sight. It was a small playground—a jungle gym made out of plumbing pipes, a sandbox that had been more dirt than sand for years now—not enough to hold an eleven-year-old boy’s interest for an hour. She looked up and down the street, went inside the small grocery, and checked the comic book rack, the candy aisle, the bathroom at the back of the store. No Jake.

  Lena, the cashier, was making hot dogs for a city family heading home from the national park, three kids with sturdy new hiking boots and Patagonia day packs with pockets and clips and zippers everywhere, their mother with a perky blond ponytail sprouting through the hole at the back of her pink sun visor. How d
id these women always look so perfect after a day on the trails? They didn’t sweat? Lena caught Raney looking and rolled her eyes in solidarity, chasing a hot dog across the greasy cylinders rotating under the heat lamp. “Hey, Raney. What’s up?”

  “Jake. Has he been in?”

  “Jake? Some other kids were here.” The hot dog slipped out of the bun onto the floor. “Shit!” Lena exploded, then shrugged at the waiting family. “It’ll be a minute,” and seemed just as happy when they walked out. She wiped her hands on her stained apron. “Want to use the phone?”

  He wasn’t at home when Raney called. She checked the aisles again, half expecting him to pop out and surprise her—hoping to scare her into a Coke or a jawbreaker. He wasn’t in the car or at his school. She was running out of places to look after half an hour, short of combing the woods and the beach, when she heard Lena call to her, “Raney! He’s here.”

  Jake was crouched in the corner of the store with his arms locked around knees pressed hard to his forehead. A skin-and-bones fortress. Raney sat on the dirty floor and put her arms around him; he shoved her off at first, then leaned into her shoulder.

  “He was in the storage closet. I was getting out the mop and there he was,” Lena said.

  A group of teenagers jangled through the door—Amelia and Caroline Wells prancing their new figures like they alone knew what was what, Jerrod Fielding and his pimply football buddies—all of them louder and braver once they saw Jake. Someone whistled his name low and mocking; Jake wiped his mouth on his sleeve and turned his face into a mask.

  When they left, Raney asked, “Hey, Buddy. What’s going on?” Jake broke then, hurling a crumpled mess of yellow-and-black plastic onto the floor. It took a moment for Raney to recognize it as the toy dump truck Cleet had bought for Jake’s third birthday. For two years he had taken it everywhere—beside him at meals, under his pillow when he slept, the only bath toy he would have. He had almost lost it when he took it to kindergarten, and after its rescue he’d left it on his bookshelf most often. But always on the top shelf, just beside his bed. The last day she’d seen it was around the time Cleet died.