Gemini (7 page)

“Leave? Now?”

“I’d rather eat in the bathtub.”

—

Charlotte first met Eric at the publication of his second book, which might as well have been his first, as his
actual
first book went out of print not too many years after its release. This second book was a narrative nonfiction that followed three couples through in vitro fertilization. It did reasonably well—won an award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and garnered a three-line mention in the
New York Review of Books
.

He gave a public reading at the Elliott Bay Book Company. Charlotte saw a mention of it in the
Stranger
, and on a whim, she decided to go. Unfortunately, the reading coincided with a Mariners home game. Every parking place near Pioneer Square was taken; the lots were charging triple. She ended up parking four blocks north of the ferry and getting to the store twenty minutes late, embarrassed about interrupting the author and his audience in the middle of the talk. The bigger embarrassment, though, was that she was one of only five who’d shown up at all, two of whom appeared to be local homeless taking shelter from the drizzly weather. She considered pretending she’d walked into the wrong room, leaving before she was noticed, but he nodded and beckoned her in and she was stuck. She could have guessed, though she didn’t know until later, that it was his first public appearance. He read from three long passages in a nervous voice, losing his place twice. Halfway through the third selection one person walked out; Charlotte found her mind drifting to the episode of
The West Wing
that she was missing. And his book didn’t even cover artificial insemination. She slipped out the door the second he asked if there were any questions.

The ball game must have let out—the streets were crowded with big-bellied men waving enormous, inflatable hands and overwrought children smeared with mustard and tears. The light changed against her before she could cross, and the swell of bodies and the smell of beer felt intolerable. She looked at her watch, impatient to get back to her car.

Suddenly the crowd took in a simultaneous gasp and then fell silent. There was movement, commotion, a flux of people to the right and back to the left, shifting quick and coordinated as a flock of starlings united in panic. A few solitary voices called for help and the crowd parted like cornstalks falling under a mower blade just before something heavy hit the ground. At the curb, half-sprawled in the muddy gutter, Charlotte saw a big dark slab of a man seizing with arched back and rigid limbs, his supersized plastic Mariners cup rattling against the curb with each rhythmic jerk of his arm.

Charlotte’s purse and jacket were down and she was on the pavement between the moving traffic and the man’s head, anchoring her small hands on either side of his meaty cheeks to protect them from the cement. A woman called out, “Put something in his mouth.” Charlotte looked at her and said, “I’m a doctor. Don’t put anything in his mouth. Call 911.” She looked for the nearest sober, calm adult and told him to find a cop and get the street blocked off. She checked the man’s wrists and neck for a MedicAlert, then she scanned the faces and called out in a voice twice as loud as her own, “Does anyone know this man?”

It ended nearly as quickly as it began. His seizure stopped. Charlotte lifted his jaw to open his airway and leaned over his face to make sure he was breathing. Slowly his body relaxed as if he had been in nothing more than an oddly timed deep nap. When his eyes fluttered open, she put her mouth near his ear and spoke low and soothing, “You’re okay. I’m right here with you. We’re going to get you to a hospital and everything will be okay.”

After the ambulance left she looked down at the front of her dress—splattered with greasy mud and saliva. Her purse and coat were no longer on the curb where she thought she’d dropped them. She brushed her hair out of her face with the backs of her filthy hands, suddenly exhausted and in no mood to deal with her stolen cards and keys and money. And then a man walked toward her from the perimeter of the dispersing crowd, holding her purse and coat in his arms. It was the man who’d given the reading—was it hours ago? The author. It was Eric Bryson.

He asked her if she was all right, which struck her as funny given that she was not the patient. She saw him blush, catching his mistake in her eyes. He asked her if she was a doctor, then immediately added, “Of course you must be,” and said he’d interviewed a lot of doctors for his book. Had she gotten much out of his talk? All the while he held on to her coat and purse as if unaware they were keeping her hostage there. When she finally reached for them, he invited her for a drink. Charlotte looked down at the front of her dress and lifted her shoulders as if the answer were obvious. Standing this close she was struck by the contrast between his dark hair, his thick dark eyebrows, and his eyes, which were a comforting gray-blue that reminded her of the sea glass she and her brother had collected on family vacations to the Oregon coast or Ocean Shores.

