Gemini (2 page)

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raney

As should be the case
with any memorable love story, the first time Raney Remington saw Bo she hated him. She didn’t have any choice but to hate him, he was so beautiful. So foreign. After all, no exceptional thing can exist for long without a counterbalance—the weight of it would tip a life over. Raney hated Bo for his skinny frame, scrawny even for a twelve-year-old kid still shy of puberty. She hated his pale skin, as coddled as all the city boys who came out to Olympic National Park for summer camps and vacation Bible schools and “back to nature” classes. All of them soggy and miserable in their L.L.Bean boots and Eddie Bauer parkas. This boy must have borrowed his father’s; the wrists drooped over his hands and the hem came nearly to his knees, his stiff blue jeans poking out all mud-splattered below. He was standing outside Peninsula Foods underneath the gutter, and a dam of leaves broke loose, spouting a cascade of rainwater directly onto his head. Any reasonable person would have stepped under cover, but this boy pulled his hood back and looked straight up at the stream like he might open his mouth and swallow. His skin was so white the shadows of his cheekbones were blue. That’s how Raney would have painted him—how she did paint him years later from memory, translucent and frail as Picasso’s
Blue Boy
, black hair a mess of damp points and planes, rain running down his cheeks like tears. A blue-blooded member of the club that didn’t want the likes of her. She stared so hard he finally looked at her, and even from across the street she caught the same ghost-blue color in his eyes. Then a woman walked out of the store and directed the boy to a scuffed red Malibu that Raney recognized from John Hardy’s store, where her grandfather bought his feed, and there was Mr. Hardy at the wheel. She watched them drive down the street and around the bend in the highway until the exhaust fumes disappeared, and she knew exactly what she wanted: that boy gone from Quentin. She never wanted to see him again.

And she didn’t. Not for ten days. Not until she was painting down in the ravine and caught him squatting on the opposite bank with his knees splayed apart inside his clasped arms and a book dangling from his hand, watching her like he’d paid for a ticket and had every right to be in her woods. Raney concentrated so fully on ignoring him she dropped her brush on the ground and had to pick pine needles and dirt off the bristles. She could swear she saw him smirk. She raised her middle finger at him. Bo, in turn, raised his first two fingers in the salute drivers around Quentin gave passing strangers on back roads. He nodded once and crossed his legs with the book facedown in his lap, as if she should pretend he belonged around here and go back to her canvas.

She worked from a row of baby food jars filled with house paints nabbed off porches and out of garages and construction dumps, a palette scrabbled from the poor taste of a poor town mixed into the colors she saw in these woods and water and sky. She dipped her brush into white primer and filled in the trillium blooming in the sword ferns beside Bo; lit the ridge of cloud showing through the canopy over his head. And then, with no conscious intention, she started painting his intrusive, unwelcome face, his doughy brow cut by his black eyebrows and the gray hollows at his temples. He needed a blood transfusion, that boy. She popped the lid off a sampler tin of Barn Red and painted a slash across his face, packed her brushes and jars into a tackle box, and hauled the whole lot down the slippery path to the creek bottom then back up the other side, where she stood over him, breathing hard with anger more than exercise.

“You here for the Bible church camp?”

“No.”

“You don’t belong here. Don’t live around here.”

“No.”

She looked out at the ocean this stream bled into, waiting, until a fist of impatience made her ask outright, “So what are you doing here?”

“Watching you paint.”

“I don’t mean
here
, here. I mean here. In Quentin.”

He squinted up at her so only half his eyes showed underneath his brows. “My aunt lives here. I’m staying with her for the summer.”

“How come?”

“My folks are on a trip to Europe.”

“So why didn’t you go with them?”

Bo looked away like he had to give the question some thought. “ ’Cause I didn’t want to spend all summer in museums and churches.” He stood up and brushed dirt from his seat, lost his balance, and bounced awkwardly back to his feet. “I live in Seattle. You know where the Space Needle is?”

