Gemini

by Carol Cassella

  “You didn’t answer me.”

  “I’m sorry. It isn’t a question I can answer yet. She’s still very sick. But we’re doing everything we can to help her.” He seemed to be calculating the truth in that, his mouth tightened at the corners and his gaze sharpened, holding her eyes with no timidity, as if he might reach through her to his mother. “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Jake.”

  “May I come in?” She moved to follow the boy into the house, but Eric touched her arm. “I don’t think we should,” he said, but Charlotte felt too invested now to leave it half done.

  The television was on and the low rumble of voices in the background made the trailer feel less isolated. If she lived here she would never turn it off, Charlotte thought. Above the set were shelves filled with VHS tapes, classics mainly—and then she saw Bette Davis slink across the screen in black and white. The wall in the hallway displayed several oil paintings that must be Raney’s, Northwest landscapes reminiscent of Emily Carr, arresting enough to make Charlotte pause. There was a striking charcoal sketch behind glass that had to be Jake, though the face had been drawn a bit too long. The trailer’s added bump-out had been made into a kitchen, and it gave the home an extra dimension that seemed more personal and substantial than she would have guessed from the outside. But the place seemed too orderly for a household in the midst of such a crisis and she remembered David Boughton’s crisply pressed white shirt. Where were the toys? A boy’s industrious mess? She wondered if Raney herself would have kept the rooms so precisely tidy.

  Jake’s skin was a lovely mocha—Native American possibly, or Hispanic—and his hair was quite black and so straight it shot at angles across his forehead and cheeks. Maybe the child was adopted. The shape of his face was arresting, clean lines and planes, his nose so narrow it was almost feminine. She could tell he was in that burst between childhood and full adolescence, his facial bones growing with their own odd symmetry, just hinting at how the final composite would gel—a cubist portrait. And then she looked more closely at his eyes. No, it was not an illusion of the light or her imagination. They were, truly, of two different colors. The left eye was a deep brown somewhere between his hair and his skin tone. But the right was distinctly blue. A cool slate-blue eye in this decidedly non-Caucasian boy.

  “Jake. I like that name. How old are you?”

  “Twelve. In December.”

  “It must be hard for you, not seeing your mom for so long. I know she misses you.”

  “Did she tell you that?” Jake asked, his eyes wide with the question so he suddenly looked much younger. She wanted to touch him, a hand on his shoulder or cupping his face, something reassuring.

  “She can’t talk to us right now. But I talk to her sometimes. And sometimes it seems like I hear her voice. I know she thinks about you every day.” He watched her without blinking. She knew he recognized the lie, but couldn’t tell if the lie made him feel better or worse. His mouth softened a little and she went on, “I think . . . I think she would want me to be sure you are doing okay. Are you?” His face didn’t change at first and she saw him glance toward the back window where David’s car would have been parked. Eric sat on a chair nearer the doorway with his fists locked under his chin, listening but separated. “Jake, can you tell me what happened?” Charlotte asked.

  “They had a fight that night,” Jake said.

  Charlotte felt Eric’s eyes on her. “The night your mother was in the accident?”

  Jake was slow to answer. “The night she left here. She wanted to take me to a doctor, in Seattle, and he was mad about it. He was mad about a lot of other things already—all that stuff in Quentin before we left.”

  Piece by piece Charlotte drew broken parts of a story from Jake that did not all fit together. As she asked questions and drew him out, it dawned on her that Jake had not known his mother was in the hospital until he overheard Charlotte and Eric in conversation with his father, just an hour ago. He seemed disconcertingly relieved about that, in fact. But after a few more questions she realized that David Boughton had convinced Jake that his mother had disappeared from his life voluntarily—run away from both of them.

  She saw Eric check his watch, sensed his growing tension, and considered how this scene would transform if Jake’s father came home. “Jake, listen. We have to drive all the way back to Seattle tonight so I can keep taking care of your mother. But I’d like to talk to you again.”

  Jake stood up and Charlotte saw him wince and shift his weight. “I want to come with you. I want to see her.”

  “I wish we could take you. I want you to see her too. Could you talk to your father about coming to Seattle?”

  “He isn’t my father.”

  Eric had been quiet until then. Now he drew close and asked, “Who is your father, Jake?”

