After a while Charlotte sat quietly and just let him talk, hearing two separate stories in his history with Raney. When he told her the story of his first kiss, she heard the trauma of his first seizure. When he told her about their two missed chances at love, at age twenty and again at twenty-seven, she heard the timeline of his recurrent brain tumors and surgeries, how they had slashed his youth with precocious mortal terror. And for the first time—how was it possible?—she heard the horrific consequence of his last grand mal seizure and the real reason Eric would never drive again.
She had never been so conscious of how little he had shared about his disease, or how little she’d admitted its effects on him; that the boundaries he had drawn were not just for his own protection. She had fallen in love with him during a blissful window of apparent health, and despite all the textbooks and articles she’d read, for the first time she admitted how unlikely it was to last. It scared her. But what scared her most was that she couldn’t tell if she was more afraid for Eric or for herself.
—
Felipe Otero had been away at a medical conference. Three days after Eric’s revelation Felipe stopped by the hospital to pick up his mail and check in, his ten-year-old son, Andy, in tow. The boy looked so much like his father it was easy for Charlotte to imagine that she was seeing Felipe as a child. She dug a handful of quarters out of her pockets for Andy to use at his whim in the vending machines down the hall. Felipe was already pulling up the computer files on the newly admitted patients. Charlotte turned the monitor away so that he had to stop reading and look at her. “Jane has a name,” she said.
“Jane Doe? When? I didn’t hear anything on the news.”
“Ortho took the cast off her arm and discovered a scar three days ago.”
“And someone identified her?”
Charlotte almost blurted out that Eric, her Eric, had been the one to recognize the physical mar that distinguished Jane as a unique individual. But suddenly she didn’t want to personalize it, at least not here in the hospital. “Well, it isn’t certain yet. Helen reported it to the sheriff’s office, but she doesn’t want the press to know—thinks the photographers would be camped out waiting for the moment of reunion, I guess.”
“How could the hospital stop this getting out?”
“Helen could stop the rain if she decided to.”
“Charlotte, listen to you. Be careful or they’ll give you her job.”
“I suppose that would serve me right.” He should have laughed with her at that, but there was a look of something closer to sympathy in his eyes that made Charlotte want to change the subject. “The conference was good?” she asked.
“Good enough. Hard to be away from the boys.” As if on cue, Andy ran around the corner and slammed into his father’s legs with two fistfuls of potato chips and candy bars. “Dr. Charlotte spoils you! And leaves the aftermath of junk food to me.” He winked at Charlotte and she felt the co-conspirator with them both, for a moment sweeping away her anxiety about Jane or Helen—even Eric. Felipe had become so much more actively a parent in these last weeks, involved in the small details that must have been handled by his wife before. He seemed quite unconscious of the subtle shift, but Charlotte had an unbidden image of him rousing his three boys in the morning, getting their oatmeal or eggs heated up, their school lunches packed. “I have to get him to soccer practice,” Felipe said, putting Andy’s head into a mock stronghold. “You’re here tomorrow? It’s hard to imagine Jane’s situation won’t become more . . . complicated.”
“Complicated? In what way?” She knew he was referring to more than Jane’s medical problems. But Andy was already pulling him down the hall.
“Tomorrow. Let’s have a drink after work if things don’t get crazy.”
—
And following the natural rule that all systems will trend toward disorder, things did get more complicated. By the next day, eighteen days after Jane was airlifted to Beacon Hospital, her kidneys could no longer balance her blood chemistry within the narrow range compatible with life. The level of potassium in her blood was alarmingly high, and Felipe, who was on duty, had to put a large-bore catheter under her clavicle so that Jane could be dialyzed. Her oxygen levels and blood pressure had improved, but the dialysis machine acted like an inert external shunt and worsened both, so she could barely tolerate the full treatment.
