“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 m
uch 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.
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.”
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