Gemini

by Carol Cassella

  “Is there any chance Jake could stay with you?” Charlotte asked.

  Louise’s reply was preceded by another heavy sigh. “I’m sixty-eight now. My home is for urgent intervention. Short term.” She paused. “Boys like Jake make that my own hard choice.”

  “Right. I understand.”

  “Do you think Jake should see his mother? Even if they can’t talk?” Louise asked.

  Charlotte saw Raney in her mind, immobile, unresponsive, her muscles wasted—as if demonic magical creatures had stolen the real mother away and replaced her with a false image. How would he react to that? Was it better to see her in the process of letting go? Or to remember what she’d been? “I don’t know the answer to that. Maybe no one does.”

  Louise said she would try to let Charlotte and Eric know how Jake was faring, but she herself was unlikely to be involved much longer. They were about to hang up when Charlotte asked, “Louise? What if . . . What if someone related to Jake turned up? What then?”

  “Well, the judge always prefers to place a child with a relative.”

  “What if they don’t even know each other?”

  “Even then. Blood over water.” Louise was quiet on the other end of the line. “What kind of relative are you referring to?”

  Charlotte took a full breath and held it a moment. “What if Jake’s biological father was another man. Not Flores. Someone Jake had never met.”

  “Someone Jake had never met,” Louise repeated in a solemn and carefully objective voice, and Charlotte saw Eric and Jake sitting side by side at Louise’s dinner table, their faces so strikingly similar. “Well, like I said,” Louise continued, “the court always prefers blood. Jake will be assigned a GAL—guardian ad litem—for the dependency proceedings. They’ll know.”

  “Ah,” said Charlotte quietly.

  “They could be sure any paternity claim was handled right. Legal proof and all.” She gave Charlotte a minute to say something, then sounded like she’d resolved any question in her own mind. “I’ll get that name for you. Should know in a few days. I’ll make sure you’re in contact.”

  —

  Over dinner Charlotte told Eric about Jake’s dependency hearing and the disappointing news that he could not stay with Louise. But she didn’t share the conversation about paternity. She wanted to talk to the guardian ad litem first. She wanted to be sure. They talked a lot, however, about whether Jake should be brought to Seattle to see his mother. The entire conversation left them both depressed, realizing they were attached to a child legally beyond their reach. The only good outcome of foster care, they agreed, was that someone other than David would handle Jake’s medical problems. If Jake’s plea for foster care was approved. If the foster home took him to the right doctor.

  Eric pushed his half-eaten meal away. “Did you ask Louise if it’s possible to get a blood sample from Jake?”

  She hesitated before she said, “No.” Which was the truth, if not all of it.

  “I don’t guess that would be an easy request to explain, would it?”

  The next day, though, Charlotte got a second phone call about Jake. This one from Katherine Hemling, Jake’s court-assigned guardian. Louise had asked her to call. Jake’s dependency hearing would be coming up next week.

  “Do you know where he would live if the judge lets him leave his stepfather’s?” Charlotte asked her.

  “Not yet. We’ll wait for the order before we start that hunt. We have a shortage of foster parents in Jefferson County—as you might guess.”

  “Ms. Hemling, Jake has been having problems with his back. When I saw him—it wasn’t a formal exam, of course—but I think he has scoliosis. Maybe something worse. He needs to see a specialist as soon as possible. Will someone, whoever he lives with, be able to get medical care for him?”

  “Oh, the state would pay for care.” She said it with a mix of both assurance and pessimism. “They do their best, Dr. Reese. But even at their best it’s a cumbersome responsibility for most homes.”

  Now, thought Charlotte. Now, before she hangs up. “I have another question. What if Jake had a blood relative?”

  “We’ve already looked. Believe me—we would always prefer that to foster care.”

  “What if someone could prove he was Jake’s biological father?”

  Katherine was quiet for a moment. “Well, can he? If so, if a DNA test proved it, he could file a paternity claim requesting custody. Or are you just asking to ask?”

