Gemini (20 page)

Raney could have told Bo about Cleet at that moment—it was an obvious opening to the topic she had skirted. Instead she juggled the words and then shooed them away, told herself it could be said another time. Or not at all; this would likely be their last conversation. Later, when she replayed that day over and over, she knew something had crossed her face. In her memory she could see him pause, deliberate. And in her memory she told herself they both understood the pact they were making.

“But you’re still painting,” Bo said.

“I still paint. When I have time.”

“What blue is this?” he asked, lightly stroking his forefinger over the side of her palm where paint had caught and dried in the fine creases.

“Cobalt. With a dab of carnation—gives it a violet tint.”

“Show me.”

She shook her head. “It’s not ready to show.”

“Show me anyway. Please?”

—

The painting was on the front porch, where the light cut under the eaves for a few hours after dawn and she could stand her canvas out of the rain showers and see across the sloping field all the way to the curl of fog tucked like a baby’s blanket over the bay most fall mornings. Bo stood a long time in front of it, looking at the painting, then across the rise and drop of land to the ridge of spiky green forest before the water, then back to the painting. Not once at her. Like the way he had looked at her paintings in Seattle, she remembered—letting his opinion seed and ripen before he spoke. After a while, without a word, he shut his eyes and tilted his face toward the porch ceiling. Then he walked back through the front door into the dark living room and flicked on the overhead light switch. Grandpa had long ago quit using this room for anything but her “gallery”—not that they ever had any guests who were displaced by that choice. The walls were filled with paintings she’d made over the last ten years. They rose from chair back to ceiling, rested shoulder to shoulder across the sofa and against the tables and bookcase. Bo let out a slow, broken breath and Raney recalled all the scenes she had painted while he read his books, back when they were never going to grow up or believed they had already done so; when every day passed without any clock but light or dark, so lost in their own worlds of color and language they started to mix together and she had at times wondered if she was painting the story he was reading. How much of him was still that boy? She looked from the paintings to his face and saw a reaction that made her feel raw—but folded inside out rather than naked, as if two skin surfaces had been scraped down to raw flesh and scarred together. It made her feel like she counted for something in a way she hadn’t counted before. He reached for her hand, and she blocked out everything telling her to pull it away. He stood so close she could feel his heat. “I should have come after you seven years ago,” he said.

“Bo, I’m engaged, or close to it. I should have told you.”

“Close to it? What does that mean?”

What did it mean? To her? “We’ve been together three years. He loves me. He’s a good man. He’ll be a good husband.” Even Raney heard the empty space that made room for Bo to put his arms around her, weave his fingers through her hair at the nape of her neck so tight she took one step closer at the insistent pressure of his hands. Then she opened her mouth to his and felt all the space between them disappear, all time after this time disappear.

“What do you want, Raney?”

What do you want, Raney?
What did she want? Another past? Another chance at him? Whatever it was, it did not reside in conscious thought. He hesitated only a moment, just long enough to allow her to pull away if she chose. “I’m staying in a hotel.”

Raney shook her head but made no move to separate until after he kissed her again. Then she took his hand and led him through the kitchen and out across the muddy yard to the barn. Together they pushed aside the hay bales and tugged the black ring latch on the bunker’s trapdoor until it gave way. The taint of mildew drifted into the air; hay dust and bits of loose straw stirred and floated into the gaping black hole. Raney wrapped her skirt into a knot and stepped onto the first rung of the ladder. Even with the trapdoor still open to the barn, it was nearly dark in the cavern of a room. She felt along the shelf edge for a flashlight, finding instead a box of matches and emergency candles. She struck a match to one candle and set it on the trunk, then Bo lit a whole row of candles in small glass votives so they pitched at odd angles and the room smelled of paraffin and sulfur and glowed with light from another century. After he pulled the hatch closed, the silence was thick as a comforter. Time didn’t matter anymore. Nothing up there mattered anymore. They might open that hatch in two or three hours or two or three days and find civilization—Quentin, Seattle, all of it—had been swallowed up and only the two of them were left, and maybe that was all she wanted. Maybe that was why whatever happened here could be justified. She wondered if she’d known since she first saw his pale face hunched over a book in the woods that they could only be together in some bubble outside the real world.

