“What do you think about going to see the doctors in Seattle?”
Jake put his cup on the sticky metal table and popped the top of his straw through the wrapper, pushing the paper down to a crinkle before anointing it with a drop of water so the paper wriggled into a long white worm. How did such things get traded down through every generation of children? she wondered.
Finally Jake answered, “Okay. If we can go to the Space Needle.”
“Sure. We can go to the Space Needle.” Raney drew two round eyes on the end of another straw and made her own worm. “But what did you think about what the doctor said? About your back?” Jake pretended to be too absorbed in his paper menagerie to hear her. She caught the next falling drop of water in her palm. “Talk to me, Jake. I know it’s scary. But if he’s right, maybe we could get your back fixed. It wouldn’t hurt anymore.”
Jake’s eyes looked dangerously red-rimmed and she could see he was trying hard not to blink. She was ready to tell him it was all right to cry, an adult would cry about it too, when he said, “Just us, right?”
Raney tilted her head, not wholly following him. “I’d be there the entire time, Jake.”
“And not David.”
Was this, then, Jake’s greatest worry? Was he willing to have surgery if it meant he could separate his mother from David, the man she had voluntarily turned into Jake’s stepfather? Raney felt her center drop away, shamed and guilty. She had made any number of wrong turns in her life and knew it could be easy to see that you were in the wrong place but still impossible to know what wrong turn had taken you there. This time she did. She had grabbed hold of people instead of life itself, and expected them to save her. She had grabbed hold of David and expected him to save them all. She touched Jake’s cheek and said, “If you don’t want David there, then he won’t be there.”
Jake let her hold his hand on the way to the car, even with a crowd of skateboarders hanging around the parking lot. On the way out of town she saw the exit for Highway 109 and the coastline, and cut the wheel so fast Jake asked if there was something wrong with the car. “No. Something’s wrong with the day,” she said. “There’s not enough fun in it yet.”
They drove past clusters of weathered, neglected beach shacks, a few newer homes decorated with glass buoys and driftwood carvings of mermaids and fishermen. A surf shop. A burger shack. And then only empty, sand-swept road, the Pacific Ocean hidden by a tidal stream and low dunes. She parked by a yellow tsunami warning sign and helped Jake jump over the gully. They took off their shoes; the sand was so hot they had to climb the shallow rise by digging their feet through the loose surface into the cool underlayers. Raney could tell Jake was favoring one hip, but otherwise he moved with a loose freedom she had missed. Sweeps of blond sea grass clustered like gossiping girls and Jake hid himself among them, thrilled to see his mother worried before he stood up and waved. They sat together on the crest of the dunes and marveled at the beach, a prairie of beiges and browns stretching to a scallop of sea foam, a stripe of ocean, and more sky than Jake had ever seen. Yes, the world was indeed round. Only a sphere could be this infinite.
Jake had spent only one day on the Pacific since he was a toddler—a weekend trip they’d taken with Cleet. “Do you remember it? Dad found that dolphin skeleton and you were too afraid to touch it?” Jake squinted, as if that might bring some vague recollection into focus. She felt bad about not getting him out of Quentin more often, always counting on more time and more money ahead of them. She picked up a handful of sand and trickled it over his bare leg. “You know what makes sand? Millions of animal shells, ground up by waves over millions of years.” But what does a million years mean when you are twelve? she thought when he didn’t answer.
What had Jake been thinking when Dr. Lawrence described how he would go to sleep for his operation? Did they have to describe it with the same words they’d use to put a lame dog down? “Jake, did I ever tell you that I knew the very second I was pregnant with you? I couldn’t see you or touch you or feel you, but I knew you were there. And I was right.” Raney saw a smile play at Jake’s lips and decided to forge ahead. She picked up a sand dollar and ran her finger around the disk. “I guess I think about life the same way—a circle. It doesn’t have a start and a stop any more than you didn’t start the day you were born and you won’t end when your body dies. And neither did your dad. His soul is still around us. His love.” She watched Jake turn this over, probing it for the solid elements he could hold on to, the hollow parts that left him doubting.
“Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true,” he said.
She almost wished God himself would walk out of the ocean with an answer. Did he for some people? The sky was cloudless; two gulls shrieked and dove after the same silver splash. She turned Jake around to face the horizon, “What’s out there, Jake? What land would I hit if I could fly straight west?”
“Mom!”
“Come on. You know. Mrs. Bywaters taught you. What country is out there?”
“China?”
She had to think for a minute. Was it Taiwan or Japan? “Doesn’t matter. Asia, right?”
He laughed at her, “Asia isn’t a country.”
“Okay, so I would have flunked Mrs. Bywaters’s geography. But if we could both hop on the backs of those seagulls and fly far enough, we would hit some country in Asia, right?”
“Right.”
“So you totally believe me?”
“Totally.”
“Would it still be there if you didn’t believe in it?”
“You’re teasing me now.”
She turned him around to face her and ran her fingers through his damp, iron-straight hair. The mixed color of his eyes, one blue, one brown, were all the ocean and earth she wanted. “No, Jake. I’m just saying that something can be real even when the only proof you have is your own faith.”
—
David was sitting at the kitchen table when they got home, a half-empty Corona in his hands. Raney sent Jake to his room—it was well after ten o’clock. “Did you eat?” she asked David. “I left you some chicken.” She opened the refrigerator and saw the plate still wrapped in Saran, untouched. She dropped her purse on the table and faced him, her hands bracing her against the kitchen counter. “I took him to the orthopedist. It took longer than I expected. I’m sorry.”
“I got a call about a job in Amanda Park. They wanted someone today. I told them I’d drive over as soon as I had a vehicle.”
“Well, that’s a shame. I’m sorry.” She opened the refrigerator again and took out the plate, peeled the plastic back, and set it on the table with a fork. “You should eat. I don’t like to waste food.”
“I don’t have much appetite at the moment.”
“Do you want to know what the doctor said? Do you care?”
“Care? I’m trying to find a job, Renee. To support us. This family.”
She paused one beat before she said it: “You wouldn’t need a new job if you hadn’t lost your temper with Fielding.”
He pushed halfway out of his chair and in one furious sweep knocked her purse and the plate of food off the table. Coins and ChapStick and pens flew like shrapnel; the glass shattered. “I wouldn’t have lost my temper if your son hadn’t started selling speed to his classmates!”
Had she known that she hated him before that moment? The word had been rolling loose and quiet in the corners of her mind, audible only when it woke her in the middle of the night, as unreal as a bad dream by morning. “I’m taking him to Seattle tomorrow,” she said in a low, hard whisper.
“Come again?”
“I’m taking Jake to Seattle tomorrow. I’ll need money.”
“Money? Hard to earn it with no car. I couldn’t even pick up my check today.”
“We can take a bus. Just get us to Aberdeen. Or drop us on the highway and we’ll flag down the
local. Keep the car. Stay and look for work.” She walked down the hall, saw Jake curled on his bed—he would have heard everything through the paper-thin walls. “Jake?” He didn’t answer. “Pack a bag, Buddy. Okay?” He gave the smallest nod. Raney went to their bedroom and began throwing clothes into an empty canvas shopping bag—T-shirts, a bathing suit, her best dress—whatever she saw that was hers and not his.
A moment later David filled the doorway. “You got a credit card filled with imaginary dollars? I’m only asking you to wait until . . .”
“I’m driving to Kalaloch to pick up your check. There’ll be a morning bus—you can take us there before you go to work.” Every muscle was tense, braced to defend herself or grab Jake and run.
But instead of the violent reaction she anticipated, David slumped against the doorframe, his voice collapsing so solidly Raney half-expected the walls to shudder. “Oh, God. Oh, Raney,” he said, so bereft she was almost taken in. She looked at him—dark sweat rings staining his usually crisp white shirt, wisps of hair lank against his perspiring skin. She saw him so clearly at this moment—so worn out and weak that her decision to ever follow him anywhere mystified her. What had taken so long? How could she ask Jake to forgive her?
