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.
“My period is late,” she told him.
She didn’t know what she expected from him; she didn’t even know what she thought about it yet. He seemed to be sorting out the definition of each word as if English were a foreign language and took great concentration. “How late?” he finally asked.
Neutral, she thought. He sounded carefully, conscientiously neutral. “Four or five days.”
He nodded. “Okay. Not so much.” So. Less neutral now.
She sat up and zipped her jeans. “Yeah. Probably nothing. I think I’ll stay here. You go. Tell him bye for me.”
—
He brought Thai food back, three stars for her favorite yellow curry, just the way she liked it. He called to her from the kitchen, and she heard him getting plates out of the dishwasher, filling glasses with ice. When she came in she could tell he’d gone to extra trouble—poured each cardboard carton into separate glass serving bowls and found some chopsticks and cloth napkins. It was late; the light through the window above the sink was dimming, but the kitchen was still warm. As soon as she sat down, Eric started talking about all the plans he’d discussed with Jim, the blurb he was hoping to get from Jared Diamond, book jacket options, the one chapter that would still need revision—he’d decided to trust his editor’s judgment on that. Oh, he’d forgotten to tell her that his father had called from Spain. He and his new wife were spending the summer there with the boys. Charlotte said almost nothing. Finally, Eric stopped working so hard to fill the empty space between them. The curry made her mouth burn—a point of focus in a day that had begun to seem surreal. She put her chopsticks down, folded her napkin in the middle of her half-finished plate, and looked at him. “It was a false alarm.”
“You got your period?”
“I took a pregnancy test,” she said.
He paused, calculating. “You already had a test kit here?”
She shrugged. “I get them free from the hospital. It was negative.” And when she could stand to look at his face again she almost cried, seeing his blatant relief.
That was over a year ago—hard to believe, she thought. They could have talked more about it then; he’d taken her hand across the table and made himself open and willing, but she’d only given his hand a squeeze and started clearing the dishes. There was no rush; better when he was less distracted by his book, when they were further along, when the gash of regret left by him and her own body had stopped bleeding.
—
Eric was already in his boat shoes and on his second cup of coffee, engrossed in the newspaper. Charlotte came into the kitchen and sat next to him, waited for him to look at her. “I need to tell you something. Helen Seras says the sheriff’s office located a husband.”
He stared at her, as if he had to repeat the words to himself. “You found out this morning?”
She squeezed his hand, but he hardly seemed aware. “Yesterday. I couldn’t say it last night—Helen has asked me not to talk about it at all until they know more. I’m not even sure they’ve confirmed that Jane is Raney. The husband hasn’t been very cooperative.” The look on Eric’s face made it clear he had no doubt Charlotte’s patient was Raney. “Eric, she’s so sick. Do you understand the tests we need to do?” He got up and walked to the window; after a moment he shook his head.
“When someone’s been this badly injured, it’s hard to know how much of their brain still functions. Even the ability to breathe. You can’t tell when they’re on a ventilator—the machine is breathing for them.”
“You’re talking about brain death,” he said.
“Yes. Once she’s off the sedatives, once the dialysis machine has balanced her blood chemistry, we need to test her brain-stem function. We check her corneal reflexes, her response to pain. We stop the ventilator and see if she can breathe on her own.”
“And if she doesn’t react? Doesn’t breathe?”
“It means she doesn’t have enough functional brain to survive, no matter what we do. It means we’re being cruel. Defying nature. We stop the ventilator and let her go. Truthfully, what’s harder is if she does blink, or breathes on her own. If she has enough brain to live but not to wake up. How far do we go then? For how long? Who decides that, if there’s no living will?”
“Someone who cares, I hope. If Raney has a husband—or a grandfather or anyone else—I’d want them to decide.”
“I want the same thing. Even if she isn’t Raney.”
Eric was so quiet it hurt. Charlotte walked to the window and stood next to him; across the street her neighbor pulled into h
is driveway and slid open the door to his minivan disgorging a gaggle of children that seemed too numerous to have fit safely inside. Balloons tied to the mailbox—a birthday party, then. Finally Eric said, “She’s different for you, even before you found out I knew her.”