Every time Jane’s ICU door opened, Charlotte wondered if it would be Christina Herrand with a court order to turn everything off, or Jane’s astounded relative, begging for more time. And what if one occurred only a day before the other? When she couldn’t stand it any longer, Charlotte went to Helen’s office. Helen’s assistant was a twentyish girl who had a different-color stripe in her bleached-blond hair every time Charlotte saw her. Today it was sky blue, and somehow the defiance of this distinctly unnatural color cheered Charlotte up. When Helen’s office door opened, she grasped both of Charlotte’s hands warmly, as she always did, as if she were running into an old friend unexpectedly at a cocktail party. “I’m glad you came by. She’s no better, is she? Your patient. I stopped by this morning, but you and Dr. Otero looked busy so I didn’t interrupt.”
“What’s happened since her ID, Helen? I haven’t heard anything.”
“Oh? I thought Simpson had called you . . . I’ve been keeping him up to date on Jane’s condition.” Charlotte caught a hesitation in Helen’s eyes before she added, “His office found an address on the Olympic Peninsula. Simpson went out to talk to the husband two days ago.”
A husband. There was a husband. Charlotte felt something inside her briefly expand and then utterly collapse, leaving a void of remarkable and unanticipated magnitude. “So she’s really Eric’s friend, then?”
Helen looked at her frankly, absent her usual placid smile. “What I’ve said is confidential, Charlotte. Simpson believes she’s been identified, but you should wait for him to tell you more. I know her condition is . . . tenuous. You have decisions to make . . .”
“No . . . I just . . . Why hasn’t her husband come to see her yet?”
“Well, grief does strange things to people. I called the husband myself yesterday—I didn’t get very far. He basically hung up on me when I said I was from Beacon. And I shouldn’t have even told you that.”
“Why can’t I phone him? He might be more open with me—her doctor.”
“I’m asking you to wait. Let the law deal with it first. Please.”
“We might not have many more days. She’s got strangers acting as her family.” A pink flush deepened the sun-scarred folds of Helen’s thin neck. Charlotte felt her register the extent of Charlotte’s disdain and forgive her—a cost of business. “Why don’t you want me involved in this?” Charlotte asked.
“Dr. Reese. Charlotte. Remember, this was a hit-and-run accident. Whoever left Jane in a ditch along the highway is likely to be prosecuted. You can imagine how that could escalate if she doesn’t survive.”
—
Charlotte was already parked in front of her own house before she dialed Felipe’s number; they’d had no time to talk at the hospital. She could see Eric’s shadow through the closed window shade—back at work, which was good. The geneticist in Sweden was nearly impossible to reach, and Eric had been forced to write around missing information; he was getting anxious about his deadline, but he’d been too distracted to write in these last few days. She wanted to tell him everything, despite Helen’s request. It would be some relief to hear that Simpson had found the husband, wouldn’t it? Give Eric some sense of resolution? She watched his shadow stretching, rubbing his head. Resolution. Another hollow word, she thought. A word that worked in poetry and obituaries maybe, but this? Whatever Eric had lost when he discovered Raney felt impossible to name, much less resolve.
He would begin pacing the room right about now, she knew, reading a copy of his day’s work out loud and stopping every lap or two to cross something out, make a star beside the good stuff. Even as she had the thought, his shadow
reached the end of the coffee table and stopped, hunching over a page for a moment before he started walking again. He was a man of reliable habits, though she suspected he hadn’t always been. Certainly not in his wilder traveling days, before she knew him. When Raney had known him.
Charlotte was about to give up on Felipe when he finally answered his cell phone. He was grabbing a burger just a few blocks away—she should drive over, catch up on things. By the time Charlotte got there, he’d already ordered her a glass of Malbec and a plate of calamari. “Eric’s probably made dinner,” she said.
“Just an appetizer. I heard you met with Helen today and figured you’d need some sustenance.”
“What did you hear?” she asked.
“Only that Jane’s demise could now be someone’s murder charge. That Helen is worried you may not be the most objective member of the care team.”
“Helen Seras said that?”
