He kept the job with Zeus, traveling to the limited reach of its small fleet of 737s, but he began writing freelance, too, keeping a bag packed and ready to go so that whenever the mood struck he could jump on a plane, take his camera and his laptop, and park himself in a hotel where no one knew his name. He sought out the fringes of the tourist routes, looking for niches that hadn’t been covered by other travel writers. Rose-petal harvests and camel wrestling in Turkey. An out-of-the way Greek island where the Aegean Sea flowed viscous as saliva, floating effortless even for his skinny body—the salt a life vest. He photographed old women gone frog-faced, their breasts wallowing in simple black dresses as they stood in doorways to observe the world hurtling through change. He tried to imagine them young, virginal; tried to see how young they still were in this ancient, ancient land. He could stand on a bridge, on a subway, on a street corner and watch people for so long he became hypnotized imagining the life they had that he would never witness, and there were moments, scary moments, when he wanted to hurl himself into their existence, turn himself inside out, and become them, become anyone but himself.
When the money was half-gone he sought out more remote places—treks into the Golden Triangle to sleep on mats with tribal groups discovering that the hard authenticity of their lives could be sold to a new breed of tourists rich enough to pay for a week’s worth of mosquitoes and mud just to say they’d been there. He burrowed into the slums of Asia and Africa, where cars slipped like fish through the chaotic streets and the smell of life flooded into him and through him until he was saturated. He craved cities where English was not just a foreign language, it was a foreign concept, where everyone seemed to know something he didn’t, and the challenge of finding clean water and a safe bed could crowd everything else from his mind. Anonymity became his favorite definition of home. A few weeks in Seattle and he was restless, waking up at night with enough security and empty black silence to remember how much he hated his own fate. The next day he would be scanning the map for any place he’d never been. Even now, a decade later, he couldn’t take a taxi without asking the driver to describe the village in Somalia or Ethiopia or Syria where his sisters, his brothers, his cousins, his parents still lived.
Three years into it, Eric was almost through the money when he ran into an old friend from his early days at Zeus Air Magazine who worked for Condé Nast now. They ended up in a sketchy bar outside Paris trading stories. The friend had just finished a piece on yachting in the Mediterranean—interviewed a Mexican billionaire on his two-fifty-footer, trying to keep up with him on 1800 Coleccion tequila shots while the guy bitched about his wife forgetting her makeup bag back in Aztec Land so she put him in the “no sex vise” unless their pilots flew the 747 back to fetch it.
They were well into their own tequila rounds when the friend said he’d heard about Eric’s car wreck. “My wife’s always worried about my dying of malaria, dengue . . . it’s the car accidents that kill you over here. Hell, I don’t have to tell you that.” Eric was ready to brush it off when the friend got too quiet, too fidgety, and added, “Sorry, man. I shouldn’t have brought it up.” He poured Eric another shot and took a swig of his own. “Listen. They have so many kids down there. I heard that girl had eight brothers and sisters.”
There it was. In one sentence. Eric felt so transformed by that inadvertently leaked bit of information he wondered if he had been looking for it ever since his accident—the missing memory that could let him move on. And it did, but not in the way he’d expected. All this time he’d thought he was trying to run away from the smoldering bomb inside his own brain. That was the easy part, he began to understand. He felt almost weightless as it dawned on him, like the next breath he took might lift him off this bar stool, lift him right up over this crowd of happy drunks. As long as he kept his rules straight—kept his boundaries close and stayed out of anyone else’s driver seat, when his brain exploded the next time it would destroy only him.
He began to hate the money after that, the cushion it allowed him. For a while he still craved the edge, the risk, wanted to take it, take it, take it all right now before it was over. Strike and get out before he could hurt another soul. He gave away what he couldn’t spend—extravagant tips left hidden under his plate, packages that arrived on friends’ birthdays with no return address, cash left in envelopes at homeless shelters. And one extraordinary, anonymous donation for a playground and school in a tiny town on an island in Mexico.
