Golden State

by Michelle Richmond

  The pain and exhaustion and terror blend into one; the sun glints off the ocean in the distance. Swing, step, swing, step, swing, step. Passing an abandoned bus stop, I find myself thinking of an afternoon in Budapest, when Tom and I, four days into our honeymoon, stood in the rain waiting for a bus to Eger. A woman stood beside us, seeming not to notice the rain, eating bread from a paper bag. The bread smelled wonderful, and the bag was like a canvas, dark spots appearing where the raindrops fell. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around where I was, couldn’t understand how I had ended up so loved, and so completely happy.

  As I move slowly past the avenues, the whitecaps of Ocean Beach visible at the bottom of the hill, it occurs to me that Ocean Beach, like the VA campus, is federal land. This part of town gets a bad rap for the fog, which is so dense in the heart of summer that you can’t see ten feet in front of your face. But October always brings a slew of warm, sunny days, so blue and bright you forget that winter is coming. Tom and I used to go to the beach with Ethan on days like that, and we’d build castles and dig moats in the wet gray sand. When we grew tired we would feast on Mexican soda and thick sandwiches from Fredy’s Deli. Those were wonderful days. After we lost Ethan, we stopped going. Just a year ago, while cleaning out the garage one morning, I found a stash of Ethan’s plastic buckets and shovels, still sandy. One of the buckets was filled with shells and sand dollars. I sat down on the floor, overwhelmed by memories. Tom found me there in the afternoon, still sitting among Ethan’s things. Without a word he helped me to my feet. He guided me upstairs and into the bathroom, where he ran water in the tub, so hot the tiny bathroom filled with steam, undressed me gently, layer by layer, and helped me into the water. “Is it too hot?” he asked.

  “It’s perfect.”

  He sat on the edge of the tub. “Remember when we used to go there?”

  “How could I forget? Ethan loved it.”

  “No,” he said. “Before Ethan, I mean. Just the two of us.”

  “Oh.” The memory slowly returned. He was right. We’d done it many times in the early years of our marriage. We would take a blanket and a bottle of wine, and we would watch the sun go down over the Pacific. Somewhere, there are photographs, in which I tried to capture the incredibly soft, velvet blue of the water. I wonder if I will come upon them someday and regret the path I’ve taken—away from those perfect moments on that perfect beach.

  Finally, I reach Thirty-eighth Avenue. “Please let her be okay,” I mutter. I collapse on the bench at the abandoned bus stop and take a deep breath. Five hard blocks, and I’ll be there.

  47

  One Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago, I was supposed to meet Heather at Bi-Rite for ice cream. It was an unusually gorgeous, hot day, and everyone was out in shorts and tank tops. As usual, the line at Bi-Rite stretched down the block. I didn’t see Heather, so I got in line and waited. Ten minutes passed. I was sweating. As my turn drew nearer, with no sign of Heather, I called her cell. Getting no answer, I texted. Still no reply. I told myself not to worry—she hated answering the phone. Still, it was unlike her, these days, to flake on me when we had solid plans. When it came to appointments of any sort, she still had a military mindset. I called again and left a message.

  A few minutes later, worried, I decided to walk to her sublet apartment just a few blocks up Valencia. I knocked on the door and waited. There was no answer. The curtains were drawn, so I couldn’t peek in the windows. I began to feel nervous.

  I tried the door. It wasn’t locked. Inside, the place was dark and smelled of lavender. I called her name, but there was no answer. The apartment was small—one bedroom with a kitchen, bathroom, and living room. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves were packed with books. More freestanding bookshelves lined the hallway. It was a terrific apartment, nice hardwood floors and high ceilings. There was a big bay window looking onto the street. I opened the curtains, and the room filled with light.

  “Heather?”

  The bedroom door was closed. I was about to step down the narrow hallway and knock on the door when a photograph on the table beside the sofa caught my eye. I was sure it hadn’t been there before. It was a grainy five-by-seven in black and white, portraying a smiling Heather in desert fatigues, her hair pulled back in a high bun. She looked tired, but at the same time she looked vibrant, happy. The photo had been taken inside a room that seemed strangely palatial, with a high ceiling and a big chandelier, and shot from across a large, gilded coffee table. From the odd angle of the shot, I guessed that the camera had been propped up and set on self-timer mode.

