One night, when Tom and I were at home watching a movie, a car started honking in front of the house. I recognized the old burgundy Mercedes with the dented hood.
“I’ll take care of it,” Tom told me. Before I could stop him, he was out the door.
Dennis’s desperate voice drifted up from the street. “Just five minutes,” I heard him tell Tom. “I just have to talk to her.”
I turned off the light and watched through a slit in the curtain as Tom tried to calm him down. Tom was seven or eight inches taller than Dennis, a solid wall of strength. They talked quietly for a while, and I could no longer hear what they were saying. Finally, Dennis got in his car and drove away. Tom came back inside, frowning.
“What did you say to him?”
“I reasoned with him. I told him that he can’t be showing up at our house. I told him that you’re very busy, and that his behavior is scaring you. He talked about his ex-wife, and then he talked about his daughter. I told him I was sorry that he’s going through a difficult time.”
“That’s it?”
Tom pulled me close. “I also told him that if he ever comes back, I’m going to beat the shit out of him.”
I stood back and looked up at Tom. “You said that?”
Tom tends to speak softly, perhaps to counteract his size. I’d never seen him threaten anyone before. But it seemed to have worked.
After that, to my enormous relief, Dennis simply disappeared. He stopped calling. He stopped coming by the hospital; he stopped sending anonymous letters in the mail.
By the time I found the Rilke book on my shelf, I no longer felt afraid to be alone in my house at night. Dennis had surely found a new girlfriend, a new job, a new person on whom to unload his burdens.
I sat down in the living room, turned on the lamp, and began to read. I read the book cover to cover in one sitting. When I closed it, I remembered that there had, after all, been a reason I was drawn to Dennis Drummond: he had an interesting mind.
5
6:35 a.m.
All cities smell in summer.
On the opening page of Rilke’s novel, a young writer named Malte watches a pregnant woman “pushing herself with difficulty along a high warm wall.” He is comforted by the fact that the hospital is just beyond the wall, where the woman will be received, her baby delivered. And not far from that hospital is another one, Valde-Grâce Hôpital Militaire. Everywhere, hospitals where the suffering can be saved. But the smell is terrible, Malte thinks, a smell of “iodoform, the grease of pommes-frites, fear.”
Of all the beautiful lines in the book, one line stuck with me: “All cities smell in summer.”
Today, the line comes to me again. There is a different smell in the air—something burning. Standing beside my vandalized Jeep, I scan the sky. In the distance, the black plume rises. I take a mental inventory of the spot, trying to map it in my mind, but I can’t quite figure out where the smoke is coming from. My compass has always been off. I know every path in the human body, the organs and skeletal muscles, the passages that carry blood from one place to another, all that intricate geography as familiar to me as my own face in the mirror. When I was in medical school, I used to dream the human body in startling detail, much in the way one dreams the streets of a hometown one has left behind. But when it comes to the actual streets of my city, I often draw a mental blank.
I open the door to the Jeep and reach across the seats, careful to avoid the shattered glass. From the glove compartment, I take a laminated map of San Francisco, the surface mottled with coffee stains. The map is rendered in bright oranges and teals, sprinkled with X’s placed there by Tom over the years. Many of the street names are obscured by his tiny, strangely neat handwriting, an ongoing diary of our life together in the city: Luna Park, where you met my parents, 11/12/1999, written near Valencia and Eighteenth, bonfire, 7/5/2004, penned across Ocean Beach. The last entry, Graham Parker at the Great American Music Hall, next to an X at Polk and O’Farrell, was dated March 5, four years ago. Is that when we stopped going to concerts together? Or is it simply when he stopped writing them down?
I reach under the driver’s seat and pull out the emergency kit. I tear open the packet of Tylenol and swallow the pills. I have no water, and they scratch going down; the bitter taste lingers on my tongue. I remove the small red Bakelite, circa 1964, that I co-opted years ago from Tom’s collection of vintage radios. Every couple of months, the local news stations will run a segment on earthquake preparedness, and they’re always reminding residents to have a battery-operated radio handy.