The last travel article he wrote was about Cambodia. He trekked three days up to a hill village and dialed his camera into focus on an old man stumbling behind his yoked oxen. He caught the light perfectly on the man’s straining, cracked face. Then, a second before the shutter opened, the man looked straight at Eric and for the first time he saw through his lens the true horror of unabating hunger. He was appalled that he earned his living promoting such misery as a tourist attraction. He sold his camera, done with putting its glassy distance between himself and life.
With the money gone he couldn’t support himself freelancing anymore and he went back to Zeus full time. Almost on a whim, he pulled out a half-finished essay about the genome project he’d begun that night in Paris after too much tequila. The article eventually turned into a book deal. A few clean brain scans, the meditative calm of losing himself inside his writing—they gave him a way to live again, if only in the present tense. The only dependable tense, wasn’t it? Unadulterated by doctored memory, unfettered by anticipation? Over time it became an instinct more than an intentional choice. Finally, at thirty-nine he’d hit a balance that worked—enough giving to counter the taking, enough pause to weigh some risks. There were his parents, his half brothers. There was the legacy of his work if he had any luck. And there was Charlotte. More than any of it, there was Charlotte. But now the description of the faint serpentine scar coiled around Jane Doe’s arm felt like it could be enough to tip everything upside down.
—
The nurse’s aide was just starting Jane’s bath when they got to her bedside. Charlotte let Eric walk into the room ahead of her and pulled the curtain closed across the glass door. It was the only privacy she could offer them. The aide dropped a washcloth into the bathwater, set the tub between Jane’s legs, then removed the foam cushions that protected her heels. Eric had to turn his head at the sight of her blackened toes. The aide bent Jane’s knee to wash her calf, her shin, the hollow under her knee, tucking the blue cotton gown under the other leg so that only a small section was exposed. Eric could tell the aide had washed a hundred bodies. She was attentive and daydreaming all at the same time, sloshing the cloth back into the tub, wringing it out, shifting the gown to expose the other leg and beginning there. It must be little different before a wake, he thought, the ritual washing of a body before burial.
She began to wash Jane’s right arm, holding it up to scrub the last of the cast plaster away. Her skin glowed under the friction of the cloth and as he watched, Eric saw a band of contrasting tissue emerge, a flushed pink coil encircling Raney’s arm between the elbow and the shoulder, like a decorative Egyptian bracelet. For my Cleopatra, he remembered telling her. She was the reincarnation of Cleopatra and he had taken her paintbrush away in a friendly struggle to draw a gold encircling line around this scar, turning the injury into a blessing of beauty.
• 13 •
raney
When Raney was in second grade, Pete Brewer, an obnoxious little boy who ended up in a wheelchair after he ran his Harley into the open door of a parked car, shouted a curse at her on the jungle gym. When she got home she asked her grandpa why the two of them had the same last name. Grandpa was sitting in the yard on a woven plastic lawn chair chipping mortar off some old bricks he’d hauled out of a demo yard, his knees splayed and his elbows braced so the bits of gray cement fell into the weeds. “What? You don’t like the name Remington?” he said, without looking up.
Raney sat cross-legged on the damp ground matching up the broken chunks of fallen ro
ck into perfect fitting pairs. “Yes, sir. I like Remington fine.”
“And you remember where it comes from?” She did. She could not forget. The day Grandpa taught her how to write her name, he started the lesson with a trip to the storage closet underneath the eaves. He brought out a long wooden box and set it on the kitchen table, swung the tiny brass hasp out from its brass ring, and lifted the lid. A rifle lay inside, fitted into a bed of crimson felt molded to its exact shape, dark with gun oil. The wooden stock was polished to a silky gloss you couldn’t help but touch, and the metal barrel and firing mechanism were a fine blue black. He lifted it out of the case and set it across her scrawny knees with solemnity equal to laying the baby Jesus in his manger. “Renee Lee Remington, every time you write your name you think of this rifle. Oldest guns in America.”
“This is the oldest gun in all America? Did you take it to the war?”
