Gemini

by Carol Cassella

  Raney would sit in the corner pretending to read or sketch, sitting so that she could see Jake’s full face and a shadowed slice of David’s, see their legs underneath the table close enough to entangle but somehow never touching. The breadth of David’s shoulders stretched the yoke of his cotton shirt across the back when he crossed his arms, listening. Raney could mark the progress of David’s frustration by the way his shoulders tensed up while Jake read, making him repeat the sentence if he stumbled. After a few days of this Raney realized that David had memorized the chapter verbatim, would correct Jake even when the word was wrong but the meaning was right.

  Then they would start on the problems, Jake taking extra minutes to adjust the pencil lead length and read the equation or question to himself again, his lips moving until he bit the lower one. Finally he put the pencil to the page. David watched, silently reading the numbers upside down from across the table, and when Jake made a mistake David would let out a little “Whup,” as if he were reining in a horse. “Tell me your thinking, son.” Under the table Raney saw Jake press his knees together. “Tell me your thinking.”

  “Well, I thought if . . .”

  “Not what you thought—you thought wrong. Your answer’s wrong. Think it out aloud to me before you get to the answer.” And that, of course, shut off all of Jake’s thinking. By the second week Jake’s legs locked tight when David so much as cleared his throat, and at David’s first spoken word Jake dropped his pencil and raced to the bathroom.

  Raney walked over and put her hands on David’s shoulders, pressing her thumbs against the tense ridges of his neck. “It makes him more confused when he’s put on the spot.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe I just don’t know how to help him. My dad would have whipped me black and blue.”

  “You don’t become a father overnight. He’s always been shy. He needs to see that you care about him, regardless of his grades.”

  His shoulders gave a little under her hands; she leaned down and put her cheek against his, to be closer to him, or maybe to be sure that Jake couldn’t hear. “I can see you care about him. I see it.”

  They plowed on through another two weeks of it, David’s voice getting softer and his shoulders getting stiffer every time he asked Jake to rework a botched equation. At the end of the first term Jake ended up with a C minus on the homework, an F on the exam and a D in the course, and the house began to feel smaller, like the emotional effort of turning them into a family was a fourth stranger who kept stepping on their toes and wedging awkwardly into the middle of their conversations.

  —

  David said things would get better for Jake once winter was over. He would be outside more, where a boy should be. The cycle of failing grades that seemed to be crushing him smaller, quieter would stop for a few months once summer came. Maybe even the aches and pains he complained of would go away. On the first day of spring David drove home from work with a load of two-by-fours and plywood on the folded-down seats in the back of the Tahoe. That Saturday he woke up, took a shower, and put on a clean white shirt, like he was going into the office. Then he got Jake out of bed and announced they were going to build another tree house together. Even bigger than the one Jake had built with Cleet on Grandpa’s farm. He’d selected the best site already, David told Jake, and marched him out beyond the fringe of forest scrub where the yard blurred into the woods. Three Douglas firs rose from the ground as straight as silos, no more than six feet apart and naked of branches for so many vertical feet it hurt your neck to scout the lowest green boughs. “Up there?” Raney asked.

  He smiled at her, then looked at his feet with his hands on his hips. After a shake of his head he said, “I can put it however high he wants it. Nail some struts into the trees and use them to hold the platform.” He was already heading back to the toolshed ready to get going, leaving Jake and Raney behind. “What do you think, Buddy? You ready for another tree fort?”

  Jake shrugged and sat down on the ground underneath the trees, scooping up handfuls of dirt and pine needles to sift through his fingers. “Looks like David is.”

  Raney squatted next to him. “It might be fun, having a tree fort here this summer. Get some other kids over to play?” As soon as she said that, Jake put his head on his arms and she knew it was cruel to hope the end of school meant the end of his isolation. “Jake? He’s trying to be your friend.”

  “It’s like he read a book: This Is How to Be a Kid’s Dad! He’s not my dad.”

