Pamela poured Charlotte a glass of wine from the nearly empty bottle on the table and said, “Eric’s telling me about all the quirky genetics stuff he’s learned researching this new book. Apparently there’s a lot more incest going on than anybody’s admitting to—shows up when they do the organ matching. I want to know if they keep a transplant list for cats. Effie’s kidneys are going, and the vet says I should think about putting him down. It would kill the boys. And me. God, I’ve had him longer than I’ve had you,” she said, leaning into Will’s shoulder. Pamela had a passion for both cats and birds, though an unfortunate intersection of the two had left her currently birdless. Effie was an enormous tortoiseshell—a male, which Pamela swore was so rare he was worth what she paid. He’d nearly eaten Charlotte’s own cat alive when she’d boarded him over a weekend.
“Did Eric tell you his book’s almost finished?” Charlotte said.
“It is? We have to toast!”
“I still have a chapter to go. And I never toast until after the reviews come in,” Eric said.
Charlotte felt compelled to add that he never read his reviews, not even when she screened them first. “But he’s close enough to finishing, he’s looking at new laptops. He buys a new one for every book. Like they came with a preloaded manuscript.”
“What do you do with the old ones?” Will asked.
“I give them to my brothers.”
“Where did the youngest decide to go to school?”
“Seattle University. He’ll be at my place for a few weeks this summer. He wants me to help him get a dog.” Eric started telling them about his half brother’s scholarship, the new girlfriend, the plot for sneaking a dog into his dorm room. Eric’s voice lifted whenever he was on the subject of his two half brothers, but especially Jimmy, the younger one. He talked faster, easier, with an almost parental pride, understandable given that Eric was practically old enough to be his brothers’ father. Suddenly Charlotte became aware of Pamela’s probing, almost wistful gaze, begging the question of when Eric and Charlotte would finally move forward and have their own child. Her instinctive response was to change the subject. “Hey, I’ve got news from Beacon Hospital. My Jane Doe has finally given us a clue about her identity!”
Pamela leaned closer. “She’s identified? How did that not make the six o’clock news?”
“Well, no, she isn’t identified. But the orthopedics department took off her cast this afternoon and discovered a scar. Unique enough it might match with records somewhere, or at least be recognized by someone.”
“I bet she’s from the Olympic Peninsula after all—some little town out there and whoever knows her wants her to stay missing. Maybe it will turn into a murder mystery. Attempted murder, at least. Eric can write a book about it. What did they find?” Pamela asked.
Charlotte hadn’t seen the scar herself yet, but she’d already called Blake Simpson to give him the orthopedist’s description. “Some circular rings wrapping around her right upper arm. The deputy on her case knows about it; it might be in the news tomorrow.”
Pamela asked if it could be a tattoo or gang mark and maybe that was why she’d been run down, but before Charlotte could answer, Will asked, “How does that feel? For you, I mean. I have the sense you’ve been her family so far. It might be strange to have a husband or parent step in and make decisions.”
The question stopped her. How did it make her feel? Her job wasn’t to be Jane’s family—Keith Sonnenberg and Christina Herrand had made that clear. The legal system might be allowed to act as Jane’s family, but not her. Not the doctor. For Charlotte the agenda was clear—to use the best of modern medicine to keep Jane alive. To hope that at some point, some part of her mind would recover. It was vague, yes. She meant it to be vague. “At some point” required no time limit. “Some part of her mind” required no measurable parameters. But what if Jane’s family believed keeping her alive was futile? Cruel, even? Other doctors at Beacon had said as much. Christina Herrand likely agreed. “I don’t know. I guess it depends on how well they knew what Jane would have wanted. But how well does anyone know that about someone else? Even family? Does anyone really know what they’d want until the time comes?”
Pamela said, “Well, doctor to doctor, we both know nobody gets out alive.”
—
Eric was quieter than usual on the walk home. Charlotte wrapped her arm through his, pacing her step to his longer stride out of habit. “Too much medical talk?”