Flicking the switch sends out a burst of static, and I adjust the dials until the tail end of Chris Isaak’s song comes through… It’s you I’m dreaming of.
I slide the map and the radio into my bag. The smoke in the distance seems to be growing higher, darker, every minute. The Marina, perhaps. I think of 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake, all those houses fallen in upon themselves. It was before I arrived here, but I’ve heard that the city, then, smelled like a city on fire.
6
“Tomorrow’s the big day for you, isn’t it?” Dennis’s question is muffled by cellphone static.
“I’m trying not to think about it.”
“I remember when I turned forty,” he says. “I was expecting some huge epiphany, but it turned out to be just an ordinary day.”
“That’s what I was hoping for.”
All the echoes one hears by the age of forty. When you’re young, everything seems new. In your mid-twenties, it begins to dawn on you that the world is full of surprise repetitions: a face recalls some other face, a novel some other novel, a song an entire summer or an old relationship. By your late thirties, it seems the world is made of these echoes. A patient in his late eighties once told me that old age is like living inside a déjà vu.
“Your sister’s giving you quite the birthday present.” Dennis laughs.
“How did you know?”
“There’s a picture in the top drawer of your desk of a woman who looks a lot like you. Taller, brown hair, different nose, but she’s definitely related. It has to be the sister you used to talk about. There’s a date on the back. It was taken two months ago out at Sutro Baths, and she’s very pregnant.” There’s a pause. “I saw the two of you going into the hotel together last week.”
I feel a spike of panic. How long has he been watching me?
“She’s in there with you now, isn’t she?”
I glance over at Heather. She is lying with her eyes closed, the blanket draped over her knees, waiting. Greg Watts has left to find help. It’s just the two of us now.
“Yes,” I say.
“I heard her in there, you know, when I was with Eleanor. She was trying to be quiet, but I heard.”
“Why Betty?” I ask quietly. “She’s taken care of you a number of times. You always got along.”
“An antidote to Eleanor,” Dennis deadpans.
“And Rajiv?”
“Just be grateful I didn’t grab your sister, too. I wanted to. I could have. You know—for what she did to you. But I didn’t, because I knew you’d be mad.”
How much did I tell him? I can’t remember. That time was so painful, and Tom became so distant. One thing I can say for Dennis: he was always there.
“You shot at me,” I say, still not able to get my mind around it.
“I’m sitting here with my Sig and my MP5. If I wanted to hurt you, I would have.”
“I have to set the phone down,” I say.
“Leave it where I can hear you.”
As I lift the blanket to examine Heather, I try to shut out the thought of Dennis at the other end of the line, armed and angry. “You’re seven centimeters,” I say.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’m right on time.” I palpate her abdomen. “The baby’s ready—the head is right where it should be.”
I wish I had a fetoscope to check the baby’s heartbeat. I wish I had clean blankets, sterile instrum
ents, good light, a trusted nurse. I wish I had something to give her for pain. All my training, everything medicine has to offer, and my sister will end up having her baby in a dark room in a ramshackle VA hotel.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Heather says. After three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, she has about her a commanding sense of calm.
I think of Rilke’s pregnant woman, making her way along the wall. What is it about a woman in labor that softens the hardest hearts? Maybe it has something to do with the idea that whoever she might be, and whatever she might have done in the past, she’s now bringing into the world something new and entirely innocent. At that moment, all is forgiven; she has the chance to begin again.
7
Beyond the windows of the VA hospital cafeteria is a hill that slopes steeply down to the sea. And half a mile across the ocean the Marin Headlands rise up, brown hills dotted with white buildings. Rugged and wild, this is where the Pacific Ocean meets the San Francisco Bay. Without fail, standing in line each morning for my coffee, I am stunned by the beauty of it all. How strange to find the world’s greatest view hidden behind a dirty window in a run-down VA cafeteria.