He bit back a smile. “Oldest gun manufacturer in America.”
She was afraid to touch it. She kept her hands locked against her chest like two flighty birds until he put it back in the case. For years she thought her ancestors had made all those guns, until she figured out they wouldn’t be living like dirt farmers and buying her clothes at Value Village if that were the case.
Grandpa didn’t get out the gun again when she told him what Pete had called her on the playground. He just hacked at the ancient mortar clinging like barnacles to those fine red bricks, sending chips flying far afield and spraying dust into the bowl of her school skirt. “I said I like my name,” she repeated.
“Then what’s your question about?”
“Well, if you are my mama’s daddy, why do I have the same name as you? Pete Brewer says I should have my daddy’s name. Not yours.”
Grandpa put the brick and the chisel down and smiled at her. Then he said something memorable enough for Raney to hold on to until she was old enough to understand it. “Well, it sounds like Pete Brewer is the card-carrying bastard in the Quentin Elementary School second-grade class.”
—
When Cleet walked into the gallery the day he finished his job on Hood Canal, Raney’s heart did one wobbly flip knowing that even to look at him was to lie. But after they talked and agreed, she watched him walk back out across the buckled plank floor, seeing a sway in his stride that hadn’t been there before. All the words in the world can’t make a woman feel as loved as that, she thought, knowing you’ve changed a man from the inside. And so it was over with Bo. She was Cleet’s again, and part of her could believe she was his even more. She had closed a door to some dangerous place that she hadn’t even seen until she’d gone through it and barely escaped. When her mind turned to the color of the child forming inside her body she tried to think only of ten fingers and ten toes, a healthy heart, a strong cry after the first-ever inhaled breath.
Cleet insisted he meet one on one with Grandpa before they set a date. Grandpa had been civil enough whenever he and Cleet had crossed paths, depending on one’s definition of civil—Grandpa generally associated that word with all that he distrusted. “What? You’re all of a sudden missing your mother’s Catholic customs?” Raney asked Cleet when he would not budge.
“Only the ones that serve a purpose. You can’t split yourself between the two of us, Raney. Besides, I already know who’d win that fight.” She started to retort but he laughed and pressed his thumb to her lips, told her to have the ice packs and bandages ready, and left her waiting on the front porch where she could hear the fireworks. But it was surprisingly quiet behind the closed front door, even when Raney pressed her ear flat to it. When Cleet called her in, she saw two drained shot glasses on the coffee table and Grandpa acting like they’d been discussing how to rebuild a carburetor or what decoy to use on a wood duck, as near to friendship as she’d ever seen him. Later she asked Cleet what he’d said to make a bond. “Bond? I just shut up and listened while he described what he’d do if I ever hurt you.”
—
Pooling the money they had both saved, Cleet and Raney were able to snare a worn-down house in need of Cleet’s talent just three hundred yards through the woods from her grandfather’s farm, if two miles by car. By the time they were moved in, Grandpa’s wound had closed under a shiny purplish patch of thin skin and he had kicked Raney’s regular assistance out of his life, although most evenings his truck showed up shortly before dinnertime or they carried their meal to him. The neighborhood was chopped into a disheveled mix of dwellings—a few rotting double-wides, some solid, timeless log cabins, falling-down barns, and a rusting Quonset hut. The neighbors themselves were an equal mix. Some Raney knew from her childhood, and some made it clear they had no interest in new neighbors whether indigenous to Quentin or not. Across the road lived a sprawling family of hard-to-determine relationships, the Wellses, who sent twin four-year-old girls Amelia and Caroline over with a casserole in a shoebox lined with a plastic Rite Aid bag, and thus Raney felt officially graduated to the dubious status of housewife.
