“You here for the Bible church camp?”
“No.”
“You don’t belong here. Don’t live around here.”
“No.”
She looked out at the ocean this stream bled into, waiting, until a fist of impatience made her ask outright, “So what are you doing here?”
“Watching you paint.”
“I don’t mean here, here. I mean here. In Quentin.”
He squinted up at her so only half his eyes showed underneath his brows. “My aunt lives here. I’m staying with her for the summer.”
“How come?”
“My folks are on a trip to Europe.”
“So why didn’t you go with them?”
Bo looked away like he had to give the question some thought. “ ’Cause I didn’t want to spend all summer in museums and churches.” He stood up and brushed dirt from his seat, lost his balance, and bounced awkwardly back to his feet. “I live in Seattle. You know where the Space Needle is?”
Raney wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of learning she’d only been to Seattle twice, the last time at age seven. Up this close she saw he must have had some blood running through his veins; he flushed pink at the corner of his nostrils and under his cheekbones while she stared him down. He reminded her of a china cup her grandmother had had—so thin you could see the shadow of your fingers through the bowl—he looked like he could break just as easy. It made her stomach go tight, this beautiful, breakable boy who lived in a house near the Space Needle with two parents lolling through France for a summer; this boy who did not belong to these woods and should know better.
“What’s your book?” she asked him.
He flashed the spine toward her. “Lord of the Rings. Read it?”
“Only good one was The Hobbit.”
“Only easy one, maybe.”
Raney felt the band tighten around her stomach again, a hot flush. She jerked her head toward the wide breach in the earth where the Little Quentin River had carved through twenty feet of cliff and the sky and ocean split the gloom of woods. “Anybody showed you the cave yet? There was seal pups in there last year—they might have come back. Follow me. Unless you’re scared.”
He chewed the inside of his lip, probably gauging whether she might be some of the riffraff he’d been warned against. That or he was just plain chicken, in which case the boys around here would make his life hell anyway. She might as well teach him how to fend for himself, she justified. She broke out across the duff and mossed roots that hinted at a trail. At the break where the earth began the steep dive to the beach she stashed her tackel box under a rock ledge, then grappled and slipped down to the beach, following the foamy waterline until she was out of his sight. When he hadn’t appeared after five minutes she popped her head and shoulders out of a gash in the bluff above the wet sand. “You gotta climb up along the side. Over here.” The lip of the cave was no more than seven feet above the beach, but he stood wary underneath her, like he was staring straight up the pylons of the Space Needle itself. Raney hooked one foot into a crevice just below the green stripe that marked the tide line, then dropped at his feet like a cat. “Over here. Hand me your book and take hold of the roots.” She talked him root by rock up the bluff into the mouth of the cave. “I’m going back to get a flashlight—I heard ’em mewing toward the rear but it’s too dark.” Any color that had crept into Bo’s face from the climb up the rocks paled, and Raney saw him winding up to protest. Frigid seawater lapped her bare ankles. She tucked his book under her arm and called up, “If you sit quiet a little ways inside you’ll be able to see them when your eyes adjust. Last summer one practically crawled into my lap. Won’t take me twenty minutes to go and get back.”
—
It occurred to Raney to return to the beach and check on the boy in the cave before nightfall; it pricked her conscience enough she didn’t eat much dinner and even after she’d gotten into bed she still tossed and turned, wondering if she was more irked at herself or at him. What idiot would follow a total stranger down a cliff into a tide-flood cave looking for seal pups? Just after midnight she pushed the covers back and pulled his soggy book out of her tackle box. The pages were stuck together and it smelled more of the woods than book glue and paper. Tolkien. Wouldn’t you just know it? She lit the gas heater in the bathroom and propped the book on a trash can in front of it, flipped the toilet seat down, and sat with her chin in her hands watching it dry. The cobalt-blue dye of the book’s cloth jacket had stained the pages a paler shade, not far off from the color of his eyes. If he had stayed missing all night, the whole town would know about it by the time the sun rose.
