Gemini (9 page)

Looking at the MRI with the radiologist, hearing the tap-tap-tap of his pencil against the black-and-gray splatter of wounds through Jane’s brain, Charlotte had for one dark moment almost wanted Jane to be proved brain-dead so they could stop all the machines and let her go. Better, perhaps, than discovering how little of her might be left if her body survived with just enough brain function to keep her heart and lungs going. Still, when Felipe suggested they lighten her coma every few days to reevaluate, Charlotte argued they should focus instead on what they might be able to fix—her lungs, her liver, her kidneys, all of which were precarious—and give her brain as much time to heal as they could. He didn’t argue back. He’d been her partner for too long.

After the first few days, the flurry of media interest had died away, and to Charlotte it seemed like the authorities were passively waiting for someone to claim this lost woman rather than actively working to locate anyone who cared. She had traded phone messages with the deputy investigating Jane’s case, Blake Simpson, but hadn’t talked to him yet, though she knew through the nurses that he was following Jane’s progress—or lack of progress.

On her way back to the ICU after lunch she passed the hospital gift shop and saw a small stuffed raccoon on the shelf, which reminded her of a family camping trip at Crescent Lake on the Olympic Peninsula. She had been about eight, so Will, her brother, would have been ten. They had discovered a nest of baby raccoons in a tree near their campsite, scrambling and crying in the high branches as pitifully as abandoned kittens. Will had braced his back against the trunk so Charlotte could stand on his shoulders, swing her leg over the lowest limb, and shimmy close to the terrified animals. In their panic one had fallen to the ground. She was sure she had killed it, but after the longest minute of Charlotte’s young life that kit had stumbled to its four feet and scampered up the neighboring tree. Crescent Lake wasn’t too far from West Harbor, the hospital where Jane had been treated after her accident—maybe not far from where Jane had lived. Would hopefully live again. Charlotte put the stuffed raccoon on her hospital account and took it up with her to the ICU, glad that the nurse was out of the room when she put it beneath the sheet, tucked between Jane’s casted arm and her comatose body. Charlotte had an ill-placed urge to curl Jane onto her side with one hand folded beneath her cheek in the illusion of natural sleep.

Felipe stopped in shortly afterward. “Did he find you?”

“Who?”

“The policeman, Simpson.”

“He’s here? Blake Simpson?”

Felipe turned to look down the hall. “Heading for the elevator.”

Charlotte checked Jane’s monitors and went down the hallway after him. “Sheriff Simpson?” She caught up with him before the doors opened and introduced herself. “Do you have a minute?”

He shook her hand with a small bow. “Dr. Reese, at last. In person instead of in a message. I have all the time you want.”

She had expected someone stern-looking, or at least more intimidating. But his smile was so welcoming it was hard to picture him putting anyone in handcuffs. He was an inch or so shorter than her and had a gap the width of a sideways penny between his front teeth that gave him a boyish, approachable face. “Never say that in a hospital.” He cocked his head and leaned forward as if he’d misheard her. “That was a joke. About time. Never mind—I’m glad to finally connect with you. You haven’t identified her, have you?” and before he could respond she shook her head. “No. Crazy question. I would have heard. Are you getting any closer, do you think?”

“Is there somewhere we can talk?” he asked.

They ended up in the coffee shop in the basement—an establishment that could only survive in a city hospital where hundreds of people were too busy or too tethered to patients to leave the building. It smelled of stale dishwater and burned coffee, and the only natural light came through two narrow, grimy windows high on the wall, with views of feet passing along the sidewalk. She apologized for it, but Simpson said no one in law enforcement could drink coffee that hadn’t boiled at least half a day.

“I’m actually a sheriff’s office deputy. My official title.” He took a sip of coffee and added three teaspoons of sugar. “How much do you know about the accident?”

“Only what was in the emergency room record—so mainly about her injuries. Other than you, no one’s been to see her. Except the press.”

“Most of the investigation is being handled out in Jefferson County. When the call came in from 911 as a hit and run—
probable
hit and run—my office was notified along with our traffic investigator. This Jane Doe”—he met Charlotte’s eyes and paused—“your lady upstairs, was unusual in that the ambulance drivers and the ER staff said she was conscious and talking but couldn’t give them a clear story or her name. Maybe because she’d hit her head, or . . .”

