“Nothing.”
“Tell me.” Raney gently pushed his arms away and sat up. “If you care about me, you’ll tell me.”
She could see him wanting to lie, then push deeper to tell her the truth, and for that she felt a terrible, overwhelming loss even before he answered, “She lost a pair of earrings. She thinks they were in her bathroom.”
“And she thinks I took them.”
He looked so sad Raney almost wanted to drop it, tell him not to answer her because there was no answer to this that would not punish him for the life he was born to. No matter how fast and far you walk you will always be shaking your boot with one last clinging, stinking vestige of the place you are trying to leave behind—it was true for both of them. She held his sweet, shadowed face in her hands and said, “You know what I think the universe plans for me? I think the universe, this world, rolls over people like me without a backward glance, so I’d better be watching out for myself.” The hurt in Bo’s face made Raney’s chest twist with something spoiled and hard but she kept going, pulling him out of her heart like a thorn. “Where do I fit in your world, Bo? Where would I possibly ever fit?”
• 9 •
charlotte
Charlotte discovered the nearly invisible scar hidden beneath Eric’s hair, a smooth arc of tissue she traced with her fingertips, the first time they made love. He’d brought his hand up to cover hers, at first halting its exploration and then gingerly guiding her forefinger along the course of the healed incision. “No secrets from a doctor, are there?”
They were tangled in sheets; a dim light made it hard to read his expression. “It’s a surgical scar, isn’t it?”
“Yep. Brain transplant.” He laughed, but even in the low light she could see the reticence in his eyes. “I had brain surgery. Three times. First when I was fourteen and the last nine years ago.” The medical part of Charlotte’s mind was already intruding, dreaming up the worst diagnoses. She waited for him to volunteer more, to be reassured before she had to make him tell her everything. Instead his next sentence was a question: “Want to break up now?”
“No. But I want to hear more. If you want to tell me.”
“I had a tumor. Benign—but it grew back. Twice.”
“You had a brain tumor? What kind?”
“Pilocytic astrocytoma.”
“How come you never told me this?”
“I guess I don’t consider it my most marketable feature.”
“Marketable? Are we buying and selling something here?” Charlotte was sitting up now. She felt unreasonably annoyed at Eric for not telling her this sooner, as if a patient had withheld some vital fact that might change her treatment plan. “Maybe it’s none of my business—just seems like you might have slipped this detail about your life in somewhere between the names of your pets and your favorite bands.”
“Well, I’m telling you now.”
Charlotte turned on the bedside lamp and stared grimly at Eric for a moment. Then she kissed him so hard it was almost a rebuke. “But you’re okay now. It’s gone?”
“I have an MRI every year. So far, it’s stayed gone.”
She rolled on top of him and locked her hands on either side of his head, a surge of relief surprising her with tears. “Don’t do that to me again. Promise?”
But an hour later she was wide awake. Promise her what? That he could foretell the future? How many benign brain tumors came back twice? He woke to find Charlotte watching him, propped up on one elbow as if she’d been waiting for him to reveal the rest of his secret in his sleep. “There’s more, isn’t there?” she asked.
“You didn’t look it up?”
“I didn’t know your latest computer password.”
“It’s under my desk lamp. Any diagnostic guesses, Dr. Reese?” He sounded groggy or, more truthfully, a little sad, as if what they said to each other next would send their relationship bumping off in a new direction, for better or worse, and he knew he would miss this time.
“I don’t want to guess. I was awake half the night trying to guess.”
“I have neurofibromatosis. I had a couple of seizures when I was a kid. They thought it was epilepsy until they found the tumor.”
“Neurofibromatosis?” She was surprised, but also suddenly calmer hearing him name it, a disease that could be fairly innocuous. A disease she was at least somewhat familiar with. “I wouldn’t have . . . I know it can vary a lot from person to person, but I never noticed anything.”
