“Still worried about controversy? What’s the worst that could happen?” she asked.
“The Chinese mafia could gun me down on the streets of Seattle. That sort of thing.”
Charlotte looked up, fully focused on the conversation now. “Seriously?”
Eric was tempted to say yes, just to hold her attention. More and more lately it seemed like her mind was elsewhere. Her patients absorbed her, he knew, particularly when she had one in limbo, not clearly going to survive but not clearly hopeless—and Charlotte was always the last to abandon hope. Plus, her parents had announced they were moving out of the house where Charlotte was raised, which had stirred up a bit of turbulence in her whole family. Sometimes, though, he suspected it was the two of them, their own relationship, that had begun to turn, but every time he thought of some way to flat-out ask her, he wondered if the question alone could derail them. Were they that fragile? “No. They’ll probably just throw me into a cell in Mongolia for a few decades. You seem tired. Your new patient doing better?”
“She has a lot of worse to go before we hit better. If we ever hit better. The Times was there today.”
“So that was her? Hard to believe anyone will recognize her photo, though.”
“It’s already in the paper?”
Eric pulled the creased newspaper out of his laptop bag and put it on top of Charlotte’s empty salad plate. The photograph of Jane staring up at her was worse than the sketch she’d seen the day before. The sketch, oddly, had looked more alive, given that the artist had presumed what Jane might look like without an endotracheal tube. In this grainy portrait Jane’s puffy eyes were glazed with lubricant, her bruised and swollen mouth distorted by bands of tape and gauze anchoring the plastic tube that connected her to the ventilator. She looked quite dead, really. Like one of those Victorian memento mori photographs of dead people.
Eric saw the look on Charlotte’s face and took the paper back, reading the article below the headline closely for the first time. “You’re in here! They quote you.”
“Not all of it, I’m sure.”
“ ‘Doing everything possible . . . Hope to find her family . . . Time is her best hope.’ Jeez, Charlotte. Come to me for copy next time.”
She had to laugh. “What could I do? Helen Seras was ready to take my badge and escort me to the street if I didn’t behave.”
“But you will do everything possible. She’s lucky she landed at Beacon. Will she make it?” he asked, lowering his voice.
Charlotte shrugged, somber again. “Miracles happen.”
“Do they?” Eric lifted his eyebrows and the light caught a look of innocence in him that belied the gray at his temples. In that moment, in that half light, Charlotte remembered the face she had fallen for, when she had first allowed herself to believe they could build a reliable world together. Would that take a miracle too? she wondered.
“Sure,” she answered. “Well, no. But if we hook all our machines up to her we might salvage enough of her brain to tell us who’s looking for her. Or who ran her over.” She thought of the message she’d left for Deputy Simpson and was tempted to check her cell phone for any missed call. Suddenly none of it seemed even mildly humorous—her distress over the photograph and her quotes, her frustration with Helen Seras. She was worried that she would lose this woman, that it might take an actual miracle to save her and she herself was not miraculous. All of it tumbled into a sad, overwhelming fatigue. “You know what? Let’s take dinner to go.”
“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 a
t 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?”
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