—
Raney believed they might have eked it out, too, if it hadn’t been for the Chertoff remodel Cleet accepted when Jake was seven. After the acrimony began she would find herself sitting late into the night drawing charcoal sketches of the old house on the bluff, each from a steeper perspective than the last, so that by the end they felt as haunted and sharp-winged as the bats that twisted from the gabled eaves. The irony of how she and Cleet had played with their own dream-future on that same front porch made the seemingly fated trail to their ruin all the more bitter. Like a trap laid for the amusement of indifferent gods.
The house was famous in their end of town, empty for most of the year because the family that had inherited it lived in New York and were either heedless or barely hanging on to it—the paint and the yard and the roof gradually going more and more wild, green life sprouting from its inorganic gutters. Though it was not quite old enough to have existed in the age of whale-oil lamps, it was built after the fashion of the captains’ houses in Port Townsend, tall as a lighthouse with a widow’s walk outside the attic, trim boards cut out like fancy cookies. And such windows—four long panes to a frame that a six-foot man might walk through without so much as a nod. Sitting out on the bluff, an old house like that quickly passes from being weathered and charming to being rough and unwelcoming if it is not pampered, and for three years no one with a legitimate right to open the front door ever stepped through it. They did, though. Cleet and Jake and Raney.
After a late summer evening picnic on the overgrown lawn, Jake spotted a half-starved tabby dragging something under the brush near the cellar windows at the back. He came running to his parents already in tears. The mother cat was transferring a litter of kittens through a broken pane of glass and one had fallen—Jake could see it paddling blindly over the basement floor in the wrong direction. Cleet crouched at the window with Jake and invested a lot of breath trying to convince him that the mother would rescue the kitten; interfering would only drive her away and it was unlawful to break into someone else’s house even to help a lost kitten. But after further father-son consultation Cleet walked back to his toolshed and returned with a crowbar and various screwdrivers.
If they could blame Jake for luring them into the basement, they had no excuse for wandering around the rest of the house. Whoever had built it had spared nothing—all the more sorrow to see it trundling toward decay, Raney said. Cleet squatted in front of the built-in dining room credenza, walnut with cherry inlay, opening and closing one drawer four or five times just to admire the precision of its dovetailed fittings. “Someone cared about this,” he said to himself, with a note of rejuvenated faith in the honor of his craft. “Someone took the time to do it right.”
Jake stayed in the basement naming kittens while Raney and Cleet tiptoed guiltily through the first floor, across loomed floral carpets so thick with dust their true color only showed in the impressions left by Raney’s bare feet. The doors were all open, which made it easier to pretend they were only looking around one more corner, into one more inviting space: a library filled with the classic titles expected for show, but also plenty of warped paperback mysteries and romances and spy novels; a music room with a grand piano on bow-squatted legs in one corner and an electric Clavinova on the other wall. There was a room that held nothing but stacked-up chairs and end tables and a slashed and stained box spring canted against the wall.
They didn’t move anything. They would never have taken anything. But they went back. Sometimes after a family dinner, a few times
when Jake was at school and they were both at home and her painting
and his joinery had drained them of creative novelty. They would go out for a walk, and if the walk led them down their road and then to the bluff and the houses, then it also led them—seemingly without
intent—to the house’s open window and back inside the empty rooms.
What did it mean to them, that house? Dreams for a grand home of their own? A minute or an hour reincarnated to lives they’d missed or already lived and forgotten?
—
The Chertoffs bought the house in late fall, long after the kittens had been weaned and pushed out of the maternal nest. In December the Chertoffs’ Realtor sent Cleet a letter asking if he was available for a custom cabinetry job and did he have any references and did he, by the way, know any construction firm who could begin a small remodeling job within the month?
Raney and Cleet talked it over at the kitchen table after Jake was asleep, a rare bottle of modest wine open and both their cups on the second fill. The letter lay in the middle, between them. Cleet rolled his cup between his palms, shifting right hand forward, then left, right . . . Finally Raney laid her hand over his cup and stopped it so suddenly wine splashed through her fingers onto the tablecloth. “You know that house. You know what it needs. Think of it as a window opening,” she said. “Maybe it isn’t the ideal time, or even the ideal window. But if you don’t jump through it now, it will be gone.”
“People like them—they’re looking for something corporate. They want custom work at a factory price.”