—
He would drive to Kalaloch to get the check—the night clerk wasn’t likely to cash it for her anyway. He asked her to come. The car ride would give them some time to talk—no, not to change her mind—to talk through what should happen next. For them. For Jake. Better to talk where he couldn’t hear it all, right?
Raney went to Jake’s bedroom, but when she sat next to him he rolled away. He had his shirt off and the abnormal curl of his spine felt like a scold for every mistake she’d ever made. She put her hand on his shoulder. “Jake? You awake?” He didn’t move but he didn’t have to. She knew he heard. “I’ll be back, Buddy. Get some rest.”
“Mom? I didn’t sell the drugs.”
She kissed him. “I never thought you did.”
—
She threw the canvas bag into the front seat; David walked around to the driver’s side, so apparently humbled it looked like his coat had suddenly grown too large for his stooped shoulders.
At night the land out here was isolated to the point of forbidding. Black sky and black fields lit only by their headlights; tunnels of wind-twisted trees and brackish marsh so dense with cattails the boundary between solid earth and drowning pool dissolved in a treacherous maze. Tsunami warning signs pointed the way to higher ground but anyone who lived out here understood the two-lane road could not carry them all to safety. The silence between David and Raney hung like ignitable gas; they drove without speaking all the way to Kalaloch, where he cashed his check. He handed the whole wad to her, and she stuffed it into her pocket.
She wanted to leave with Jake on that bus tomorrow with no question they would not be coming back to him. “I’m sorry, David,” she said, willing to take her own blame. “We rushed into this marriage. We should have taken more time. It’s nobody’s fault.”
He stared at the road, rolling his fists over the steering wheel. “Fault.” he repeated. “A family falls apart and it’s no one’s fault—like it’s a natural disaster or something?” His tone was bizarrely calm; it set Raney on edge.
“I’d hardly call us a family, David. Jake is sick, and all you’ve done is stand between him and help.” The car was gradually speeding up, the road so sparsely traveled their headlights seemed to end at the rim of the known world.
“You have a short memory, Raney. Remember how I found you? On the brink of losing your house? Your son flunking out of school?”
She could hear him winding up, knew he was probing for a way into her—anger followed by apologies followed by hopelessness, circling back to anger again. Any button he could push. Funny she had never realized before now—at this late age—that an argument could still connect two people after tenderness had worn itself out. She decided to say nothing, tried to soothe herself by imagining the bus trip tomorrow. Maybe the hospital could help her find a place to stay, maybe they’d have a job . . .
“Are you listening?” he said.
“I’m listening.” Maybe Jake’s schoolwork had been affected by his back pain. Seattle would have more choices of schools anyway. Maybe he’d never needed any medicine—she’d never seen any difference in him, off or on. Couldn’t tell from his behavior which days he’d taken it and which he’d forgotten. Or when he’d run out. She looked at her husband’s profile—rigid, scowling, likely mulling the next taunt. Had it ended this way with Shannon, his last wife? She knew nothing about him, did she? Nothing at all. This was how he did it, she realized. This was his malignant gift. Someone with no conscience can tell any lie and never be detected—no blush, no averted eyes. “What do you know about Jerrod and Jake?” she asked. “Why would Fielding cover up whatever happened in his office that night? You said he wouldn’t go to the police. What was going on with his books?”
David’s brow twisted into an expression of mock pity. “Is this how it went with you and Cleet? You finally made him feel worthless enough to . . .”
“At least my dead husband isn’t alive and well in Florida. I want to leave tonight. Get Jake. We’ll sleep in the bus station. We’ll sleep on the road.” She twisted her wedding ring off her finger and flung it at him.
“That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Shannon. No matter how much I explained. This isn’t about Jake. This is about revenge for a lie I only told to protect you.” David’s jaw clenched hard between his sentences. The road leaped faster under the hood of the car, curving as they neared an empty intersection and the sky was blotted out by a copse of sea-stunted trees. “You’re above a lie, Renee? The poor widowed mother? Lost her husband in a ‘freak boating accident.’ ” He had one hand off the steering wheel now, stabbing his finger toward her face.