The best thing about the area was its proximity to the bluff, where the view faced away from the man-made scruff of Quentin toward the maze of bay and forest and inlets backdropped by snow-capped mountains. Perched above the water was a row of old Victorian-era houses built when the railroad was supposed to make Port Townsend and the Olympic Peninsula the economic hub of the Northwest. A few were abandoned, but some had been purchased by lost tourists in a fit of romance inspired by the view on some sunny summery day, usually left empty more and more days out of each succeeding year. Sometimes she and Cleet would share a picnic on the wide steps of those deserted front porches. Cleet believed the houses made for better property value and maybe it was true—to walk down their street was certainly to walk up the social ladder.
—
Even before Raney felt the nudge and press of Jake’s feet and knees and elbows against the inside of her, she came to a different understanding of her purpose. Rather than her own life as a single book with many chapters, Jake became the title page. The dedication and acknowledgments. The prologue and epilogue. The only lasting thing she might leave behind other than a trunkful of paintings.
They had a snowstorm the day she went into labor, and two giant cedars fell between their house and the highway. Cleet had only cleared one when Raney’s water broke. He called 911 and then he called the doctor and made him describe in detail how to deliver a baby at home. The doctor told Cleet to hot-iron a set of new shoelaces and use that to tie off the cord, then cut it with boiled scissors. Turned out you didn’t really need so much to deliver a baby—clean, warm towels, clean water, clean scissors, and a clean shoelace—$17.99 before tax.
And if all of evolution was focused on pushing the human race one step farther through time, then it might barely explain what Raney felt the minute she first touched her baby. Surely no one person could generate that much emotion—it would splinter the mind. When she looked into Jake’s scrunched red face poking out of the flannel sheet Cleet had wrapped around him, she knew he had blown in from some old, old star. His mystified, wide-open pupils working so hard to focus—she could see him puzzling out where that stardust had blown him this time around, like he was searching for a bridge between that world and this one. Later that night, while he slept, she wrote him a letter, coaxing his baby-soul to land here for just another eighty years or so—a blink of an eye for an angel, maybe, but scary-crazy for people. His blue-black eyes were the most comforting place she’d ever dreamed of; for Raney they held the wisdom of Buddha, Muhammed, and Jesus combined, just for starters. And his skin was a blend of all three, a perfect balance between Cleet’s shade and her own. Cleet had laughed when she first pulled back the bound flannel sheet and ran her hand over Jake’s belly and arms and legs and back. “He’s all there, I checked,” Cleet said, and she couldn’t tell him she was crying in relief that after nine months of worry she could begin to let her secret go and forgive herself for what she might have done to him.
At what point did she full
y accept that all her intuited conviction had been wrong—that she could see her golden son in Cleet’s golden hands and not fear she had both deceived him and conceived their child in that deceit? Whatever day it actually was, she marked it as the day she put Jake into her grandfather’s arms and saw him fingering Jake’s black hair and perfect golden skin, trying to accept that his own blood circulated in the flesh of another race. He stared at Jake for a long, silent time until finally, when Raney thought she would take her baby away and say, “Good-bye! It’s Jake or me,” Grandpa leaned down and kissed Jake’s head. She saw in that kiss what her grandfather must have done twenty-eight years ago when his only daughter put her bastard child in his arms. Maybe it was that kiss Raney’s broken mother remembered when she decided Raney was better left behind.
—
If Raney had loved Cleet incompletely before Jake was born, her love bloomed full-fledged watching him fall in love with his son. Once, in a dream, she bolted awake in a sweaty memory of Bo lighting votive candles down the spine of a broken-hinged trunk, Bo swimming over her, pressing her down into a nest of sleeping bags, Bo’s sweat and skin moving through her, and she had cried out in terror that the bare sail of shoulder rising from the bed next to her was his, not Cleet’s. She lived the next week in shame at the revived memory. Raney now lived the truth that there are all types of love: the kind that hits you like a truck hauling down a highway, the kind that needs as much nurturing as a winter campfire, and the range between. The love she and Cleet depended on was the kind that made life survivable day after day. There was a value in that that might show the tool marks of effort, but for centuries it had put food on tables and kept kids warm and fields planted and doors bolted against the world when a family had nothing but each other for army and justice and church.
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