Golden State: A Novel

by Richmond, Michelle

  “I can’t,” I said. “It would be too weird, visiting you at your place.”

  “It doesn’t have to be my place,” he said, dripping sauce onto an oyster with a tiny spoon. “It could be yours, too—your pied-à-terre, your home away from home.”

  “I like the home we have.” I realized what I’d said. I also realized that I was verging on drunk and flirting with my soon-to-be ex-husband. “The one we had,” I corrected myself. “Damn this beer. One of these days I’ll become accustomed to you in the past tense.”

  He reached over and folded my hand in his. “I don’t want to be past tense.”

  This was new. Unexpected.

  “Isn’t it a little late to be telling me that now?”

  “It all seems too permanent, Jules. It doesn’t feel right. This isn’t what I intended.”

  In the old days it might have softened me—the way he held my hand, the way he looked at me, his dark eyes with their unsettling tractor beam effect. This was a man who knew how to pull me in. He always had. But when he’d walked out, he had broken the marriage, and I knew it couldn’t be repaired.

  “What did you intend?” I asked, firmly pulling my hand away.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I wanted to shake us up, to make you see what you’d be missing without me.”

  He’d gotten it all wrong. I wasn’t wired that way. How could he not know that about me, after all these years?

  The first weeks after he left, we barely talked. Two months into the separation, he called my cell from out of the blue, late at night, his voice slow and loose; he’d been drinking. “I’m confused, Jules. I thought I wanted a fresh start, but now I’m not so sure.”

  It was so like him, to think he could control the conversation, that the ball would always be in his court. “You sound as if you think it’s all up to you,” I said.

  “What are you saying?” he asked, startled.

  “You turned my life upside down. I’m still mad as hell at you, and maybe now I’m the one who wants a fresh start. Did that ever occur to you?”

  “Are you saying you don’t want to talk to me?”

  “I do and I don’t,” I said.

  “As long as you’re on the fence, I’m going to keep calling you,” he said.

  His tone was so casual, so infuriatingly confident. I hit End Call. Then I dialed Heather.

  “So now he wants you back,” she said.

  “I don’t think he knows what he wants.”

  Soon, we were talking several times a week, but our conversations weren’t bringing us closer. I began to feel more like his therapist than his estranged wife. One minute he wanted to move back in; the next minute he wasn’t sure. He was like a child trying to choose between the comforting stuffed animal he’s loved for years and the shiny new toy. A month ago, when I finally filed for divorce, Tom suddenly knew exactly what he wanted. But by then, it was too late.

  Now, as the cable car rocks past the clots of protestors shouting slogans, I strain to hear the music from the Bakelite. Crooked couple standing side by side, Rouse croons. Is that me? Is that you?

  There’s something willfully blind about Tom’s song selections today. As if all that old charm will pull me back in, as if a night in his bed—or, rather, on his couch—will erase everything. As if we can go back in time.

  19

  “When I was deployed,” Dennis says, “every time someone got shot or blown up, there’d be some dumb fuck who insisted that it happened ‘for a reason.’ That always pissed me off. Like everything was supposed to be okay, because there was a reason behind every shit thing that happened.”

  He’s sobbing now. Is it remorse, or is it fear?

  “But I’m sitting here looking at Eleanor, and there’s blood all over the floor, and even though I can’t stand her, I’ll be damned if I can think of any divine purpose.”

  I don’t know what to say, what will set him off, so I remain silent.

  “I bet you never say that to the family after someone dies,” Dennis moans, sniffling. “I bet you never feed them that load of crap about how it happened for a reason.”

  “You’re right,” I say cautiously. “I don’t.”

  “I swear to God, I didn’t plan to do it. So here’s my question: What if I didn’t have a choice? What if it’s written in the laws of the universe?”

  “Do you believe that?” I ask softly.

  “Nice try,” he says snidely. “I asked you.”

  What I believe is this: there is no divine flow chart, no elegant spiritual mathematics through which our lives are processed. Events occur, we respond to them, we make choices, and our lives are shaped accordingly. But what is the right answer for Dennis at this moment? For the sake of Betty and Rajiv, I must tread carefully.

