Gemini

by Carol Cassella

  Sandy hefted the bin of jewelry onto a shelf and turned to look Raney full in the face for the first time. “I’m not. If you don’t love Cleet enough to accept what your grandfather will say when he hears you aren’t marrying someone as white as General Custer, then you don’t love Cleet enough to marry him. Honestly I’ve wondered if it’s the only reason you’ve waited this long.”

  “That’s not it,” Raney said angrily. And it was true—she wasn’t the least afraid of what Grandpa might say. She would put the question to him, then. Tonight. Before she talked to Cleet again. She drove the twenty minutes home to Quentin arguing out both sides the whole silent trip. Love. Was that what she and Cleet had together? Love? Plenty of other “L” words, for sure. Like: she liked him more than anyone else she knew. Maybe more than anyone she’d ever known. Loyalty: They had that, didn’t they? There was no other man she was the least tempted by and Cleet was as steady as they come. Lust: okay, maybe not lust, but sex was comfortable between them. Easy. Then Grandpa’s voice broke into her head. Marriage lasts a long time, Renee. A lifetime. Joy and me had months, years, sometimes, with the two of us against the world. Life’s hard enough—you really want to throw race into the fire with it? You love him enough to fight that for fifty, sixty years?

  It’s close enough to love to turn into love. And he loves me enough to make it up for both of us, she would answer. And thus her mind spun out the arguments so that she was prepared, she hoped, for whatever her grandfather might throw in her path—had practically painted him into a new suit and tie ready to walk her down the aisle. She burst into the kitchen ready to say it all, and when he wasn’t at the table, she ran upstairs to his bedroom hoping to beat any doubts. But his bedroom was empty too. So was the bathroom. She didn’t start to worry until she found the barn door open and a single, bloodied, cut-off trouser leg puddled beside the bunker hatch.

  Raney climbed into the cab of the truck and had the clutch pushed in before she remembered the keys were in her purse on the kitchen table. She slammed through the back door just as the telephone rang. It was Sandy. The hospital had called the gallery shortly after Raney left. Grandpa had gashed his leg when he tried to cut the padlock off the bunker door with a Sawzall.

  By the time Raney drove all the way back to the emergency room in Port Townsend, he was resting on a gurney in his stained nightshirt with a brand-new pair of Jefferson General pajama bottoms covering thirty-two stitches in his left shin. He’d been given a pain pill and had a plastic tube hissing oxygen through his nose. The doctor was nice enough, though to Raney he seemed too young to look so pinched and exhausted. He told her how to take care of the dressing and when the stitches should come out. Then he signaled for Raney to follow him out of the cubicle into the hallway, a look of concern on his face that got her pulse racing.

  She started, “I don’t know how much his insurance covers here. At the VA, maybe, but—”

  The doctor cut her off. “Just call the billing office. They’ll work something out for you. How long has he had claudication?”

  “I didn’t know he had claudication. What’s claudication?”

  “Pain in his calves when he walks. Atherosclerosis.” He must have caught the frown between Raney’s brows and tried again. “The blood flow to his legs isn’t good—there are plaques, or narrowing in the blood vessels. His wound is going to be slow to heal. Sometimes they don’t heal. I’m concerned about it.”

  “What do you mean, it might not heal? How could it not heal, if I keep it clean, dressed?” He looked so tired she couldn’t picture him smiling—like it might take too much effort.

  “Hopefully so,” he said.

  “What happens if it doesn’t?”

  “Well, let’s hope it does.”

  Raney stayed home from work the next day to take care of Grandpa. Between the pain pills and the pain he still had despite them he was too unsteady to trust on the stairs; he became almost as dependent on her as he had been in the days after his heart attack—and as begrudging. When he wobbled on a step, she grabbed his waist and he tried to pull away, which nearly sent them both to the bottom in a tumble. “Damn, child! I should put a padlock on your bedroom door.”

