Gemini (16 page)

—

Eric was already up when Charlotte woke the next morning. He’d made coffee and put out a plate of French toast for her; his own dirty dish was already in the sink. He sat at his computer, possibly so engrossed in his chapter he didn’t hear her come in. More likely upset with her about the half-finished conversation last night, she decided. It frustrated her again, too easily. “Eric, would you just say it? Tell me I was insensitive. That my family drives you crazy.” He turned around and looked at her with an expression she hadn’t expected, a surprised half smile on his lips but such anguish in his eyes it drilled even deeper into her guilt. “Okay,
I’ll
say it. I was thoughtless. I . . .”

“Oh, God, Charlotte. Please stop. This is not . . . I need to go to the hospital with you.”

A breath caught in her throat. She saw it all now—how quiet he’d been after dinner, the long shower and something taken from the medicine cabinet before he slept deep and hard. Had he seen his neurologist lately? Had he had his routine scan and kept the results to himself? “Why? What?”

“I need to see your patient.”

“My patient?”

“The scar on her arm you described—I need to see it. I think I know who she is.”

•
10
•

raney

Raney didn’t totally believe what
she said to Bo the night they came so close to making love, that “the universe rolls over people like me.” But it was plenty clear the human race considered some people more equal than others, and her words served their purpose. The next day a FedEx truck dropped the book of Monet paintings at her apartment with no return address, no note—like it had been sent to her from the painter’s Giverny grave. Other than that Bo didn’t make any effort to reach her.

She caught the bus back to Quentin for the holidays; Christmas came and went with no letter, no phone call, no late-night pebbles thrown at her window. It was a vacuum of contact so intentional it made its own raucous noise and crushed even the bit of hope she would admit to. There were nights after Grandpa went up to bed when Raney would finish the dishes and pull a kitchen chair over to the telephone, stare at the infuriatingly mute black box, and think herself through every step of calling Bo: how she’d pick up the receiver, punch in the ten numbers burned so crisp in her memory she knew the page and column they occupied in the Seattle phone book. She could feel the hard circle of plastic pressing against her head and hear the punctuated hum as their lines connected. Her imagination always screeched silent at the moment she should have heard Bo saying hello. She was never going to make that call or put a pen to paper—partly because there were not enough words to make either of them feel right about what had or hadn’t happened. But partly, also, to punish herself. As if she needed to be sure she hurt as much or more than she suspected she’d hurt him.

Three days after New Year’s an overnight frost laced every twig and tire rut with shimmering crystals and Quentin threw off its blanket of clouds to the bright-blue arctic cold. As always, Grandpa got up and dressed before the sun was above the horizon. He went out to the barn to feed the dogs and hens and did not come back in. Raney was at the kitchen window in her bathrobe when some wrong shape between the sharp shadow of the barn door and the glittering grass caught her eye. It was Grandpa’s booted leg. In a breath she was out the door and kneeling over him. The white enamel pan of chicken feed had been dumped and pellets lay scattered in the folds of his jacket and the stubble of his beard like oat-colored hail.

“Slipped,” he said. “The ice.”

He raised an arm for Raney to help him up, but halfway to sitting he collapsed again. “Grandpa? What is it? Did you break something?” He shook his head and rubbed at his left shoulder, his face the same color as the frost. “Did you fall on your arm?”

“It’s not broken. Just . . . hurts.” He rubbed it again and then balled his fist into the middle of his chest. Raney bunched an old horse blanket under his head and ran into the kitchen to call 911.

Grandpa stayed in Jefferson General Hospital for two weeks. The doctors told Raney he’d lost 25 percent of his heart. She bit back the question of which quarter was gone—the piece that loved tramping alone through the woods following deer up impossibly vertical paths, or the piece that loved felling and chopping up two great fir trees every summer so they could be self-sufficient with heat for a full winter, or the piece that loved hauling engine parts out of old trucks and cars to refurbish and sell. Or maybe, God forbid, the piece that loved her.

He seemed diminished when he came home, his blusters and gripes punctuated with question marks. After a week or so, when Raney still couldn’t goad the fight back into him, she concluded it was less from circulatory weakness than from slamming into his own mortality. But mortality wasn’t really the right word. Dependence—that was the demon slipping in like a wintery draft, half-disguised in the pills and capsules they sent home with him.