  “I believe in cause and effect,” I say.

  “Okay, that’s fair,” Dennis says. It’s quiet, and I can tell he’s thinking. “Let’s say you had to choose a day in your life that changed everything. What would it be?”

  I don’t even have to think about it. “August nineteenth, seven years ago.”

  It was ten o’clock on a cold Sunday night.

  Tom was at work, and I was alone, decompressing with an old episode of The X-Files, when the doorbell rang. Who could be visiting at this hour? I looked through the peephole and, to my astonishment, there stood Danielle, one of my patients from the free clinic in the Tenderloin where I volunteered twice a month.

  I opened the door. Danielle wore a dirty yellow sweatshirt and jeans that sagged off her bony frame. Her lipstick was bright pink, garish against her pallid skin. Seeing her on my doorstep, so out of context, was startling.

  “How did you find me?” I asked.

  “You were in the book. Over at the Shell station.”

  The phone book. Who used that anymore?

  I immediately thought of her twenty-one-month-old son and had a terrible feeling. “Where’s Ethan?”

  “In the car.” She pointed to a beat-up Toyota parked haphazardly by the curb.

  “Is he okay?” I asked, but I didn’t wait for an answer. I moved past her, down the steps to the street, and opened the back door. There was no car seat. Ethan was propped between two pillows, swaddled in blankets. A seat belt was crossed over his small body, a diaper bag on the seat beside him. I unbuckled him and lifted him out. He didn’t stir. His skin was clammy, and through the blankets I could feel that his diaper was soggy. Instinctively, I put my ear to his mouth to make sure he was breathing. He was. I grabbed the bag, carried him up the steps and into the house.

  “Come in. It’s freezing.”

  “I can’t,” Danielle mumbled. “My shoes are dirty.”

  “It’s okay. Come inside.”

  Ethan’s head rested on my shoulder, surprisingly heavy. A child so small, so light—and then this good, solid weight against my shoulder. I breathed him in; his hair smelled like peaches. My sleeve was soaked through where his small body rested against my arm. I looked at his face in the light, relieved to discover that his color was fine, his breathing normal.

  Danielle kicked her shoes off and stepped across the threshold. Her feet were pale and filthy, but her toenails, like her lips, were painted a happy shade of pink.

  I jostled Ethan gently. He startled but didn’t wake. “Did you give him something?” I demanded.

  She looked at me, confused.

  “Medication,” I clarified. “Benadryl? Cough medicine?”

  “No.” She shook her head emphatically.

  “Does he always sleep this hard?”

  “He’s just tired. We were out at Union Square today, working.”

  “Working?”

  She held out her hand and pantomimed asking for money.

  “You took him with you to panhandle?”

  She shrugged. “Tourists love him.”

  “He shouldn’t be out there, Danielle. He’s just a baby.”

  Her face turned red, and I realized I’d been close to shouting.

&nb
sp; “Who’s gonna take care of him? The fairy godmother?” She scratched nervously at her neck. “I shouldn’t have come here.”

  I lowered my voice. “We’ve been through this, Danielle. You’re eligible for day care. Your child and family services worker can arrange it for you.”

  In the two years I’d been volunteering in the Tenderloin, I had tried hard to follow the advice of Dr. Bariloche, who had introduced me to clinic work back in medical school. “There are a lot of sad stories, mountains of need,” she cautioned. “It will break your heart, but you have to keep your distance.” For the most part, I’d been able to do just that. It probably would have been the same with Danielle, were it not for Ethan.