  I picked up the photograph, not quite believing my eyes. Heather was sitting next to a man, someone whose face I recognized from other, more public photographs, from TV and newspapers. It was the governor, looking strangely unlike himself behind a three-day beard. He was wearing a denim button-down with the sleeves rolled up; on TV, I’d never seen him in anything other than a suit. He wasn’t facing the camera. He was gazing at Heather, as if he was about to tell her something.

  “Impossible,” I whispered.

  I searched the photo for seams, for signs that it had been doctored, inexplicable alterations in light and shadow. I studied the hand draped over Heather’s shoulder, the proportions and probability. My first instinct was to marvel at the intricacy of the lie, the precision of the ruse, the bold lengths to which Heather would go to keep her story intact. But then a thought crossed my mind: What if, this time, she was telling the truth?

  The bedsprings creaked, a doorknob turned, and Heather stepped into the hallway, her belly huge under an old T-shirt, her legs bare. She rubbed her eyes. “Shit. I’m sorry. I was supposed to meet you for ice cream. After lunch I was so tired I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I lay down to take a quick nap, and I was out like a light.”

  She noticed the picture in my hand. She smiled, as if to say she’d won this round but she wasn’t going to gloat. “I’ll go change,” she said. “The salted caramel cone is calling my name.”

  She went back into the bedroom. I set the picture down. I had to recalibrate. There was no denying that it was my sister in the photograph. There was no denying that the man beside her was the governor.

  As dresser drawers opened and closed down the hall, I thought of Tom’s show, Anything Is Possible. In the early days, Tom used to try his topics out on me. Invariably there would be a debate—me playing the role of the skeptic, Tom playing the role of the one who believed in endless possibilities: time travel, heaven, ESP, peace in the Middle East. It was almost always easy for me to argue against him, because his topics frequently struck me as absurd, just myths and mirrors, the stuff of imagination, not science. But slowly, over time, Tom began to wear away at my doubt: a general from the NASA Ames Research Center came on the show to explain why we would colonize Mars by 2025; a well-known neuroscientist and former atheist described his own near-death experience, which had caused him to reconsider the possibility of life after death.

  I’d grown up in a world where even the most mundane things sometimes seemed impossible, and where dreams were always tamped down by reality. “Medical school?” one teacher had scoffed during my junior year of high school. “Don’t get your hopes up. There’s a good nursing school in Jackson, though.” There was a hometown boy who’d left Laurel in the 1950s and made a name for himself in Hollywood, and he was still revered in the town as a kind of miracle, an anomaly. Another local boy had briefly stood at the helm of a wildly successful Fortune 500 company. The town was proud of these unusual native sons, but also mistrustful. That the actor ultimately met an unfortunate end in a drunk driving accident and the Fortune 500 executive ended up in jail for insider trading seemed fitting; if you aimed too high, you were bound to pay the price.

  In my mother’s mind, fame and even simple good fortune happened to other people, from other places. After all, she and my father had dared to dream: his job at the bank, the briefly owned Lincoln Continental, the golden ideal of growing old together. None of it had come t
o fruition. The idea of our family’s hard luck was so ingrained in her that when I was accepted to medical school, she told me there would still be a place for me at home “if it doesn’t work out.” And she really seemed to believe that it wouldn’t. She had a certain idea of how the world was supposed to operate for people like us. My life, to her, seemed unfathomable, some fantasy bubble that was bound, eventually, to burst.

  I thought I had trained myself not to think like that. My own life served as evidence that it was possible to break the chains of circumstance, that one could rise above expectations. But as I stood in Heather’s apartment, looking at the photo of her and the governor, struggling with my own disbelief, I had to wonder if, perhaps, I was more like my mother than I thought. Had I become too doubtful, too closed off to see what Tom liked to refer to as “the endless possibilities of the world”?

  Walking to Bi-Rite Creamery, we didn’t talk about the photograph. I wasn’t sure what questions to ask. I was still processing it, still trying to figure out which part of her story was true, which part was false.

  “Cat got your tongue?” Heather asked.

