Gemini: A Novel

by Cassella, Carol

  In only one action did she break from this: just before she left to pick up Eric, she stopped in the hospital gift shop and bought two packages of sugar-free gum in two different flavors—one grape and one bubble gum. She put them into an unsealed letter envelope and dropped them in her purse.

  • 17 •

  raney

  No one had seen her body since Cleet died—even Raney had stopped looking at herself in the mirror. Who cared as long as your clothes fit and all the parts did what they were supposed to? She could remember being in the changing room of the public pool where Jake was taking swimming lessons, years ago. A senior exercise class was letting out and she’d walked into a shower room crowded with nude elderly women, soaping up. Raney’s first thought was of the witches in a movie version of Macbeth they’d shown in her junior high English class, the bubbling cauldron stirred by stripped-down, slack-breasted old women. Most of the students had never seen any bare breasts, much less on the big screen, and when exam time came, all anybody could remember about Shakespeare’s play were those naked witches. But that day in the changing room Raney thought those women—their flesh mottled pink and quivering like jelly under the hot spray—were more beautiful than any of the dimple-free, nubile goddesses used to sell everything from motor oil to Florida vacations. Those bodies had been put to good use: babies and good cooking and hard labor so that strong biceps still muscled underneath their loose arm rolls. They’d given up the fight against gravity and looked proud of it; entered an age when, at last, they would be measured by their minds alone. She wanted to paint those women. Wanted to show off her own post-pregnancy belly and say, “Hey! Look what I did!”

  She felt none of that the first night she shared her bed with David. His soft, clumsy hands felt alien exploring her body and she faced how little she knew about this man who was now her husband. Sometimes at night Raney lay next to David and felt Cleet there. And even Bo. Her three lovers, each holding the bit of herself she’d given away and her holding pieces of them while she pondered the boundaries of love. Is it a room inside your soul that opens when your lover enters? That still exists once he’s gone? Or is it a space that can only survive in the union of two?

  Things worked better outside the bedroom. Having a third person in the house muffled some of the preadolescent tension that could crop up between Raney and Jake. While David and Jake didn’t always have much to say to each other, they could fill whole evenings going through David’s movie collections—from the old James Bond films all the way back to Douglas Fairbanks. They bought a new television set and a used VCR. And for the first time in months Raney could open the mailbox without worrying she’d find a foreclosure notice from the bank. She could see how thoroughly David worked at this new job of being a father, like the right spreadsheet and number juggling could make the balance come out true. Sometimes she wanted to tell him to relax—he’s a boy not an accounting puzzle. You can’t make a tree grow, you just provide the right sun, water, and soil and give it time.

  David decided to salvage Jake’s dismal school grades by tutoring him in the evenings. When Raney helped Jake with his homework, she always turned it into a game, using dried beans on the abacus of the tablecloth checks, or making up math stories about ninja warriors or bridges spanning Kool-Aid seas between cookie dough islands. It usually made Jake laugh even if his grades kept falling. David, though, was more methodical. After dinner he wiped and dried the table before he lined up two mechanical pencils and a pad of graph paper. He extracted a neatly folded lens cloth from its zippered plastic pouch to polish his reading glasses, then opened Jake’s textbook to the day’s lesson. By the time Raney and Jake had the kitchen clean, David had read the entire chapter and worked out every problem on separate sheets of paper. Then he pushed the book across the table and told Jake to read the chapter aloud.

  Raney would sit in the corner pretending to read or sketch, sitting so that she could see Jake’s full face and a shadowed slice of David’s, see their legs underneath the table close enough to entangle but somehow never touching. The breadth of David’s shoulders stretched the yoke of his cotton shirt across the back when he crossed his arms, listening. Raney could mark the progress of David’s frustration by the way his shoulders tensed up while Jake read, making him repeat the sentence if he stumbled. After a few days of this Raney realized that David had memorized the chapter verbatim, would correct Jake even when the word was wrong but the meaning was right.

  Then they would start on the problems, Jake taking extra minutes to adjust the pencil lead length and read the equation or question to himself again, his lips moving until he bit the lower one. Finally he put the pencil to the page. David watched, silently reading the numbers upside down from across the table, and when Jake made a mistake David would let out a little “Whup,” as if he were reining in a horse. “Tell me your thinking, son.” Under the table Raney saw Jake press his knees together. “Tell me your thinking.”

  “Well, I thought if . . .”

  “Not what you thought—you thought wrong. Your answer’s wrong. Think it out aloud to me before you get to the answer.” And that, of course, shut off all of Jake’s thinking. By the second week Jake’s legs locked tight when David so much as cleared his throat, and at David’s first spoken word Jake dropped his pencil and raced to the bathroom.

  Raney walked over and put her hands on David’s shoulders, pressing her thumbs against the tense ridges of his neck. “It makes him more confused when he’s put on the spot.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe I just don’t know how to help him. My dad would have whipped me black and blue.”

  “You don’t become a father overnight. He’s always been shy. He needs to see that you care about him, regardless of his grades.”

  His shoulders gave a little under her hands; she leaned down and put her cheek against his, to be closer to him, or maybe to be sure that Jake couldn’t hear. “I can see you care about him. I see it.”

