Gemini (8 page)

It was Bo, goddamn him.
Goddamn
him! He took off, though no faster than any blind person could move, and Raney grabbed his shirt and hung on until a dim gray showed in front of them and, as they neared a corner, full sight returned. She started hitting him, beating him over the shoulders and chest, and would have beaten him directly in the face if he weren’t so tall. She wanted to break his nose and send him out into the world with a permanent crooked scar like a branded criminal. And goddamn it, he would not stop laughing. And he looked so cool there in the half-lit room, his black hair splaying in every direction and his shirt pulled half off, holding her flailing arms at bay. He just looked so . . .
good
. She stopped hitting him, but he didn’t let go of her. She didn’t want him to let go of her, which must have been obvious because he slowly pulled her closer and she was still laughing but it was different now, a nervous laugh, not a little-kid-playing-games laugh but something else. Something she wasn’t used to, but she liked it. She liked how his arms were more muscled than hers, and that his head was above hers, leaning over her. And then it happened. He kissed her. Soft and hesitant at first and then more sure of himself, pressing into her mouth and pulling her body against his. Raney didn’t know if she was supposed to breathe, and after a minute her head started to spin; she pressed her fists against Bo’s chest. He moved away just enough to smile at her—he had the best smile, she thought. He always had, even when she hated him.

It was hard to recall, later, the order in which things happened after that. Raney remembered the look on Bo’s face changing, more serious at first and then just odd. Scary odd. His breathing grew short and shallow, more a pant than a breath. He seemed to buckle, his knees bending slowly and his hand reaching toward the floor until, all at once, he was down. Hard. Rigid hard. His legs and back arching and his arms held tight to his chest, his head turned awkwardly to one side and then everything, all of him, all at once in a spasm that seemed to go on and on and Raney was screaming and then running out toward the sun into the open field, blinded by the light now and crying for help.

She was a child again, instantly, wanting any grown-up to rescue them. People started running toward her. It seemed to take forever before one man sprinted to his car and got to a pay phone, and then forever for the ambulance to get back. Two people had gone into the concrete battery to help Bo, and a woman was holding on to Raney, pulling her down into the grass and smoothing her hair, crooning to her like a mother. Raney tried to tell the medics what she’d seen—they didn’t seem scared, which made her feel only a little less terrified. She couldn’t remember what bank Bo’s aunt was in and the woman drove her through town until she recognized it. The woman went in to give Mrs. Hardy the news, seeing that Raney didn’t have that courage left in her.

—

A policeman drove her home. He said it was just a seizure—Bo would be fine. Later Raney heard they took Bo to the hospital nearby, Jefferson General, and from there he went straight back to Seattle. It was near enough the school term she didn’t really expect him to come back to Quentin. But she didn’t expect to hear nothing from him at all, she had to admit. No answer to the letters she left at Hardy’s Store. Not that summer or any other summer. It was like Bo had been snatched back into his natural world and left Raney’s completely behind. Forgotten. Best forgotten—the way she wanted it too—she finally convinced herself.

•
7
•

charlotte

The second time Charlotte saw
Eric it was equally an accident. Pamela, Charlotte’s sister-in-law, had delivered Charlie just eight weeks earlier and Hugo, then two, had turned into a shipwreck of jealous, inarticulate misery. Charlotte stopped by their home on her way to a nearby birthday party and could hear the competition of wails all the way from the street. Pamela opened the door in her bathrobe, one red swollen breast half-exposed, and Charlotte realized there were three people crying inside the house. She reached over to rub Charlie’s back and Pamela put the child into her arms. “I have to find Hugo . . .” and she was up the stairs.

Charlotte danced the screaming baby around the living room in a slow bob until Pamela came back with Hugo arching backward in anger, trapped in her arms. It was overall, Charlotte thought, a Rockwell-perfect portrait of family dysfunction. “Where’s Will?” she asked.

“At work! Where I wish I was! Taking care of
other
people’s children! They both screamed all night and Will was at the hospital on emergency call.” Hugo twisted his way out of her grasp and ran back to the staircase, throwing himself against the baby gate until he gave up and collapsed on the floor with a cry that sounded so hopeless Charlotte wondered how that much dejection and angst could accumulate in two short years.

“Are they sick?”

Pamela sat on the couch, looking almost as dejected as her son. “No. That’s about the only thing I feel qualified to know. God sent me this day to punish me for all the times I’ve told mothers how to manage tantrums.”

“Let me watch the baby for a bit.” Hugo had given up the fight by now and looked like he was minutes away from falling asleep on the rug. “Go take a nap. I’ll be fine with him.”

“Sure. Spit-up would do a lot for that silk blouse. Why are you dressed up?”

“Birthday party. Friend of a friend just a few blocks from here. I can be late.”

By this time Charlie had become fixated on one of Charlotte’s earrings and was quiet, appearing to contemplate how he might master the feat of getting his hand locked onto his target. The sudden peace had the effect of a sedative on Pamela. “You want to take him with you?” she asked. “He’ll take a bottle now. Sort of.”