  Jake went to another room and came back with a photograph of Cleet holding Jake on his lap in front of a commercial fishing boat. “My name is Jacob Remington Flores. And this was my dad.”

  Charlotte took the picture. “He’s a good-looking man. So are you. You look like him.” She had heard Jake say “was,” and tried to think of a way to ask what had happened. As if he’d read her thoughts, Jake volunteered, “He died. Fishing on a boat like that.” Charlotte saw Eric’s shoulders sink; he turned away and walked down the hallway.

  “Jake, I’ll tell your mother I met you. I’ll tell her how strong you’re being, okay?” As they were leaving, she thought of one more question. “You said your back was hurting. Is that why your mother was taking you to a doctor?” He turned around and raised his shirt, bending just enough for Charlotte to see the lazy S shape curling his spine—not dramatic, easily missed, she knew from experience, but enough to need medical attention.

  They were already in the car when Jake came outside and waited for Eric to roll down his window. “My mother would never have left me. You can tell her I know. David is lying.”

  —

  “I should have asked him if he felt safe. I should have given him my phone number. What if he isn’t safe with that guy?” Charlotte asked. She was hunched over the steering wheel, seeing the inside of the trailer more clearly than the road. She’d hardly said a word for the first ten miles, barely aware of Eric’s tense posture and silence. The car briefly veered over the centerline and she heard him gasp. “Should we go back?” she asked. When he didn’t answer, she broke her eyes from the road and glanced at him—did she actually see a trace of tears on his cheek? She’d been so concerned about Jake she hadn’t considered Eric’s reaction to seeing how painfully Raney’s life had unfolded. “Eric, I’m sorry—I’m so sorry. It must be awful for you, what’s happened in her life.”

  “You didn’t see it, did you?” Eric asked.

  He sounded acutely aggrieved, beyond rational grief. “See what?” She glanced in the rearview mirror, expecting a mangled animal in their wake. “See what?”

  “Jake. His face.”

  “What did you see? Is he being abused? I should turn around,” Charlotte said, pulling the car onto the shoulder and skidding several feet in the gravel before the car came to a full stop.

  He answered in a broken voice, “All those stories I told you about Raney and me as kids. In college and after. When my aunt and uncle died and I saw Raney for the last time, I slept with her, Charlotte.”

  That was it? Charlotte thought. Some surge of guilt was enough to bring him to tears when he had been so stoic this whole wrenching day? He had a look of astonishment on his face, either at whatever she had missed or the fact that she was oblivious to what she had missed. “What are you talking about?”

  “I slept with Jake’s mother twelve and a half years ago.” He waited, watching for a transformation in her expression. “Did you see Raney’s paintings? The charcoal sketch of Jake on the wall? I saw you look at it twice. That wasn’t Jake.” Charlotte’s jaw was tight. She wanted to get back on the highway and drive away from here, be home in her own small house with her ca
t and her own bedroom that smelled of down and clean wool. “That was me. Raney made that sketch of me. When I was twelve years old.”

  Charlotte tried to grasp the crisis of conscience he must be experiencing, seeing this woman who had meant so much to him battling death and unable to save her own son. Nothing less could have inspired this delusion. Surely a delusion. Why did it make her feel angry instead of sympathetic? “Are you telling me you think Jake is your child? Did you look at his skin? His father’s—real father’s—picture? His last name is Flores.”

  “Yes. I don’t know. I can’t explain it.” Eric’s voice was barely recognizable to her, it was so tight with pain. “Raney didn’t know her own father. Who knows what race he was.”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” she retorted. “She’s clearly white—a recessive gene. Why am I explaining this to you—the one who’s writing the whole chapter on genetics?” Then she added more to herself, though perfectly audibly, “Because you’re more committed to a memory than you are to me, is why.”

  Eric slumped against the door and for the next sixty miles neither of them said a word.

  —

  They didn’t see each other for three days after they got back from Queets. Charlotte stayed after work for committee meetings she had ignored all year; she volunteered to take Felipe’s shift one night when his son was sick and slept late on her next day off, curled up with the cat, her phone turned off. Eric left a message saying his editor wanted an additional chapter by the end of next week. And what next? Charlotte thought. We’ll say we have too much laundry to see each other?