From the trailhead behind the hospital, you can see the foghorn atop the water like a maritime wedding cake. On foggy days, with its relentless moaning and the competing sounds of the ships calling to each other in their low, vibrating tones, it sounds gloomily apocalyptic, as if a herd of prehistoric beasts has descended upon the city from across the ocean. The day Heather returned was such a day, blue and windless. It was just past seven on a Wednesday morning in October, and I was following my usual routine—grabbing a cup of coffee in the cafeteria before my shift, ticking off the day’s schedule in my mind.
She sat alone in a booth up against the wall, her back to the door. She could have been anyone—someone’s girlfriend, someone’s wife, a young veteran just home from the war. It wasn’t until she turned her head to look out the window and I saw her in profile that I knew. I stopped in my tracks, caught my breath.
I had not laid eyes on her in more than four years, had not even spoken with her in that time. While I’d always assumed our reunion would be on neutral ground, Heather had deliberately chosen my space, with its constant low murmur of voices and the hum of machines, the aquamarine walls bearing cheaply framed prints of breaching whales, the aqua-and-pink booths with their aqua-and-pink tables, and the blue, everywhere blue, especially when you glanced out the long rows of windows, beyond the cheerful shabbiness of the cafeteria, to the rough Pacific. What did that mean? Or was I misreading the gesture? After all, she was the veteran here; I was only an employee. She stared out the window and then continued drinking her coffee. A newspaper lay open on the table in front of her, but she didn’t appear to be reading.
I had often wondered what I would say when we saw each other again. Each time I found myself thinking about our reunion, I would put it out of my mind. Running helped. So did movies. Mostly, there was work, and it filled my days. When I wasn’t at the hospital, there were medical journals to read, lectures to give, seminars to attend, interns’ phone calls to return.
I held my breath, scanning Heather for signs of injury.
She turned suddenly, as if reacting to a loud noise or to the sound of her name—although there was no noise, and I had not said a word. Later, I realized how difficult that moment must have been for her, how she had taken the excruciatingly awkward first step after so long a silence. There’s a Nathaniel Hawthorne story I read in college in which a man walks out of his house one day, planning only a brief absence, but the more time passes the more impossible a reunion seems—so that decades go by before he finally returns home to his wife. I understand now how families become estranged, not by design but by embarrassment. You come to a point when so much time has passed that it seems impossible to make the first move.
She’d been twenty-five years old the last time I saw her, the day she turned our lives on end. Now she was twenty-nine. Her hair, which she’d worn long and bleached blond since high school, was cropped to her shoulders and had reverted to her natural brown. She wore almost no makeup, and her face was fuller, healthier-looking, the sharp cheekbones gone soft. She used to pride herself on her pallor, avoiding the sun with stubborn dedication, but now her complexion was sun-kissed, a spate of freckles splashed across her nose. I hadn’t seen her with freckles since she was a child. She had always been beautiful; now that she’d stopped trying so hard, she was even more so.
“Heather?”
She smiled, activating tiny lines around her eyes. “Hi.” Even her voice was in a lower key—the voice of a woman, not a girl. “Have a seat,” she said.
“I can’t,” I said instinctively, even though my shift didn’t start for another hour.
“Why not?”
Everything about the way she spoke to me, what she said, was so nonchalant, as if the years of silence, and the event that had preceded them, had never happened.
Reluctantly, I slid into the booth across from her. “You look good,” I said. “I like the bangs.”
She ran a hand self-consciously over her hair. “Thanks. It’s nice to be out of fatigues.”
“It was four years ago that you enlisted. Are you free and clear?”
“Ha. Is anyone ever?” She laid her hands on the table in front of her—an old habit, acquired when her high school French teacher told her that the French always keep their hands in sight during meals. In those days, she’d dreamed of living in Paris. “I’m not re-enlisting, but they have a way of dragging you back in. I had a platoon sergeant who was being processed for retirement when he got called back, thanks to Stop Loss.”
Heather flicked her coffee cup with a fingernail. “You’re staring.”
“Sorry.” I glanced away. It came as such a relief to simply look at her. Her face was more serious than before, her dimples already etched into permanent lines. She seemed young for that, but then, I’d seen soldiers in their twenties whose hair had turned white.