—
The rest of Raney’s conscious life flashed like a strip of film with missing frames, jumbled and distorted. She saw a deer at the boundary of their headlights, and screamed; David must have thought it a howl against his rage. Then she was out of the car, kneeling on cold concrete holding a doe’s massive head, her great neck twisting in fear, the black pool of her eye so close, so huge, Raney saw the dome of the night sky there, the black orb of unending time. There was an agonal scramble of hoof against pavement and then the fawn—there was a fawn—poised to spring after its mother despite Raney’s own cry, the shouts of a man, the gunning of an engine. Something solid landed in the nearby marsh with a splash and Raney saw taillights. But then headlights again, a rocket of white light . . . when? A second later? Moments? The fawn, locked in the blinding glare, so close, almost inside her reach . . . We expect so much more, don’t we? she thought. How funny that we expect so much more.
• 22 •
charlotte
Raney was readmitted to Beacon Hospital in less than a week. Charlotte was at home; Felipe called and asked if she wanted to come in. Raney’s chest was gradually filling with fluid—an aggressive, drug-resistant pneumonia—some bug almost certainly spawned in the bacterial miasma of Beacon’s own ICU, which had flourished with exponential reproduction in the soup of her damp lungs. “Her saturation is eighty-four percent,” Felipe told her. “I thought you’d want to be here.” She knew what he was saying. They would need to put her back on the ventilator and put in a chest tube to save her life. To save her life, she repeated to herself. Words so loosely defined. Save—implying kept for later? Rescued from a known and terrible fate? Life—that one was easily enough defined by those who were living, perhaps analogous to prisoners describing the mind of God as a locked cell.
Eric was carrying another load of books to the attic room he was converting into his office; he saw Charlotte in her white lab coat, fumbling through the drawer for her keys, her wallet. Usually by the time she had that coat on she was already transformed into the confi
dent, collected clinician—as if the coat itself held transformative properties. Instead, she was clearly distressed, tearing her purse apart in her search for the keys. He waited, the box of books balanced on his shoulder, until she looked up at him. “I can’t do it,” she said. “Find them, I mean. I can’t . . . Would you come with me to the hospital?”
In the elevator Charlotte talked without leaving any space for Eric to respond: “How could they have screwed up so soon? One week and she’s got an empyema! Were they looking the other way? Maybe it started before she was transferred—maybe we missed the first signs . . .”
Even from the ICU doorway, even with no medical education, Eric could see how wrong Raney’s color was—her skin was the blues and grays she had painted him with twenty-five years ago. Twenty-five. He counted the years again, was it possible? Her mouth and nose were covered with a misting green mask. The monitor above Raney’s bed showed lit-up numbers in blue and green and red, one flashing: 82, 80, 77 . . . Felipe was holding Raney’s wrist in his gloved hands, a small syringe aimed like a fine dart at the pulse just above her thumb. Charlotte went to his side and talked to him for a moment, too hushed for Eric to hear. When she came back, she explained that they were running out of time—the tube would have to go in now if they had any chance to save her. Charlotte picked up the telephone and dialed a number. Then, before she said a word, before anyone answered, she hung up. “I shouldn’t do it to her, should I?”
Eric held her eyes for a minute, enough time for her to make the call if she knew it was right. She waited, looking at him for confirmation now, or support, or just to know he would be there when it was done. Finally, when she was ready, he said, “Maybe it’s time to let Raney choose.”
• • •
The Jefferson County courtroom looked nothing like Charlotte had expected—a small room at the back of the old Port Townsend courthouse with no throne of a judge’s bench, no tiered box for jurors. The judge himself was a nondescript man of late middle age. The single impression Charlotte had was that his body type would always make him look a bit overweight unless he was a bit too thin. Theirs was only one of many cases on the docket that day—all manner of contested family combinations awaited. She passed part of the long delay studying the women and men and children milling around the waiting room and the grassy lawn that looked over the sound, guessing who might be related to whom. Then Jake walked into the room with Katherine and another woman—Jake’s lawyer, it soon became clear.
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