  When she wasn’t thinking about Eric, she was thinking about Jake. If something didn’t break soon, she would have to confess to Helen or Simpson that she had been to Queets. But when she got to the hospital on Friday morning, there was a pink message slip in her mailbox. Blake Simpson wanted her to call him.

  “Dr. Reese,” he said cheerfully as soon as he heard her voice. “I understand I missed your call. I found a note on my assistant’s desk.” He lowered his voice so slightly Charlotte suspected it was unconscious. “Find all sorts of things on her desk instead of mine.”

  Charlotte’s pulse jumped so she felt almost faint. She’d been careful not to leave her name with the assistant when she made that aborted call to Simpson’s office from Quentin. She hesitated until, in the same inclusive sotto voce, he said, “We keep a record of caller ID here, of course.”

  “I should have thought of that.”

  “Most people don’t,” he answered, laughing softly and letting her off the hook. She remembered the appealing gap between his front teeth, the permanent informality it lent to his face, in such contrast to his uniform. He was an easy man to open up to. “Mrs. Seras has kept me up to date on Renee Flores. I hear she’s not making much progress.”

  “She’s holding on—some things better, some things not. She’s getting dialysis now. But her lungs are a little stronger.” She thought of Jake, his solemn eyes when he told her that he knew his mother would never have left him.

  Simpson gave her a minute and then prompted the ultimate question. “But she’s not waking up.”

  “We had to sedate her to prevent seizures . . .” Simpson was quiet on the other end of the line. Charlotte was afraid he would ask her about the impending tests for brain death. Now, after meeting Jake, how could she bear confirming that Raney was gone in all but flesh and they must let her flesh follow? She wondered how much Simpson understood about Raney’s three possible outcomes: recovery, brain death, or the purgatory of persistent coma—only one of which, the least likely, would give Jake a mother.

  “Well, it’s a shame,” Simpson said. “I guess you know she has a school-age boy.”

  Charlotte hesitated for a moment and then decided to tell him about the trip to Queets. “Deputy Simpson, I drove out to see her husband last week . . .” She paused, wondering if he might start reading her Miranda rights or something. “I waited three days after Helen Seras called him and he never came to see Raney. Never even called. I . . . It isn’t . . .”

  “Yeah. Mr. Boughton let me know you’d been to see him. Let me know pretty loudly, in fact. I hope you didn’t find him too unpleasant.”

  Now Charlotte vividly remembered David Boughton’s last words to her, the angry defensiveness in his voice when he said only God could decide Raney’s fate.

  “How did he identify her if he won’t come to the hospital?”

  “We showed him a picture of her, her scar. He said he didn’t want to remember her like that—hooked up to the breathing machine.”

  “Deputy Simpson . . .”

  “Blake.”

  “Do you know how the accident happened yet? Mr. Boughton said he was being investigated. Are you allowed to tell me? I don’t mean to put you in a—”

  He broke in, either deciding it was no longer confidential or that he did not care. “I investigated Boughton from here to Oklahoma and twenty towns in between. I checked the car; he cooperated and let me inside both his house and the Tahoe. Keeps it pretty clean—no fabric marks on the bumper. No repairs, no record of any repairs in the shops near there. There’s no evidence he’s harmed the son—we tried to interview him but Boughton cut it short, which is his legal right. I checked the guy’s work history, his landlords. Talked to his estranged family. I turned up a string of lost jobs and broken relationships and not a single good friend. You met the man. What did you think of him?” Before Charlotte could decide what words best described the uncomfortable, almost hostile feeling she’d gotten from David Boughton, Simpson said, “Exactly. I went to the court for a warrant but the judge turned it down—what did I have? Renee Flores was found with a bag of clothes that suggested she was leaving him, just like he told us. Unfortunately, it isn’t a crime to be a narcissistic jerk. Which brings me to the point of this phone call. If you did see or learn anything you think is pertinent, I’d appreciate a statement.”

  The question immediately sucked Charlotte back into that trailer in Queets, Jake’s angular and cautious brown face that was captured in the sketch on the wall. She saw his cautious eyes watching her, one a soulful, aching brown and the other blue. The same slate blue as Eric’s. It was impossible, but impossible to deny the blood she saw in both of them. She felt sick—a caving of the solid, reliable elements in her world. “Deputy Simpson . . .”

