Gemini: A Novel Read online

  Bo looked like he’d fallen down the rabbit hole. “Jeez, you could live in here.”

  “That’s the point.”

  He leaned close to inspect the photo of Raney’s grandmother. He stood up and touched the hunting rifle and knives, picked up a shortwave radio from the shelf. “So how does your granddad say the world is going to end?”

  “Depends on his mood. There’s that AIDS disease. He says that could be like the bubonic plague. The USSR might blow us up—they have missiles pointed right at the navy base over in Bremerton, you know.”

  “My dad says the Soviet Union is broke. He says it’s going to fall apart ’cause of Afghanistan.”

  “What does your dad do that makes him so smart?”

  “He buys and sells corn and stuff. Commodities.”

  “Corn. Your dad sells corn. In Seattle.”

  “Well, at least I’ve got a dad. He’s rich too.” Raney’s face went stony, not believing he would put that shit on her. Bo turned all shades of pink. He took his hand out of his pocket like he might touch her, but she pulled back. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”

  She shrugged, but wished now that she’d left him out in the yard still searching for her. She stood on the cot and pulled an oblong box off the shelf. It was filled with cartons of Marlboros. She took out a pack and tamped it firm against the heel of her hand like she did it all the time, unzipped the gold plastic string from the clear wrapper, and shook one cigarette out. “Go on. Take it.” He looked at it like she was passing him a rattlesnake. “Can’t bite you.”

  “Your granddad would kill me.”

  “He won’t know. I’ll just rearrange the packs so you can’t tell one’s gone.” Bo slowly pulled the cigarette out of the red-and-white box and held it between his thumb and first finger, turning it this way and that. Raney took a lighter off the shelf and clicked it into a blue flame; the sharp scent of butane made her feel grown-up and brave. “Go on. I do it all the time.” Bo put the filter in his mouth, and she touched the flame to the tobacco. Nothing happened. “You pull the smoke into your mouth, stupid. Breathe in, not out.”

  “I know. Just give me a minute.” She clicked the lighter again, and Bo siphoned enough air through the cigarette for the paper to catch. Not two seconds later the hatch right over their heads opened up and Grandpa jumped down the ladder in three steps.

  Raney had never seen him so mad. The truth, really, was that she hadn’t much seen him mad at all. As gruff as he was with everyone else, he had never been harsh to her. Later she decided it must have been some protective instinct coming out in him, no different from Gif’s growling at Bo. Bo ducked like he thought Grandpa might hit him, but Grandpa just stood there, a look of fuming fury on his face. The small room was getting hazy from smoke; Bo was holding the cigarette in front of him like a holy candle. For a minute Raney wondered if he was going to offer it to her grandfather. Finally she hissed, “Put it out, Bo.”

  Grandpa boomed, “You’ll not waste a perfectly good cigarette on my property. Smoke it. Right here.” Bo looked at Raney, like she would overrule her own grandfather. Grandpa took the cigarette out of Bo’s hands and put it to his mouth. “I told you to smoke it.”

  So Bo took a puff, inhaling this time. He started to cough immediately, but Grandpa didn’t budge. Nobody was leaving that room until the cigarette was gone. Tears were running down Bo’s face and he coughed so hard he doubled over. After five puffs he bolted past Grandpa up the ladder and out the barn door and Raney heard him retching in the grass.

  “I started it, Grandpa,” she said.

  “And he obviously didn’t turn you down.” He followed Bo up the steps and waited for him to stop vomiting. Bo wiped his mouth and backed away. “Oh, come on,” Grandpa jeered, rolling his sleeves up his arms. “You’re enough of a man to smoke. Break into my things. What else are you good at? Think you’re strong?”

  Bo looked half-scared, half-bewildered and fully hoping a second hole in the ground might open up for his escape. “I don’t want to fight you, Mr. Remington.”

  “Hell, I’m not gonna fight you.” He looked Bo up and down and then pointed down the hill toward the highway. “It’s a half mile to that road. Half mile down and half mile back up. Tie your shoes first, pup.”

  Bo shot Raney a desperate look. She raised her eyebrows and mouthed, Just do it!

  “That’s right, kid,” Grandpa said. “You’re strong enough to beat the old man. You get a ten-count head start.”

  Bo pinched his mouth shut and then he took off. Raney couldn’t tell if he was running to race or running to get away. Grandpa counted to ten with his hands proud on his hips, and then he shot off too. He caught up with Bo halfway down the hill and from up at the barn Raney heard him whoop. They kicked a cloud of dust between them that almost blocked her view. When they reached the mailbox at the highway she could tell Bo had taken up the challenge and was digging in; he slapped the square wooden post and skidded on the gravel in a tight circle. Grandpa was so close they looked like a single four-legged creature before Bo pulled away. He started back up the hill just as fast as he’d gone down. They were both calling out now, Bo with a victorious yelp and, Raney swore, she heard her grandfather let out a laugh. She started running down the hill toward them, saw Bo grow larger and closer and Grandpa slip farther back and then they both disappeared just below the short, steep rise at the last bend. When she saw them again, Bo was in full stride, pumping fast and smiling wide. But Grandpa was doubled over at a standstill.

