Free Gemini by Carol Cassella

crowded with big-bellied men waving enormous, inflatable hands and overwrought children smeared with mustard and tears. The light changed against her before she could cross, and the swell of bodies and the smell of beer felt intolerable. She looked at her watch, impatient to get back to her car.
    Suddenly the crowd took in a simultaneous gasp and then fell silent. There was movement, commotion, a flux of people to the right and back to the left, shifting quick and coordinated as a flock of starlings united in panic. A few solitary voices called for help and the crowd parted like cornstalks falling under a mower blade just before something heavy hit the ground. At the curb, half-sprawled in the muddy gutter, Charlotte saw a big dark slab of a man seizing with arched back and rigid limbs, his supersized plastic Mariners cup rattling against the curb with each rhythmic jerk of his arm.
    Charlotte’s purse and jacket were down and she was on the pavement between the moving traffic and the man’s head, anchoring her small hands on either side of his meaty cheeks to protect them from the cement. A woman called out, “Put something in his mouth.” Charlotte looked at her and said, “I’m a doctor. Don’t put anything in his mouth. Call 911.” She looked for the nearest sober, calm adult and told him to find a cop and get the street blocked off. She checked the man’s wrists and neck for a MedicAlert, then she scanned the faces and called out in a voice twice as loud as her own, “Does anyone know this man?”
    It ended nearly as quickly as it began. His seizure stopped. Charlotte lifted his jaw to open his airway and leaned over his face to make sure he was breathing. Slowly his body relaxed as if he had been in nothing more than an oddly timed deep nap. When his eyes fluttered open, she put her mouth near his ear and spoke low and soothing, “You’re okay. I’m right here with you. We’re going to get you to a hospital and everything will be okay.”
    After the ambulance left she looked down at the front of her dress—splattered with greasy mud and saliva. Her purse and coat were no longer on the curb where she thought she’d dropped them. She brushed her hair out of her face with the backs of her filthy hands, suddenly exhausted and in no mood to deal with her stolen cards and keys and money. And then a man walked toward her from the perimeter of the dispersing crowd, holding her purse and coat in his arms. It was the man who’d given the reading—was it hours ago? The author. It was Eric Bryson.
    He asked her if she was all right, which struck her as funny given that she was not the patient. She saw him blush, catching his mistake in her eyes. He asked her if she was a doctor, then immediately added, “Of course you must be,” and said he’d interviewed a lot of doctors for his book. Had she gotten much out of his talk? All the while he held on to her coat and purse as if unaware they were keeping her hostage there. When she finally reached for them, he invited her for a drink. Charlotte looked down at the front of her dress and lifted her shoulders as if the answer were obvious. Standing this close she was struck by the contrast between his dark hair, his thick dark eyebrows, and his eyes, which were a comforting gray-blue that reminded her of the sea glass she and her brother had collected on family vacations to the Oregon coast or Ocean Shores.
    The weather had begun to clear and the breaking clouds were slashed by a pale twilight sky. They began walking up Alaska in the direction of her car, but then they were turning up Marion, and then at the door to the Metropolitan Restaurant before she thought to question who was following and who was leading and whether she cared. She wiped the front of her dress with a wet paper towel in the women’s room and buttoned her coat over it, realized upon looking in the mirror that her mascara had wept black streaks over her cheeks.
    They split an antipasto plate and a