Gemini (24 page)

She looked at Eric and felt a rush of love. If she ran to him, told him, “Now. Tonight. Time won’t last for us either,” would she catch him on this wave? Or was this urgent intimacy just her desire to have what Raney once had: Eric when he could still pretend he would never die.

He looked at her, squinting against the sun. “What?”

“It’s just so beautiful out here today.”

The docking announcement sounded overhead and they walked back to the car; the hold was chilly and dark and Charlotte turned the heated seat on until they were out on the road and back in the sun. They drove across Bainbridge Island and the small Agate Pass Bridge, which connected it to the peninsula, then half an hour later crossed the massive Hood Canal Bridge, hinged in the middle for the passage of nuclear submarines heading from the Bangor submarine base. The land in this corner of the country was splattered in channels and islands like a messy afterthought of creation. Charlotte had lived in the Northwest all her life and couldn’t memorize the puzzle of earth and ocean, only the names of the few towns and beaches that attracted summer tourists and their money. She and Eric should have taken some weekends here, gone hiking or to one of the lodges on the coast. There just never seemed to be enough time. Here and there a finger of tribal land touched the highway, marked by fireworks stands and pickup trucks advertising fresh-caught salmon and fresh-dug clams. Deeper into the peninsula the air was ripe with the stench of dairy cows and horses where massive barns loomed over modest homes. Then the clutter of the town began, sparse at first—a nest of abandoned cars, a small grocery, a bar, a hamburger stand.

Eric got quieter as they neared Quentin. Charlotte tried to imagine what he must be feeling; every time he’d been to this town it had marked some drastic change in his life—broken family, broken love, broken brain. Every memory from here must make the specter of Raney’s immobile body more horrifying. For one startling moment she wanted this trip to be a dead end, for Raney Remington to be discovered alive and well, gone fat with a passel of children. A complete stranger hooked up to Beacon Hospital’s machines.

“Do I turn here? Do you remember?” Charlotte asked.

“Take a right up there at the gas station. I can find her grandfather’s house. It’s a place to start.”

Quentin had hardly changed, Eric said. It seemed to have shrunk rather than grappled to its spindly legs in the eleven years since he’d been here. He signaled Charlotte to pull up in front of the plate-glass windows of a small building. Hardy’s Store was a sign shop now, advertising custom and preprinted plastic, laminated, or metal signs. The interior was dark, despite the Open sign hanging at an angle from a string on the front door. Eric cupped his eyes to the glass and saw walls plastered with No Trespassing, For Rent, For Sale, Logging Feeds Families, Stop the Land Grab. He was quiet and she took his hand.

“Was this where she worked? Raney?” Charlotte asked.

“No. It was my aunt’s grocery store. She and my uncle lived up there. And me, for a while.” He pointed to the three uncurtained windows above the porch where he had lived for two summers of his unfolding life. “I’m glad it’s closed. Don’t really want to know all that’s happened here since they died.”

Charlotte shielded her eyes to look up at the inhospitable dark rectangles. She had been to Eric’s childhood home in Laurelhurst once, before it was sold. A grand arts and crafts specimen on the crest of a hill overlooking the lake, with gardens spilling across a double-sized lot. His mother and stepfather were in South America, or maybe it was South Africa—they were always somewhere else—and Charlotte and Eric sat in the kitchen at the back of the house where doors led into a butler’s pantry and maid’s quarters. The house was chilly with no one home, room after cavernous room above and around them. Or maybe the house was always chilly—it had that aura.

She waited in the car outside the sign store while Eric stood, hands in pockets, somberly looking down the street as if something unexpected might appear. “Where now?” she asked when he finally got in.

“Her grandfather’s farm, I guess. If he’s still alive. Go straight along this road toward the park.” A few miles on he told her to take a left, then right, then turned them around to try another road. After five more turnarounds they crested a hill and he asked her to pull over. He got out and studied the mountains that could be seen from that vantage, the break in the horizon that marked the bay. “It was back there. The first road we took.” He directed Charlotte up and down four different driveways before he asked her to stop in front of a small, Hardie board–sided house with six identical neighbors. They were all relatively new, their patchy lawns dotted with plastic Big Wheels and skateboards. She followed him along a worn dirt path behind the houses until he stopped underneath an enormous bigleaf maple fouled with the scrap plywood of a broken tree house. Eric paced out where the old barn had been, the duck pond, the rusted red car nestled in morning glory and hollyhocks, the farmhouse itself. It had all been turned into a subdivision.

They drove twenty minutes down the highway to Port Townsend, and Eric found the art gallery where Raney had worked, but Sandy had sold it just six months earlier to a transplant from Los Angeles. “Bought it sight unseen and retired to more work than I left behind,” the new owner said. Sandy had taken off for the Costa del Sol, or was it Costa Rica? Someplace sunny. But in his files he did have an address for the woman named Renee who had worked for Sandy off and on. Charlotte put the address into her GPS; it was only a mile or so from where Raney’s grandfather had once lived. It had to be her.

This time Eric asked Charlotte to park at the end of the road. A muscle twitched in his jaw and Charlotte knew he was contemplating what he might say to the man who answered the door. “I should go,” Charlotte said. “I’m her doctor—I have a legitimate reason to talk to him.”

“Should you check with the detective first? Are you breaking any law?”