Eric shrugged. “I should be used to it by now. Sometimes too much.” He dropped it after that, but his body was less relaxed against her own. He had never discussed his brain tumor with Charlotte’s family. She wanted to tell him she understood—to risk burdening him with how much his own medical condition weighed on her too. They could talk about so much together, but never this. The facts, yes, but not the implications. Sometimes Charlotte saw Eric take a Tylenol and she wanted to rush him in for another MRI. It was always there in the background, in the scar on his head barely concealed by his thick black hair, in the extra years it had cost his education, his career, in the missing, broken gaps that nobody but him could mend. And, more and more lately, in the stalled decisions for her own future that seemed to be eroding the love between them. All stolen by a single fractured gene.
“I’ve never told Will or Pamela about your medical history. Being pediatricians, they would totally get it, but . . . What am I saying? I’m just saying I think it’s your decision, not mine.”
“No big deal.” But he headed for the bathroom as soon as they were back at his apartment. Charlotte heard the medicine cabinet open and close before he took a long shower. She was half-asleep by the time he got into bed, so cautious not to awaken her she knew she would hit either a stone wall or an argument if she tried to talk it out. In minutes he was snoring and she was wide awake. She walked her cold feet up his back until he muttered and let go of the day in a long sigh, rolled onto his side, and breathed quiet enough for Charlotte to let her mind go.
Why could she not love an uncomplicated man? Her mother had done it for forty-two years—found someone smart and sturdy and been plenty entertained by arguing about the pros and cons of lumpectomy over mastectomy, laparoscopic surgery versus open. Their shared careers, two children, and four weeks of vacation (usually to medical meetings in serendipitously tropical locations with suspiciously empty meeting rooms) had kept her parents happy enough. But we love who we love, and how do you fix that if you discover you need different futures? She couldn’t think about it without feeling the solid earth split black and gaping beneath her.
—
Eric was already up when Charlotte woke the next morning. He’d made coffee and put out a plate of French toast for her; his own dirty dish was already in the sink. He sat at his computer, possibly so engrossed in his chapter he didn’t hear her come in. More likely upset with her about the half-finished conversation last night, she decided. It frustrated her again, too easily. “Eric, would you just say it? Tell me I was insensitive. That my family drives you crazy.” He turned around and looked at her with an expression she hadn’t expected, a surprised half smile on his lips but such anguish in his eyes it drilled even deeper into her guilt. “Okay, I’ll say it. I was thoughtless. I . . .”
“Oh, God, Charlotte. Please stop. This is not . . . I need to go to the hospital with you.”
A breath caught in her throat. She saw it all now—how quiet he’d been after dinner, the long shower and something taken from the medicine cabinet before he slept deep and hard. Had he seen his neurologist lately? Had he had his routine scan and kept the results to himself? “Why? What?”
“I need to see your patient.”
“My patient?”
“The scar on her arm you described—I need to see it. I think I know who she is.”
• 10 •
raney
Raney didn’t totally beli
eve what she said to Bo the night they came so close to making love, that “the universe rolls over people like me.” But it was plenty clear the human race considered some people more equal than others, and her words served their purpose. The next day a FedEx truck dropped the book of Monet paintings at her apartment with no return address, no note—like it had been sent to her from the painter’s Giverny grave. Other than that Bo didn’t make any effort to reach her.
She caught the bus back to Quentin for the holidays; Christmas came and went with no letter, no phone call, no late-night pebbles thrown at her window. It was a vacuum of contact so intentional it made its own raucous noise and crushed even the bit of hope she would admit to. There were nights after Grandpa went up to bed when Raney would finish the dishes and pull a kitchen chair over to the telephone, stare at the infuriatingly mute black box, and think herself through every step of calling Bo: how she’d pick up the receiver, punch in the ten numbers burned so crisp in her memory she knew the page and column they occupied in the Seattle phone book. She could feel the hard circle of plastic pressing against her head and hear the punctuated hum as their lines connected. Her imagination always screeched silent at the moment she should have heard Bo saying hello. She was never going to make that call or put a pen to paper—partly because there were not enough words to make either of them feel right about what had or hadn’t happened. But partly, also, to punish herself. As if she needed to be sure she hurt as much or more than she suspected she’d hurt him.