  “Blake.”

  “Jake, Raney’s son, said his parents had a fight that night, the night of her accident. Boughton told Jake that his mother ran away of her own accord, but Jake says he’s lying.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line for a moment, and Charlotte found herself unimaginably euphoric, hoping that she had offered the key to Jake’s escape from his stepfather. Then Simpson answered, “Yes. We know all that. Unfortunately, it’s also not a crime to argue with your wife.”

  —

  Making rounds that morning, Charlotte had to force herself to focus on her other patients. Raney, Eric, Jake, David Boughton—they preoccupied her mind, creeping into any space between thought and action. She went to Raney’s bedside last, afraid some fresh complication might have arisen overnight and the end would be too plain to deny anymore. Raney’s room looked unchanged, though. No extra pumps or tubes, “no CPR going on”—ha!—the dark joke she and Felipe sometimes used as a one-line summary to start the average “no bad news” day. But she was relieved to find that the rocker Christina Herrand always sat in was empty; her services were no longer needed now that Raney had been identified.

  Anne, Raney’s usual nurse, was away and everything took more time, more explanation. Diana, the kind, methodical, and very inexperienced nurse who was on duty, seemed increasingly nervous around Charlotte as the morning progressed. When it was time for Diana’s break, she was out of the room so fast Charlotte knew she’d done a poor job camouflaging her impatience.

  She checked Raney’s lines, her medication infusion rates, her urine, her color, her lungs, her heart—the usual da
ily routine. But the doctor in her couldn’t shake off the discordant images of Eric with this woman, as a boy, as an adolescent, as an infatuated young man, as a lover. She glanced at the automated blood pressure reading, then turned Raney’s wrist over and placed the first two fingers of her left hand over Raney’s radial artery, preferring to diagnose by touch than by machine. They might have taken too much fluid from her in dialysis this morning; her pulse was weak—the slightest compression and it disappeared. Charlotte had touched her often in the course of care, usually with gloves on, always with some clinical purpose. Get in, make a plan, get out. Solve all problems and keep the spark of life going another month, another day, another hour, because without that bridge the rest of a lifetime would never happen. It was not her job to judge where the road led beyond that.

  A bottle of lotion stood on the nightstand and Charlotte poured some into her palms, smoothed it over Raney’s arm where the flesh was still pink and perfused above the necrotic fingertips. Her arm was a stick of wood, a heavy inanimate weight. Charlotte let the hand fall back onto the air mattress. Damn you, Raney. Tell me if you’re in there. Tell me what you would want. The room was empty but for the two of them. She sat down in the reclining armchair provided for family members. She’d never sat in one before, never known any friend or relative who’d been in intensive care. A thousand days—more—she’d paced these rooms and studied the monitors for a numerical history of her patients’ courses, always in too big a rush to sit and watch. Just watch. The way husbands and children and sometimes even parents watched and prayed. She tried, for a moment, to clear her mind of medicine; to stop the calculations of perfusion and oxygenation, to sit here like any un-savvy fellow human and pretend that this woman would wake up one day and tell Charlotte her story: how she’d gotten here, where she was right now, one foot in this world and one in, well, who could know? She’d never found an answer to that one in medical school.

  One of the monitors alarmed—an IV bag was nearly empty. Charlotte got up and switched it. The fluorescent light above Raney’s bed made her face look ghostly, a death mask. Now that the swelling was gone, her chin, her brow, and cheeks were distinctly sculpted. How did family members stand it? Being able to see and touch the one they loved, able to stroke their arm, whisper in their ear and get nothing in return? No confirmation that the touch, the words, a kiss had passed through the shell to the soul inside. Someone had combed her hair, as if a visitor might finally come, or Raney herself might suddenly wake and run her hand over her hair as women do to assure themselves they are presentable. Charlotte swept an errant strand off Raney’s forehead and then tucked her own hands into her pockets, thinking. She leaned closer to the bed, close enough to smell the oils in Raney’s hair, the scent of her skin. “I’m jealous,” she whispered to the comatose woman, and then laughed at hearing this pitiful truth audibly escape. “I’m jealous that you had him when there was still time.”