The weather had begun to clear and the breaking clouds were slashed by a pale twilight sky. They began walking up Alaska in the direction of her car, but then they were turning up Marion, and then at the door to the Metropolitan Restaurant before she thought to question who was following and who was leading and whether she cared. She wiped the front of her dress with a wet paper towel in the women’s room and buttoned her coat over it, realized upon looking in the mirror that her mascara had wept black streaks over her cheeks.

They split an antipasto plate and a bottle of Zinfandel, and Charlotte noticed how long and slender his fingers were, the hands of a pianist or painter, like they were intended to have a purpose all their own. Designed, perhaps, for when the job of writing involved a quill rather than a keyboard. She told him a little about her job at Beacon, her house, which she had just bought and was trying to remodel herself after a mishmash job by prior owners. She told him about growing up in Seattle in a family of doctors (her mother a pathologist, her father a surgeon) and how sometimes she wondered if she’d ever given any other occupation a chance. Her brother, Will, had proposed to his wife in college on the condition that she, too, go to medical school, declaring it the only way to stomach the average, gory, Reese-family-dinner conversation. They were both pediatricians now.

Charlotte did not tell Eric about Ricky, the boyfriend she had just broken up with, or the fact that one month earlier she and her sister-in-law, Pamela, had lit a match to Ricky’s last and best present to Charlotte, a ticket to Belize, where Ricky was now staying in an oceanfront cottage with the girlfriend he’d originally left for Charlotte. All the better—Charlotte burned under tropical sun and hated how she looked in a bathing suit. She did, however, remind herself that she had sworn on the flames of that ticket that she had nothing more in her to give to a man, romantically at least, and at thirty-five planned to take her life forward alone. But even at the height of her anger she admitted that she hated Ricky more for the years she’d given up to him than for his deceit; she probably wouldn’t have dated him at age twenty-two, twenty-four, twenty-eight. So it was herself she should be angry at, right? Regardless, it was only herself she could change.

By the time they finished two tiramisus she knew a lot less about Eric than he knew about her. He’d been a mediocre student but a passionate reader. After college he’d taken a job writing for an airline throwaway, churning out articles about beaches in the airline’s small market, tips for getting through TSA, which terminals had the best burgers. Two years into it he put on a backpack, cashed in all of his accumulated frequent-flier miles, and got hooked on traveling for a while. He’d done pretty well as a travel writer for a few more years and then the Human Genome Project took off. One night he drank too much tequila and wrote an editorial for the
New York Times
about the risks of knowing your own genetic code, the impossible-to-answer question of whether a deadly diagnosis would change how you live. His tequila-enhanced spin caught the eye of an editor at
Nature
who commissioned an article, which got noticed by a publisher who bought Eric’s first book. There was a hesitancy about the way he told Charlotte that story, a reluctance to answer her questions about what had sparked his passions, for travel or science or, in fact, for writing at all. It was a modesty she found comforting and trustworthy, but then she reminded herself that it was natural to look for those traits after dealing with Ricky’s ego for more than a year, so she switched to less probing topics. Thus, it was no accident that Charlotte left the restaurant without a complete picture of Eric. But when she woke up the next morning her first thought was about a comment he’d made. He wanted to be a science writer, he’d said, because he’d lost faith in the public’s ability to objectively weigh data: too much zealous opinion, too much TV, too much unquestioned religion, too few questioning minds. It could have sounded bitter, but Eric relayed it like a parent gently tsk-tsking a lazy child, like such delinquency only made his job more critical.

After they’d eaten he’d walked her back down to her aging Saab. “Haven’t seen one of these in a while,” he said.

“Yeah. It runs. When it’s not in the shop. I should ditch it, but I’m attached.”

She unlocked her car and stood with one foot inside so the door was between them. Still, he stood close enough that she could smell the soap from his white shirt, could see the shadowed notch of his collarbone above his loosened tie. His eyes moved over her face, lingering on her mouth. “You were good with that man tonight. Kind,” he said.

“Thanks. And your reading was good. I’m glad I came.”

“My reading sucked. But I’m glad you came too. Got you and two homeless people out of the rain.”

Charlotte laughed and started to close her car door. Eric held his hand against it and leaned in. “Why did you come, by the way?” She smiled and shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t tell him it was because she had decided that if she was still single on her thirty-eighth birthday, she would consider artificial insemination and raising a child on her own.