Three days after New Year’s an overnight frost laced every twig and tire rut with shimmering crystals and Quentin threw off its blanket of clouds to the bright-blue arctic cold. As always, Grandpa got up and dressed before the sun was above the horizon. He went out to the barn to feed the dogs and hens and did not come back in. Raney was at the kitchen window in her bathrobe when some wrong shape between the sharp shadow of the barn door and the glittering grass caught her eye. It was Grandpa’s booted leg. In a breath she was out the door and kneeling over him. The white enamel pan of chicken feed had been dumped and pellets lay scattered in the folds of his jacket and the stubble of his beard like oat-colored hail.
“Slipped,” he said. “The ice.”
He raised an arm for Raney to help him up, but halfway to sitting he collapsed again. “Grandpa? What is it? Did you break something?” He shook his head and rubbed at his left shoulder, his face the same color as the frost. “Did you fall on your arm?”
“It’s not broken. Just . . . hurts.” He rubbed it again and then balled his fist into the middle of his chest. Raney bunched an old horse blanket under his head and ran into the kitchen to call 911.
Grandpa stayed in Jefferson General Hospital for two weeks. The doctors told Raney he’d lost 25 percent of his heart. She bit back the question of which quarter was gone—the piece that loved tramping alone through the woods following deer up impossibly vertical paths, or the piece that loved felling and chopping up two great fir trees every summer so they could be self-sufficient with heat for a full winter, or the piece that loved hauling engine parts out of old trucks and cars to refurbish and sell. Or maybe, God forbid, the piece that loved her.
He seemed diminished when he came home, his blusters and gripes punctuated with question marks. After a week or so, when Raney still couldn’t goad the fight back into him, she concluded it was less from circulatory weakness than from slamming into his own mortality. But mortality wasn’t really the right word. Dependence—that was the demon slipping in like a wintery draft, half-disguised in the pills and capsules they sent home with him.
On the twelfth day, when he’d barely joined into a conversation with her, Raney decided the noise of one steady voice was better than questions answered by silence. She grabbed a book off her bedroom shelf and pulled a rocking chair next to Grandpa’s bed, crossed her feet on the end of his mattress, and started reading out loud. “ ‘Chapter One. Third. I’ve watched through his eyes, I’ve listened through his ears, and I tell you he’s the one—’ ”
Grandpa interrupted, “Who’s the one?”
“I don’t know yet. We have to keep reading.”
“Sounds like it’s about Jesus or something. Religion or something.”
Raney flipped the book over and looked at the jacket cover, realized it was one of the books Bo had left at her house the first summer he’d been in Quentin—one of the few she hadn’t read. “It’s a novel, Grandpa. Ender’s Game by a man named Card. Orson Card,” and she continued reading through the first page until he interrupted her again.
“I just got out of a hospital—I don’t want to hear a story about people having operations.”
“Well, what do you want? Little House on the Prairie?”
“At least I’d learn something useful.” He pushed a Kleenex box off the bedside table and dug a big paperback out from under a stack of Auto Traders. “Here. Read this.”
Raney readjusted herself in the chair and flipped through the book for a minute before she started reading, first to him and then out loud to herself in a tone of disbelief. “ ‘I believe we are the descendants of people who left civilizations among the stars. . . . The world’s cities will perish but there need not be another Dark Age. Instead, we can go from our Survival Homesteads on to the stars.’ Grandpa? Where did you find this?”