As soon as it was light, she bundled a thin sheet of plywood and a few clean brushes into a tarp, picked up her paints, and stomped out of the house. Not ten yards down the drive she turned around, climbed back upstairs, and shoved his stupid book into her pack. A fog had moved in, making the early summer day as wintery as December, the clouds so low to the ground it was like the ocean had spread itself thinner and higher until it blurred into sky. On days like this Raney sometimes painted the mood she felt more than the shapes she saw, shifting her palette to grays and greens that moved in waves rather than the sharp lines of sunshine and shadow. She propped her plywood up on a park bench across the street from Hardy’s Store a good hour before it opened. She watched the lights come on upstairs and then in the back storeroom when the Star Food Service truck pulled up, and finally saw the shadow of Mrs. Hardy through the milky glass in the front door. A minute later Mrs. Hardy stepped onto the worn plank porch with a broom in one hand, her other hand planted at what used to be her waist, breathing in the foggy morning air like she expected no better from life but no worse either—just her usual sour acceptance of Quentin and its slow journey to nowhere. She didn’t look panicked. Not like a woman who’d stayed up all night combing the woods for her nephew with the police. She saw Raney and nodded her chin. And damn if Raney didn’t figure out then that she’d been holding her breath for the last thirteen hours.
An odd thing happened after that, which Raney would remember all her life. She began a painting of the main street of town: the empty two-lane highway that barely slowed as it passed the few storefronts and the elementary school on its way to the national park; Jimmy Tucker’s shoebox Pan-Abode house beyond the intersection near the Baptist church, his dad’s rusted trawler forever listing on its keel like it had been swept over his chain-link fence and deposited there by a great tidal wave. She painted Hardy’s Store in the center and sketched in Mrs. Hardy stabbing at the doorjamb with her broom. But right after Raney started coloring in Mrs. Hardy’s bulky figure and fleshy calves in their thick-rolled stockings, she suddenly dipped her brush into Commodore Blue and painted denim jeans on a skinny boy wearing Converse sneakers and a gray hooded sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up. Not five minutes later Bo took the broom out of his aunt’s hand and pushed the sleeves of a gray sweatshirt further up his pale arms. That was sufficient God-sign to last Raney all summer. She assumed she was forgiven.
She caught him looking at her, but she kept painting and he kept sweeping until it felt too ridiculous. She wiped the paint off her brush and pulled his book out of her backpack, marched across the street, and stuck it in his hand. “I tried to dry it out.” She saw a tangle of scratches up both arms, one long red line under his left eye. So he’d climbed up the face of the cliff instead of risking the surf—City Boy didn’t have enough fat on him to float, she thought. Or he didn’t know how to swim.
He flipped through the clumped, wavy pages with one thumb, the broom tucked under his arm. “Guess you didn’t try very hard.”
That seemed to be as much as either of them could think to say; Raney wasn’t about to apologize now that she knew he hadn’t spent the night in that cave. They stood silent, watching two crows tear at a sodden bag in the gutter near her painting. The mist gathered itself into somethi
ng more declarative, and he jerked one shoulder toward her propped-up plywood. “Your drawing’s getting wet.”
“Everything here gets wet at some point,” she answered. He looked at her with a funny half smile, like she’d shared a secret, and she felt something prickly creep up her spine; something she wanted to avoid but it was already inside. “I know where there’s an eagle’s nest. Three babies still in it.” She spit on two fingers and held them up in the air. “For real—I swear. No caves.”
—
Bo stayed in Quentin for three months, the whole of his summer vacation and then some. If he missed his mother or father or anything else about his life in Seattle, he didn’t say a word to Raney, nor did he ask about the topics she sidestepped. As if they had an undeclared truce on their private struggles, they talked only about what mattered each day—the book he was reading, the easel she was saving for, the model car he was building, what section of the town dump they should scavenge next.