“People like
them
? They’re just people. Rich or smart or maybe just lucky. They’re just other people. Not so different from us—two legs, two arms, dirty underwear. You should at least consider it. Answer the letter and see where it goes.” Cleet tilted his head to the side once—a gesture she’d come to recognize as hinting a crack in his resolve. “Cleet, we can’t even afford the college savings anymore.”
The project—a new sunporch, bathroom, master suite, and kitchen—took ten months. In that time Cleet bought a new table saw and subcontracted a plumber, an electrician, a drywaller, a painter, and an apprentice carpenter. At the end of the job he handed the Chertoffs’ agent, Todd King, his last bill, equal to one-quarter of the sum plus all the unreimbursed expenses Raney and Cleet had paid up front, the last ten thousand out of their own savings while they scraped by on Raney’s paycheck.
A month later Cleet sent a second letter, and a month after that he telephoned King five times with no returned call. He drove to the county courthouse to file a lien, and then the crushing potency of the Chertoffs’ money was unleashed. Cleet got a certified letter from a lawyer and a hired construction inspector claiming defects and delays totaling $170,000. They offered to settle for $50,000—more than Cleet’s salary for the whole job.
“We’ll hire a lawyer of our own,” Cleet said.
“I talked you into taking this job—it’s my fault we’re in this. These people have more money than God and they are willing to spend more money fighting you than this whole project cost. We have to walk away from it. If you drop the lien and walk away they won’t come after you.”
Cleet wouldn’t look at her. She sat half in hope he was considering her words, and half in fear that he resented her for not rising up in defiance along with him. The sun had dropped below the trees, and the only light in the room shone from the oven window. She couldn’t read his face but would not let go of both his hands until this was seen through. Finally he took in a breath. “My grandparents moved to this country because they believed in the U.S. government. They believed there was a place with justice. For all. If I can get a judge, a court, to hear what I have to say, then we won’t lose this.”
“Cleet, the lawyer charges three hundred dollars an hour. Every hour. What do we have to pay him with?”
“I’ll pay the lawyer after I’m rightfully paid what I’m owed. What I earned.”
They went to the first meeting together. The lawyer was in his late fifties probably, ran his office out of a small house in Port Angeles with one secretary, and tended to ramble on about other cases he’d handled, the paucity of good workmen these days. Later Raney wished she’d had the gumption to clarify that he was billing them the same for time reminiscing as for time arguing their case. The lawyer laid out the probable course: the Chertoffs would be deposing their experts to prove the construction flaws, and they would have to find their own experts to counter them. Cleet gave a small nod now and then. But Raney saw every word flow out in vivid greens and golds—a second mortgage, Jake’s college money, clothing, groceries, electricity, propane. By noon her shoulders and stomach ached from sitting with every muscle tensed. The long drive home was a conspicuous silence that pounded against her eardrums, interspersed with sharp arguments and tears.
Somewhere along the course, sometime over the next endless months, she let go of the battle. Cleet was fighting devils hot and vivid in his memory and his father’s memory and even his grandfather’s, back to some root conviction that the soul of a man was ultimately righteous and just and a righteous fight must result in justice. Why could she not believe that? It worked in the movies.
Cleet didn’t want her to go to the arbitration, but she insisted. “It’s all for show,” he said.
“Of course it is. But if your wife doesn’t look like she believes in you, why should the arbitrator?”
“No. I mean the whole thing. This whole arbitration is just for show. You were right. They won the day they pulled out their checkbook.”
They made Raney sit separated from Cleet, maybe to keep her from kicking his shins so he’d change his answers. Cleet kept his eyes fixed on the opposite wall while the two lawyers took turns asking the experts questions: how they would have run the ductwork or where they would have put the outlets. Should the gap between a counter and a cabinet be an eighth of an inch or a sixteenth? They started at nine and went until five with coffee breaks and stretch breaks and lunch breaks and Raney knew they would be billed for every minute of it. On the second-to-last day the arbitrator looked fed up with the Chertoffs’ lawyer’s endless dissection of every nail pop and paint drip, which she took as a hopeful sign. The arbitrator asked if anyone needed another break, and she said, “No,” too emphatically. It seemed to wake up whatever pinch of humor he had left in his dour soul, and he smiled like it was time to relax and forget this was Cleet against the machine. “You sit still as a sphinx over there,” he said, chuckling. “Don’t you get restless?”
“We’re paying three hundred dollars an hour. That keeps me pretty alert.”