  A couple of weeks before, she had brought him in with a fever, screaming in pain. It was a nasty ear infection. I wrote a prescription for antibiotics and called downstairs to have it filled. Danielle and Ethan weren’t in our records, so I gave Ethan a plastic dump truck to play with while I went through the standard questionnaire with Danielle, filling out the details of their medical histories. She seemed desperate for someone to talk to. She opened up to me about her drug addiction, which she’d been battling for years. “I quit cold turkey the day I found out I was pregnant,” she said. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

  Shortly after giving birth, she confided, she’d fallen back in with the people she used to know, and things had spiraled out of control. “But I’m done with all that now,” she vowed. “I’m going clean. Every time I look at him, I know I don’t have a choice. I have to get better.” She told me about Ethan’s father, who was serving time for armed robbery. “The best thing that ever happened to me was when he got locked up. I finally feel safe.” As she talked, she kept adjusting her headband, a pretty wooden one engraved with an intricate pattern.

  It was plain to see that, for all her terrible choices, Danielle was trying hard to be a good mother. Ethan’s clothes were a bit dirty, but he seemed well taken care of, with no bruises, no burn marks, none of the heartbreaking signs of abuse that one so often encounters in the children of addicts. He easily climbed into his mother’s lap and put his arms around her neck, to which she responded with kisses and chatter. There was an obvious bond between them.

  At one point he toddled across the floor, patted my knees with his dimpled hands, laid his head down on my lap, and started sucking his thumb. My heart turned over; I was instantly disarmed. I put my hand on his head, then his cheek, which was red and warm from fever. His unruly curls were as soft as air, his skin impossibly smooth. I gave Danielle a paper bag containing a bottle of bubble-gum-flavored antibiotics, a bottle of grape-flavored Tylenol, and two medicine droppers. I gave Ethan his first dose and carefully explained the instructions to Danielle, extracting a promise that they would visit in a couple of weeks for a complete checkup. When I left the clinic half an hour later, I was startled to see her standing at the bus stop across the street in the driving rain, clutching a squirming, crying Ethan to her chest.

  “It’s miserable out,” I said. “Let me give you a ride home.”

  “Thank you,” she said, on the verge of tears.

  Her apartment was in the Outer Sunset, a block from Ocean Beach, on the ground floor of a shabby building. By the time we got there, the rain had vanished, and the sun was shining over the Pacific. The living room was cheerfully crowded with baby books, teething rings, and toys. The kitchen door led onto a small, enclosed patio. Danielle had hung a hammock from two hooks on the patio’s ceiling. She plopped Ethan into the hammock, and he laughed as she swung him back and forth.

  “Hey, want to stay for dinner?” she asked. “We could eat out here. With those trees, it’s totally private. No one can see in. Not bad for the projects, huh?”

  I was caught off guard, with no ready-made excuse, and so I ended up staying. Over hot dogs and Diet Cokes, Danielle peppered me with questions about my job, my husband, my family. “Do you want kids?” she blurted at one point.

  “One day,” I said, “probably.”

  I was still relatively young at the time, thirty-three, so wrapped up in my work that it didn’t seem like a good time to start a family. Tom wasn’t ready yet, either. And besides, unlike most marriages, ours had not begun with the assumption that there would eventually be children. We had never definitively agreed that we wanted to have them. Still, in the back of my mind thirty-five loomed large, the age when the biological clock strikes some gloomy midnight hour and conception suddenly becomes more difficult. I knew that if we did want to be parents, we would need to start sooner rather than later.

  As we were clearing up the dishes, she looked at me shyly and remarked, “I don’t know many people like you.”

  “Like me?”

  “Educated, married, a good job. All your nice clothes. I bet you live in a really nice house.”

  There was no accusation in her voice, but I suddenly felt pierced by guilt. How easy my life must seem, from her perspective. “I’ve been lucky,” I said.

  I couldn’t escape the feeling that I had already crossed some invisible boundary. The fact that, two weeks later, she was standing in my house at ten o’clock on a Sunday night only confirmed that I had gone too far.

  “Sit down,” I told her. “I’m going to change him.”

  I carried Ethan into my bedroom and laid him on top of the covers. I put my hand on his tummy and jostled him gently, trying to rouse him. He screwed his face up, his eyes flew open, and he let out a loud cry. Overcome with relief, I scooped him up, swaying back and forth. “It’s okay,” I crooned. “You’re okay.” Soon he stopped crying. I sat him on the bed and opened the diaper bag. The powdery smell of the disposable diapers, the comforting orderliness of them, stacked flat and white at the bottom of the bag, and the sound of the plastic tabs sticking into place took me straight back home to Mississippi. I’d been so proud, in those days, to play the dutiful big sister, the mom-in-training.