  “Sorry. I was kind of lost in thought.”

  I wondered if it was out of graciousness that she pretended I’d never seen the photo or if, instead, she simply enjoyed the fact that I was so dumbstruck.

  The next morning, a strange thing happened. I was driving to UCSF to give a lecture, and as I turned up Cole, I caught sight of the orange Avanti, sitting in front of Reverie Café—the very car, bought with lottery winnings, that had inspired Tom’s show all those years before. I might not have noticed the Avanti, were it not for the fact that the meter maid’s vehicle was at that moment partially blocking my path, and the meter maid was in the process of slipping a ticket under the windshield wiper of the Avanti. Just then, a man hurried out of the café. It was my husband’s friend Wiggins. My windows were down, and I could hear him arguing.

  I maneuvered around the meter vehicle and drove on, thinking of the Avanti, a car that was a symbol of all that was possible. I thought of recent items from the news, a whole slew of seemingly impossible things that had in fact come to pass. Scientists had discovered that the universe is crowded with Earth-like planets, many of which had evidence of flowing water. A graduate student in Arizona, meanwhile, had proved theoretically that life could begin with arsenic, a substance that was previously believed to destroy it, thus exploding our notions of what conditions needed to exist in order for life to form. A sixty-six-year-old woman in India had just given birth to triplets. There was a hole in the ozone over Antarctica the size of North America, the glaciers were disappearing more rapidly than anyone had ever imagined, and the rainbow toad, believed for nearly a century to be extinct, had been found alive and well in the Ecuadoran rain forest. And then there was California, the thirty-first state, suddenly hell-bent on independence.

  I had to wonder: Was Heather the irrational one, or was I? Which was more willfully blind: To believe it was possible to win the lottery? Or to insist, despite firm evidence to the contrary, that it wasn’t?

  48

  12:02 p.m.

  The first block—Fulton to Cabrillo—is manageable. With each painful step I’m grateful that the street’s incline is slight. The white buildings of the VA hospital tower at the top of the hill, the large American flag snapping back and forth in the wind.

  These days, I work fairly regular hours. But during my residency and in the first few years of my practice, there would be a point in every double shift when the work became purely mental, when the body, left to its own devices, would simply give out. When that happened I would picture the end of my shift as a finish line and repeat to myself, over and over, “Almost there, almost there, almost there.” For the last couple of hours, these two simple words would keep me going. The next few blocks are no different, the finish line so near I can taste it.

  I pass a ramshackle playground where a group of teenagers sit on the swings, smoking and laughing. A woman in a long skirt, hair covered with a black net, chases two little girls up the slide. On the other side of the playground, half a dozen men are shooting hoops. While the rest of the city deteriorates into chaos, in this quiet neighborhood built on sand dunes, it almost feels like an ordinary day.

  I turn left on Balboa and make my way down to Forty-third Avenue. Balboa to Anza is more difficult. It’s all uphill, and the block seems to go on forever. Every few steps I look up at the Stars and Stripes flapping over the VA—my finish line. I’m moving as fast as I can: step with the right foot, swing on the crutches, step, swing, step, past the tall, narrow houses.

  And then, suddenly, I’m on the ground, cheek to the pavement, flat on my stomach on the sidewalk, staring into an open garage that’s packed with cases of bottles, stacked all the way to the ceiling. I curse, startled by the volume of my own voice on the quiet avenue.

  An older woman is standing inside the garage. She looks at me, surprised, before rushing to my side. Warm blood gushes from my nose. I taste salt, iron. I reach up and touch my face; my forehead is bleeding too. The woman tugs at my arm, her grip surprisingly strong, and with her help I am able to push myself up on my palms. Then, with a few excruciating movements, I manage to get to a standing position.

  “Come inside,” she orders, picking my messenger bag up off the ground.

  “I can’t,” I say, wiping blood from my face. My hands are covered with it. I’m dizzy, light-headed.

  “You must.”

  My nose keeps gushing. The cut in my forehead is pumping blood so fast, it’s difficult to see.

  “Come!” she says again, and this time she is dragging me toward her house. I stumble after her, trying to see through the blood. I follow her through the garage, to the side stairs. She sets down my bag and props my crutches against the wall. “I will help you,” she says.