Cleet’s lawyer was in a barely controlled state of livid after that, but when they got home, after Jake was asleep, Cleet pulled her onto his lap and cupped his wide, rough fingers along the curve of her skull, his body soft and wholly connected to hers for the first time since it had begun. “I love you, Raney. This is why we’re a good match, huh? You say what you think and I think what you say.”
—
In his final summary, the prosecuting lawyer said Cleet was skilled and probably well intended, but overestimated his talent, allowed ambition to push his common sense aside. To Raney, that was just another rich man telling the likes of them to stay in their place. But nobody rich ever says that when he’s looking for a good deal, she knew.
It took two weeks for the final decision to come in. Raney was in the yard hunting for any tomatoes that had escaped blight; a tremble of bees stirred the lavender and her hand was cupped around the swollen weight of the last fruit—enough joy in one small patch to inspire faith in providence. So when Cleet came to her with the ruling she felt the full ballast of overturned hope.
Cleet’s lawyer acted like they’d won the case, saying they should be thrilled to get a fraction of the Chertoffs’ unpaid bill, given all the construction claims. And Cleet’s lawyer
had
won. They owed him double the award they got.
•
14
•
charlotte
Two full days had passed
since Charlotte sat across from Helen Seras at her sleek glass-and-steel desk and repeated everything Eric knew about Raney Remington’s scar. Still nothing had appeared on the evening news or in the papers; no reporters or detectives had barged into the ICU. Nor had any family member. Helen had instructed Charlotte to keep the story to herself until it could be validated.
Validated!
One of those hospital euphemisms like “proper channels” or “organizational challenges” that irritated Charlotte—spineless phrases designed to obscure both the problem and the power behind it.
Helen had listened closely enough, even taking notes while Charlotte explained Eric’s memory of Raney’s arm caught and stripped raw by the rope swing. But when Charlotte and Helen went to Jane’s room together, hours after the bath Eric had witnessed, the blushed and swollen scar had settled back into a faint pink circle of skin and the dramatic revelation seemed less definitive even to Charlotte.
Helen had promised she would notify Blake Simpson that day. Why hadn’t he come by? And there should have been at least a phone call from Raney Remington’s family, Charlotte thought. If Raney had any living family. If Jane Doe was indeed Raney Remington.
Christina Herrand said nothing about the scar. She came to see Jane every day. She usually brought a book with her, always the same small, leather-bound volume with gold-leaf edging along the tissue-thin pages and a red silk bookmark. Sometimes she brought a bit of knitting, which appeared to be the same rectangle of yarn stitched and unraveled and stitched up again. Charlotte suspected it served best as an excuse to avoid any conversation or eye contact, or perhaps only a purposeful task to fill the hours of waiting—waiting for Jane’s condition to change, waiting for some sign that she was destined to live or die so that no one else would be forced to act. Often, though, Christina just sat and watched. Now and then she asked Charlotte questions: What did the Glasgow Coma Scale actually mean? How much could it
really
predict? When might the doctors (and here Charlotte was tempted to remind Christina that she, too, was a doctor, was Jane’s primary doctor, in fact) decide if all her toes had to be amputated, all her fingers? And at least twice this: How many people woke up after so much time unconscious on a ventilator? After so many insults to their brain, their lungs, their kidneys, their liver? What quality of life could they hope to come back to?
The second time Charlotte had bitten her tongue for one restrained moment and then blurted, “Maybe better than the average American parked for eight hours a day in front of reality TV.” Before she could soften the sarcasm, Charlotte was appalled to hear Christina begin consoling
her
.
Eric was beside himself with impatience, chafing at the idea that he, too, should obey Helen Seras’s dictums. He couldn’t let it go, as if talking about Raney was all that kept him from physically carrying her back to Quentin, back to whatever life she’d made since he’d left her waiting for his phone call. He spent hours telling Charlotte about his summers in that backwater town, the sense that he had been abandoned there by his parents while they clawed their way through a divorce. He told her about the girl he remembered—unrecognizable in the comatose creature lying in the ICU: an artist who used charcoal and pigment to show the world both as it was and as it could never be; worldly enough to call him on his prejudices as much as his possibilities even though she’d rarely traveled fifty miles from her own house. “She was always telling me we had nothing in common.” He laughed to himself and Charlotte caught a sting of remorse. “Nothing and everything.”