“Well, not until I asked her and she admitted it.” The flourish with which he said this made Charlotte laugh despite herself. “It’s the only way to get the truth from them!” he went on. “So now I’ll ask you. Is it true?”
“Which? Murder or my objectivity?”
“You choose. I already know the answers. ‘Only machines are objective,’ ” he quoted her from their past conversations.
“Correct. As for murder . . . I’m not a lawyer. Not my problem.”
“As long as you keep the machines going.” Felipe’s irreverence was his most appealing characteristic in Charlotte’s opinion, but the joke sent an uncomfortable shiver through her. “Maybe Helen needs to reconsider her own objectivity. She gave me a grilling about starting dialysis—harmless enough, unless she’s tallying up the daily cost of Jane’s survival. Or maybe Christina Herrand, the hired gun—excuse me, guardian—is whispering in Helen’s ear. She was there tonight, knitting. Rumi in hand.”
“Rumi? I’d assumed she was reading the Bible,” Charlotte said.
“I peeked when she went to the ladies’ room.”
“I know Helen’s told her about Jane’s ID—I guess she had to, legally. I’ve avoided talking to her about it. Or she’s avoided it . . .”
“I’m sure she’s waiting for proof positive. Notarized, no doubt. If it’s true they’ve found the husband I’ll miss Christina, in a way. I was hoping that knitting might be a sweater for me. Scarf at least.”
“You don’t think it’s true?” Charlotte asked him.
He shrugged and for the first time looked slightly reserved. “I don’t know. Maybe a husband has been found. But did Helen say Jane was, indeed, Eric’s friend? It makes for a remarkable coincidence—the doctor’s boyfriend being the one to identify the unknown patient. Don’t you think?”
“They happen sometimes. We’re the only Level I trauma hospital here.”
“True. How is Eric handling it?”
Charlotte stumbled for an answer. The startling moment of Eric’s discovery felt almost trivial compared with the tremors that continued between the two of them, undiscussed. Felipe was watching her somberly. He said, “We need to do more formal testing on her brain stem, Charlotte. A few more days of dialysis but . . . There could be some tough decisions ahead. Have you talked to him about that?”
Charlotte shook her head. “There’s still a lot we haven’t talked about.” After a pause she asked, “What do you think about the tests?”
“I think I’ve let you postpone it for too long.”
“That’s not what I meant. Do you think she’s brain-dead?”
“Likely. Which could be the better of two evils.”
“She’s thirty-nine. Two years older than me.”
“You’ve lost patients younger than this, Charlotte. What’s different here?” He had put his fork down and was studying her as if no answer could be wrong except the failure to answer at all.
“I don’t know. That she’s alone? A victim?” She groped for something more rational, but the truth swept in from somewhere else. “I just feel like she has more to do. I have to give her more time here.”
“So you are the immortal twin, come to the rescue.” She looked puzzled and he continued. “You’ve forgotten your school lessons. Castor and Pollux, the twins. One the child of Zeus and one the child of a mortal. When the mortal Castor is killed, Pollux splits his immortality to save him.”
“Are you telling me not to try to play God, Felipe? Really?”
“I know better than to tell you anything.” He laughed. “And we are all Gods within our realms, as my grandmother would have said. Especially doctors, as my mother would have said. Anyway, it worked in the myth. Except, of course, the twins could then live only in the stars.”
By the time she got home, Eric had put her dinner under plastic wrap in the refrigerator. He looked up expectantly and she leaned to kiss him—another moment to collect her emotions, to imply without lying that there was still no news. She couldn’t talk about it now. What would she tell him? She felt almost as confused about Jane’s identity as she had before Eric saw the scar. Why hadn’t Simpson called her yet? A husband. There was a husband. She heard Helen’s words again, tried to imagine what kind of husband could shun his critically ill wife. How would Eric react? She was too tired to think anymore, talk anymore—she had the next day off; there would be time then, after she’d slept. She shut his laptop and coaxed him into bed.
