“Rumi? I’d assumed she was reading the Bible,” Charlotte said.
“I peeked when she went to the ladies’ room.”
“I know Helen’s told her about Jane’s ID—I guess she had to, legally. I’ve avoided talking to her about it. Or she’s avoided it . . .”
“I’m sure she’s waiting for proof positive. Notarized, no doubt. If it’s true they’ve found the husband I’ll miss Christina, in a way. I was hoping that knitting might be a sweater for me. Scarf at least.”
“You don’t think it’s true?” Charlotte asked him.
He shrugged and for the first time looked slightly reserved. “I don’t know. Maybe a husband has been found. But did Helen say Jane was, indeed, Eric’s friend? It makes for a remarkable coincidence—the doctor’s boyfriend being the one to identify the unknown patient. Don’t you think?”
“They happen sometimes. We’re the only Level I trauma hospital here.”
“True. How is Eric handling it?”
Charlotte stumbled for an answer. The startling moment of Eric’s discovery felt almost trivial compared with the tremors that continued between the two of them, undiscussed. Felipe was watching her somberly. He said, “We need to do more formal testing on her brain stem, Charlotte. A few more days of dialysis but . . . There could be some tough decisions ahead. Have you talked to him about that?”
Charlotte shook her head. “There’s still a lot we haven’t talked about.” After a pause she asked, “What do you think about the tests?”
“I think I’ve let you postpone it for too long.”
“That’s not what I meant. Do you think she’s brain-dead?”
“Likely. Which could be the better of two evils.”
“She’s thirty-nine. Two years older than me.”
“You’ve lost patients younger than this, Charlotte. What’s different here?” He had put his fork down and was studying her as if no answer could be wrong except the failure to answer at all.
“I don’t know. That she’s alone? A victim?” She groped for something more rational, but the truth swept in from somewhere else. “I just feel like she has more to do. I have to give her more time here.”
“So you are the immortal twin, come to the rescue.” She looked puzzled and he continued. “You’ve forgotten your school lessons. Castor and Pollux, the twins. One the child of Zeus and one the child of a mortal. When the mortal Castor is killed, Pollux splits his immortality to save him.”
“Are you telling me not to try to play God, Felipe?
Really
?”
“I know better than to tell you anything.” He laughed. “And we are all Gods within our realms, as my grandmother would have said. Especially doctors, as my mother would have said. Anyway, it worked in the myth. Except, of course, the twins could then live only in the stars.”
By the time she got home, Eric had put her dinner under plastic wrap in the refrigerator. He looked up expectantly and she leaned to kiss him—another moment to collect her emotions, to imply without lying that there was still no news. She couldn’t talk about it now. What would she tell him? She felt almost as confused about Jane’s identity as she had before Eric saw the scar. Why hadn’t Simpson called her yet?
A husband. There was a husband.
She heard Helen’s words again, tried to imagine what kind of husband could shun his critically ill wife. How would Eric react? She was too tired to think anymore, talk anymore—she had the next day off; there would be time then, after she’d slept. She shut his laptop and coaxed him into bed.
—
She woke up spooned around him like it was any summer Saturday—as if the stress of these last three days had blown everything out of perspective and a deep, dreamless sleep had set it right again. He pulled her arms tight and said, “Sunny today. Let’s get away. Go out on the boat.”
She showered, washed her hair, and put a thick conditioner on to soak, as much to linger in the hot water and steam as for any improbable benefit to her unruly hair. After she’d rinsed and turbaned her head she stood dripping in front of an empty linen cabinet. She got back into the shower and called out to the bedroom, “Can you get me another towel? There’re some in the dryer, I think.”
“Maybe I should hold you hostage for it,” Eric joked, like his old self.
“If you make me wait any longer I’ll be dry anyway.”
He tossed the towel over the shower door and started to shave. Charlotte emerged, tubed in fluffy pink, and stood behind him facing the mirror. “If I move in with you, we are throwing those towels out,” Eric said.
“They’re great towels. Expensive towels.”
“They’re pink.”
“Expensive pink.”
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 his 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.