  “Don’t damn me for helping you, Grandpa. I locked the bunker because it was dangerous for you to be climbing down the ladder alone. And I’m not a child!” She was alarmed at how frail his ribs felt against her, like she could crack him in half. When had he gotten so old? She felt like she’d opened her eyes expecting only a new day but awoke instead to a new era, the last gone before she’d known it was going. She had not talked to him about Cleet yet, and now she knew the real worry was not her marrying a man of a different race. It was her leaving home. Leaving Grandpa.

  She pulled an easy chair into the kitchen where he could reach the telephone and refrigerator without letting go of either the chair or the counter, and then drove into town for groceries and, with luck, some crutches. In front of Hardy’s Store a state patrol car had parked odd-angled across three spaces, and she imagined the vitriol Grandpa would have spewed about “the law” hogging space that belonged to regular tax-paying Americans. But the joke turned to alarm when she walked into the store, where a crowd of neighbors was gathering. John and Evelyn Hardy, Bo’s aunt and uncle, had been killed in a head-on collision with a logging truck on Highway 104. Raney was ashamed at the first thought to enter her head: Bo would probably come back to Quentin for the funeral. She would see Bo again.

  Part Two

  • 11 •

  raney

  The entire town of Quentin packed into the Rising Sun Baptist Church for the Hardys’ funeral, even Grandpa. Raney pushed him up the zigzag ramp in a borrowed wheelchair. They arrived so early the sanctuary looked bare, the sparse flower arrangements like lost tropical islands in the chilly white room. Raney told herself that her resolve to be seated and collected early had nothing to do with Bo. She refused to scan the faces gradually filling the pews behind her, tried to concentrate on the folded service program in her hands. It wasn’t a given that he would come. It wasn’t a given that he was living anywhere near Seattle, or the United States, or, for that matter, that he cared enough about his aunt and uncle to come to their funeral even if he lived next door. At the top of the program page above the scripture from John 11:26 there was a sketch of two entwined angels, which, Raney guessed, were supposed to be Mr. and Mrs. Hardy smiling down on everyone from the hereafter. It had been years since Raney had said two words to either of them, but she for sure knew that neither had been anywhere close to angelic in their lifetimes. She began to sweat, cold as it was outdoors. Then a hard tingle zipped from her scalp all the way down her spine and she knew Bo was in the room.

  She didn’t actually see him until the funeral was over and everyone had wandered outside into the steady gray drizzle, the ladies’ heels sinking through the muddy lawn like golf tees and the men uncomfortable in ties worn only to marry and bury. From the upper yard, near the white walls of the church, a slice of the bay was visible, flanked by the high, evergreen cliffs where she and Bo used to roam. A few fishing boats were anchored out and bucked against their lines in channeled gusts of wind. She studiously focused on the water, leaning over to point out features to Grandpa, barely able to hear her own voice over the thud of her heart. Then she felt Bo’s eyes find her and she slowly stood up and turned around. He raised one hand—a wave that was salutation and apology, regret and invitation all mixed into that one single gesture. For Raney it was like plugging in a Christmas tree: one electrical spark that suddenly illuminates not just a tree or a house or a village square but an entire season. An entire faith. Maybe her entire life.

  He pulled away from a small group wearing black, which could only be family—no one from Quentin. Bo’s mother was not among them. Later Raney learned that his mother had grown so estranged from her sister that even after a sheet of black ice snatched her away at the age of fifty-two, his mother wouldn’t cut her Italian ski trip short to attend
the funeral, although she did send some crystals to be placed inside the casket.

  Bo spoke to Grandpa first, squatting in the damp to shake his hand and ask after the farm and the dogs, careful not to make mention of the wheelchair. And then he rose and faced Raney. He hadn’t grown any since she’d seen him almost seven years earlier—still too slim, too wiry. His shoulders had filled out, giving him a more masculine cut—or perhaps it was just the suit riding so squarely out to the sleeve seam and then falling straight and true to his wrists. It looked expensive, his suit. She felt self-conscious about her own consignment-store dress, and a little thought clicked at the back of her brain: how much Cleet had admired it on her.