Bo pulled the mattresses from both cots onto the floor and spread the blankets and pillows and sleeping bags on top of them so the small space was a cushioned nest. The candle flame moved in languid waves over his face and was lost in the hollow coves under his eyes and cheeks. He looked ethereal. Haunted—that much more a mystery to her, and what they were about to do that much less real. He kissed her full and deep and then Raney pushed him away, enjoying the moment of uncertainty she saw cross his face. She took off her jacket and unbuttoned her blouse, let them drop to the floor. Bo slipped his sweater off, disappearing for a moment inside it, then emerging with a static crackle of hair, his body shining pale in the candlelight. They sat without moving for a while, and then he lowered his face toward hers as if to kiss her, but stopped forehead to forehead. “I’m cold,” he said.

“Me too.”

“No. Never cold.” he answered, sure of himself again, moving over her now with his legs locking them into one animal. She felt no shyness with him, no need to prove any point of beauty or sensual talent—she had been here too many times in her imagination, completing an interrupted story. She fought the inevitable comparison to Cleet—tried to believe her body was different with Bo because she had known him so thoroughly before they recognized themselves as sexual beings. Or maybe, she wondered much later, maybe because she could not let herself believe there would be a second chance to learn each other’s erotic secrets. There was no permanence to this. Only later did she see the irony in that.

—

Bo had to leave the next day. He was headed to Mexico for ten days to do a story about deep-sea fishing off some islands, but they decided to meet in Seattle as soon as he got home. Raney would arrange for someone to check on Grandpa and she would pick up Bo at the airport. When she walked him to his car, he pulled her to him with some new reserve she felt but could not place. “Do you love this guy?”

“There’s all kinds of love, Bo. There’s this kind, what just happened, and there’s the marrying kind.”

“You’re willing to take one without the other?”

The way he said it, it could be taken as a challenge or an aspersion. Or, possibly, an invitation. She wished she could see his eyes. “Are you saying you could give me both?”

He was very quiet for a moment. “Being married to me . . .” He stopped then, as if his rational mind had just caught up with him. A memory. Even the tension in his arms against her back changed into something less fluid—less a part of her own skin.

After a minute she asked, “You’ll let me know if your flight changes?”

“I’ll call every day—if I can find a phone.”

—

She thought about many things later, when he did not call her. The first days it was not actual thought, but unadulterated sensual memory, replaying the exact stroke of his fingers over her breasts, her hips, until her skin flushed, aroused so that it was almost a shock to open her eyes and rediscover he was gone. She thought about how there weren’t likely to be many telephones on the Mexican island, whose name she could not recall or even guess at despite poring over a world atlas in the Port Townsend library.

Weeks later she relived the minutes and hours after he left the bunker, mapped the interior of her body to determine the minute she knew Jake was with her. Inside her. It eluded her, refusing to be confined to one split second of sperm penetrating egg, DNA from two aligning and dividing into a brand-new individual; maybe, she decided, because the beginning lay well beyond biology.

When Cleet first touched her again, she thought about nothing, her mind emptied like a door automatically shut, splitting Bo from Cleet as completely as her body had in the bunker. As the time came and passed for Bo’s return from Mexico and the phone did not ring, Raney learned how much control she had over that door. The room she lived in was Cleet’s room, Cleet’s future, her grandfather, her art. She was able to almost convince herself that Bo had done it intentionally, set her up for the same rejection she’d put him through seven years earlier and that
this
was the real Bo—a man willing to plot and connive in order to hurt her. But one week more and Sandy caught her squatted in a dark corner of the back storeroom and made her talk.

“You did it, didn’t you? Then you thought Prince Charming would come back here and gather you up,” Sandy said.

“You can be a mean friend sometimes, Sandy.”

“The kind everybody needs most. So what now? I’ll drive you to Seattle if you want. Take you right up to his door with my gun in the backseat. Or flowers. I just want it to be you deciding this instead of him.”

“Well, some things appear to be already decided.” Raney felt the change for certain by then, not in her belly but in the primitive base of her brain where rhythms of breath and heart begin. Like the tiniest pinhole was being blown open to something infinite and all connected; a portal to every bit of soil and air that had ever been part of a human being.