•
6
•

raney

Raney didn’t hear a word
from Bo from September to July. By December she had quit checking the mailbox. By March she decided she didn’t care. By April she convinced herself he’d gone all preppy and would be no fun even if he did come back to Quentin. But by June she was taking the long way home from school every day on foot, just so she could pass Hardy’s Store. When she chanced upon him sitting on his aunt’s front porch in early July she could see straightaway that she’d been partly right—he was paler and more awkward than in her angriest memory. His arms and legs seemed to have grown six inches but forgotten to notify his brain. She gave him a look intended to show she was trying to recall his name, and when he said, “Hey, Raney,” his voice broke high and then dropped onto a low note she would never have recognized.

“Hey yourself.”

“Friendly as ever, aren’t you?”

“I’m friendly enough. To people that act like a friend. How’s
New York
?” She drew the words out in a pretentious drawl.

“Connecticut. It’s okay. How’s
Quentin
?”

His own pretentious drawl naming this unpretentious town sent a hot flush from Raney’s chest up to her face. “No worse for missing you, if anybody did.”

But after the rust was chipped away, they found a friendship intact if more tempestuous for reasons Raney could not discern. The year had changed more than his voice and his height. He wasn’t as bookish anymore, and suddenly she wasn’t always the one laying down the dare. A splinter of anger seemed to be lodged inside him, working its way to the surface in the violent rocket of stones he hurled off the bluff, or the heights he was now willing to climb to. Sometimes in the way he looked at her. Some days they were friends like they’d been friends the summer before, moving from one adventure to another, one joke to the next, fluid as a river flowing downhill without any inkling of consequence. On those days they were a team—a unit of two kids against the grown-up world. But other times Raney saw something else quiver through Bo, something primitive and scary and repulsively attractive at the same time. She attributed it to his parents’ divorce or the headaches he complained about—it would be years before she connected the changes in him to what was changing in her too. It was as if, after fourteen years of knowing exactly who she was, some ancient, alien being seeded inside her had awakened to throw the old Raney out on her ear. It brought out something mean in her. It made her want to hurt him in a way she hadn’t since the day she stranded him in the seal pup cave. It made her want to cry, which she had not done in a long time.

—

August started with a week of hard rain, and the stream at the back of Raney’s grandfather’s property clogged up behind branches and brush until the shallow duck pool became a full-blown pond, thick and olive green. She woke up to Grandpa’s cursing in the yard and pushed aside her curtains to see him standing beside a shovel planted in the mud with his hands on his hips, his cap thrown to the ground. Never a good sign. She slid the window open and called out to him but slammed it shut at the first breeze, nearly doubled over with the smell.

A six-point buck had got wedged into the driftwood dam. Grandpa said he probably died days ago, his bloated body drifted downstream by the rain. Raney’s idea was to chop up the dam and let him drift down to the neighbor’s farm, but Grandpa was already going to the barn to get a pruning saw and rubber gloves. She stood near the back door in her nightgown, bare feet turning blue in the dewy grass. “Get your clothes on,” he told her.

She started to ask him what he was expecting her to do, but decided cutting up a decaying deer might be a lesser evil than his mood. At the water’s edge the smell was so foul she had to drop her head between her knees. She ran back to the house and found a bottle of her grandmother’s Youth-Dew and some handkerchiefs to tie around their faces. Grandpa worked for over an hour getting the legs off so the deer could be rolled up inside a plastic tarp. He wore thigh-high green waders to work a rope under the belly, crimson blood coiled through the nacreous water, and the rising heat of the day brought out swarms of iridescent flies. Even such gore has its own kind of beauty.

Once the deer was trussed up in the tarp, Grandpa said he needed Raney’s help to haul it out, but despite their combined weights angling parallel to the slope of the bank, they made no progress. Grandpa looked every year of his age, leaning over his knees with that perfumed robber’s mask sucking in and out of his mouth, and Raney could not help but think of the day he had raced Bo uphill and met his own match ticking away inside his own chest. Not five minutes later she heard Bo calling to her from the driveway, turned around, and saw him straddling his bicycle. She felt an inexplicable rush of guilt, as if she’d been caught at the scene of a murder. He walked closer until a breath of wind carried the rank miasma of the rotting carcass in his direction and he covered his face with his sleeve. Raney watched him try to puzzle out the mess they were in. “You need help?”