  They couldn’t talk long, only enough for the required news. Bo was a pallbearer and had to leave for the graveside service; his cousins were waiting at the hearse. He had already started down the muddy hill when he stopped and came back to say, “I’m here until Thursday morning. Can I see you?” and then his cousin called for him—the other cars were leaving. Bo took one step backward, away from Raney, and perhaps for that, or for the excuse it gave her, she did not mull the reasons it wasn’t a good idea to see him tonight, or tomorrow, or ever again. She just answered yes—she’d be home tomorrow. After he drove away, Sandy came up to her and stood there, saying nothing, all of it written on her face.

  —

  The first thing Raney did when she got home was call Cleet. “I’ve got your favorite dress on. Should I drive up to Port Townsend?” He made dinner for her at his tiny apartment—two rooms that had once been the office for a sailmaker’s loft, so it didn’t even have a shower, only a rubber extension hose that attached to the sink faucet. He’d taken it for the view out over the stormy Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the cheap rent, saying he’d readily trade the hundred-dollar shower for the eight-hundred-dollar view. Raney never stayed the night anyway—she didn’t trust Grandpa alone by himself. His leg was stubbornly refusing to heal, and at the last doctor’s visit they had hinted that a prosthesis might eventually give him more mobility than a painful, weeping chronic wound. The look on Grandpa’s face had made the habitually implacable orthopedic surgeon shrink by two inches right in front of Raney’s eyes—well worth the drive all the way to the Tacoma VA Hospital.

  After dinner Cleet said he was leaving for the Hood Canal early the next morning to deliver the cabinets he’d made for a Boeing executive’s weekend house—the family had offered him space in their guest cottage for the few weeks it would take to install the cabinets and do some other finish work. “You could come with me,” he told Raney. “It’s right on the water—good clamming there. Be like a little . . . holiday.” Had she heard him hesitate? About to say honeymoon instead of holiday? Had she made the substitution in her mind and only then noticed the band tighten in her throat? He had let his proposal sit between them indefinitely decided, as if leaving it undisturbed by more discussion would allow it to shift from a suggestion into something too corporeal to undo.

  “I can’t leave Grandpa alone.”

  “No. You shouldn’t.” Cleet sat beside her on the oversize sofa he used for a bed, took her plate off her lap, and kissed her, eventually, inevitably letting his fingers slip from the nape of her neck to the zipper pull at the back of her dress. “He’ll be okay for another hour, or so, huh? I’ll miss you.”

  “I’ll miss you too.” And she would, she knew, and it made her suddenly want him to stay with her. Be there at her house in Quentin all of Wednesday and into Thursday, too, until well after Bo left the peninsula. They were part of the same world, she and Cleet. Different races, maybe, but each had scraped and gouged and clung to whatever luck happened by until they had carved a common path in this lost corner of the continent. He knew her and knew the life she was born to, because he had been born to it too, had become part of the rhythm of her day—the one person besides Sandy who heard what she didn’t say almost as clearly as he heard her voice. Years, now, it had taken them to build that—an easy thing to forget to treasure. And after years he knew exactly where to touch her at exactly the right moment in their lovemaking, so there was no need to help or to guide. No danger of one experimental move gone astray.

  She told herself all of this again when she got home and checked on Grandpa, then made tea in the kitchen, sitting up long after she was aching for her bed. When the phone rang she put her hand on the receiver without lifting it, the vibrations making her fingers tingle until after twenty-seven rings it finally went silent.

  So that was it. She was going to let Bo walk out of her life again—exactly the right thing to do, she was certain. She repeated it to herself every time she woke up that long night, and worked to remember the way Cleet’s voice always made her feel like the world could be at peace even when her mind turned itself inside out looking for terms to settle what felt like an endless fight. She opened her eyes in the dark and saw the velvety shades of Cleet’s dark irises, shunned a flash of color at the back of her brain suggesting her own green eyes fell somewhere between Cleet’s brown and Bo’s blue.

  But early the next afternoon when she heard a car pull into the driveway, she no longer felt certain of anything. Out the kitchen window she could see only the front end—silvery blue. Sporty. New. She looped her hair into an unflattering knot and started washing the dishes just to keep her hands busy, drying each one and putting it into the cabinet. He caught her face as he walked by the window and stopped, waited until Raney gave him an almost invisible nod, then came through the back door without knocking.