He sat up with more vigor than he’d shown since his heart attack and snatched the book away. “Give it t’me. Look here. Oh, damn—I can’t read it without my damn glasses. Look here.” He opened the book to a different page and thrust it into her lap.
She saw the title now, The Survivor, volume 1, by Kurt Saxon, and read the table of contents: “ ‘How to Make a One or Two Horsepower Windmill from Scrap. How to Make the Best Black Powder. Surviving a Nuclear Winter.’ A nuclear winter? The Berlin Wall came down last year, Grandpa, or didn’t you hear?”
“And Saddam Hussein is taking over countries left and right. It never hurts to know how to take care of yourself, Renee. By yourself. You never know when you’ll be left all alone.”
Raney shut the book, stung as sharply as if her grandfather could have known how close to her heart his arrow of personal pessimism had landed. “Take your pills, Grandpa. I’m gonna put dinner on.”
“Renee,” he called out just as she reached the door. She stopped, her hand still on the doorknob, unable to look at him. After a minute of silence she heard him exhale so deep she had to turn around, worried it was a last gasp, and was almost more startled to see him colored with emotion. “I know it’s not easy, the years between leaving one home and finding another. I know it’s not easy.”
—
Until the day Raney told her grandfather that she was not going to return to the Art Institute, she’d had only one blowout argument with him. She had just turned twelve, and after much pleading on her part, he agreed to take her on a backpacking trip. When the awaited day came, they hiked eleven miles uphill to the campsite with gear and food and water, her load nearly as heavy as his, and by the time he finally dropped his pack and said they were done for the day, Raney was holding her eyes wide to keep tears from spilling down her dirty cheeks. Grandpa counted five matches into her palm and pointed to the blackened ring of rocks in the middle of a clearing, proof any number of former hikers had readily made fires on this site. Then he started stringing up the rope and tarp that would be their tent as if he didn’t doubt they’d be heating chili and warming their stiff hands within the quarter hour.
The sun was below the tree line and mosquitoes emerged in a rank miasma. Her sweat-soaked T-shirt grew cold, reeking of the smoke-and-pepper musk new to her body. She walked the perimeter of the campsite gathering sticks and dead wood, constructing her timber tower with the same careful layering she used for their woodstove at home. But in the woodstove she’d always wadded a brown paper grocery bag under the kindling pyramid. She struck the first match on a campfire rock and touched it to the smallest
dry stick, watched the bark glow and flare, then dampen just as quickly when the bark burned away to pulp.
On her next try she collected pine needles dry as old bones, dead aspen leaves, and brittle gray cones. She lit the second match, waited until the sulfur burned away and the tiny wooden stick held a steady blue flame, then touched it to each material in turn. Only the fine spray of pine needles burned. She cupped them against the wind down to the bottom of her pyre, where they dissolved from orange to gray ash without so much as a thread of smoke. Matches three and four died an equally futile death. Her hands grew clumsy and thick with the cold and the fifth match snapped in half, so close to the bulbous tip it burned her fingers when it finally caught and she dropped it into the dirt.
Raney sat down on a rock and glared at the charred skeletons of another man’s success as if all her anger might reignite a blaze. Grandpa troweled a shallow ditch around the pitched tarp, whistling through his collection of birdcalls.
Half an hour later he pried the lid off a can of chili and started eating it cold, straight from the tin. He handed her a spoon and gestured for her to dig in. Raney flew into a fury, threw the spoon into the coals, and told him she hated camping and when she grew up she would live in a house with a built-in furnace and a dial thermostat and when she didn’t sleep in her own bed she would sleep in a hotel on clean sheets somebody else had to wash. He listened and nodded and then untied his Coleman bedroll and went to sleep, leaving the can of chili with its thick orange jelly of grease on a split log for Raney to eat when she chose. She had stood outside the tent, railing at him until the forest was hushed as a graveyard and she was too spent to care what she ate or where she slept.
Gemini: A Novel Page 14