  I put one arm around her shoulders, clutch the banister with the other hand, and together we proceed slowly up the stairs. Then she leads me through a door into a warm kitchen. Something is cooking on the stove, the lid of the pot noisily lifting and lowering, sending out puffs of steam. From another room comes the sound of children’s voices.

  She takes several paper towels from a roll and hands them to me.

  “Thank you,” I murmur, pressing the towels to my nose, my forehead. I pinch the bridge of my nose between my thumb and forefinger. It takes minutes for the bleeding to stop. What is happening to Heather? I have to get out of here.

  The woman takes an unlabeled bottle from the freezer and pours a bit into a small blue glass. “Drink this,” she orders. “You will feel better.”

  I shake my head, but then she’s pressing the glass to my lips. The cold vodka stings going down.

  “I will show you the bathroom,” she says.

  I follow her out of her kitchen, past a large living room, where seven children are standing in a line, waiting their turn. In the middle of the room is a balance beam, and at one end of it stands a man of about sixty, giving orders in Russian to a boy no more than five, who is making his way along the beam. The boy looks up, sees me, and falls off. Then all of the children are staring at me, wide-eyed. The man glances up too, and on his face is a look of shock. The woman says something to him in Russian, he claps his hands, and the children stand at attention.

  “Day care,” she tells me. “Please excuse the children for staring.”

  In the bathroom, one glance in the mirror explains their reaction; there’s so much blood, I look like a crime scene. My lip is cut and has already started swelling.

  The woman wets a washcloth with warm water and cleans my face.

  “Oh!” she says, smiling, when the blood is gone. “This way you are much prettier.”

  Then she opens the medicine cabinet and pulls out a box of Band-Aids and a spray can of Bactine. “Close your eyes,” she says. She sprays the cut on my forehead. It stings. She covers the cut with a large Band-Aid. “Much better.”

  I thank her for her
kindness.

  “With pleasure,” she says, leading me back down the stairs and into the fog. She hands me my crutches and puts the bag over my shoulder. “Sorry I don’t have car,” she says. “If I have, I give you ride.”

  Now I go more slowly. Step, swing, step, swing, step, swing. This city never ceases to amaze me. Behind every door, it’s as if there’s another, secret country. In many ways, San Francisco already is what California wants to be: a world unto itself.

  My foot feels like a dead weight dangling from my leg. Every sensation in my body is concentrated there. I sing to myself to try to get up the hill. It’s a song Tom’s been playing on the radio lately, so insanely catchy I haven’t been able to get it out of my head—“Save Me, San Francisco,” by Train. I don’t care who hears me. I don’t care who sees me. All I care about is getting to Heather.

  I keep hobbling uphill, the song keeps playing in my head, and when I come to the last line I remember what Tom said this morning: “You never needed me to carry you anywhere.” He couldn’t be more wrong.

  And then I’m at Anza, looking up the impossibly steep hill toward Geary, the clock ticking with each step. The waves pound the shore in the distance, the foghorns bellow. It takes me a good ten minutes to get up the hill. Finally, I set off across the wide, empty road. Ahead, at the top of the hill, the flag above the VA keeps flapping in the wind. By the time I reach the other side, my heart is beating wildly, and I have to catch my breath.

  The next block, Geary to Clement, is a blur of pain and exhaustion, and then I’m standing at the foot of the VA campus—one last, steep flight of steps between me and the finish line.

  “Almost there,” I chant under my breath. “Almost there.”

  49

  The Father of Mississippi Secession, according to my childhood textbooks, was a native New Yorker with a strangely apropos name: John Anthony Quitman. At the age of twenty-one, Quitman moved from Ohio to Natchez, where he practiced law and married well. A few years after his arrival, he purchased a large plantation called Monmouth. He would go on to a career in the state senate and the U.S. Congress, abandon politics briefly to command U.S. troops in Mexico, and eventually serve a year as governor of Mississippi. During his decades in politics, he was a fierce proponent of Mississippi’s independence. But before Quitman was a secessionist, he was an expansionist. If he had had his way, Cuba would have joined the union as a slave-holding state.