  A mindful of memories flooded in with his slouched gait, his pale, unsettled eyes. Memories fully scented and richly colored: hot-pink Stargazer lilies stolen from his aunt’s cutting garden one August afternoon; the illicit odor of burning grass after a day clearing his uncle’s yard; seaweed and sand and even that rank, rotted deer. Without looking directly at him she could sense how the man had changed from the boy—an edginess, a sharper definition of self but still not fully at peace. It heightened her own self-consciousness. But no, that wasn’t right—it wasn’t herself she felt so conscious of. It was Cleet; the easiness of what they were together—no big ups, no big downs—suddenly, disturbingly less palatable to her. Taking care to set the last plate down without a clatter, she turned around and rested her arms behind her on the rim of the sink, hiding nothing about her body. “You came. I didn’t expect you to, if I’m honest.”

  “I never knew you to be anything less than honest.”

  She offered to make some coffee. “Tea,” he answered. “Espresso or tea. So . . . tea. Thanks.”

  She dumped a kettle of perfectly fresh water down the sink, stuck the spout under the faucet to fill it, and sprayed water all over herself before she thought to take the lid off and fill it through the proper hole. She was annoyed at herself for acting nervous. She was annoyed at him for making her nervous. What did she have to be nervous about? It was all ridiculous—just friends catching up after seven long years. “It’s a shame about your aunt and uncle,” she said.

  “It is a shame. I’m afraid they won’t be much missed.” Raney raised her eyebrows and he offered an honestly apologetic shrug, which eased the tension.

  “Well, sit down,” she said. “How can you tell me about seven years’ worth of life standing up? I figured you were living in New York City by now. Or London, maybe. Graduate school, for sure. Right? You writing famous novels yet?” Everything came out too fast, words hurrying around some obstacle she didn’t want to name. He laughed, and in that quick, self-deprecating exhalation she suddenly saw him at fourteen again, the two of them twisted into their unlikely first kiss, too young to know it mattered, felt him at twenty, nearly seven years ago, the weight of his body pressing her into his mother’s bed.

  “I’m writing famous three-page stories in Zeus Air Magazine, circulation base of five hundred. Best used as coasters or for stashing chewed gum when the stewardess delivers your drink.”

  “Zeus Air? That’s a real airline?”


  “Debatable.”

  Raney relaxed a little more to think that everything hadn’t been easy for him, and it made her aware of how many times over these years she had speculated, assumed. She put two cups of tea on the table and sat down across from him. “But you’re writing. For a real magazine.”

  “I do it for the travel discounts mainly—the job lets me cross over with bigger airlines.”

  “Where do you go?”

  “Where do I not go? Far as a plane can take me.”

  He leaned in a bit, his expression opening up like he needed to tell her the risks he’d taken. He talked about his trips through Southeast Asia, China, Central America. He’d shunned western Europe, and Raney inferred that was as much to define himself in opposition to his parents as to follow his own inclinations. It was like hearing a narration of all those old National Geographics she kept stacked in her closet, and she asked him question after question: What was the food like? What color was a tropical ocean—really? Warm enough to swim in? What was it like to stand in an Indian market in the monsoon rains? He never mentioned a single friend on all those trips, and when she asked him if it didn’t get lonely he switched the questions to her, when she’d left school, where she worked now, if any of her old friends were back in Quentin too. She leaned forward to reach the sugar and caught his eyes flicker to her chest, pulled her sweater close where it gapped above her breasts, and that, too, she saw him notice. They talked for an hour. No—more than two, she realized when she glanced at the clock. She thought she heard Grandpa stir upstairs and carried up some tea and graham crackers but found him dozing with a pillow over his head, his breathing regular and deep.

  When she came back into the kitchen, Bo’s face brightened like she’d been away a whole day after years of being steadily together, and without thinking, she kissed his cheek. It was funny, she thought, that a man so out of place in this town and this house could look so at home to her. “Did your grandfather remember who I was yesterday?” Bo asked her.