After a week or so Raney decided that stranding Bo in that cave was the best possible beginning for their friendship, right up front doing away with any awkwardness about him being a boy and her a girl, him having money and her not. He was like one of those kidnapped kids that bond with their kidnappers and forget they ever lived a better life. And with Raney at his back the local boys bequeathed a grudging tolerance and kept their distance. Bo made a good effort to pretend that clawing his way out of the cave had been no big deal, but the forests and drift-tangled beaches around Quentin were as foreign to him as Paris would have been to Raney, and for the first time in her life she was the wise one, the teacher. One afternoon she took him up Mount Wilson to see the view of the bay and he spent a long time reading the forest service signs warning of cougars. Half an hour later she turned around to see him poking a stick at something in the trail, and he shot off like a shy horse when Raney snapped a branch coming back for him. She stopped at the pile of wet black cones he’d been inspecting. “What were you looking at?” He ambled toward her, shrugging his shoulders, looking embarrassed. “You thought it was cougar scat, didn’t you? Cats bury their business. Anyway, if a cougar’s following us you won’t know till he’s got his claws in your neck.” They were already comfortable enough he could laugh at such a gibe.
Raney’s grandfather, though, had a different take on her new friendship—he didn’t like Bo from the get-go. One hot afternoon Bo was buying her a Slurpee at 7-Eleven when Grandpa pulled his truck across two parking spaces and got out with the engine still running. He stood in the middle of the walk between Bo and his bicycle, staring Bo down. “I am Renee’s grandfather. You are . . . ?”
Bo looked at Raney and then looked back at her grandfather and dropped the Slurpee on the ground. He bent to pick up the cup, then seemed to think the better of it, wiped his hand on his pant leg, and held it out. “I’m Robert, sir.”
Grandpa crossed his arms. “Well, Robert, you need a haircut.” Then he turned to Raney like Bo was nothing more than a squashed bug. “Dinner at six. Small towns have big eyes, Renee.”
After he got into his truck Raney picked up the half-empty plastic cup and stuck it into Bo’s rejected hand. “You’re not going to pee your pants, are you? He’s not scary when you know him. He might get used to you.” Later, a part of her mind figured Grandpa must have wondered what this twelve-year-old boy was teaching her, a thirteen-year-old girl, out in the woods all day. Grandpa didn’t trust many people right off the bat, and Raney was the only family he had left to worry about, so he invested himself thoroughly in the job. As a consequence, perhaps, Bo only came to Raney’s house once, early in that first summer, a day Grandpa had driven to Shelton to sell a gun he’d bought at the Bremerton Gun Show. Even though she knew he was sixty miles away, her hand was cold and sweaty opening the back-door latch; she kept hearing the cough of his F-150 every time a car came up the hill below their property, heard his boot step every time one of the dogs jumped up on the porch. She hardly ever invited people into that house—her few girlfriends were too scared of Grandpa to do more than call for Raney from the yard. Her nervousness seemed to infect Bo. He kept asking, Where was Shelton, how long was the drive, when had her grandpa left, how long did it take to sell a gun?
“You’d think he was buying a gun to use on you,” she finally retorted, and it must have hit close to home, because Bo came right back with, “Well, would he?”
She told him her granddad liked guns well enough, but his philosophy was that the best protection when TEOTWAWKI comes is long-term survival. The gun hoarders would be out there killing each other off for a few months until the ammunition ran out, and then those who’d stayed alive and healthy would end up the better for it.
“When what comes?”
“TEOT . . . The End Of The World As We Know It.” By the look on his face it was clear this was not something people on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle were worrying about. “Never mind. Watch out for the dogs—show ’em the back of your hand first.”