She sipped her coffee and frowned. “Ugh.”
“Rule number one: never get your coffee from the cafeteria. There’s a stand around the corner. It’s just Starbucks, but it’s fresh.”
“Just Starbucks,” she said, shaking her head. “Out in the desert, I’d have given my left arm for a Starbucks.”
She looked down at her coffee, twirled the paper cup around. “It’s good to see you, Julie.”
I didn’t respond. I thought of Ethan. I wasn’t sure I was ready for her to walk back into my life.
A gardener moved slowly past the window, head down, the loud buzz of his weed trimmer cutting through the silence. The sound faded as he crossed the lawn, whacking away at the wildflowers. Bits of yellow and pink went flying. The cafeteria door was open, and a rich scent of grass wafted in, and something else—honeysuckle.
“Mmmm,” Heather said, turning her head. “Smells like Mississippi.”
I couldn’t help smiling. “Remember Buddy? I wonder what ever happened to him.”
She turned away from the window, angling the left side of her face toward me. “Sorry?”
“You’re favoring your left ear,” I said, and it dawned on me that she’d been doing it all along.
She frowned. “IED. My right ear is shot. The doctor called it sensorineural hearing loss.”
“Didn’t they give you a hearing aid?” I asked.
“Yes, but I hate it.”
“Are you okay otherwise?”
“Ten fingers, ten toes,” she said. “I’m okay. There are little things, of course. I’ve started getting headaches.” She tapped the newspaper in front of her. “I have to read the same paragraph over and over. I can’t remember the last time I made it through a novel.”
I thought of her as a child, all those Nancy Drew mysteries and Judy Blume books and Chronicles of Narnia volumes stacked on the floor beside her night table, how she’d read them into the wee hours, so that I’d have to drag her out of bed in the morning
and practically dress her for school myself.
“Besides the headaches,” she continued, “I can’t always control my temper. I get really mad about the dumbest things. The last VA doc I saw said the temper doesn’t have anything to do with the explosion, that it’s typical PTSD, but I’m not sure.”
“If I were deaf in one ear, I’d be pissed, too,” I said.
Heather grinned. “I see you haven’t lost your winning bedside manner.”
I didn’t tell her that I see ravages of PTSD every day: drug addiction, alcoholism, domestic violence, depression. I didn’t tell her about the kid who ended up in the ER every couple of months for repeated suicide attempts. The last one succeeded.
“What really gets me is that I can’t remember the punch lines to my favorite jokes,” she said. “I’ll start telling one, and I’ll get halfway through it before I realize I don’t know how it ends.” Jokes had always been Heather’s way of saying hello, saying goodbye, flirting, even apologizing. As a kid, she would spend hours at the kitchen table, scribbling jokes in a bright red notebook.
“Anyway, here I sit, right? All in one piece. With a sexy war wound to boot.” She brushed aside her bangs, and I repressed a gasp. There was a three-inch scar just above her left eyebrow.
“Jesus, who did that?” Someone had botched the stitching, leaving a jagged, raised line along her forehead.
“It wasn’t the medic’s fault. Our convoy was on patrol near the COB, driving down this rural road. It was deserted, or so we thought—nothing to see for miles around. It feels like something’s crawling around in my helmet, so stupidly, I take it off, just for a second, and this kid, couldn’t have been more than ten, eleven years old, steps out from behind a tree, grinning. He’s covered in dust, because everything and everybody there is covered in dust, but even so you can tell he’s a beautiful kid, big brown eyes, wavy hair, like he just stepped out of one of those old Benetton catalogs. He reaches into his pocket and lobs this big, sharp rock at me. It splits my skin right open. I’m bleeding like crazy, and then these older kids—fourteen, fifteen years old—start coming out of nowhere, only they don’t have rocks, they have guns. Our guys return fire, the kids start dropping like flies, and the driver just floors it. In the chaos we couldn’t find the medical kit, so somebody closed the wound up with superglue as we were barreling down the road. By the time I got to the field hospital, there wasn’t much they could do, aesthetically speaking.”
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