Grandpa laughed, but Raney wanted to run; some irrational part of her mixing up the smell and the decay and an image of how her hair must look ballooned over the tied handkerchief. All of it jumbled into that unwelcome diffidence she felt when she saw Bo’s jeans slung low on his hips or his shirt pulled tight across his shoulders.

“Go get him a kerchief, Raney,” said Grandpa.

The three of them were able to pull the carcass over the bank and through a patch of woods to an open pocket of higher ground with good sun. Grandpa said the birds would spot the deer quick, promising that within a few days it would go to its sky burial. He rolled the deer off the plastic and arranged its dismembered legs like it was just asleep, then he folded the tarp into a square, bound and knotted by the bloody rope. He stood straight as a soldier by the body with his head tucked down, and Raney felt Bo’s eyes watching her, looking for a sign about what he was supposed to do. Then Grandpa pulled out his camp knife and sliced a rectangle of flesh out of the buck’s shoulder. He craned, searching the treetops, and then flung the meat skyward, whistling low when a blue-black wedge transformed into a raven, which in one perfect arc carried the first bit of that dead deer to heaven.

Bo’s head turned and followed the bird so far he wobbled and righted himself against a tree. Grandpa wiped his knife blade on a fern bough and walked around the pond to disappear inside the barn. A minute later Raney and Bo heard the creak and whump of the bunker hatch hitting the floor, and the smoke of hay dust swirled and settled beyond the barn doors.

Raney saw Bo press his fingers to his temples. “You’re not going to throw up again, are you?”

Bo ignored the question and walked out of the clearing toward the bluff. The light breeze trailed over salted sand and tide pools; Raney took a deep breath and wished she could force the clean air through her skin, turn herself inside out and be rinsed pure. After a minute or so Bo sat cross-legged on the ground, took out his pocketknife, and started whittling at sticks like he buried rotting deer every day in Seattle. “I bet your grandpa was sure the world was ending when Chernobyl blew up.”

“You shouldn’t laugh at him.”

“He did, though, didn’t he? I bet he made you spend the whole day in the bunker.”

Raney started to deny it but couldn’t stare Bo down. He had an edge about him today that kept getting in her way, making her hear her words before she said them, see her own face, her shape when she moved. “It wasn’t so bad. I learned how to play poker.” But Bo looked like he’d scored a point on her, and Raney’s mind raced, looking for a way to get back at him, a name for whatever game this was. “You stayin’ out here the whole summer? Seems like your mom would want to spend some time with you before you fly halfway across the planet back to that boarding school,” she said.

“My mom’s in Mexico hunting ghosts or angels with her boyfriend. So what’s a ‘sky burial’ anyway?”

“That’s how the Buddhists bury each other. Buddhists don’t believe the body matters, once your soul has left. They carry you to a mountain and chop you up for the birds to eat.”

“You believe that?” he asked.

“That I want to be fed to birds after I die?”

“That you have a soul that goes on. Something that outlasts you.”

Raney looked up at his face. The sun was directly behind him and her eyes stung. “Grandpa says Buddhists believe in karma. That you come back in another lifetime, better or worse depending on if you’ve been good or bad. You could come back rich, or a beggar. Or not human at all. Maybe a dog. That’s why Buddhists don’t kill animals. Even an ant. It could be your own kid from a past life.”

Bo was real quiet for a minute. Then he said, under his breath, “Wonder what the hell I did.”

Raney couldn’t help herself. “Yeah. Your life is so terrible you have to choose which mansion to live in, your mom’s or your dad’s.”

“You can be a b-i-t-c-h sometimes, Renee Remington.”

“And you can be a stuck-up pain in the neck. I haven’t seen my mom since I was six—for all I know that dead deer was my mom, working her way down the ladder of bad deeds. How should I know what happens when you die? I thought your parents made you go to church. Didn’t they give you all the answers?”

Bo was silent and Raney was already wishing she could take her words back. She felt too aware of his body next to her, like he was running a fever, the heat of his skin radiating into her own. She wanted him to stab that stupid knife into his arm. She wanted him to go home, all the way to Seattle. All the way to Connecticut. She wanted him to sit closer on the smooth warm rock, to feel the length of his arm matched alongside hers and discover exactly where her shoulder would fall below his. She wanted him to take two wrong steps and fall off that cliff.