After a while Charlotte sat quietly and just let him talk, hearing two separate stories in his history with Raney. When he told her the story of his first kiss, she heard the trauma of his first seizure. When he told her about their two missed chances at love, at age twenty and again at twenty-seven, she heard the timeline of his recurrent brain tumors and surgeries, how they had slashed his youth with precocious mortal terror. And for the first time—how was it possible?—she heard the horrific consequence of his last grand mal seizure and the real reason Eric would never drive again.
She had never been so conscious of how little he had shared about his disease, or how little she’d admitted its effects on him; that the boundaries he had drawn were not just for his own protection. She had fallen in love with him during a blissful window of apparent health, and despite all the textbooks and articles she’d read, for the first time she admitted how unlikely it was to last. It scared her. But what scared her most was that she couldn’t tell if she was more afraid for Eric or for herself.
—
Felipe Otero had been away at a medical conference. Three days after Eric’s revelation Felipe stopped by the hospital to pick up his mail and check in, his ten-year-old son, Andy, in tow. The boy looked so much like his father it was easy for Charlotte to imagine that she was seeing Felipe as a child. She dug a handful of quarters out of her pockets for Andy to use at his whim in the vending machines down the hall. Felipe was already pulling up the computer files on the newly admitted patients. Charlotte turned the monitor away so that he had to stop reading and look at her. “Jane has a name,” she said.
“Jane Doe? When? I didn’t hear anything on the news.”
“Ortho took the cast off her arm and discovered a scar three days ago.”
“And someone identified her?”
Charlotte almost blurted out that Eric, her Eric, had been the one to recognize the physical mar that distinguished Jane as a unique individual. But suddenly she didn’t want to personalize it, at least not here in the hospital. “Well, it isn’t certain yet. Helen reported it to the sheriff’s office, but she doesn’t want the press to know—thinks the photographers would be camped out waiting for the moment of reunion, I guess.”
“How could the hospital stop this getting out?”
“Helen could stop the rain if she decided to.”
“Charlotte, listen to you. Be careful or they’ll give you her job.”
“I suppose that would serve me right.” He should have laughed with her at that, but there was a look of something closer to sympathy in his eyes that made Charlotte want to change the subject. “The conference was good?” she asked.
“Good enough. Hard to be away from the boys.” As if on cue, Andy ran around the corner and slammed into his father’s legs with two fistfuls of potato chips and candy bars. “Dr. Charlotte spoils you! And leaves the aftermath of junk food to me.” He winked at Charlotte and she felt the co-conspirator with them both, for a moment sweeping away her anxiety about Jane or Helen—even Eric. Felipe had become so much more actively a parent in these last weeks, involved in the small details that must have been handled by his wife before. He seemed quite unconscious of the subtle shift, but Charlotte had an unbidden image of him rousing his three boys in the morning, getting their oatmeal or eggs heated up, their school lunches packed. “I have to get him to soccer practice,” Felipe said, putting Andy’s head into a mock stronghold. “You’re here tomorrow? It’s hard to imagine Jane’s situation won’t become more . . . complicated.”
“Complicated? In what way?” She knew he was referring to more than Jane’s medical problems. But Andy was already pulling him down the hall.
“Tomorrow. Let’s have a drink after work if things don’t get crazy.”
—
And following the natural rule that all systems will trend toward disorder, things did get more complicated. By the next day, eighteen days after Jane was airlifted to Beacon Hospital, her kidneys could no longer balance her blood chemistry within the narrow range compatible with life. The level of potassium in her blood was alarmingly high, and Felipe, who was on duty, had to put a large-bore catheter under her clavicle so that Jane could be dialyzed. Her oxygen levels and blood pressure had improved, but the dialysis machine acted like an inert external shunt and worsened both, so she could barely tolerate the full treatment.
Every time Jane’s ICU door opened, Charlotte wondered if it would be Christina Herrand with a court order to turn everything off, or Jane’s astounded relative, begging for more time. And what if one occurred only a day before the other? When she couldn’t stand it any longer, Charlotte went to Helen’s office. Helen’s assistant was a twentyish girl who had a different-color stripe in her bleached-blond hair every time Charlotte saw her. Today it was sky blue, and somehow the defiance of this distinctly unnatural color cheered Charlotte up. When Helen’s office door opened, she grasped both of Charlotte’s hands warmly, as she always did, as if she were running into an old friend unexpectedly at a cocktail party. “I’m glad you came by. She’s no better, is she? Your patient. I stopped by this morning, but you and Dr. Otero looked busy so I didn’t interrupt.”