On the twelfth day, when he’d barely joined into a conversation with her, Raney decided the noise of one steady voice was better than questions answered by silence. She grabbed a book off her bedroom shelf and pulled a rocking chair next to Grandpa’s bed, crossed her feet on the end of his mattress, and started reading out loud. “ ‘Chapter One. Third. I’ve watched through his eyes, I’ve listened through his ears, and I tell you he’s the one—’ ”

Grandpa interrupted, “Who’s the one?”

“I don’t know yet. We have to keep reading.”

“Sounds like it’s about Jesus or something. Religion or something.”

Raney flipped the book over and looked at the jacket cover, realized it was one of the books Bo had left at her house the first summer he’d been in Quentin—one of the few she hadn’t read. “It’s a novel, Grandpa.
Ender’s Game
by a man named Card. Orson Card,” and she continued reading through the first page until he interrupted her again.

“I just got out of a hospital—I don’t want to hear a story about people having operations.”

“Well, what
do
you want?
Little House on the Prairie
?”

“At least I’d learn something useful.” He pushed a Kleenex box off the bedside table and dug a big paperback out from under a stack of
Auto Trader
s. “Here. Read this.”

Raney readjusted herself in the chair and flipped through the book for a minute before she started reading, first to him and then out loud to herself in a tone of disbelief. “ ‘I believe we are the descendants of people who left civilizations among the stars. . . . The world’s cities will perish but there need not be another Dark Age. Instead, we can go from our Survival Homesteads on to the stars.’ Grandpa? Where did you find this?”

He sat up with more vigor than he’d shown since his heart attack and snatched the book away. “Give it
t
’
me. Look here. Oh, damn—I can’t read it without my damn glasses. Look here.” He opened the book to a different page and thrust it into her lap.

She saw the title now,
The Survivor
, volume 1, by Kurt Saxon, and read the table of contents: “ ‘How to Make a One or Two Horsepower Windmill from Scrap. How to Make the Best Black Powder. Surviving a Nuclear Winter
.
’ A nuclear winter? The Berlin Wall came down last year, Grandpa, or didn’t you hear?”

“And Saddam Hussein is taking over countries left and right. It never hurts to know how to take care of yourself, Renee. By yourself. You never know when you’ll be left all alone.”

Raney shut the book, stung as sharply as if her grandfather could have known how close to her heart his arrow of personal pessimism had landed. “Take your pills, Grandpa. I’m gonna put dinner on.”

“Renee,” he called out just as she reached the door. She stopped, her hand still on the doorknob, unable to look at him. After a minute of silence she heard him exhale so deep she had to turn around, worried it was a last gasp, and was almost more startled to see him colored with emotion. “I know it’s not easy, the years between leaving one home and finding another. I know it’s not easy.”

—

Until the day Raney told her grandfather that she was not going to return to the Art Institute, she’d had only one blowout argument with him. She had just turned twelve, and after much pleading on her part, he agreed to take her on a backpacking trip. When the awaited day came, they hiked eleven miles uphill to the campsite with gear and food and water, her load nearly as heavy as his, and by the time he finally dropped his pack and said they were done for the day, Raney was holding her eyes wide to keep tears from spilling down her dirty cheeks. Grandpa counted five matches into her palm and pointed to the blackened ring of rocks in the middle of a clearing, proof any number of former hikers had readily made fires on this site. Then he started stringing up the rope and tarp that would be their tent as if he didn’t doubt they’d be heating chili and warming their stiff hands within the quarter hour.

The sun was below the tree line and mosquitoes emerged in a rank miasma. Her sweat-soaked T-shirt grew cold, reeking of the smoke-and-pepper musk new to her body. She walked the perimeter of the campsite gathering sticks and dead wood, constructing her timber tower with the same careful layering she used for their woodstove at home. But in the woodstove she’d always wadded a brown paper grocery bag under the kindling pyramid. She struck the first match on a campfire rock and touched it to the smallest dry stick, watched the bark glow and flare, then dampen just as quickly when the bark burned away to pulp.