  Bo saw Raney’s face change as she passed him. He spun around and sprinted back to reach Grandpa first. As bad as Bo had looked after choking on that cigarette, Raney’s grandfather looked worse. He bent over his knees with a low moan, his eyes squeezed shut in a grimace and his breath coming coarse and quick. Raney knelt in the gravel beside him. “Grandpa,” she said, then repeated with a cry of panic, “Grandpa!”

  He shook his head once and then again. He put a hand on Raney’s shoulder and slowly straightened his knees and then his back until he was upright. His face was the color of ash, stubble bristled over his chin. Had it always been so gray? He was sixty-one, but he looked old to her that day. Old for the first time. It took a while for color to return to his face.

  Bo was as quiet as death through all of it. Finally he asked, “Are you all right, sir?”

  Grandpa took a deep, clearing breath and pulled up so his greater height cast a shadow over Bo. He waved him away. “Go on. Both of you, go on. You’re too scrawny to take advantage of her anyway.”

  —

  Raney’s grandfather started preparing for the end of the world the spring her mother, Celine, disappeared. Raney remembered climbing onto the kitchen counter so she could see the barn doorway through the window, watching him drive a shovel into the still winter-hardened ground, stamping his boot down onto the flange like he was crushing evil itself. For days he clove and heaved pile after pile of soil out of the earth. She remembered her grandmother washing dishes at the sink with her mouth pressed into a hard white line, offering Raney no explanation. And as young as Raney was, she understood that he didn’t need a reason to dig. He just needed a place to spew his fury and a hole in the ground was as good as anything else. After all, there’s no bottom to it until you decide you are done. She didn’t feel rage herself. Later, much later, she knew that degree of anger was too big for a four-year-old child. All she felt was a brand-new emptiness, deep as that hole under the barn.

  He pretty much quit going to work in the machine shop, maybe so that if Celine came back he would be there to catch and hold her. And she did come back once, a few months after Raney’s grandmother passed. She came and went again so quick and quiet he would never have known she’d been there but for the fact that this time she took Raney with her. The summer after Raney’s sixth birthday she woke up in the middle of the night and there stood Celine, all the blowsy blond
flesh of her Raney knew from the photo she kept tucked inside a National Geographic magazine. She had wrapped the picture in a foldout map of Africa, possibly by chance or possibly because her mother was as exotic and foreign to Raney as that wild continent with its bare-breasted, dancing natives.

  Celine had already put Raney’s clothes into a grocery bag. She scooped her baby into her arms like they’d kissed good night just a few hours ago, Raney still in half a dream. The dream and the real never did fully sort out—what memories of that summer were true and what were the longing of her motherless childhood. Even years later she would recall the noise and color and smell of events that couldn’t have happened: a parking-lot carnival with every ride lit up and spinning, arcade games whirring and gonging, but Celine and Raney are the only two people there; Raney rides the Octopus standing on the seat with her arms extended wide to the wheeling sky while Celine laughs and waves to her from the deserted gate in a deserted asphalt lot. A day later, or maybe a month, Raney sits between her mother’s bare, tanned knees and pushes down the accelerator of a convertible sports car, trying to catch shimmering black pools on a hot desert road before they evaporate. That night, or a month before, or a week later, in a windowless room where it is always night, a man places a wrapped package in her lap and inside is a blue dress with a stiff petticoat—she will get a pink dress tomorrow if she stays quiet and lets her mother sleep.

  Over time she learned a few more facts. Grandpa had come into her room to wake her and found an empty bed, empty closet and drawers. He waited two days to call the police, a delay that was criticized by some, but given that it was the child’s own mother doing the taking, even the police were slow to call it kidnapping. And considering Grandpa’s view of anything resembling government, Raney never blamed him.

  They were gone for nine weeks. They took a bus down through Oregon and across Idaho, and after a stay in Denver they switched to cars driven by a series of men who all had the same unshaven face and ponytail. Then a loop through Kansas and Oklahoma and north Texas until Celine landed in Las Vegas, where they stayed long enough in one motel that it acquired the imprint of a home for Raney—a routine of waking up alone to powdered doughnuts and a carton of milk set out on the desk beside the TV, which was already tuned to the Sesame Street channel. The room had a small refrigerator with Oscar Mayer cold cuts and peanut butter and jelly. Their days and nights must have got swapped around, so by the time Raney awoke it was after dark, and by the time she heard a key ratchet into the doorknob, it was nearly dawn. Celine would take Raney down a steep set of concrete stairs where a swing set and a merry-go-round sat in a field with grass so tall she had red whip marks across her bare legs after playing, as if no other child had trampled that ground.