“Raney’s my patient, and she can’t tell me what she wants.” Charlotte looked over the steering wheel down the densely wooded road, no house even in sight. “I guess I don’t care. It’s the right thing to do and if the law isn’t with me, then it should be.”

After a minute of silence they decided to go together. But as soon as they rounded the first curve through the green-black trees and saw the only house, saw the broken front door, the grass-grown walk and punched-out windows, they knew it was vacant.

•
15
•

raney

Love is certainly the least
rational state of mind. Love makes babies that were never intended. Love drives knives into perfectly decent if still imperfect husbands and wives. It breaks bank accounts and sends people into rages over slights they’d ignore in a stranger. And it can blind you to changes happening in someone you’ve lived with and depended on—particularly when they are changes you don’t want to face.

Cleet sold his tools after the lawsuit. Raney didn’t even know he’d put an ad in until a pickup truck drove straight across their front yard and backed up to his shop. She would have thought they were being robbed if she hadn’t witnessed Cleet loading his jointer, shaper, band saw, and most of his routers into the padded bed. She watched, convincing herself it was an empty exercise in spite until the three men bent under the weight of a pristine slab of Honduras mahogany Cleet had owned for eight years—saving it for some piece of furnishing he had yet to imagine. That scared her. She pulled dinner out of the oven before it was warmed through, fed Jake, and sent him across the woods to play with the Wells twins. When Cleet came in she was waiting at the kitchen table, already worn out from the arguments she had shouted into the echoes of her own mind.

“It will cost you twice as much to replace them. Even buying used.”

He twisted a bottle of beer open and sat opposite her. She could smell his sweat, sharper than usual, smelled his unwashed hair. He’d lost ten pounds since the arbitration, she bet. “I won’t be replacing them. I won’t need them where I’m going,” he said.

Later, she tried to pin down what she’d assumed he meant by that—that he was taking a company job? Leaving Quentin? Leaving her and Jake? “Even if you work with somebody else’s tools you’ll need some of your own. Whatever they paid won’t make a dent in what we owe.”

“Raney, I’ve taken a job on a purse seiner. Off the Aleutians out of False Pass. I leave next week.”

She sat back in her chair with the force of it, like a physical blow in her chest. “You didn’t want to talk to me first? How long will you be gone?”

“A few weeks. Maybe more. Christo got me on. It’s good money. Too good to pass up.”

“So where am I in this? What if I say no?”

He looked at her for a long time; his eyes were so dark in the low light they were all enormous pupil, bottomless. “You won’t. Any more than I would you.”

—

There wasn’t time to think about Cleet’s choice before he left. Or maybe that was Raney’s best excuse not to think about it—a trick that had been getting her through the last months pretty well. They made love five times in four days. In the same four days Cleet and Jake made a tree fort in the bigleaf maple behind Grandpa’s house and a somewhat wobbly stool, into which Jake carved Raney’s initials. As if he’d been told that seven is the age of reason, Jake brought his school calendar to the breakfast table the day Cleet was leaving and made him circle the days he’d be gone, turning any sorrow into a team project the only way Jake knew how. Raney watched Cleet avoid the uncertainty by drawing ever fainter rings along successive days all the way through the month; fading one day to the next with the same gradual paling she saw between their skin tones.

After Cleet left, Raney bought a huge map and thumbtacked it to the living room wall. There was so much more ocean than land in the world, so much more space than people. The Aleutian chain swung halfway to Russia like the curved tusk of a great mammoth, blue water slipping through every island crevice, lapping millions of miles of beach. Great tongues of current forever swallowing the earth.

Cleet sounded upbeat when he called her from Port Moller. The work was grueling, filthy, he smelled rank with fish even when he could shower, but he liked his four crew members well enough. He called twice in the first few days offshore, but then Raney heard nothing for a week. Still, she didn’t worry. In some ways it was easier at home, with just her and Jake. They settled into new habits—dinner in the tree fort when the weather was good, walking together through the woods and along the creek bed to Grandpa’s every day.

She didn’t start worrying until the doorbell rang and through the sidelight she saw a man on the porch with the name of the boat stitched on his jacket. Her very first feeling when he gave her the news was a deep shame for the surreal overlap in time when she had been painting, playing with Jake, cooking and freezing meals for when Cleet came home, and all the time he was already gone.

The net had just closed and they were starting to purse when the boat lurched. The sea was rough that day. Pretty high. Cleet had been at the bow, the others at the stern, so they couldn’t say exactly how many minutes passed before they realized he was in the water. They’d sent the skiff over immediately; the coast guard was there within twenty minutes or so . . . The man giving her the news stopped talking after a while, or Raney stopped hearing him. Even by the next day the conversation seemed vague as a fading dream—someone else’s nightmare, surely. She remembered asking the man about a survival suit, or a life jacket—was Cleet wearing one? He’d rushed to say the captain had made them wear some new, high-tech jackets—CO
2
cartridge that inflated if you went over. Gave one to every man, it was that rough. But a survival suit? No—only if the boat was in danger. Then he’d licked his lips and taken a minute to think. She could see his mind turning, weighing, almost stopping himself before he said they’d found all the jackets on board though, in the end. She remembered leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and her forehead on her fists, concentrating like he was telling her the last secret code to save the world and it was her job to memorize it, only it was coming out in a language she couldn’t understand.

—

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.