Bo walked through the door ahead of her, and Raney followed his eyes around the sparsely furnished kitchen, seeing it for herself in a new way. Seeing how much she had forgiven and how much she had accepted without expecting anything more—a paucity of material goods that suddenly looked more like loneliness than simplicity. There was a long plank table in the center of the kitchen with two mismatched wooden chairs, a jar of washed silverware in the middle. They had four metal folding chairs in the pantry for guests, but they’d never used them, not as far as she could remember. On the Formica counter was a metal toaster, a half loaf of bread in a knotted plastic bag, and a row of gallon-sized glass canning jars with flour and sugar and coffee. None of her schoolwork or class photos were taped on the refrigerator, standard decor in her friends’ houses she’d not thought to miss in her own. A shorter counter along the back wall held a deep porcelain farm sink under a wavy-paned window that looked across the yard and the shallow duck pond and chicken coop. On a clear winter day when the wild cherry and the bigleaf maple were bare, you could see the white cap of Mount Olympus, but now they made a green thicket. The view out that window had always been enough for her until Bo was sitting at their kitchen table running his fingernail down the greasy crack between two of the wooden planks.
Gif, their old German shepherd, butted his nose against the screen door until she let him in. He made a thoughtful assessment of Bo, lifting his nose to take in the boy’s scent; then he leaned against Raney’s leg. Bo reached out a hand but drew it back when Gif curled his lip and rumbled.
“Hungry?” Raney asked.
He only shrugged, which didn’t surprise her; she’d yet to witness him eat anything that he hadn’t packed from home and didn’t look suspiciously vegetarian. So she noticed it when he asked, “You got any Coke?”
Raney stopped scratching Gif’s ear and looked at him. “You drink Coke?”
“Well, no. Not at my house. But I thought maybe you did.”
She shook her head. “Gramps doesn’t believe in it. I mean he believes it exists and all, he just . . .” She petered off, unexpectedly self-conscious with him. “So why don’t you drink Coke?”
Bo was looking at Gif, rubbing his fingers together like he might tempt the dog to trust him. For a minute Raney didn’t think he was going to answer, and then he shrugged and said, “Sort of the same. My mom thinks it makes me sick.”
“Sick how?”
“I had this spell last year. From eating too much sugar and preservatives.”
“What kind of spell?”
“Like a fainting spell. How come your dog’s so mean?”
“He’s not mean once he knows you. I guess he only knows me and Grandpa. I could fix you some cheese toast.”
“How long’s your grandmother been gone?”
“A while. She died when I was about eight. Had the cancer.”
“What happened to your mom and dad?”
He
re it came. The question that always changed everything. It had taken him long enough—he hadn’t brought it up once on the treks through woods and beach they’d already taken and Raney had gotten hopeful he’d never ask. She had a vision of that moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy’s world goes Technicolor. Raney knew that was the part most people liked best, but not her. She might love standing in the oil-paint section of the Port Townsend craft store touching the undimpled tin tubes of color she couldn’t afford, imagining the mix of tints that would tell the truth about her own world, but in The Wizard of Oz she preferred the black-and-white part. Dorothy safe and sound with her Auntie Em and Uncle Henry and nobody giving a damn where her mother or father was.
She pulled a fork out of the jar on the table and started gouging at the filthy crevices Bo had picked at. “My mom left when I was four. She was sick. I don’t remember it, but Grandpa says she left because she didn’t want me to see her like that.” Bo was staring at her like he was waiting for her to cry or something, and she had an urge to plant the fork in the back of his hand.
“What about your dad?” he asked like he couldn’t help himself.
Raney squared her shoulders and looked straight at him. “I don’t know who my dad is, which is fine with me. I’d rather have a grandpa who loves me than a dad who couldn’t care less, right? We’re the same blood, Grandpa and me. So don’t go feeling sorry.”
“I didn’t say I felt sorry . . .”
She pointed the fork at his face. “You didn’t say it but I could see you were thinking about it. My mom loved me plenty. I got letters for a while.” She put the fork back in the jar and crossed her arms. “I think she’s dead. Sometimes I wake up at night and know it for sure, down inside of me. You know how when it’s black and quiet and you’re dreaming and then you go through that weird space of trying to figure out if you’re asleep or awake? Well, I think those dreams might be truer than anything you think in the light of day. Like you had one foot in the next world. I’ve seen her there, my mom. If she could get back to me she would.”
Gemini: A Novel Page 2