  “I know he’s not your dad. Nobody can be your dad again. But give him a chance to be some part of our family. We’re all trying to figure it out.” The earsplitting whine of a power saw was followed by the clap of wood hitting the floor. Jake stood up, a grimace crossing his face as if he’d been punched. “What is it? Your back?” Raney asked.

  Jake started toward the shed and then turned around, so abruptly angry Raney felt slapped. “We could have made it alone. Just us. I didn’t care about losing the house!” he shouted.

  That night, after David had spent hours cutting and stacking all the wood without commenting on the fact that Jake was nowhere to be seen in this father-son bonding project, Raney poured a beer into two glasses and sat down at the kitchen table. David was paying bills, and the overhead light gleamed in his balding brow. His reading glasses had slipped down his nose and he kept tipping his head up to read the checkbook and then down again to look over the rims at his calculator, a bobbing marionette head.

  “I’m worried about Jake,” Raney said. “I want to take him to the doctor.”

  David tipped his chin down to look at her, took his glass of beer out of her hand, and after a sip began running his fingers over the calculator keys. A piano player couldn’t move like that. After a minute he said, “He’s seen the doctor, hasn’t he?” Raney sat quiet and still, weighing how long she could stay cool. Finally he took off his glasses and folded them into his pocket, as if her boiling silence had gotten his attention. “Hasn’t he? I mean, maybe he’s seeing the wrong doctor.”

  Now she was speechless. She’d been prepared for a battle and was surprised to hear him on her side, then chilled to admit how much it surprised her. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. I think this is more than growing pains.”

  “I do too. I think his teachers have been trying to say so for quite a while. Maybe we should listen.”

  “His teachers? When did they talk about his back pain?”

  He blinked and Raney saw something flicker and then settle itself, as if he’d grasped some fact about her he’d missed before and, in a split second, both pitied her and been moved to act. “Raney, I know Jake isn’t my own blood. But he is my family now. I’m here to take care of him—to take care of you both.” Raney pulled her chin back a notch, wondering if his next words would make her want to thank or curse him. “Don’t you think Jake has all the signs of being hyperactive? ADD? His grades, his frustration, his impulsivity? All this pain you talk about, it’s a pretty convenient way to get out of hard work.”

  “I think Jake . . .” She felt acutely conscious of Jake’s closed bedroom door just a few feet from the kitchen, and reined back to a sharp whisper. “I think Jake is pretty near perfect. Creative and smart and sad about losing two people he loved in the space of four years. And, yes, a little out of the ordinary. I think his teachers want every kid to be a perfectly square peg who fits into their perfectly square holes—so their own narrow minds don’t have to spin in circles until their heads are up their back ends.”

  “Raney . . .”

  “What? He doesn’t make their job easy so we slap a label on him?”

  —

  The next day Raney picked Jake up from school an hour early and drove him to a different doctor’s office—there were only two in town. She parked in back so David wouldn’t see her car if he drove past, then waited more than an hour for the nurse to fit them into the schedule. Raney flipped through magazines, all of them months out of date with articles missing where other bored patien
ts had ripped the pages out. Jake slumped in his chair and stared at the TV mounted high in the corner. He was still mad. Mad at David, which meant mad at her, Raney knew. People shoot the target closest to them. Finally the nurse called her up to the desk, but it was to tell her the doctor was not on their insurance list, so the charges would be higher and she had to sign again at yet another red X.

  The doctor had practiced medicine in Quentin longer than Raney had been alive; she had a vague recollection of him wrapping her ankle with an Ace bandage at a grade school field day. He was nice to Jake; paternal, which she could tell Jake disliked. The doctor joked with him for a minute, then started asking what hurt, when it hurt, how much it hurt, what kind of hurt? Burning? Aching? Throbbing? Jake skipped out of reach after the first two questions. Sure, his knee hurt if he ran too fast; his shoulder hurt if he threw a ball too hard. The last time Raney had seen him throw a ball was before she married David. The doctor thumped Jake with a rubber mallet and had him walk around the tiny room, then squat and waddle across the floor on his heels. Then the doctor handed Raney a pamphlet on something called Osgood-Schlatter and some home stretching exercises along with directions for how to take Tylenol and Motrin. At the door he signaled her back and asked if there was trouble at home, how Jake was doing in school, if he complained as much in the summertime. For that she was billed $42.