—

It had been ten months since Eric picked up Charlotte’s mud-splattered coat and stood apart from the crowd while he witnessed her ministrations over the seizure victim. He had called her three or four times in the weeks that followed, but she was always busy. She was on call, she had too many patients, too little sleep, she had meetings . . . When she told him she couldn’t go sailing one Saturday because the dishwasher repairman was coming, he quit calling. He almost didn’t recognize her when he opened the door at the birthday party—her auburn hair was longer and blown into a sleek scoop around her face. She had more makeup on. In some ways, he thought later, he’d been more immediately attracted to the drenched and mascara-streaked mess she’d been when they first met.

Oh, yes. And there was the baby in her arms. She had a baby.

—

“It’s you,” he said.

“It’s who?” she answered, and then, looking at him closely, “Oh. You. The writer—I’m sorry . . .”

“Eric Bryson. And who’s this guy?” But then Charlie cried out in his half sleep and Charlotte bumped him onto her shoulder so she could take off her scarf and gloves, dropping one on the floor as she moved past Eric into the hallway, where her friend Elizabeth swept Charlotte and the baby into the party amid much cooing as Elizabeth made a nest for Charlie in an overstuffed chair. Charlotte didn’t intersect with Eric again until she went into the kitchen to put Charlie’s milk in the fridge, catching Eric propped against the sink holding a full bottle of beer with the cap still on it and watching her like he was trying to figure out the punch line of a puzzling joke. It was the first time she’d seen him without a sweater, and as lean and tall as he was, she saw now that his middle had the soft fullness of a body surprised to find middle age sneaking up on it. The fluorescent lights bled all the color out of his skin, or perhaps just intensified the color of his eyes, the deep black of his hair. It made her feel awkward, the way he was looking at her. Like she owed him something, and maybe she did. How long had it been since he’d called her anyway? Had she said she’d call back?

“How’ve you been? You’re still writing?” she asked.

“Sure. How ’bout you? You were working at Swedish?”

“Beacon. How do you know Elizabeth?”

“I don’t. I came with a friend.” He tipped his head to one side and saluted Charlie with his unopened beer. “So. Cute baby.”

“Charlie? Yeah—they tend to be, don’t they?” A group of distressingly loud guests crowded into the kitchen then, their own drinks emptied and refilled enough times none of them noticed the electricity so thick between Eric and Charlotte it made her neck tingle. She cupped Charlie’s warm head into the cove of her shoulder. “He’s not used to the party scene. I should get him home soon,” she said, heading back to the living room, surprised, herself, at how calculatedly ambiguous she was leaving this.

Not much later, Eric was sitting on the couch across the coffee table from her, four or five people breaking in on each other to make a single braided stream of hyperbolic talk, and Charlie sound asleep and peacefully oblivious. Eric said half as many words as anyone else, but each time—a small joke or political jab—it shifted the conversation like an unexpected gust, and Charlotte found herself waiting for his next comment, glancing at him to see how he reacted to each turning of the topic. When a pause fell among them he smiled at her and she suddenly felt embarrassed at her earlier aloofness. She stood up, gathered Charlie in her arms, and made her good-byes. At the door, though, it was Eric who located her gloves and coat and took Charlie from her while she put them on. He was clearly unused to babies and held him like he anticipated some eruption of noise or body fluid momentarily; she almost moved Eric’s hands into a more proper cradle.

“I didn’t have any idea, you know, about the . . . I wouldn’t have kept calling you.”

Charlotte buttoned her coat and took the baby back. “Charlie’s my nephew. If you don’t hate me, call again. We can grab a coffee or something.”

—

He did call, and they did have coffee, then a few weekend lunches and one quick, early dinner, and afterward she reminded herself how stable her life was. Full, really, with her family, her work, her own plans for her future. The next time he called, she was too busy and then too tired. But each time they talked longer, and one week, when he hadn’t called, she called him. Just to talk. He was telling her about his new editor when she interrupted him in the middle of a sentence. “Eric, I really don’t have room in my life for a romance. Is that okay?”

There was a long pause. “Why did you call me?”

“Because I like talking to you. I like that part.”

“So let’s talk on my sailboat this Saturday.”

“I’m busy Saturday.”

“Sunday.”

—

It was not her thing, sailing. She got seasick and hated the endless wind and sun, the tactical turns back and forth that took you nowhere and back again. It was too unproductive at the end of the day. But she felt bad about having strung Eric along, if that was what she’d done. It hadn’t been intentional, more like a hope they would naturally settle into a dependable friendship and avoid all the “rules” that got attached to romances. Yes, whenever she held Charlie or played with Hugo she could feel the primal ache of maternity, the press of time. And the torched ticket to Belize was long enough behind her that she could reasonably envision herself happily married someday, if it came to that, or at least
pleasantly
married. There were even moments she suspected she
wanted
that someday. After Ricky, though, Charlotte felt done with all the effort it took to get there—a bit like sailing: fighting against the wind only to turn around and land at the same place you started except older, sunburned or shivering, and with a lot less money.