Raney wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of learning she’d only been to Seattle twice, the last time at age seven. Up this close she saw he must have had some blood running through his veins; he flushed pink at the corner of his nostrils and under his cheekbones while she stared him down. He reminded her of a china cup her grandmother had had—so thin you could see the shadow of your fingers through the bowl—he looked like he could break just as easy. It made her stomach go tight, this beautiful, breakable boy who lived in a house near the Space Needle with two parents lolling through France for a summer; this boy who did not belong to these woods and should know better.

“What’s your book?” she asked him.

He flashed the spine toward her. “
Lord of the Rings
. Read it?”

“Only good one was
The Hobbit
.”

“Only easy one, maybe.”

Raney felt the band tighten around her stomach again, a hot flush. She jerked her head toward the wide breach in the earth where the Little Quentin River had carved through twenty feet of cliff and the sky and ocean split the gloom of woods. “Anybody showed you the cave yet? There was seal pups in there last year—they might have come back. Follow me. Unless you’re scared.”

He chewed the inside of his lip, probably gauging whether she
might be some of the riffraff he’d been warned against. That or he
was just plain chicken, in which case the boys around here would make his life hell anyway. She might as well teach him how to fend for himself, she justified. She broke out across the duff and mossed roots that hinted at a trail. At the break where the earth began the steep dive to the beach she stashed her tackel box under a
rock ledge, then grappled and slipped down to the beach, following
the foamy waterline until she was out of his sight. When he hadn’t appeared after five minutes she popped her head and shoulders out of a gash in the bluff above the wet sand. “You gotta climb up along the side. Over here.” The lip of the cave was no more than seven feet above the beach, but he stood wary underneath her, like he was staring straight up the pylons of the Space
Needle itself. Raney hooked one foot into a crevice just below the
green stripe that marked the tide line, then dropped at his feet like a cat. “Over here. Hand me your book and take hold of the roots.” She talked him root by rock up the bluff into the mouth of the cave. “I’m going back to get a flashlight—I heard ’em mewing toward the rear but it’s too dark.” Any color that had crept into Bo’s face from the climb up the rocks paled, and Raney saw him winding up to protest. Frigid seawater lapped her bare ankles. She tucked his book under her arm and called up, “If you sit quiet a little ways inside you’ll be able to see them when your eyes adjust. Last summer one practically crawled into my lap. Won’t take me twenty minutes to go and get back.”

—

It occurred to Raney to return to the beach and check on the boy in the cave before nightfall; it pricked her conscience enough she didn’t eat much dinner and even after she’d gotten into bed she still tossed and turned, wondering if she was more irked at herself or at him. What idiot would follow a total stranger down a cliff into a tide-flood cave looking for seal pups? Just after midnight she pushed the covers back and pulled his soggy book out of her tackle box. The pages were stuck together and it smelled more of the woods than book glue and paper. Tolkien. Wouldn’t you just know it? She lit the gas heater in the bathroom and propped the book on a trash can in front of it, flipped the toilet seat down, and sat with her chin in her hands watching it dry. The cobalt-blue dye of the book’s cloth jacket had stained the pages a paler shade, not far off from the color of his eyes. If he had stayed missing all night, the whole town would know about it by the time the sun rose.

As soon as it was light, she bundled a thin sheet of plywood and a few clean brushes into a tarp, picked up her paints, and stomped out of the house. Not ten yards down the drive she turned around, climbed back upstairs, and shoved his stupid book into her pack. A fog had moved in, making the early summer day as wintery as December, the clouds so low to the ground it was like the ocean had spread itself thinner and higher until it blurred into sky. On days like this Raney sometimes painted the mood she felt more than the shapes she saw, shifting her palette to grays and greens that moved in waves rather than the sharp lines of sunshine and shadow. She propped her plywood up on a park bench across the street from Hardy’s Store a good hour before it opened. She watched the lights come on upstairs and then in the back storeroom when the Star Food Service truck pulled up, and finally saw the shadow of Mrs. Hardy through the milky glass in the front door. A minute later Mrs. Hardy stepped onto the worn plank porch with a broom in one hand, her other hand planted at what used to be her waist, breathing in the foggy morning air like she expected no better from life but no worse either—just her usual sour acceptance of Quentin and its slow journey to nowhere. She didn’t look panicked. Not like a woman who’d stayed up all night combing the woods for her nephew with the police. She saw Raney and nodded her chin. And damn if Raney didn’t figure out then that she’d been holding her breath for the last thirteen hours.