  They plowed on through another two weeks of it, David’s voice getting softer and his shoulders getting stiffer every time he asked Jake to rework a botched equation. At the end of the first term Jake ended up with a C minus on the homework, an F on the exam and a D in the course, and the house began to feel smaller, like the emotional effort of turning them into a family was a fourth stranger who kept stepping on their toes and wedging awkwardly into the middle of their conversations.

  —

  David said things would get better for Jake once winter was over. He would be outside more, where a boy should be. The cycle of failing grades that seemed to be crushing him smaller, quieter would stop for a few months once summer came. Maybe even the aches and pains he complained of would go away. On the first day of spring David drove home from work with a load of two-by-fours and plywood on the folded-down seats in the back of the Tahoe. That Saturday he woke up, took a shower, and put on a clean white shirt, like he was going into the office. Then he got Jake out of bed and announced they were going to build another tree house together. Even bigger than the one Jake had built with Cleet on Grandpa’s farm. He’d selected the best site already, David told Jake, and marched him out beyond the fringe of forest scrub where the yard blurred into the woods. Three Douglas firs rose from the ground as straight as silos, no more than six feet apart and naked of branches for so many vertical feet it hurt your neck to scout the lowest green boughs. “Up there?” Raney asked.

  He smiled at her, then looked at his feet with his hands on his hips. After a shake of his head he said, “I can put it however high he wants it. Nail some struts into the trees and use them to hold the platform.” He was already heading back to the toolshed ready to get going, leaving Jake and Raney behind. “What do you think, Buddy? You ready for another tree fort?”

  Jake shrugged and sat down on the ground underneath the trees, scooping up handfuls of dirt and pine needles to sift through his fingers. “Looks like David is.”

 
Raney squatted next to him. “It might be fun, having a tree fort here this summer. Get some other kids over to play?” As soon as she said that, Jake put his head on his arms and she knew it was cruel to hope the end of school meant the end of his isolation. “Jake? He’s trying to be your friend.”

  “It’s like he read a book: This Is How to Be a Kid’s Dad! He’s not my dad.”

  “I know he’s not your dad. Nobody can be your dad again. But give him a chance to be some part of our family. We’re all trying to figure it out.” The earsplitting whine of a power saw was followed by the clap of wood hitting the floor. Jake stood up, a grimace crossing his face as if he’d been punched. “What is it? Your back?” Raney asked.

  Jake started toward the shed and then turned around, so abruptly angry Raney felt slapped. “We could have made it alone. Just us. I didn’t care about losing the house!” he shouted.

  That night, after David had spent hours cutting and stacking all the wood without commenting on the fact that Jake was nowhere to be seen in this father-son bonding project, Raney poured a beer into two glasses and sat down at the kitchen table. David was paying bills, and the overhead light gleamed in his balding brow. His reading glasses had slipped down his nose and he kept tipping his head up to read the checkbook and then down again to look over the rims at his calculator, a bobbing marionette head.

  “I’m worried about Jake,” Raney said. “I want to take him to the doctor.”

  David tipped his chin down to look at her, took his glass of beer out of her hand, and after a sip began running his fingers over the calculator keys. A piano player couldn’t move like that. After a minute he said, “He’s seen the doctor, hasn’t he?” Raney sat quiet and still, weighing how long she could stay cool. Finally he took off his glasses and folded them into his pocket, as if her boiling silence had gotten his attention. “Hasn’t he? I mean, maybe he’s seeing the wrong doctor.”

  Now she was speechless. She’d been prepared for a battle and was surprised to hear him on her side, then chilled to admit how much it surprised her. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. I think this is more than growing pains.”

  “I do too. I think his teachers have been trying to say so for quite a while. Maybe we should listen.”

  “His teachers? When did they talk about his back pain?”

  He blinked and Raney saw something flicker and then settle itself, as if he’d grasped some fact about her he’d missed before and, in a split second, both pitied her and been moved to act. “Raney, I know Jake isn’t my own blood. But he is my family now. I’m here to take care of him—to take care of you both.” Raney pulled her chin back a notch, wondering if his next words would make her want to thank or curse him. “Don’t you think Jake has all the signs of being hyperactive? ADD? His grades, his frustration, his impulsivity? All this pain you talk about, it’s a pretty convenient way to get out of hard work.”

  “I think Jake . . .” She felt acutely conscious of Jake’s closed bedroom door just a few feet from the kitchen, and reined back to a sharp whisper. “I think Jake is pretty near perfect. Creative and smart and sad about losing two people he loved in the space of four years. And, yes, a little out of the ordinary. I think his teachers want every kid to be a perfectly square peg who fits into their perfectly square holes—so their own narrow minds don’t have to spin in circles until their heads are up their back ends.”

  “Raney . . .”

  “What? He doesn’t make their job easy so we slap a label on him?”