After a long minute Bo hurled the stick out over the water, and they both watched it spin end over end, until it fell below the line of sight and they were still, as if listening for the far-off splash. His back was to her now and suddenly Raney heard, or convinced herself that she heard, her grandfather calling her name. She stood to take the path home, but her foot twisted under a rim of the flat rock and she stumbled, reaching for the only thing within her grasp—Bo. He turned and caught her arm, righted her, and there they were, her eyes just at the level of his mouth, and he did not let her go. She turned her face up—it was an instinct—and now she could see him clearly, his eyes, his thin, angular cheeks, streaked and damp. Bo was crying.

—

Bo didn’t come around much for a few weeks after that. Then, near the end of August, his aunt had to drive to Port Townsend to meet with a banker. Bo suspected his aunt and uncle might be selling the store—just a guess, but his aunt did seem even more taciturn than usual. She wanted Bo to accompany her, and when Raney rode her bike past the Chevron station and saw them gassing up the scuffed red car, Bo invited her along. It was only a twenty-minute drive, but by the time they got to Port Townsend, Bo and Raney were joking in the backseat, listening to Cyndi Lauper and Prince on Bo’s Walkman, trading the headset back and forth as if no awkwardness had come between them.

Mrs. Hardy drove up and down Water Street looking for the right building until, with an exasperated sigh, she parked and got out, allowed they could walk out to the beach if they caused nobody trouble.

Being a weekday, the beach wasn’t crowded, but it was still noisy and smelled of hot dogs and Coppertone, so it felt like a resort compared with Quentin. While most of the beaches on the peninsula were half rock or half mud, the sand here was fine-grained and silky and so hot they had to dig their feet into the darker sand underneath, still damp from the last high tide. Raney twisted her hair up and pinned it with a driftwood stick, bent over a clear pool, and let the water pour into her cupped palms to wash over her throat and the divots and curves along her collarbone. When she stood up, Bo was watching her. She turned and started down the beach. They came across some kids building a sand castle, and when Bo fell behind she looked back to see him digging away right alongside them. A wave washed in and the entire fortress, at least two feet high, collapsed. One of the kids started crying; Raney laughed until a parent stood up and Bo and Raney took off running. Soon the beach was well below them and it became a game of chase, her after him, then him after her. Raney cut up the asphalt drive and across the stubbled lawn until, nearly winded, she came to the concrete gun batteries built to defend Admiralty Inlet from the Japanese. Bo was far enough behind she only had to duck to lose him beyond a small hill, then circle back into the dark tunnels and wait.

One heard stories about these abandoned military caverns, a maze of dank, underground rooms and hallways—hideouts for killers and thieves, and the spirits of soldiers who’d shipped out and never come home. Certainly more than one girl in the Quentin high school had lost her virginity in here. Raney’s footsteps echoed against the walls. She heard Bo running toward her and froze, holding her breath until it hurt. He stopped somewhere near the entrance, then turned in another direction. She waited until it was quiet and stepped around the corner, so far removed from daylight her eyes could not adjust and the blackness made her dizzy, as if gravity, too, had been altered by this midnight in the middle of the day.

She listened for a long time and then gingerly walked forward with her arms extended to find the wall. Even with so much care it still shocked her when she hit it, maybe just to realize the blackness was that profound—her own fingertips beyond her sight. She stepped her hands along the wall in the direction she thought led outside, cringing at a plasticky knob of dried gum, a slick patch of moss. And then a corner, another slab wall—not where she expected it. Her pulse jumped. She didn’t know if she should go back or go forward or turn around in open space and stumble in a new direction. It was not a closed box—she had come in through an opening and there was no logic to the terror that someone or something could have shut it off, shut her inside a concrete cell. She turned around and pressed her back against the wall, tried to will her eyes to suck in any point of light, but she might as well have had no eyes. She started to call out—Bo was almost certainly out there, somewhere. Or someone was. She heard shuffling, a subtle quake of movement over the ground, but it had no origin or arc she could make sense of. It moved again, close—very close. A brush of two hard surfaces. An instant later she shrieked when something warm rubbed against her arm and, as if the shriek had told her attacker precisely where she was standing, two hands grabbed her around her waist. She heard another voice shriek then bust up laughing.