  —

  Raney discovered Jake’s next school progress report buried at the bottom of his trash can. David got home before Jake that day and found Raney lying across their bed holding the papers clasped on her stomach like they were a poultice against some nauseating illness. “Raney?” He sounded alarmed.

  He took the report out of her hands and sat on the edge of the bed with a heavy sigh; Raney prayed it wasn’t a breath of relief that the news was not an overdue bill. “You could at least have him tested,” David said.

  “I don’t think he’s being straight with me. What kind of answers would he give on some test for ADD? It’s something else.”

  “What else? He hasn’t complained of pain in weeks. He grew an inch last month—of course things hurt.”

  Raney rolled off the bed as far away from him as she could get, but he reached for her arm. “Look, I’ve never had kids of my own—Jake is probably as close as I’ll get unless . . .” His color deepened. He put his glasses on the bed and pressed his palms over his eyes. “Maybe ditching his report card in the trash is his way of asking for help.” When Raney didn’t answer, he added, “If he had diabetes would you refuse to give him insulin?” He could have hit her and it would have hurt less.

  For a while David dropped the subject. Raney spent more time building models with Jake, slipping questions about his joints and his back in like they were just comments on the structure rising level after level from his floor. She tried to remember her own teenage years when she, too, had been willing to injure herself to gain an ounce of power. It made her sad that Jake was now too long and heavy to rock back and forth at her breast. Did all parents feel so baffled in the storm of their child’s adolescence? Maybe David was right. Maybe it was easier to cope with a physical problem than a mental one and she was the one in denial. But now and then she watched through the kitchen window as Jake climbed the ladder to his tree house and she saw him grimace with a hand at the middle of his back.

  A month before school let out, the principal called David and Raney in for a conference. Jake had gotten into another scuffle. The only reason he wasn’t suspended was because he had clearly come out the loser. The next week David came home from work with the name of a doctor in Chimacum, just outside Port Townsend—a generalist who’d diagnosed a friend of a friend’s daughter with MS after three other doctors said there was nothing wrong. He could see Jake for any aches and pains and evaluate his school problems too. And be discreet about it, if that was what worried Raney.

  —

  Raney came home from the doctor’s visit with a prescription for something called Adderall. The next morning she put the first capsule in front of Jake with a glass of milk. They both looked at it for a moment, then he shrugged and popped it into his mouth. Raney had to bite her own tongue to keep from making him spit it out just before he swallowed.

  His mood and habits stuttered for the next few weeks; some days Raney thought she saw a difference in Jake and other days he seemed the same—cranky and slow at his homework. “Kind of the definition of an adolescent, isn’t it?” David said. Two weeks later the doctor doubled the dose, seeming pleased with Jake’s report on his progress, and at the third visit the dose went up again.

  When they got back from the appointment, David was at home, though it was only two o’clock. “Did you come home for lunch?” Raney asked him.

  “Yeah,” he answered. She glanced around the spotless kitchen. “Actually I picked up a burger. Taking the afternoon off.”

  “You feel okay?”

  “I’m fine. I’m not allowed an afternoon off?” He picked up his jacket and left the house, slamming the door.

  She didn’t see him again until he tried to slip under the covers after midnight without waking her. Raney rolled onto her back. The moon was so bright it made shadows in the room, turning everything the shades of one of David’s favorite black-and-white movies. “Tell me,” she said.

  After a broken sigh he said his boss Tom Fielding had cut his hours in half. Business was down and Tom was trying to economize “by laying off the very person who might find him a way to increase his profits, the son of a bitch.” Raney rolled onto David’s shoulder, felt his heart pounding through her own chest. She soothed him as if he were Jake run home from school by bullies. There would be other work. Business would pick up again. She was almost asleep when he said, “I’m losing my benefits, Raney. That’s where Tom plans to save the money—he’ll never take me back full time.”