  Charlotte told her, then, about Eric and Raney, the timing of their romance with Jake’s birth, the physical similarities. The relatively rare genetically inherited disorder they both likely shared. And when Katherine suggested a simple buccal swab, Charlotte told her why it would not be that simple. She told her about chimeras. After she had explained it all—down to the cats—Charlotte asked if the court might order a blood sample from Jake. Possibly other tissue if that was not definitive.

  “Frankly,” Katherine answered in a politely curt voice, “that sounds pretty close to crazy. But yes. If you could give reasonable cause, I suspect the judge would approve it. But the biological father would have to file a paternity claim first. And he should do it before the hearing.”

  —

  That night Eric made love to Charlotte with an intensity that portended an acceptance of finality, or so she imagined. She didn’t tell him about her conversation with Katherine—she didn’t know how.

  When Charlotte went to work the next morning and discovered Raney’s bed empty, she rushed to the nursing station in a near panic. But it was nothing unexpected—a spot had opened up at the chronic care facility across the street, so Beacon had moved her. They needed the ICU bed. Within the hour Charlotte was busy taking care of the new occupant, a ninety-four-year-old man in congestive heart failure. Eric surprised her with grilled steak that night—a food she loved and he considered just shy of poison—putting it out on her favorite china with silver cutlery and a good Cabernet. It was funny how often he seemed to predict she might need a boost, had some uniquely personal pleasure waiting even before he’d seen her face or heard her voice.

  “What is it?” he asked when she gave up on the fillet halfway through. She told him about Raney’s transfer, hoping that would be enough, but he knew her too well. “Something else is bothering you. Is it about Jake?”

  It should be an easy thing to tell him, Charlotte thought. A simple rule of law, which he could take or leave. It was his decision. His right. She had to let it go. “I need to know something,” she said. “I want you to think about it before you answer. How does it change things if you know you’re genetically related to Jake?”

  He looked puzzled. “He’s more likely to get the medical care he obviously needs. We have more leverage if I can prove he’s mine, whether he’s in a foster home or with Boughton. We’ve been over all this.”

  “Agreed—we might have more leverage. But that’s a different question. I’m asking, How will it matter to you?”

  “Oh, Charlotte,” he said, sounding sad and resigned and almost—it broke her heart to hear—pitying. “I don’t know. I can’t answer that until it happens. Maybe just what you said in the motel that night. It’s the moral thing to do, isn’t it? If he has NF, he got it from me. I’m responsible for it.”

  Charlotte tried to keep her voice steady. How could it be so hard to say something to someone you knew so well? “I talked to the guardian ad litem helping with Jake’s court case. We can get a blood sample. The court can order one. But you would have to file a paternity claim before the judge would order the test.”

  “A paternity claim? What, stating that I think I could be his biological father?”

  “No. A paternity claim means you intend to act as Jake’s father. A real father. That you intend to raise him.”

  Eric stood up and walked to the kitchen door with his back to her. She could hear him breathing slowly, like he was counting breaths to calm himself. “Raise him. That’s a lot more than we’ve been talki
ng about.”

  The resigned tone of his voice ripped through her. She knew she couldn’t let it go—not again. “Have we talked about it? Have we even admitted what we should really be talking about? This is more than Jake. This is years old, and we keep pretending we have forever to decide. Or I do. This is about us, Eric.”

  “What?” He turned to face her. “I haven’t stood by you in this?”

  “You stand by me always. You stand by me, but we’re standing still. In the same place. Where are we going? What are we together?”

  They both felt it, the chill slipping into the air, slipping between them. Charlotte was ready to turn away, say, Forget this. I’m just tired—worn out. I meant nothing. Without any effort she had been doing that for years—moving from one day to the next, loving him from one day to the next, knowing that all human plans are subject to the whim of the universe. What was there, in the end, to hold on to? Why count on anything more than now—this one infinitesimal point in time? So they had lived and loved as if one day could forever turn into any other. How had she forgotten the first rule of biology? That survival depends on continuous change. Stand immobile in one place and you will starve, freeze, or burn; oxygen will not enter or exit, cell division will cease. Because time will go forward with or without you, implacable and unceasing, glacially grinding down anything that won’t move at its pace.