Still, on Sunday morning she changed clothes three times before Eric came by, and when he took her bag of towels and sunscreen and his arm brushed hers, she pulled away like she had been burned. It left her angry at herself and freshly tongue-tied with him—tempted to cancel the date on the spot as if her irritating self-consciousness were his deliberate fault. And whatever she had found attractive when they first met was gone anyway—he was wearing shorts and boat shoes, and his long, pale legs with that black hair looking like something pulled out of a giant web. He looked so . . . so . . . academic, even if his travel stories had sounded fantastic. Maybe
too
fantastic. Maybe he was a product of his own verbal embellishments. She could hardly imagine him wrestling a jib across a bow. And she was letting him take her out on the open sound?

They took her car, as always. Eric didn’t even own one, living as he did in the heart of downtown where he could walk or take a taxi and sell the lease on his parking space. He had this habit of asking every cabbie where he was from, why he’d scrabbled his way halfway across the planet to this country, to Seattle, sometimes talking for long minutes with the meter still running. It had annoyed Charlotte at first, particularly when she was already worn out from work and could only think about eating or going to sleep, but she was beginning to find it kind of dear, she had to admit. Once, a driver had answered him with a gruff politically charged retort, and Charlotte left the car fuming, saying Eric shouldn’t have tipped him at all, but Eric had only laughed and handed the guy an extra five.

It was the perfect sailing day, according to Eric—sun breaking through in a tease of summer, a steady west wind that could take them leagues without a tack or luff. He was transformed out here, completely at ease so that even the natural gawkiness of his body gave way to a coordinated grace. It was the first time she had seen him or talked to him that she didn’t sense a surging current of thought engaging much of his mind. There were boats everywhere, colorful billowing spinnakers and the tilted triangles of a race clustered tight as a flock of white birds. The whole world was out to play. Once they were outside the harbor, she turned her face into the strong breeze and opened her mouth so the air seemed to fill her effortlessly, not just her lungs but her head, her entire torso, fill her to the tips of her fingers and toes as if she were a kite borne aloft, caught in an encompassing, superabundant natural force. She felt giddy, blindingly enlightened—how foolish she was to pretend she or any doctor had power over such unknowable physic.

Eric pushed the tiller and touched her knee in warning; the bow cut an oblique angle, and the boom swung easily over her head. She had put a scopolamine patch behind her ear to prevent nausea, and it was making her mouth dry and her eyesight blurry, but as the hull rose and fell across the steady chop, she felt a small knot tying itself in the middle of her stomach. She knew enough to focus on the horizon, tried to keep its level line her single orientation between the swell and dip of the gunwales, tried to recapture the momentary bliss of epiphany she had seen in that gulp of wind. A gust came over the water; she could see its approach in the rippling shimmer. The boat heeled, and Eric reached across and took her hand to pull her to the high side, stretching his legs across the cockpit to brace himself. His right hand gripped the tiller, and seemingly unconscious of his touch, he wrapped his other arm around Charlotte’s waist. And then he became quite conscious of it, his arm more secure and purposeful, and she felt his eyes exploring her face as intensely as she had felt them the first day they met, when he had walked her to her car in the twilight. He eased the tiller so the bow dropped and the boat leveled off a bit. She broke her eyes from the stomach-settling line of sky and ocean and looked at him, gave in to the dizzying electric pull between them. He tilted his head and his arm drew her closer. And at that instant saliva flooded her mouth and she lurched away to throw up over the side of the boat.

He still kissed her for the first time, later that evening. That alone, she thought, might have been what persuaded her to let go and fall in love. So almost a year after she chanced upon a book reading, chanced upon a man falling into a seizure practically at her feet, her life diverged onto a course she couldn’t have predicted or planned. A course she would have said she no longer hoped for, in no small part because it depended on someone else.

—

In the middle of Jane’s fourth night at Beacon Hospital she had a grand mal seizure and Otero had to put her into a medically induced coma with phenobarbital, a potent sedative. It was the only way to stop the electrochemical fireworks set off by the injured parts of her brain, and each seizure had the potential to cause even more damage. As much as Charlotte hated it, the phenobarbital coma delayed one pressing dilemma: it gave her the perfect reason not to continue checking her patient for brain death. Deeply sedated, Jane couldn’t react to the basic tests of brain function—pain, or noise, or a light brush of her eyes. And if she was brain-dead, all else was pointless. She would expire soon after they stopped the ventilator.

The MRI had confirmed Charlotte’s diagnosis of fat emboli—dozens of small lesions were scattered through the cortex of Jane’s brain, that thin, tangled neural shell that held higher consciousness. Her mind. Her
Jane
-ness. No, not “Jane,” Charlotte thought, but the woman Jane had actually been. Was.
Is
. The mother, the child, the friend, the artist or mathematician. The atheist or Christian, Democrat or Republican or anarchist. The teacher or bus driver. Or all of those—as complicated as all people are—defined by one thing one day and changed on another. Searching, always, for what lay on the other side of the truth we believe absolutely today. The seat of Jane’s soul, whatever a soul was, resided in her cerebral cortex—the rest of her body was little more than the insensate plant that fed it, allowed it a means to see, smell, hear, communicate, move.