Charlotte blew a circle of fog on the windowpane and outlined the cluster of colored balloons, as still as a photograph advertising family life in the great American suburbs. She said, “There’s no wind today, you know. Bad day for sailing. We could take a ferry ride to the peninsula instead.”
“Even after what Helen told you? You’re going to walk up and knock on his door?”
“What else can I do?”
“I can knock.”
—
If it was terrible weather for sailing, it was perfect for crossing the sound. The sun was still low on the eastern horizon and every riffle of water flashed a silver-blue mirror. The triangle of Mount Baker pierced the northern haze and the snowy dome of Mount Rainier shouldered the south, like two great pillars holding sea and sky apart for life to play out between them. It made Charlotte feel insignificant and grand all at the same time, so impermanent in the vast landscape that it was blindingly obvious the only way to matter at all was to cling to every moment even as you leaped into the next.
She looked at Eric and felt a rush of love. If she ran to him, told him, “Now. Tonight. Time won’t last for us either,” would she catch him on this wave? Or was this urgent intimacy just her desire to have what Raney once had: Eric when he could still pretend he would never die.
He looked at her, squinting against the sun. “What?”
“It’s just so beautiful out here today.”
The docking announcement sounded overhead and they walked back to the car; the hold was chilly and dark and Charlotte turned the heated seat on until they were out on the road and back in the sun. They drove across Bainbridge Island and the small Agate Pass Bridge, which connected it to the peninsula, then half an hour later crossed the massive Hood Canal Bridge, hinged in the middle for the passage of nuclear submarines heading from the Bangor submarine base. The land in this corner of the country was splattered in channels and islands like a messy afterthought of creation. Charlotte had lived in the Northwest all her life and couldn’t memorize the puzzle of earth and ocean, only the names of the few towns and beaches that attracted summer tourists and their money. She and Eric should have taken some weekends here, gone hiking or to one of the lodges on the coast. There just never seemed to be enough time. Here and there a finger of tribal land touched the highway, marked by fireworks stands and pickup trucks advertising fresh-caught salmon and fresh-dug clams. Deeper into the peninsula the air was ripe with the stench of dairy cows and horses where massive barns loomed over modest homes. Then the clutter of the town began, sparse at first—a nest of abandoned cars, a small grocery, a bar, a hamburger stand.
Eric got quieter as they neared Quentin. Charlotte tried to imagine what he must be feeling; every time he’d been to this town it had marked some drastic change in his life—broken family, broken love, broken brain. Every memory from here must make the specter of Raney’s immobile body more horrifying. For one startling moment she wanted this trip to be a dead end, for Raney Remington to be discovered alive and well, gone fat with a passel of children. A complete stranger hooked up to Beacon Hospital’s machines.
“Do I turn here? Do you remember?” Charlotte asked.
“Take a right up there at the gas station. I can find her grandfather’s house. It’s a place to start.”
Quentin had hardly changed, Eric said. It seemed to have shrunk rather than grappled to its spindly legs in the eleven years since he’d been here. He signaled Charlotte to pull up in front of the plate-glass windows of a small building. Hardy’s Store was a sign shop now, advertising custom and preprinted plastic, laminated, or metal signs. The interior was dark, despite the Open sign hanging at an angle from a string on the front door. Eric cupped his eyes to the glass and saw walls plastered with No Trespassing, For Rent, For Sale, Logging Feeds Families, Stop the Land Grab. He was quiet and she took his hand.
“Was this where she worked? Raney?” Charlotte asked.
“No. It was my aunt’s grocery store. She and my uncle lived up there. And me, for a while.” He pointed to the three uncurtained windows above the porch where he had lived for two summers of his unfolding life. “I’m glad it’s closed. Don’t really want to know all that’s happened here since they died.”
Charlotte shielded her eyes to look up at the inhospitable dark rectangles. She had been to Eric’s childhood home in Laurelhurst once, before it was sold. A grand arts and crafts specimen on the crest of a hill overlooking the lake, with gardens spilling across a double-sized lot. His mother and stepfather were in South America, or maybe it was South Africa—they were always somewhere else—and Charlotte and Eric sat in the kitchen at the back of the house where doors led into a butler’s pantry and maid’s quarters. The house was chilly with no one home, room after cavernous room above and around them. Or maybe the house was always chilly—it had that aura.