  Her voice broke. “You may have a son, Eric. The child you could never decide, never commit, to have with me.”

  “How is it fair of me to have a child? Even Jake? Do you know what it’s like to wonder how long you’ll be here?”

  “How long will anyone be here? Would Raney have given up having him if she’d known what was going to happen to her? Okay, you have a disease. You might die at fifty. Or tomorrow. Does that mean you and I don’t matter? That a child we make is a mistake? If you die before me or get sick again, will it hurt any less because you wouldn’t commit to me?”

  He looked at her and she saw the wound she had made. Saw it and felt cruel and more wounded herself. “Please, Eric. I can’t keep choosing between you and the rest of my life. Stop protecting me from losing you. Oh, God, I’ve probably lost you already.”

  He seemed paralyzed for a moment and Charlotte wanted to leave, run from the room and the house and the memory of it all. Then he moved close enough to touch her, ran his hands across her tear-streaked face and around her arms to pull her close. She resisted him at first, then slowly let him hold her until they both calmed. “And what do we do if the test says I’m his father?” he asked.

  “Then you’ll be his father. We’ll raise your son. We will raise him together.”

  • 21 •

  raney

  David refused to go to the orthopedic surgeon in Aberdeen with Raney and Jake. As a man who worked hard for his own living, he couldn’t excuse taking up a doctor’s time when there was no way to pay him. “There was a boy in my school in Oklahoma who had curvature. Doctor made him wear this metal brace for years. He hated it—finally just threw it away. Ended up doing fine without it,” he told Jake. Raney put dinner on the table without a word, using the last of her self-control to keep Jake from witnessing the bitterness two married adults were capable of. Later, in bed, David put his arms around her and whispered, “I know it’s hard. If you can just wait until I get a job with benefits. If he isn’t getting better in a few months I’ll go along with it.”

  The next morning she slid out of bed, dressed in the dark, and carried David’s trousers into the kitchen before she fished through the pocket for the car keys. She shook Jake awake, quieting his mouth with one calm hand. “Breakfast on the road today, Buddy.”

  —

  After they left Dr. Lawrence’s office, Raney drove straight to the Dairy Queen for Yukon Cruncher Blizzards. Neither of them had said much since leaving the exam room—Jake, she figured, because he was pondering how many needles or shots lay ahead. Raney, though, was turning the surgeon’s words inside out, hunting for any certainty in the possiblys, probablys, and remotelys he had used. She tried to discount the scariest medical terms—tumor, cancer, steel rods, transfusion—against the friendlier ones—benign, good prognosis, recovery—but she couldn’t clearly remember what he’d said about the actual likelihood of any of them. For all that, she had liked the surgeon. He let Raney know that he had all the time in the world for their questions, even though she could hear ten screaming children through the walls.

  “So what did you think of him?” she asked Jake.

  “I liked the candy.” In this last year of too many doctor’s visits, Jake and Raney had both bemoaned the apparent collusion between dentists and doctors who rewarded children with only Batman or My Little Pony stickers after a needle stick.

  “What do you think about going to see the doctors in Seattle?”

  Jake put his cup on the sticky metal table and popped the top of his straw through the wrapper, pushing the paper down to a crinkle before anointing it with a drop of water so the paper wriggled into a long white worm. How did such things get traded down through every generation of children? she wondered.

  Finally Jake answered, “Okay. If we can go to the Space Needle.”

  “Sure. We can go to the Space Needle.” Raney drew two round eyes on the end of another straw and made her own worm. “But what did you think about what the doctor said? About your back?” Jake pretended to be too absorbed in his paper menagerie to hear her. She caught the next falling drop of water in her palm. “Talk to me, Jake. I know it’s scary. But if he’s right, maybe we could get your back fixed. It wouldn’t hurt anymore.”