Sandy waited a minute before it began to dawn. “You’re kidding. You’re on the pill, right? Something?”

“Of course. When I remember.”

“And Cleet?”

Raney pressed her hands against her eyes and leaned hard into the wall. After a long minute she shrugged her shoulders. “He’ll be happy. He likes kids.”

“His own, maybe.”

“It could be his own.”

“You have choices, Raney. You don’t have to get married because of this. It’s your life.”

Raney wiped her eyes and rolled her head back and forth before she gave a small laugh, then crawled forward so her face was right in front of Sandy’s. “It’s not about me anymore. I know my choice. And we’re gonna be fine. All three of us. Cleet, Renee, and baby Flores.”

•
12
•

eric

Eric loved to drive. With
his first paycheck from Zeus Air he put a down payment on two things: a Leica camera lens (which he could at least write off) and a silver-blue Fiat Spider. He was twenty-four years old and, from what he’d seen of life, believed he’d already beaten the beast. He’d
survived
. And that sports car was the sleek machine he planned to spin straight through to the rest of his dreams, with a little extra gas to make up for lost time.

He would spend days following the smallest map lines threaded across Snohomish, Skagit, and Whatcom counties, all the way to the rim of Canada—holding the wheel against the curve, craving the amnesia-inducing openness of a landscape latticed with roads. His mother had fought his renewing his license. She wanted his doctors to block him, but his neurologist wasn’t persuaded. Eric had been seizure free for long enough, the doctor said, and he should quit letting the disease
or
his mother define him. So the first day Eric owned his new car he picked up his mother from the Lopez Island ferry and kidnapped her, turning north on I-5 instead of south. When he got near Bellingham he cut west onto Chuckanut Drive, whipping along the coastal road with the top down until her hair was a Medusa frizz and tears arced down her cheeks, driving until he finally caught her smiling.

In his late teens he’d gone through a phase of anger toward his mother, but now that he was well—his brain tumor cut out, destroyed, gone for good, so sure of it he’d skipped his last MRI—he understood that his rage had been against the disease itself, the few glitched amino acids that had likely come from her. Now he just wanted her to forgive herself.

The last time Eric drove a car he was twenty-six. He was on a small island off the coast of Mexico, writing an article about deep-sea fishing. Normally he would have taken buses and taxis, but on this particular trip the delays of local transportation crawled under his skin like a parasite. He had itched to get to a phone since his plane took off from SeaTac; he tried to make a call between transfers and hit his fist into the Mexico City airport wall when he only got a busy signal. Now, with his small hotel still two hours away, he had no patience for the scabbed and skinny boys plucking at his shirt to get him into their father’s, their uncle’s, their brother’s car, so he rented his own. A convertible. Time to celebrate, he could remember thinking, that for the first time in his life he was both healthy and in love.

He remembered many things with precise clarity for a few hours thereafter: the twilight settling in, thick as liquid and seeded with stars; the riotous sounds of an impoverished, close community—barking dogs and blaring radios and car horns, and children everywhere, boiling into the dirty streets—and for the first time in all his travels it did not make him feel more lonely. He could remember pulling to the side of the road, a gleaming sickle of beach where he stripped to shorts and sandals and sent one glorious shout to heaven that the universe had finally turned in his favor. He remembered a wedding party blocking the main road near his turnoff and, it was so odd, he could remember how far away the brake pedal suddenly felt, the strange, elastic expansion of time it was taking to make his foot move from the accelerator, as if his body had changed shape or size.

Everything else became
afterward—
bits of time scattered randomly as broken glass. His first distinct memory from
afterward
was the fingers of his right hand scraping a thin cotton bedspread, a flickering fluorescent light above his head. Later, the Seattle skyline through the window, blue with an early summer sky, his mother reading in the chair beside him. Later still, his fingers moving to the soft bristle of his shorn scalp, the tender edges of a fresh wound. For years images would flash through him at odd times until a vague shape of those lost months began to emerge: a smoldering headache igniting, searing through his eyes, his teeth, the folded matter of his brain; straps binding him, wheels under him, faces upside down; sloshing like so much cargo as he is rolled, lifted, hauled, flown. And always he remembered, would never forget, the sense of some urgent task left unattended so that his rare moments of lucidity had felt desperate. A dream of running through quicksand.