She waited in the car outside the sign store while Eric stood, hands in pockets, somberly looking down the street as if something unexpected might appear. “Where now?” she asked when he finally got in.
“Her grandfather’s farm, I guess. If he’s still alive. Go straight along this road toward the park.” A few miles on he told her to take a left, then right, then turned them around to try another road. After five more turnarounds they crested a hill and he asked her to pull over. He got out and studied the mountains that could be seen from that vantage, the break in the horizon that marked the bay. “It was back there. The first road we took.” He directed Charlotte up and down four different driveways before he asked her to stop in front of a small, Hardie board–sided house with six identical neighbors. They were all relatively new, their patchy lawns dotted with plastic Big Wheels and skateboards. She followed him along a worn dirt path behind the houses until he stopped underneath an enormous bigleaf maple fouled with the scrap plywood of a broken tree house. Eric paced out where the old barn had been, the duck pond, the rusted red car nestled in morning glory and hollyhocks, the farmhouse itself. It had all been turned into a subdivision.
They drove twenty minutes down the highway to Port Townsend, and Eric found the art gallery where Raney had worked, but Sandy had sold it just six months earlier to a transplant from Los Angeles. “Bought it sight unseen and retired to more work than I left behind,” the new owner said. Sandy had taken off for the Costa del Sol, or was it Costa Rica? Someplace sunny. But in his files he did have an address for the woman named Renee who had worked for Sandy off and on. Charlotte put the address into her GPS; it was only a mile or so from where Raney’s grandfather had once lived. It had to be her.
This time Eric asked Charlotte to park at the end of the road. A muscle twitched in his jaw and Charlotte knew he was contemplating what he might say to the man who answered the door. “I should go,” Charlotte said. “I’m her doctor—I have a legitimate reason to talk to him.”
“Should you check with the detective first? Are you breaking any law?”
“Raney’s my patient, and she can’t tell me what she wants.” Charlotte looked over the steering wheel down the densely wooded road, no house even in sight. “I guess I don’t care. It’s the right thing to do and if the law isn’t with me, then it should be.”
After a minute of silence they decided to go together. But as soon as they rounded the first curve through the green-black trees and saw the only house, saw the broken front door, the grass-grown walk and punched-out windows, they knew it was vacant.
• 15 •
raney
Love is certainly the least rational state of mind. Love makes babies that were never intended. Love drives knives into perfectly decent if still imperfect husbands and wives. It breaks bank accounts and sen
ds people into rages over slights they’d ignore in a stranger. And it can blind you to changes happening in someone you’ve lived with and depended on—particularly when they are changes you don’t want to face.
Cleet sold his tools after the lawsuit. Raney didn’t even know he’d put an ad in until a pickup truck drove straight across their front yard and backed up to his shop. She would have thought they were being robbed if she hadn’t witnessed Cleet loading his jointer, shaper, band saw, and most of his routers into the padded bed. She watched, convincing herself it was an empty exercise in spite until the three men bent under the weight of a pristine slab of Honduras mahogany Cleet had owned for eight years—saving it for some piece of furnishing he had yet to imagine. That scared her. She pulled dinner out of the oven before it was warmed through, fed Jake, and sent him across the woods to play with the Wells twins. When Cleet came in she was waiting at the kitchen table, already worn out from the arguments she had shouted into the echoes of her own mind.
“It will cost you twice as much to replace them. Even buying used.”
He twisted a bottle of beer open and sat opposite her. She could smell his sweat, sharper than usual, smelled his unwashed hair. He’d lost ten pounds since the arbitration, she bet. “I won’t be replacing them. I won’t need them where I’m going,” he said.
Later, she tried to pin down what she’d assumed he meant by that—that he was taking a company job? Leaving Quentin? Leaving her and Jake? “Even if you work with somebody else’s tools you’ll need some of your own. Whatever they paid won’t make a dent in what we owe.”
“Raney, I’ve taken a job on a purse seiner. Off the Aleutians out of False Pass. I leave next week.”
She sat back in her chair with the force of it, like a physical blow in her chest. “You didn’t want to talk to me first? How long will you be gone?”
“A few weeks. Maybe more. Christo got me on. It’s good money. Too good to pass up.”
Gemini: A Novel Page 22