Eric pushed aside the dark hair in the cove underneath his arm; Charlotte saw a cluster of light brown spots on his skin. “Recognize it? My neurologist used to bring his medical students into my appointments to name this.”
“Crowe sign? Is that right? I haven’t read about it since my pediatric rotations.” She touched the most visible freckles under his arm and then ran her hand across his bare chest. “You don’t have any other spots? Bumps?”
He shook his head. “I have some Lisch nodules in my iris, but other than the freckles there’s nothing you’d see. And my well-meaning mother treated my headaches and first seizures with herbs and diet for a long time before my father stepped in.”
“Herbs?”
“Mistletoe, skullcap, goldenseal.” He sounded detached from it, almost clinical. Charlotte couldn’t get a sense of the confused, ill child who’d experienced it. “How long before you were diagnosed?”
“I ended up in the hospital after a seizure, and my dad whipped me off to a neurologist in Boston.”
“Neurofibromatosis is inherited. One of your parents must have it.”
“Autosomal dominant. Mom has a few café au lait spots, but she didn’t want to get tested. It can be a spontaneous mutation—that’s pretty common. And what difference would it have made? I’ve got it. It’s in my genes forever.”
“Your mother wouldn’t get tested?”
“I started getting sick around the time she and my dad split up. Probably part of the reason . . . it carries a lot of extra baggage for her.”
Charlotte studied the steep angles of his high cheeks and nose, all the enviably defined features her own face lacked. She wanted to touch the thickened semicircle where some surgeon had cut through his sweet, fourteen-year-old skin and sawed through his skull into his sweet, fourteen-year-old brain. She wanted to reach through the body of the adult Eric to the boy and comfort him. And whether it was the fourteen-year-old boy she envisioned or the thirty-six-year-old man she held, this sudden confrontation with his mortality broke open a new truth for her. “I think I love you,” she said, having given it no thought at all, only opened her mouth to surprise both of them. Eric’s eyes darkened for a second before he laughed, more to himself than to Charlotte. “You’re laughing at that? I don’t even know what I mean!”
“You chose the right profession, Charlotte. You love taking care of broken people.”
“But you’re not broken. Neurofibromatosis isn’t even that rare—it isn’t life threatening.”
“No. Not unless it’s causing tumors in your brain.”
—
He didn’t return any words about love, and she didn’t repeat them. Not for a long time. But things changed as a result anyway. A few weeks later he invited her out to Lopez Island to meet his mother and her longstanding boyfriend. Within the first hour Charlotte knew she had two strikes against her. The first was her figure, not a surprise to her—she would at best describe her own body as “solid.” Eric’s mother greeted Charlotte appraisingly at thigh level before lifting her gaze and eventually smiling.
The second strike was that Charlotte was a doctor. “You’d like some more beets?” she asked Charlotte, holding the heavy platter above the table with one hand so steadily it made Charlotte’s arm ache. They were sitting on a sunny, south-facing porch and Eric’s mother had on sunglasses, which obscured the keen direction of her eyes. “I
was getting so many red spots on my hands, those spidery blood vessels, before I started eating beets. You can put them in all sorts of dishes, Charlotte.” Eric got up and walked into the kitchen.
“Too many sunburns in my life, I guess. I’ll have to try that. Eric’s a good cook—especially vegetables. He must have learned from you,” Charlotte said.
“He had to detoxify all the poisons he was prescribed.” She waved her hand, perhaps batting away an insect, an entire past. It was disconcerting not to see her eyes. Charlotte looked through the doors into the kitchen, where Eric was already washing up dishes, with dinner still on the table.
Eric’s mother had made up two different rooms for them, Charlotte’s at the back of a narrow converted porch, the painted plank floor sloping perceptibly toward the single-paned windows overlooking a cattailed marsh. There were some amateur watercolors tacked to the walls, predictable island scenes of pale water viewed through sea grass or dunes. One, though, was of a pensive boy shadowed in long light, viewed from the high vantage of a bird. Or a god. There was a quality of isolation about the child that seemed both sad and futile and drew Charlotte close. She was surprised to see Eric’s mother’s signature in the corner and wished she knew how long ago it had been painted. She had been trying to protect him for a long time, Charlotte thought, a maternal fist against a force of nature.