When he was finally moved to the rehab unit two months after his operation, three months before he was able to walk on his own, he got a physical therapist to help him find her phone number. He called three, four, five times, letting it ring until he lost count, then, at last, an old man picked up, the grandfather, a bark in his voice when he told Eric that Raney wasn’t there. She lived with her husband now.

—

Six months after Eric got out of the hospital his father called him from the East Coast and said he wanted to talk to him. In person. He flew Eric to New York, and they met for lunch at a café on Amsterdam Avenue in the middle of a heat wave so intense even the tourists had abandoned the city. Eric had spent the entire flight conjecturing what news his father was about to break—another divorce, another half sibling on the way, some truth about Eric’s own prognosis that his mother hadn’t been strong enough to tell him. The actual news was both more benign and more mind-blowing: Eric’s grandfather had left him a trust fund, which he was to inherit at the age of thirty-five, not enormous but enough to give him options. But his father, the executor, had rewritten the terms so the money would come to Eric now, at age twenty-seven. “Why now?” Eric had asked, and when his father shied from the question, Eric asked him again, goading him to say out loud that he suspected Eric might not have a thirty-fifth birthday. His father looked away, seemingly distracted by the traffic spewing fumes into the miserable air, but Eric caught something—guilt or regret—in his half-hidden face. It was beginning to make Eric mad, watching the pinpricks of sweat stipple his father’s upper lip and still he kept his suit coat on. Finally he loosened his tie, his first concession to the coffin of heat making Eric’s head pound, and threw the question back. “Why
not
now? You’re not mature enough?”

Put to sensible, steady work, the money could be his ticket to a graduate degree, a small house, everlasting comfort if not splendor. It could be there if the day came when Eric couldn’t work anymore, or needed extra help. If such a day came.
And then what?
Eric wanted to make his father say out loud. He could afford the luxury of surviving in a life he didn’t want to live? The luxurious misery of surviving in a body without a mind? Maybe for that reason alone Eric made it a personal cause to do exactly what his father worried most about—he burned through the money as fast as possible.

He kept the job with Zeus, traveling to the limited reach of its small fleet of 737s, but he began writing freelance, too, keeping a bag packed and ready to go so that whenever the mood struck he could jump on a plane, take his camera and his laptop, and park himself in a hotel where no one knew his name. He sought out the fringes of the tourist routes, looking for niches that hadn’t been covered by other travel writers. Rose-petal harvests and camel wrestling in Turkey. An out-of-the way Greek island where the Aegean Sea flowed viscous as saliva, floating effortless even for his skinny body—the salt a life vest. He photographed old women gone frog-faced, their breasts wallowing in simple black dresses as they stood in doorways to observe the world hurtling through change. He tried to imagine them young, virginal; tried to see how young they still were in this ancient, ancient land. He could stand on a bridge, on a subway, on a street corner and watch people for so long he became hypnotized imagining the life they had that he would never witness, and there were moments, scary moments, when he wanted to hurl himself into their existence, turn himself inside out, and become them, become anyone but himself.

When the money was half-gone he sought out more remote places—treks into the Golden Triangle to sleep on mats with tribal groups discovering that the hard authenticity of their lives could be sold to a new breed of tourists rich enough to pay for a week’s worth of mosquitoes and mud just to say they’d been there. He burrowed into the slums of Asia and Africa, where cars slipped like fish through the chaotic streets and the smell of life flooded into him and through him until he was saturated. He craved cities where English was not just a foreign language, it was a foreign concept, where everyone seemed to know something he didn’t, and the challenge of finding clean water and a safe bed could crowd everything else from his mind. Anonymity became his favorite definition of home. A few weeks in Seattle and he was restless, waking up at night with enough security and empty black silence to remember how much he hated his own fate. The next day he would be scanning the map for any place he’d never been. Even now, a decade later, he couldn’t take a taxi without asking the driver to describe the village in Somalia or Ethiopia or Syria where his sisters, his brothers, his cousins, his parents still lived.