Charlotte filled in. “She was hypothermic. That can make people confused. It was lucky she didn’t die of exposure before they found her.”

He nodded. “So you know all that. I understand she told the ambulance driver a deer was hit and she was trying to save it. But later she said she was blinded by somebody’s oncoming headlights.”

“So she was driving?”

He shook his head. “No. No, there was no vehicle at the scene. She was probably walking near the road, or crossing it, and was hit by a driver who fled the scene. Or possibly she was a passenger and the driver let her out of the car then hit her and drove off. Could have been hitchhiking. She was found about eight feet off the road in the grass—tall enough a lot of cars passed by for a lot of hours before a trucker spotted her. We don’t even know what time the accident happened. There
was
a dead deer, on the opposite shoulder of the road ten feet north of her location. And a second deer too. A fawn, closer to where the victim, your lady, was found. The medics, the ER docs, were paying more attention to her injuries than her story, of course. By the time the traffic investigator got to the emergency room, she’d been given something for pain and was making even less sense. The doctors wanted to take her to the operating room for her leg, which was bleeding pretty bad, and the on-duty deputy decided to let that go forward. Thought he could get more information after she was all fixed up. Of course, things didn’t go like everybody planned.” He grimaced in a commiserating sort of way. “Not much does.”

Charlotte found herself trying to re-create some plausible scene in her imagination: Jane walking down the road and finding the struck deer, bending to help it, and being hit by an oncoming car. Jane hitting the deer herself and sending someone else away in her car to get help—would a person do that for a deer? Wouldn’t the person have come looking for her? Or more grim scenarios: Jane kicked out of a car during an argument, Jane kidnapped, Jane fleeing—a husband, a boyfriend, a psychotic stranger, caught and hit and thrown into the weeds and deliberately deserted. “If the driver of her own car, someone she knew, hit her it would have been intentional, wouldn’t it?”

“I try not to assume. Everything’s considered until it’s ruled out.”

“Can you trace the car that hit her?”

He took another sip of his coffee and Charlotte thought he was repressing a smile. “All I can say is the car probably had a high carriage, judging by the impact. There were several sets of tire marks nearby—but then an uninvolved car could have braked for the deer and left it for dead before Jane even got there. So . . . hard to know.” He did smile then. “It’s never quite as easy as it looks on
CSI
.”

Charlotte rubbed her temples and laughed. “Yeah. Or on
Grey’s Anatomy
. She had nothing with her that gives any clue? No purse, no suitcase?”

“We found a canvas tote bag with some clothes in the mud a quarter mile down the road—some jeans and T-shirts. Underwear. Bathing suit. All about her size, so probably hers. She had a few hundred dollars in her pocket but no wallet.”

“No ID?” It was a stupid question, she knew.

“We combed every square inch of the surrounding area. A lot of marsh out there. The bag of clothes was half-sunk. No matches have turned up in the system, not in the State or National Missing and Unidentified Persons data banks, and her fingerprints aren’t on file. We had a sketch made and posted it, locally and on the web. Pretty sparse place, though. My theory is she was moving, or running,
from
somewhere else
to
Jefferson County—if she was from around Kalaloch or Forks, you would expect somebody out there to notice her missing. Only a handful of people live in those towns and most are Native.”

—

Charlotte got home late that evening and discovered Eric in her kitchen taking a lasagna out of the oven. “You cooked! That’s sweet of you,” she said, kissing him lightly and dropping into a chair at the table.

“Trader Joe’s. Vegetarian, though, and I added some fresh stuff. My Internet was down, so I worked here today.”

“Get much done?”

He shrugged. “Yeah. Except every new idea makes the book that much longer and the deadline further behind. I decided to add a chapter.” He lit a candle stub, poured two glasses of wine, and carried their plates over, sitting across from her and taking her hand, a habit he had of knitting their fingers together for a moment before starting to eat. Funny that all of a sudden it reminded her of her grandmother’s reliable preprandial prayer—a ritual so routine no one listened to it. “You look beat,” he said.