Eric knocked once and she moved to the window before he came in. He picked up her overnight bag. “You should take the double bed.”
“No. I like this room. Listen to the birds out there.”
“Red-winged blackbirds,” he said. “They love these wetlands; nest in the cattails. They’re polygynous—one male can have ten females.”
“Don’t get too inspired! Where did you come up with that trivia?”
“I wrote an article about wetlands four or five years ago. Best thing about my job—I can sound smart without knowing much of anything.” The ceiling was so low he held his shoulders hunched like a gangly, self-conscious teenager. Charlotte sat on the narrow bed, remembering the first time she’d snuck up to a boy’s room just to see his signed Bruce Springsteen poster—they had both climbed out a window when the boy’s mother started up the stairs. Twice that age now and she felt almost as awkward in this house. From the nightstand she picked up a woven reed box with a carved wooden snake on top, coiled to strike. “Is this where your mom keeps her pet scorpions?”
Eric laughed. “It’s a Lombok box. I got it for her in Indonesia.”
“Ah yes—during your worldwide travels. How full of surprises you are, with all your secret pasts.”
Eric closed the bedroom door and sat next to her, pressed one large hand against her chest with little resistance until she was lying across the bed and he stretched above her. “Maybe we should keep some secrets of our own later tonight.”
—
When they got off the ferry the next day, Charlotte asked Eric to drive back to Seattle, forgetting he didn’t have a valid license. “You should renew it. You could drive my car.”
“I don’t drive. You know that.”
“No. I know you don’t own a car—a cool, eco-conscious choice—but I had no idea you flat-out don’t drive.”
“Are you going to break up with me over it?”
“You keep asking me that.” She pulled onto the crowded highway, edging between eighteen-wheelers and cars filled with kids in bathing suits dangling cigarettes and bare feet out their open windows. “Why hadn’t you told her I was a doctor?”
“I don’t tell her a lot of things. I should have, I guess. She’s a little . . . She hasn’t had it easy—grew up with next to nothing and lost her last relative, her sister, nine years ago. I’ve learned to love her as she is, I guess. She’s too old to change.”
“There’s no such thing as too old to change.” There was a long silence between them that Charlotte filled with recalled snippets of backhanded compliments Eric’s mother had made over the course of two long days, only now they seemed born more of fear than personal judgment. How deeply can love alter a person? How much choice do any of us have? Insects streaked through the headlight beams like tiny shooting stars, and her contact lenses were beginning to sting. She put the blinker on and a second later pulled across two lanes onto the shoulder through a blare of horns. “Look, I do know what I meant. I meant that word. What I said.”
Eric was still clutching the dashboard, the car barely at a stop. “Jesus! What are you doing?”
“I’m telling you I love you. It isn’t my fault—it’s not like you get to vote on these things, is it?”
He let his head fall back and closed his eyes for a moment before taking her hand. “No. There’s no voting.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Am I in this alone? Say it. Let me get out now.”
He squeezed her hand hard enough she was sure he was letting her know how much he was about to hurt her, distracting her with physical pain before he crushed her heart. “No. You are not alone. I love you too.”
“Really? You do?” He smiled at her. “So can we agree your mother has no vote here?”