“What’s happened since her ID, Helen? I haven’t heard anything.”
“Oh? I thought Simpson had called you . . . I’ve been keeping him up to date on Jane’s condition.” Charlotte caught a hesitation in Helen’s eyes before she added, “His office found an address on the Olympic Peninsula. Simpson went out to talk to the husband two days ago.”
A husband. There was a husband. Charlotte felt something inside her briefly expand and then utterly collapse, leaving a void of remarkable and unanticipated magnitude. “So she’s really Eric’s friend, then?”
Helen looked at her frankly, absent her usual placid smile. “What I’ve said is confidential, Charlotte. Simpson believes she’s been identified, but you should wait for him to tell you more. I know her condition is . . . tenuous. You have decisions to make . . .”
“No . . . I just . . . Why hasn’t her husband come to see her yet?”
“Well, grief does strange things to people. I called the husband myself yesterday—I didn’t get very far. He basically hung up on me when I said I was from Beacon. And I shouldn’t have even told you that.”
“Why can’t I phone him? He might be more open with me—her doctor.”
“I’m asking you to wait. Let the law deal with it first. Please.”
“We might not have many more days. She’s got strangers acting as her family.” A pink flush deepened the sun-scarred folds of Helen’s thin neck. Charlotte felt her register the extent of Charlotte’s disdain and forgive her—a cost of business. “Why don’t you want me involved in this?” Charlotte asked.
“Dr. Reese. Charlotte. Remember, this was a hit-and-run accident. Whoever left Jane in a ditch along the highway is likely to be prosecuted. You can imagine how that could escalate if she doesn’t survive.”
—
Charlotte was already parked in front of her own house before she dialed Felipe’s number; they’d had no time to talk at the hospital. She could see Eric’s shadow through the closed window shade—back at work, which was good. The geneticist in Sweden was nearly impossible to reach, and Eric had been forced to write around missing information; he was getting anxious about his deadline, but he’d been too distracted to write in these last few days. She wanted to tell him
everything, despite Helen’s request. It would be some relief to hear that
Simpson had found the husband, wouldn’t it? Give Eric some sense of resolution? She watched his shadow stretching, rubbing his head.
Resolution
. Another hollow word, she thought. A word that worked in
poetry and obituaries maybe, but this? Whatever Eric had lost when he discovered Raney felt impossible to name, much less resolve.
He would begin pacing the room right about now, she knew, reading a copy of his day’s work out loud and stopping every lap or two to cross something out, make a star beside the good stuff. Even as she had the thought, his shadow reached the end of the coffee table and stopped, hunching over a page for a moment before he started walking again. He was a man of reliable habits, though she suspected he hadn’t always been. Certainly not in his wilder traveling days, before she knew him. When Raney had known him.
Charlotte was about to give up on Felipe when he finally answered his cell phone. He was grabbing a burger just a few blocks away—she should drive over, catch up on things. By the time Charlotte got there, he’d already ordered her a glass of Malbec and a plate of calamari. “Eric’s probably made dinner,” she said.
“Just an appetizer. I heard you met with Helen today and figured you’d need some sustenance.”
“What did you hear?” she asked.
“Only that Jane’s demise could now be someone’s murder charge. That Helen is worried you may not be the most objective member of the care team.”
“Helen Seras
said
that?”
“Well, not until I asked her and she admitted it.” The flourish with which he said this made Charlotte laugh despite herself. “It’s the only way to get the truth from them!” he went on. “So now I’ll ask you. Is it true?”
“Which? Murder or my objectivity?”
“You choose. I already know the answers. ‘Only machines are objective,’ ” he quoted her from their past conversations.
“Correct. As for murder . . . I’m not a lawyer. Not my problem.”
“As long as you keep the machines going.” Felipe’s irreverence was
his most appealing characteristic in Charlotte’s opinion, but the joke sent an uncomfortable shiver through her. “Maybe
Helen
needs to reconsider her own objectivity. She gave me a grilling about starting dialysis—harmless enough, unless she’s tallying up the daily cost of Jane’s survival. Or maybe Christina Herrand, the hired gun—excuse me,
guardian—
is whispering in Helen’s ear. She was there tonight, knitting. Rumi in hand.”