Gemini (37 page)

“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 talking 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 you 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?”

“China?”

She had to think for a minute. Was it Taiwan or Japan? “Doesn’t matter. Asia, right?”

He laughed at her, “Asia isn’t a country.”

“Okay, so I would have flunked Mrs. Bywaters’s geography. But if we could both hop on the backs of those seagulls and fly far enough, we would hit some country in Asia, right?”

“Right.”

“So you totally believe me?”

“Totally.”

“Would it still be there if you didn’t believe in it?”

“You’re teasing me now.”

She turned him around to face her and ran her fingers through his damp, iron-straight hair. The mixed color of his eyes, one blue, one brown, were all the ocean and earth she wanted. “No, Jake. I’m just saying that something can be real even when the only proof you have is your own faith.”

—

David was sitting at the kitchen table when they got home, a half-empty Corona in his hands. Raney sent Jake to his room—it was well after ten o’clock. “Did you eat?” she asked David. “I left you some chicken.” She opened the refrigerator and saw the plate still wrapped in Saran, untouched. She dropped her purse on the table and faced him, her hands bracing her against the kitchen counter. “I took him to the orthopedist. It took longer than I expected. I’m sorry.”

“I got a call about a job in Amanda Park. They wanted someone today. I told them I’d drive over as soon as I had a vehicle.”

“Well, that’s a shame. I’m sorry.” She opened the refrigerator again and took out the plate, peeled the plastic back, and set it on the table with a fork. “You should eat. I don’t like to waste food.”

“I don’t have much appetite at the moment.”

“Do you want to know what the doctor said? Do you care?”

“Care? I’m trying to find a job, Renee. To support us. This family.”

She paused one beat before she said it: “You wouldn’t need a new job if you hadn’t lost your temper with Fielding.”

He pushed halfway out of his chair and in one furious sweep knocked her purse and the plate of food off the table. Coins and ChapStick and pens flew like shrapnel; the glass shattered. “I wouldn’t have lost my temper if your son hadn’t started selling speed to his classmates!”

Had she known that she hated him before that moment? The word had been rolling loose and quiet in the corners of her mind, audible only when it woke her in the middle of the night, as unreal as a bad dream by morning. “I’m taking him to Seattle tomorrow,” she said in a low, hard whisper.

“Come again?”

“I’m taking Jake to Seattle tomorrow. I’ll need money.”

“Money? Hard to earn it with no car. I couldn’t even pick up my check today.”

“We can take a bus. Just get us to Aberdeen. Or drop us on the highway and we’ll flag down the local. Keep the car. Stay and look for work.” She walked down the hall, saw Jake curled on his bed—he would have heard everything through the paper-thin walls. “Jake?” He didn’t answer. “Pack a bag, Buddy. Okay?” He gave the smallest nod. Raney went to their bedroom and began throwing clothes into an empty canvas shopping bag—T-shirts, a bathing suit, her best dress—whatever she saw that was hers and not his.

A moment later David filled the doorway. “You got a credit card filled with imaginary dollars? I’m only asking you to wait until . . .”

“I’m driving to Kalaloch to pick up your check. There’ll be a morning bus—you can take us there before you go to work.” Every muscle was tense, braced to defend herself or grab Jake and run.

But instead of the violent reaction she anticipated, David slumped against the doorframe, his voice collapsing so solidly Raney half-expected the walls to shudder. “Oh, God. Oh, Raney,” he said, so bereft she was almost taken in. She looked at him—dark sweat rings staining his usually crisp white shirt, wisps of hair lank against his perspiring skin. She saw him so clearly at this moment—so worn out and weak that her decision to ever follow him anywhere mystified her. What had taken so long? How could she ask Jake to forgive her?

—

He would drive to Kalaloch to get the check—the night clerk wasn’t likely to cash it for her anyway. He asked her to come. The car ride would give them some time to talk—no, not to change her mind—to talk through what should happen next. For them. For Jake. Better to talk where he couldn’t hear it all, right?

Raney went to Jake’s bedroom, but when she sat next to him he rolled away. He had his shirt off and the abnormal curl of his spine felt like a scold for every mistake she’d ever made. She put her hand on his shoulder. “Jake? You awake?” He didn’t move but he didn’t have to. She knew he heard. “I’ll be back, Buddy. Get some rest.”

“Mom? I didn’t sell the drugs.”

She kissed him. “I never thought you did.”

—

She threw the canvas bag into the front seat; David walked around to the driver’s side, so apparently humbled it looked like his coat had suddenly grown too large for his stooped shoulders.

At night the land out here was isolated to the point of forbidding. Black sky and black fields lit only by their headlights; tunnels of wind-twisted trees and brackish marsh so dense with cattails the boundary between solid earth and drowning pool dissolved in a treacherous maze. Tsunami warning signs pointed the way to higher ground but anyone who lived out here understood the two-lane road could not carry them all to safety. The silence between David and Raney hung like ignitable gas; they drove without speaking all the way to Kalaloch, where he cashed his check. He handed the whole wad to her, and she stuffed it into her pocket.

She wanted to leave with Jake on that bus tomorrow with no question they would not be coming back to him. “I’m sorry, David,” she said, willing to take her own blame. “We rushed into this marriage. We should have taken more time. It’s nobody’s fault.”

He stared at the road, rolling his fists over the steering wheel. “Fault.” he repeated. “A family falls apart and it’s no one’s fault—like it’s a natural disaster or something?” His tone was bizarrely calm; it set Raney on edge.

“I’d hardly call us a family, David. Jake is sick, and all you’ve done is stand between him and help.” The car was gradually speeding up, the road so sparsely traveled their headlights seemed to end at the rim of the known world.