—
She woke up spooned around him like it was any summer Saturday—as if the stress of these last three days had blown everything out of perspective and a deep, dreamless sleep had set it right again. He pulled her arms tight and said, “Sunny today. Let’s get away. Go out on the boat.”
She showered, washed her hair, and put a thick conditioner on to soak, as much to linger in the hot water and steam as for any improbable benefit to her unruly hair. After she’d rinsed and turbaned her head she stood dripping in front of an empty linen cabinet. She got back into the shower and called out to the bedroom, “Can you get me another towel? There’re some in the dryer, I think.”
“Maybe I should hold you hostage for it,” Eric joked, like his old self.
“If you make me wait any longer I’ll be dry anyway.”
He tossed the towel over the shower door and started to shave. Charlotte emerged, tubed in fluffy pink, and stood behind him facing the mirror. “If I move in with you, we are throwing those towels out,” Eric said.
“They’re great towels. Expensive towels.”
“They’re pink.”
“Expensive pink.”
It had been their joke for years, this trading of personal quirks and pleasures they would be forced to relinquish if they lived together. The quips had started as tentative bait dipped into the waters of commitment that the other could snatch or swim by. But by now the jokes felt de-barbed—their way of promising not to leave each other without being obligated to stay. She had assumed it was their tacit agreement to give it more time—the answer would declare itself. She watched him shave and knew by heart exactly where the next razor stroke would begin and end. A comfortingly unchanging habit in a comfortable unchanging relationship. As soon as she had the thought, she remembered her own rule never to greet a patient’s family with the words “There’s been no change.” There was always change, from one breath and one heartbeat to the next. Dying and surviving both required momentum, and in her mind, only a heartless doctor would refuse to measure that change for a family.
A year or so after their first trip to Lopez Island, when his mother’s uncalculated rudeness had made Charlotte realize that she was falling in love, her house had become the more commonly shared dwelling. Eric had gradually taken over two drawers in her dresser, the top shelf in the bathroom cabinet that she could hardly reach anyway, and displaced her white sugar with his agave syrup in the kitchen. For another year it had seemed part of a slow, easy stream going somewhere purposeful, no need to predict where, in its own slow and easy time.
Then Eric’s editor had come into town
. The three of them took a jazz brunch cruise on the Argosy—one of those tourist activities you did only when you hosted an out-of-towner—and came away from it freshly reminded of Seattle’s unique beauty. After the cruise they’d dropped the editor at his hotel and come back to Charlotte’s house. Eric wandered into the kitchen and came back to the bedroom with two glasses of wine, holding one out for Charlotte. She was lying on her back across the bed with her head at the foot so that her hair hung over the edge, still matted and curled from being out on the water. Her hands were folded over her abdomen and her blue jeans were unzipped. She was wearing headphones connected to an iPod and didn’t show any sign of hearing him come into the room. “Wine?” he asked.
He walked over and lay down next to her. When she still didn’t move he pulled one of the earbuds to his own ear and listened: Joan Osborne’s “St. Teresa,” the one she always listened to when some pent-up emotional wave was about to break. When the song ended, he rolled above her with one hand beside each shoulder and studied her face looking for a clue. “Hey in there. You okay?” Charlotte nodded, calm enough for him to assume their quite perfect day on the quite perfect Puget Sound had merited Joan. “Jim wants to talk about marketing. Good sign. I told him I’d stop by his hotel before he goes to the airport. Want to come? Or I can get a cab.”
Charlotte took out the other earbud and looked into Eric’s lovely blue eyes, one of the first things she’d noticed about him years ago. She saw his face as freshly as she had seen the Seattle skyline from the boat this morning. It was handsome to her, even when she reminded herself to focus on the flaws that had disappeared with familiarity—the lean, slightly crooked nose, the hollowed shadows that made him look too serious unless he was smiling. He wasn’t that thin, really, but if all you saw was his face you would expect protruding ribs and hipbones, the same skinny, awkwardly tall physique she’d seen in his teenage pictures.
Gemini Page 21