  —

  Summer break began in early June. Jake started spending all day outside, in the woods, roaming the cliffs and inlets of the bay. Raney didn’t know where he was half the time. David said it was a good sign—Jake was doing what a twelve-year-old boy should be doing. “Probably climbing trees, chasing frogs . . .” He waved his arm around like that might help him recall more of his own boyhood activities. Try as she might, Raney could not picture David doing any of that as a boy. In fact, it was hard to imagine David as a boy—she kept seeing a slightly balding kid wearing a starched white shirt and wing tips, hoping to skewer a slippery minnow onto a hook without getting his clothes dirty. She knew Jake was outside only because David was inside—and she was the one who’d let him in. David was home half the time now, restless and looking for squabbles, it seemed.

  Every night Raney sat on the edge of Jake’s bed and talked to him about her day, who’d bought something in the gallery, what she’d paint once she had some free time—things he used to like hearing. But when she asked him where he’d been and what he’d done and who he’d played with, his answers cut her off: Around. Stuff. Some guys . . . Getting even with her, it felt like. She consoled herself that Jake was finally playing with other kids. She’d seen Tom Fielding’s son Jerrod walking with him on the road—not her first choice of friends but a friend nonetheless. So she let him be. She went off to work with his lunch ready in the fridge, a kiss on his forehead, and a promise to make good choices. Good choices. Good God, she thought—was there a better way to be sure your son didn’t tell you what was really going on? And then she left. She drove to the gallery in Port Townsend and left Jake alone the whole day. With David.

  Then Sandy closed the gallery for two weeks, supposedly to take a vacation, but Raney suspected the bills for keeping the gallery open had tipped the scales against even Sandy’s impractical love of the art. When Raney told David, he walked to the window and stared out toward the muddy yard and tangled woods. After a long minute he let the blind fall closed with a metallic clap. “We can’t make our mortgage payment this month,” he said, like that was a simple asterisk at the bottom of their spr
eadsheet, and left the house.

  Half an hour later she heard a knock at the door and Raney hoped David might have come home with either an apology or a plan. But instead it was the neighbor girls, Amelia and Caroline Wells. They looked so startled to see Raney answer her own door, she half expected them to shriek and run off.

  “Are you looking for Jake?” Raney asked. They nodded their identical heads in unison. “I think he’s asleep. Do you want to come inside?”

  One of them started to giggle, less like nervous laughter than a mean inside joke. They were three years older than Jake, already blossomed into curves Raney had never had—did Jake have a crush?

  Amelia and Caroline looked at each other; one of them shrugged and started walking away. The other said, “Nah. Just tell him . . .” She looked back at her sister, who was waiting halfway down the gravel drive. “Tell him Jerrod Fielding is waiting.”

  “Waiting where?”

  The girl was off the porch by then, sassier with every step. “He’ll know.”

  Jake was at the table when Raney came back into the kitchen, his thumbs flying over a cheap handheld game machine. “The Wells twins were here. I’m supposed to tell you Jerrod is looking for you.” She took a box of Cheerios out of the cabinet and sat down before she noticed Jake’s expression. “Jake? What’s up?”

  He shrugged and scootched out from behind the table. “Nothing’s up.” A few minutes later he came out of his room dressed in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, heading for the front door.

  Raney called out, “Did you eat?” He came back long enough to stuff two cereal bars into his back pocket, and then he was gone.

  She didn’t see him again until well after dinner had been served and gone cold, been wrapped up and put away. David hadn’t come home either, and Raney was angry she’d bothered to cook for either of them. When Jake tried to sneak in the front door with his hoodie up over his head, she lit into him. “It’s after ten—I was about to call the police.” He was hunched in his sweatshirt with his hands stuffed in the front pocket like some street thug. She remembered the snide laugh Caroline or Amelia had tossed off . . . Jerrod Fielding is waiting. “Jake, what’s going on?”