  —

  The next day Raney picked Jake up from school an hour early and drove him to a different doctor’s office—there were only two in town. She parked in back so David wouldn’t see her car if he drove past, then waited more than an hour for the nurse to fit them into the schedule. Raney flipped through magazines, all of them months out of date with articles missing where other bored patients had ripped the pages out. Jake slumped in his chair and stared at the TV mounted high in the corner. He was still mad. Mad at David, which meant mad at her, Raney knew. People shoot the target closest to them. Finally the nurse called her up to the desk, but it was to tell her the doctor was not on their insurance list, so the charges would be higher and she had to sign again at yet another red X.

  The doctor had practiced medicine in Quentin longer than Raney had been alive; she had a vague recollection of him wrapping her ankle with an Ace bandage at a grade school field day. He was nice to Jake; paternal, which she could tell Jake disliked. The doctor joked with him for a minute, then started asking what hurt, when it hurt, how much it hurt, what kind of hurt? Burning? Aching? Throbbing? Jake skipped out of reach after the first two questions. Sure, his knee hurt if he ran too fast; his shoulder hurt if he threw a ball too hard. The last time Raney had seen him throw a ball was before she married David. The doctor thumped Jake with a rubber mallet and had him walk around the tiny room, then squat and waddle across the floor on his heels. Then the doctor handed Raney a pamphlet on something called Osgood-Schlatter and some home stretching exercises along with directions for how to take Tylenol and Motrin. At the door he signaled her back and asked if there was trouble at home, how Jake was doing in school, if he complained as much in the summertime. For that she was billed $42.

  —

  Raney discovered Jake’s next school progress report buried at the bottom of his trash can. David got home before Jake that day and found Raney lying across their bed holding the papers clasped on her stomach like they were a poultice against some nauseating illness. “Raney?” He sounded alarmed.

  He took the report out of her hands and sat on the edge of the bed with a heavy sigh; Raney prayed it wasn’t a breath of relief that the news was not an overdue bill. “You could at least have him tested,” David said.

  “I don’t think he’s being straight with me. What kind of answers would he give on some test for ADD? It’s something else.”

  “What else? He hasn’t complained of pain in weeks. He grew an inch last month—of course things hurt.”

  Raney rolled off the bed as far away from him as she could get, but he reached for her arm. “Look, I’ve never had kids of my own—Jake is probably as close as I’ll get unless . . .” His color deepened. He put his glasses on the bed and pressed his palms over his eyes. “Maybe ditching his report card in the trash is his way of asking for help.” When Raney didn’t answer, he added, “If he had diabetes would you refuse to give him insulin?” He could have hit her and it would have hurt less.

  For a while David dropped the subject. Raney spent more time building models with Jake, slipping questions about his joints and his back in like they were just comments on the structure rising level after level from his floor. She tried to remember her own teenage years when she, too, had been willing to injure herself to gain an ounce of power. It made her sad that Jake was now too long and heavy to rock back and forth at her breast. Did all parents feel so baffled in the storm of their child’s adolescence? Maybe David was right. Maybe it was easier to cope with a physical problem than a mental one and she was the one in denial. But now and then she watched through the kitchen window as Jake climbed the ladder to his tree house and she saw him grimace with a hand at the middle of his back.

  A month before school let out, the principal called David and Raney in for a conference. Jake had gotten into another scuffle. The only reason he wasn’t suspended was because he had clearly come out the loser. The next week David came home from work with the name of a doctor in Chimacum, just outside Port Townsend—a generalist who’d diagnosed a friend of a friend’s daughter with MS after three other doctors said there was nothing wrong. He could see Jake for any aches and pains and evaluate his school problems too. And be discreet about it, if that was what worried Raney.

  —

  Raney came home from the doctor’s visit with a prescription for something called Adderall. The next morning she put the first capsule in front
of Jake with a glass of milk. They both looked at it for a moment, then he shrugged and popped it into his mouth. Raney had to bite her own tongue to keep from making him spit it out just before he swallowed.

  His mood and habits stuttered for the next few weeks; some days Raney thought she saw a difference in Jake and other days he seemed the same—cranky and slow at his homework. “Kind of the definition of an adolescent, isn’t it?” David said. Two weeks later the doctor doubled the dose, seeming pleased with Jake’s report on his progress, and at the third visit the dose went up again.

  When they got back from the appointment, David was at home, though it was only two o’clock. “Did you come home for lunch?” Raney asked him.

  “Yeah,” he answered. She glanced around the spotless kitchen. “Actually I picked up a burger. Taking the afternoon off.”

  “You feel okay?”

  “I’m fine. I’m not allowed an afternoon off?” He picked up his jacket and left the house, slamming the door.

  She didn’t see him again until he tried to slip under the covers after midnight without waking her. Raney rolled onto her back. The moon was so bright it made shadows in the room, turning everything the shades of one of David’s favorite black-and-white movies. “Tell me,” she said.

  After a broken sigh he said his boss Tom Fielding had cut his hours in half. Business was down and Tom was trying to economize “by laying off the very person who might find him a way to increase his profits, the son of a bitch.” Raney rolled onto David’s shoulder, felt his heart pounding through her own chest. She soothed him as if he were Jake run home from school by bullies. There would be other work. Business would pick up again. She was almost asleep when he said, “I’m losing my benefits, Raney. That’s where Tom plans to save the money—he’ll never take me back full time.”