—
But Eric was right. It was in his genes forever, this nearly invisible disease, this genetic flaw with myriad expressions, so that the articles and textbooks Charlotte read could spin her from placid acceptance to anguish in the course of a few pages. The statistics were overwhelmingly in his favor—until she factored in the seizures, the brain tumor, the cell type, the recurrences. Statistics gave no peace when you hoped to replace a percentage with a name. A face. A single individual who might or might not be the one out of one thousand. At night, in bed, her worry was quieted in the urgent, instinctive drive to bond. Charlotte could almost forget Eric had a permanent, threatening diagnosis so thoroughly enmeshed in his DNA it would be his and half of all his children’s and theirs beyond and beyond, until it was extinguished with the last of that cell line. It was, in ways, like falling in love with someone of another race or religion or culture. The blind accommodation of budding love blotted out all obstacles until eventually, inevitably, the outside world would force the lovers in front of a mirror: Look at you! You think you can make your own rules? What will become of your children?
She remembered the editorial Eric had first written for the New York Times about the peril of knowing the demons in your own genetic code. She understood it in an entirely new way now, how much present-day joy could be crushed by dread of your likely future. Time might loop back on itself in quantum physics, but this surely was example enough of the reason God and nature had never granted people the power to foresee what was coming. For the first time she got it—the unappreciated bliss of ignorance; that the street you cross might not be safe, that the child you carry might not be born whole, but no matter the scope of the tragedy, if you are blind to your fate you can be happy until that moment arrives.
What will become of your children? Could she ask him that? Could she let him go without asking?
One morning, six months after Lopez, she rolled close to him and said it. “I want to have a child someday, Eric.”
He stroked her hair quietly for a moment, then kissed her. “I know. I love you. I’ve never let myself . . . Give me some time.” And she loved him, too, so she let that be enough for a while.
A few months later they were with Charlotte’s family for her birthday dinner, in the house where she’d grown up. Every adult but Eric was a doctor. Will and Pamela, Charlotte’s brother and sister-in-law, were pediatricians; Charlotte’s father was a retired surgeon, and her mother had been a pathologist. Charlie was a toddler by then and latched on to Eric after he proved willing to wind up Charlie’s toy car a dozen times over without flagging. Charlotte watched them, Eric teasing Charlie with false starts the way you might coax a dog to fetch, Charlie scrunching his small body into a wad of laughter, playing on the tease as mu
ch as the racing car. A dozen times Eric let Charlie creep close and launched the car just before the baby reached him. Once, though, lunging before he’d found his balance, Charlie tumbled against Eric’s knee and Charlotte saw Eric instinctively pull away before giving Charlie the car to stop his tears. Pamela had been watching their game, and happened at that moment to turn from Eric to Charlotte with a maternal smile, a questioning tilt of her head. Charlotte blushed and only then caught Eric looking across the table at her, looking at Pamela, seeing what he was not supposed to see and no longer playful at all. Her parents were oblivious, retelling one of her father’s more raucous hospital stories. In the midst of it Eric abruptly left the table and Charlotte followed him into the kitchen. He was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and shot her an uncomfortable smile when she asked what was wrong.
“No problem,” he answered lightly enough. “I love hearing autopsy details between the bleeding-raw steak and the birthday cake.”
“I’m sorry. We forget. I can put your steak back on the grill.” She kissed him. “We’ve always been sweet with our patients—even my mom. And most of hers were in pieces.”
He had laughed at that, but she understood that Eric had been a patient too many times himself to divorce the humor from his own history. By the time the evening was over, though, she understood that it was not her parents’ graphic stories that drove Eric from the table that night. It was the look on her own face as she watched Eric playing with Charlie.
• • •
It was Jane’s twelfth day in the intensive care unit. Her lungs had stiffened so much the pressure required to inflate them had blown a hole through the delicate alveolar membranes, and they’d had to put a chest tube between her ribs. Orthopedics had one bit of good news: they planned to remove her right arm cast in a few days. Jane was no longer septic, but she had now developed a superinfection in her intestines from all the antibiotics she’d gotten, and her kidney function was deteriorating. Charlotte knew only her patient’s relative youth was keeping her alive. She felt trapped in a grim version of whack-a-mole—solve one life-threatening problem just in time to discover another.
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