  Jake’s eyes looked dangerously red-rimmed and she could see he was trying hard not to blink. She was ready to tell him it was all right to cry, an adult would cry about it too, when he said, “Just us, right?”

  Raney tilted her head, not wholly following him. “I’d be there the entire time, Jake.”

  “And not David.”

  Was this, then, Jake’s greatest worry? Was he willing to have surgery if it meant he could separate his mother from David, the man she had voluntarily turned into Jake’s stepfather? Raney felt her center drop away, shamed and guilty. She had made any number of wrong turns in her life and knew it could be easy to see that you were in the wrong place but still impossible to know what wrong turn had taken you there. This time she did. She had grabbed hold of people instead of life itself, and expected them to save her. She had grabbed hold of David and expected him to save them all. She touched Jake’s cheek and said, “If you don’t want David there, then he won’t be there.”

  Jake let her hold his hand on the way to the car, even with a crowd of skateboarders hanging around the parking lot. On the way out of town she saw the exit for Highway 109 and the coastline, and cut the wheel so fast Jake asked if there was something wrong with the car. “No. Something’s wrong with the day,” she said. “There’s not enough fun in it yet.”

  They drove past clusters of weathered, neglected beach shacks, a few newer homes decorated with glass buoys and driftwood carvings of mermaids and fishermen. A surf shop. A burger shack. And then only empty, sand-swept road, the Pacific Ocean hidden by a tidal stream and low dunes. She parked by a yellow tsunami warning sign and helped Jake jump over the gully. They took off their shoes; the sand was so hot they had to climb the shallow rise by digging their feet through the loose surface into the cool underlayers. Raney could tell Jake was favoring one hip, but otherwise he moved with a loose freedom she had missed. Sweeps of blond sea grass clustered like gossiping girls and Jake hid himself among them, thrilled to see his mother worried before he stood up and waved. They sat together on the crest of the dunes and marveled at the beach, a prairie of beiges and browns stretching to a scallop of sea foam, a stripe of ocean, and more sky than Jake had ever seen. Yes, the world was indeed round. Only a sphere could be this infinite.

  Jake had spent only one day on the Pacific since he was a toddler—a weekend trip they’d taken with Cleet. “Do yo
u remember it? Dad found that dolphin skeleton and you were too afraid to touch it?” Jake squinted, as if that might bring some vague recollection into focus. She felt bad about not getting him out of Quentin more often, always counting on more time and more money ahead of them. She picked up a handful of sand and trickled it over his bare leg. “You know what makes sand? Millions of animal shells, ground up by waves over millions of years.” But what does a million years mean when you are twelve? she thought when he didn’t answer.

  What had Jake been thinking when Dr. Lawrence described how he would go to sleep for his operation? Did they have to describe it with the same words they’d use to put a lame dog down? “Jake, did I ever tell you that I knew the very second I was pregnant with you? I couldn’t see you or touch you or feel you, but I knew you were there. And I was right.” Raney saw a smile play at Jake’s lips and decided to forge ahead. She picked up a sand dollar and ran her finger around the disk. “I guess I think about life the same way—a circle. It doesn’t have a start and a stop any more than you didn’t start the day you were born and you won’t end when your body dies. And neither did your dad. His soul is still around us. His love.” She watched Jake turn this over, probing it for the solid elements he could hold on to, the hollow parts that left him doubting.

  “Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true,” he said.

  She almost wished God himself would walk out of the ocean with an answer. Did he for some people? The sky was cloudless; two gulls shrieked and dove after the same silver splash. She turned Jake around to face the horizon, “What’s out there, Jake? What land would I hit if I could fly straight west?”

  “Mom!”

  “Come on. You know. Mrs. Bywaters taught you. What country is out there?”