Hearing Eric articulate what must show in her face made Charlotte feel beyond “beat”—like her last pocket of energy had suddenly deflated. She was too tired to think about explaining her day to him. “So what’s the new chapter?”

“I keep coming across stories that spin out of some of these transplant cases: surprises from the genetic testing, unexpected consequences, weird symptoms.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, people who claim they inherit memories from their transplanted organs. Food cravings for things the donor ate—a lot of those. Twins who get the same cancer in the same kidney. Some pretty macabre stories, like a bone marrow donor who was accused of a rape when his blood showed up in the crime scene, but, of course, the rapist was the guy who’d gotten his bone marrow.”

“Someone he knew?”

“That’s the scariest part—he was a Good Samaritan donor; he’d been kind of a delinquent kid and wanted to make amends, but with his record nobody believed him. He almost went to prison for it. And then there was a girl with liver failure. Her dad wanted to donate part of his liver and the tissue typing showed that her real father was—”

“The postman,” Charlotte broke in.

“You wish. It was her mother’s brother.”

“Oh, God. People love stuff like that, though. Maybe they’ll make it into a TV serial and we’ll be rich,
rich
and famous!”

“Which you would hate,” he said, laughing.

“The famous part, maybe. You’ve got the genetics credentials covered, after your genome article. Does your editor like the idea?”

“I might write it into the book and see what he says after. I’m still tracking down one geneticist in Sweden who never answers his phone or his e-mail.”

Charlotte listened, watching the way his fingers played over his wineglass and thinking of how much of her body they had touched. They had made her feel beautiful in a body she did not consider beautiful. She had been with Eric over the course of two other books and numerous articles in their three years together, and she had decided it was not possible to love a writer until you understood the cycle of his work. Each phase reflected a different part of the creator as much as it reflected the developing creation itself. He was always happiest, or at least the most talkative, in the research phase, the journey of investigation igniting him from one topic to the next until gradually, intuitively, he discovered how they should be connected. He had an inherent curiosity fueled by the promise that whatever puzzle he solved, another question always waited. In that regard he had the perfect job. She envied him that flexibility—medicine could also be described as a quest to solve puzzles, but doctors could not choose the problems they were required to untangle, nor abandon them when no solution could be discovered. As he wrote his last draft, though, Eric would get quieter, as if all his words had to be saved for the page, ideally distilling his research so that readers were not just enlightened, they were inspired. But then he would turn the project in, meet his deadline, and immediately swoop her off to a weekend in New York or San Francisco, as if he wanted to make up whatever ground they’d lost. He’d talked about Paris this time, if she could get some extra days off. Out of the blue she caught herself wondering if these intense celebratory weekends really moved their relationship any further ahead. Ahead of where? Where were they headed? She almost asked him, in a complete change of mood, but checked herself. She was tired. And tonight she sensed in him the restless energy of being ready to be done with the book without being done with it—trapped in his indecision. How appropriate, she thought, and then hated herself for thinking it.

Eric sat back in his chair holding his wineglass halfway to his mouth. “Something’s bothering you. Things okay with your parents?”

“Not so great. It’s stressful to pack up thirty-eight years of your life,” she said, remembering she’d promised her mother she would help her wrap and box the contents of a china cabinet crammed with dozens of antique figurines her grandmother had passed down—dancing dandies and shepherdesses with porcelain lace frocks and pink-bowed lambs. Although she had been forbidden to touch them as a child, Charlotte would sometimes turn the skeleton key in the tall, glass-fronted doors of the mirrored cabinet and build a story set of these bisque-faced, rosy-lipped peasants. Sure enough, one day she dropped a coiffed lady in a bell-shaped dress and cracked her head clean off at the neckline. Charlotte had been terrified, but her mother, the least domestic of women, had propped the hollow head on a candlestick from which it reigned over their dinner table for years, decorated with tinfoil crowns for birthdays and Christmas. Her mother hated those figurines, though she wouldn’t confess it; just rolled her eyes and repeated, “I promised I would take care of them.” The burden would be Charlotte’s before long. “Hard to accept that all your junk won’t fit into the teeny-tiny suitcase they let you take to heaven. But they’re okay. Stuff at work isn’t so okay. I see a collision course ahead over my Jane Doe.”