  “Good as new,” I exulted, lifting Ethan high in the air, and he laughed as if we’d discovered some brilliant new game. In the diaper bag, I found a soft blue T-shirt and pants, a tiny pair of white socks with trains stitched across the elastic. The anger I felt toward Danielle eased, seeing the care she had taken in arranging his things. I dressed Ethan and carried him back to the living room, where Danielle was walking in circles around the coffee table, biting her nails.

  I sat down on the couch, cradling Ethan in my lap.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “I’m trying,” she said. “I’m trying so hard.”

  “You have to try harder. If you keep up like this, you’re going to lose him.”

  She looked at me as though I were the most naïve person on the planet. “It’s not that easy,” she said. “This thing, addiction, it’s with you every minute, every second of every day. And when you have a kid, it’s a thousand times worse. Every time I look at him, I can’t help thinking he’d be better off without me.”

  Later, I would realize I should have offered some words of reassurance at that moment. “That’s not true,” I should have insisted. “Ethan needs you.” But I didn’t say it; deep down, maybe I agreed.

  Ethan was squirming on my lap, so I set him down on the floor. He was instantly off and moving, touching everything he could get his small, fat hands on. I walked around behind him, nervous that he would hurt himself. I kept taking things out of his fingers, steadying him when he looked like he would topple. Eventually, he plopped down on the rug by my feet and became engrossed with a loose thread.

  “So, are you going to tell me why you’re here?” I said, trying to make eye contact with Danielle, but she wouldn’t look at me. She kept pacing, chewing her nails.

  “I’m in a little trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “I got caught with some stuff.”

  “Stuff?”

  “Meth,” she said, not meeting my eyes. “My lawyer says I have to check into rehab this week. If I don’t, the jud
ge is going to put me in jail.” She sat down on the couch and put her head in her hands. “Everything’s falling apart. I was thinking maybe you could take care of Ethan, just for a little while.”

  “What?” I said, startled.

  “My lawyer says I’ll be out of rehab in thirty days.”

  “Don’t you have family?”

  “A sister in Glendale, but she won’t take him. She hates me. Anyway, I don’t want her anywhere near him. She’s not a nice person.”

  Ethan had lost interest in the rug and wandered back over to me. He held out his arms, and I picked him up. His soft curls brushed against my chin. Keep your distance, I scolded myself. “It’s impossible,” I said, as much to myself as to her. I had a life, a career, a husband. I had responsibilities. Tom would never go for it.

  Danielle gave me a pleading look. “You like Ethan, I know it. Don’t you? You light up when you hold him.”

  Just then, Ethan reached up and patted my face, babbling, “Mama.” I was aware, of course, that toddlers just learning to talk tend to call all women “mama” and all men “dada.” Even so, I melted. The wheels started turning in my brain. Just a month. It was nothing. I had some vacation time coming, and anyway, Tom and I could afford to hire someone to help out. Say no, my brain was telling me. But I didn’t want to say no.

  “I can’t promise you anything,” I said, “but I will at least talk to my husband.” I was surprised by the words as they came out of my mouth.

  “Thank you,” she said, beaming. “Oh, God, thank you.” She wiped her eyes with her sleeve, smearing mascara across her face. “Ethan will love it here,” she said, as if it were a done deal, as if I’d given her a definite yes instead of a lukewarm maybe. “His caseworker’s card is in the diaper bag. Her name is Terry. Anything you need to know, she can tell you. I packed Ethan’s favorite blanket and binky. He can’t sleep without them. He likes to have music on the radio when he goes down for a nap. Country music works best, for some reason. I can’t stand it, but he likes it, so …”

  Her voice trailed off. She came over, lifted Ethan out of my lap, and pressed her mouth to his hair. “I’ll miss you, little man,” she whispered.