On her next try she collected pine needles dry as old bones, dead aspen leaves, and brittle gray cones. She lit the second match, waited until the sulfur burned away and the tiny wooden stick held a steady blue flame, then touched it to each material in turn. Only the fine spray of pine needles burned. She cupped them against the wind down to the bottom of her pyre, where they dissolved from orange to gray ash without so much as a thread of smoke. Matches three and four died an equally futile death. Her hands grew clumsy and thick with the cold and the fifth match snapped in half, so close to the bulbous tip it burned her fingers when it finally caught and she dropped it into the dirt.

Raney sat down on a rock and glared at the charred skeletons of another man’s success as if all her anger might reignite a blaze. Grandpa troweled a shallow ditch around the pitched tarp, whistling through his collection of birdcalls.

Half an hour later he pried the lid off a can of chili and started eating it cold, straight from the tin. He handed her a spoon and gestured for her to dig in. Raney flew into a fury, threw the spoon into the coals, and told him she hated camping and when she grew up she would live in a house with a built-in furnace and a dial thermostat and when she didn’t sleep in her own bed she would sleep in a hotel on clean sheets somebody else had to wash. He listened and nodded and then untied his Coleman bedroll and went to sleep, leaving the can of chili with its thick orange jelly of grease on a split log for Raney to eat when she chose. She had stood outside the tent, railing at him until the forest was hushed as a graveyard and she was too spent to care what she ate or where she slept.

The next morning he took her hand and led her into the woods, scanning the branches of the evergreens without even glancing at the ground. “Here,” he said, stopping in front of a bough laced with pale blue-green necklaces of moss. “Tease that off the branch. Go around here.” He swept his hand in a general circle. “Get three or four handfuls of the stuff.” At the base of her virginal pyre he mounded up a nest of moss and handed Raney one more match. The moss caught and blazed at the first touch of the flame, burning long enough to scare all trace of damp and cold from the smaller sticks so they, too, burned and caught and in turn caught those above.

They cooked oatmeal and sausages and hot chocolate and roasted half a bag of marshmallows. Grandpa acted like last night had never happened—talking about camping trips he’d taken with Raney’s grandmother before she got sick, a boyhood elk hunt with his own grandfather, “back when we used muskets and flint,” and laughed gently under his breath when Raney nodded without so much as a smile. After they ate they carried the dishes to a stream and scrubbed them out with sand and sat still and quiet until all the life that depends on a stream forgot they were intruders and let them witness the ceaseless hunt for food.

After a very long while he said, “Raney, you’ll make a lot of choices in your life—some like mine and some different. But you can’t know who you are unless you know who you are not. Met your limits and overcome what you can. On your own.” He paused, giving her time to digest this. “Do you get my meaning?” At the time, all she could wonder was why he’d put her through a cold, hungry night instead of building the fire himself. But as if assuming her silence begged more explanation, he added, “I suppose a nicer grandfather would make it easy on you—tell you how to get through life instead of make you learn it through living. Sometimes you can’t find a new path until you admit you’ve hit your limit. Doesn’t mean you’re giving up—means you’re smart. Tough.”

The second big blowout between them happened the day Raney was supposed to go back to school in Seattle after his heart attack, him still so weak that climbing to his bedroom required two stops on the staircase. She told him she was withdrawing and moving back home, and in a burst of cursing he threatened to kick her out of the house, going as gray and breathless as the day he’d collapsed, humbled finally by a nitroglycerin tablet she stuck under his tongue. That battle too, she understood, was over an unwillingness to accept limitations—it was apparently a flaw they both shared.

—

For a month or more taking care of Grandpa was a full-time job, half her energy poured into making him believe he was still taking full care of himself. Other than the time he had surprised her with an envelope of $7,000 in cash, Raney had never thought about where Grandpa’s money came from or went. Until it was her job to do all of the buying and cooking she had never stopped to consider how much was from their own poultry or garden or Grandpa’s barter and trade. But one bitter day in February she poured soap into the tub and left the water running while she put the laundry away, then stripped and stepped into a bath of bubbly, icy-cold water. That afternoon she cashed part of her leftover school money to fill the propane tank and later that night she used a screwdriver to open Grandpa’s locked desk drawer, taking care not to leave a mark on the wood, which turned out to be wasted effort as he caught her red-handed going through his papers. “You take a wrong turn at your own bedroom door, Renee?” The boom in his voice so shocked her the bank statements and bills scattered. He stared at her a minute and added, “Don’t you look guilty as all hell!”