Three years into it, Eric was almost through the money when he ran into an old friend from his early days at
Zeus Air Magazine
who worked for Condé Nast now. They ended up in a sketchy bar outside Paris trading stories. The friend had just finished a piece on yachting in the Mediterranean—interviewed a Mexican billionaire on his two-fifty-footer, trying to keep up with him on 1800 Coleccion tequila shots while the guy bitched about his wife forgetting her makeup bag back in Aztec Land so she put him in the “no sex vise” unless their pilots flew the 747 back to fetch it.

They were well into their own tequila rounds when the friend said he’d heard about Eric’s car wreck. “My wife’s always worried about my dying of malaria, dengue . . . it’s the car accidents that kill you over here. Hell, I don’t have to tell you that.” Eric was ready to brush it off when the friend got too quiet, too fidgety, and added, “Sorry, man. I shouldn’t have brought it up.” He poured Eric another shot and took a swig of his own. “Listen. They have so many kids down there. I heard that girl had eight brothers and sisters.”

There it was. In one sentence. Eric felt so transformed by that inadvertently leaked bit of information he wondered if he had been looking for it ever since his accident—the missing memory that could let him move on. And it did, but not in the way he’d expected. All this time he’d thought he was trying to run away from the smoldering bomb inside his own brain. That was the easy part, he began to understand. He felt almost weightless as it dawned on him, like the next breath he took might lift him off this bar stool, lift him right up over this crowd of happy drunks. As long as he kept his rules straight—kept his boundaries close and stayed out of anyone else’s driver seat, when his brain exploded the next time it would destroy only him.

He began to hate the money after that, the cushion it allowed him. For a while he still craved the edge, the risk, wanted to take it, take it, take it all right now before it was over. Strike and get out before he could hurt another soul. He gave away what he couldn’t spend—extravagant tips left hidden under his plate, packages that arrived on friends’ birthdays with no return address, cash left in envelopes at homeless shelters. And one extraordinary, anonymous donation for a playground and school in a tiny town on an island in Mexico.

The last travel article he wrote was about Cambodia. He trekked three days up to a hill village and dialed his camera into focus on an old man stumbling behind his yoked oxen. He caught the light perfectly on the man’s straining, cracked face. Then, a second before the shutter opened, the man looked straight at Eric and for the first time he saw through his lens the true horror of unabating hunger. He was appalled that he earned his living promoting such misery as a tourist attraction. He sold his camera, done with putting its glassy distance between himself and life.

With the money gone he couldn’t support himself freelancing anymore and he went back to Zeus full time. Almost on a whim, he pulled out a half-finished essay about the genome project he’d begun that night in Paris after too much tequila. The article eventually turned into a book deal. A few clean brain scans, the meditative calm of losing himself inside his writing—they gave him a way to live again, if only in the present tense. The only dependable tense, wasn’t it? Unadulterated by doctored memory, unfettered by anticipation? Over time it became an instinct more than an intentional choice. Finally, at thirty-nine he’d hit a balance that worked—enough giving to counter the taking, enough pause to weigh some risks. There were his parents, his half brothers. There was the legacy of his work if he had any luck. And there was Charlotte. More than any of it, there was Charlotte. But now the description of the faint serpentine scar coiled around Jane Doe’s arm felt like it could be enough to tip everything upside down.

—

The nurse’s aide was just starting Jane’s bath when they got to her bedside. Charlotte let Eric walk into the room ahead of her and pulled the curtain closed across the glass door. It was the only privacy she could offer them. The aide dropped a washcloth into the bathwater, set the tub between Jane’s legs, then removed the foam cushions that protected her heels. Eric had to turn his head at the sight of her blackened toes. The aide bent Jane’s knee to wash her calf, her shin, the hollow under her knee, tucking the blue cotton gown under the other leg so that only a small section was exposed. Eric could tell the aide had washed a hundred bodies. She was attentive and daydreaming all at the same time, sloshing the cloth back into the tub, wringing it out, shifting the gown to expose the other leg and beginning there. It must be little different before a wake, he thought, the ritual washing of a body before burial.