  The police never found them—likely handicapped by the nebulous legalities of Raney’s ownership. At the end of summer Celine drove her back to Seattle, and they crossed the sound on the ferry, a journey that stayed sharp in Raney’s memory because, even at the age of six, she knew it marked her last day with her mother. Her grandparents weren’t home when they arrived. Celine deposited Raney in the kitchen with a bag of dirty clothes and a brand-new Barbie doll, and drove away. For the rest of time Raney would catch a scent of Jean Naté perfume or clove cigarettes, or the mustiness of an old canvas tent, the metallic tang of a Greyhound bus windowsill, and be emptied of gravity and grounding by the rogue wave of an emotion she could not name.

  —

  Raney didn’t see Bo for three days after the race. She hung around Hardy’s Store, reading Tiger Beat magazine at the rack near the stairs leading up to the bedrooms. She bought five-penny candies so she could see Mrs. Hardy’s face up close, thinking that if her eyes were red it must mean something bad had happened to Bo. It never crossed Raney’s mind to just ask outright where he was. And then on the evening of the fourth day she was in her bedroom and heard a whistle, opened the window, and there he was, straddling his bicycle in her backyard.

  After thirty seconds pretending she couldn’t care less, she went to the back door. “So where the hell were you?”

  He squinted down the long drive. “My dad says girls shouldn’t cuss.”

  “Well, I’ll remember that next time I want advice from a corn farmer in Seattle. I thought you’d gone home.”

  “My dad took me camping in the park for the weekend. I didn’t know he was coming until he showed up at the store.” He looked down the drive again, and Raney realized he was checking for her grandfather’s truck.

  “What? Did you hide in the bushes till my grandpa drove off this afternoon? He won’t be home for a couple of hours.” Bo swung his leg over his bike and they started toward the path that led through the woods to the bluff. Once the house was out of sight, he parked his bike against a fir. The path narrowed, so they couldn’t walk side by side, and Raney led him down a deer trail that skirted a clear-cut where the fireweed and yarrow grew thick and hummed with bees. She gathered a bouquet of the purple and cream flowers and showed Bo how to choose the ripest, bright-orange huckleberries from the top of the bush, still bittersweet this early in summer. Above the clearing a red-tailed hawk screamed and Bo searched the sky. “I heard a bald eagle,” he said.

  “You’ve been watching too many westerns. Eagles sound like this . . .” Raney tried to imitate the high, broken kre-ee of an eagle, less imposing than the smaller hawk’s cry. “Well, not like that. But not like they sound in the movies.” She slapped his arm and he jerked it back. “Mosquito. They’re bad this time of night.” She pinched a feathery leaf from one of the yarrows still in her hand and rolled it between her fingers, then pressed the crushed greens on his mosquito bite. “I always wonder why so many animals hunt at dusk. Mosquitoes, snakes. Coons. Filling up without a worry in the world they’ll be alive and on the go tomorrow.”

  “That is just the kind of thing you would say, Raney.”

  “What does that mean?” She let the flowers fall to the ground and started back toward the house.

  “But he’s okay, isn’t he?”

  “I was just talking, Bo. You’re the one who’s making a big thing about it. My grandfather’s fine. That was indigestion.”

  Bo hop-skipped till he caught up with her. “Does your grandfather hate me?”

  “As a matter of fact, I asked him that. He said he likes you fine. He just likes me a lot better.”

  Bo closed his mouth in a tight line and considered. “So I can keep coming around?”

  “Yeah. If you can get over being scared of both of us, you can keep comin’ around.”

  —

  For the rest of that summer they lived in the woods and the ravine and the cove, running wild as hares. For Raney it was little in the way of new, but Bo was a prisoner set free, starting that summer off in a tight fist and every day between him and his parents’ fights letting a little more light inside. His pale, blue-white skin became blushed in days of sun. Someday, Raney decided, she would invent paints that came with permanent scents: greens that smelled of fish and seaweed; yellows that smelled like lightning strikes and crushed cedar and wet bark stripped from hundred-year-old firs; creams and whites that smelled like sand sifting through your fingers. By the end of that summer Bo’s portrait would have smelled like all of those. Even his body changed. His muscles began to fill his lean height, which had seemed like a cumbersome gift he couldn’t coordinate.

  Bo had a whole list of books he was supposed to read that summer, and when the rain kept them inside he’d pull one out of his pack. They might have been assigned, but Raney could tell he liked reading them. Often she found them left behind in the bathroom or on a kitchen counter, and he made no effort to reclaim them, pointedly leaving The Catcher in the Rye a second time and asking if they read “that kind of book” at her school. She was stung at first, but the books collected on her shelves and slowly she began to read them.

  Raney’s school started before Labor Day,
but Bo stayed around another week until his father came to take him to his new boarding school in Connecticut. His last weekend in Quentin was over a full moon, a tide high enough to swell the brackish lagoon near the mouth of the river. At its crest the flood of fresh and salt water in the pool was more than eight feet at the deep spot. Years before, kids now full grown had strung a rope off the angled branches of a big madrone. The bound knot was as thick as a thigh and so weathered it had petrified into a solid mass—impossible to trace one lap of rope around another. No grown-ups ever checked it, but the town was small enough that any broken necks or backs would have been famous, and so the swing was universally accepted as safe. Most things are until a disaster occurs.