An odd thing happened after that, which Raney would remember all her life. She began a painting of the main street of town: the empty two-lane highway that barely slowed as it passed the few storefronts and the elementary school on its way to the national park; Jimmy Tucker’s shoebox Pan-Abode house beyond the intersection near the Baptist church, his dad’s rusted trawler forever listing on its keel like it had been swept over his chain-link fence and deposited there by a great tidal wave. She painted Hardy’s Store in the center and sketched in Mrs. Hardy stabbing at the doorjamb with her broom. But right after Raney started coloring in Mrs. Hardy’s bulky figure and fleshy calves in their thick-rolled stockings, she suddenly dipped her brush into Commodore Blue and painted denim jeans on a skinny boy wearing Converse sneakers and a gray hooded sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up. Not five minutes later Bo took the broom out of his aunt’s hand and pushed the sleeves of a gray sweatshirt further up his pale arms. That was sufficient God-sign to last Raney all summer. She assumed she was forgiven.

She caught him looking at her, but she kept painting and he kept sweeping until it felt too ridiculous. She wiped the paint off her brush and pulled his book out of her backpack, marched across the street, and stuck it in his hand. “I tried to dry it out.” She saw a tangle of scratches up both arms, one long red line under his left eye. So he’d climbed up the face of the cliff instead of risking the surf—City Boy didn’t have enough fat on him to float, she thought. Or he didn’t know how to swim.

He flipped through the clumped, wavy pages with one thumb, the broom tucked under his arm. “Guess you didn’t try very hard.”

That seemed to be as much as either of them could think to say; Raney wasn’t about to apologize now that she knew he hadn’t spent the night in that cave. They stood silent, watching two crows tear at a sodden bag in the gutter near her painting. The mist gathered itself into something more declarative, and he jerked one shoulder toward her propped-up plywood. “Your drawing’s getting wet.”

“Everything here gets wet at some point,” she answered. He looked at her with a funny half smile, like she’d shared a secret, and she felt something prickly creep up her spine; something she wanted to avoid but it was already inside. “I know where there’s an eagle’s nest. Three babies still in it.” She spit on two fingers and held them up in the air. “For real—I swear. No caves.”

—

Bo stayed in Quentin for three months, the whole of his summer vacation and then some. If he missed his mother or father or anything else about his life in Seattle, he didn’t say a word to Raney, nor did he ask about the topics she sidestepped. As if they had an undeclared truce on their private struggles, they talked only about what mattered each day—the book he was reading, the easel she was saving for, the model car he was building, what section of the town dump they should scavenge next.

After a week or so Raney decided that stranding Bo in that cave was the best possible beginning for their friendship, right up front doing away with any awkwardness about him being a boy and her a girl, him having money and her not. He was like one of those kidnapped kids that bond with their kidnappers and forget they ever lived a better life. And with Raney at his back the local boys bequeathed a grudging tolerance and kept their distance. Bo made a good effort to pretend that clawing his way out of the cave had been no big deal, but the forests and drift-tangled beaches around Quentin were as foreign to him as Paris would have been to Raney, and for the first time in her life
she
was the wise one, the teacher. One afternoon she took him up Mount Wilson to see the view of the bay and he spent a long time reading the forest service signs warning of cougars. Half an hour later she turned around to see him poking a stick at something in the trail, and he shot off like a shy horse when Raney snapped a branch coming back for him. She stopped at the pile of wet black cones he’d been inspecting. “What were you looking at?” He ambled toward her, shrugging his shoulders, looking embarrassed. “You thought it was cougar scat, didn’t you? Cats bury their business. Anyway, if a cougar’s following us you won’t know till he’s got his claws in your neck.” They were already comfortable enough he could laugh at such a gibe.