Golden State: A Novel

by Richmond, Michelle

  Every now and then over the years, the subject of Václav Havel would come up during some other argument. “It’s like the whole thing with Václav Havel,” I would challenge him. “You’re so private. You never tell me anything.”

  And Tom would sigh and say, “You know everything about me, Jules. What you see is what you get.”

  But I never really believed him. There always seemed to be something lurking just beneath the surface, some story yet to be told, some bit of his past—or, worse, his present—on which he was holding out. Every time I turned on the radio, whether I was aware of it or not, I was waiting for some new layer to be peeled away.

  34

  “We’re the same, you and me,” Dennis says.

  “How’s that?”

  “I lost my daughter. You lost your son. That’s something you never get over. It’s like, everything you see reminds you of your kid.”

  “When was the last time you saw Isabel?”

  “It’s been three months. They moved to Texas.”

  “I’m sorry, Dennis. I didn’t know.”

  “Even after I lost custody, at least I knew I could see her every now and then. I could go to her softball games, and if her mother was feeling generous, they’d meet me for pizza. But now, she’s so far away. It’s like I have no idea what’s going on in my daughter’s life. The other day, I realized I’m not even sure what grade she goes into next year—sixth or seventh.”

  “That has to be hard,” I say. “I wonder about Ethan, too. I worry whether he has friends, and I wonder what subjects he’s studying, if he plays sports.”

  We fall into silence. If I can just hold him off a little while longer, I think desperately, until help arrives.

  “Dennis,” I venture.

  “Hmm?”

  “How is everyone?”

  “Oh, we’re just dandy. A little crowded in here, but other than that, it’s one big party. Want to talk to Rajiv?”

  My heart lifts. “Yes.”

  He laughs cruelly, and instantly I understand that it was the wrong response.

  “The last few times I came in to see you, they pushed me off on Rajiv. You two are attached at the hip, aren’t you?”

  “I’m his attending physician,” I explain, battling panic. “That’s all. If anything goes wrong with one of his patients, it comes back to me.”

  “She’s pretty good-looking, isn’t she, Rajiv?” Dennis’s voice is muffled; he’s no longer talking into the receiver.

  There’s no response. “Answer me!” he shouts, and my breath catches.

  “She’s my boss,” Rajiv replies.

  “Hell, that never stopped anyone, did it?”

  “Dennis,” I cut in desperately. I remember a crucial piece of advice they told us in the crisis seminar: try to lighten the mood. It’s risky, but I don’t know what else to do. “Ask Rajiv who does his laundry.”

  Dennis repeats the question to Rajiv.

  “My mother,” comes the muffled reply.

  “See?” I interject, trying to make my voice light. “He’s just a kid. Besides, he’s not my type.”

  Dennis laughs. This time, the laughter is more relaxed. “I had you going, didn’t I?”

  Shaking, I collapse into the chair. Suddenly, Heather is standing beside me, her palm on my face.

  “It’s gonna be okay,” she whispers.

  I grip her hand, and she squeezes back, hard. Everything’s backward. I should be the one comforting her.

  35

  On a rainy night in April, I was sitting in my office, immersed in the file of a patient for whom diagnosis was proving maddeningly elusive, and I had lost track of the time. It was something I’d been doing a lot ever since Tom moved out. As long as I was at work, I could delay the moment when I walked through my front door into an empty house.

  There was a light tap on the half-open door. It was Heather, her belly stretched taut against a silky black top. I hadn’t seen her since the argument at my house almost three weeks before, when she’d told her crazy story about the governor.

  “Knock knock,” she said.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Holy crap,” she said.

  “Holy crap who?”

  “No, I mean really, holy crap. I can’t think of a single joke. I’m drawing a complete blank.”

  “It’s called mommy brain,” I said. “All the blood rushing to your uterus.”

  She eased herself into a chair. “Actually, I think it’s called IED brain.”

  I set aside the patient file. “I left a bunch of messages.”

  “I know.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Fine. Some trouble sleeping, leg cramps, nothing monumental. Wait, I just remembered one.” She paused for a moment to think. “Right, so this dashing young taxi driver is taking a pretty woman to JFK. He looks in the rearview mirror and says to her, ‘You know, you’re the fourth pregnant lady I’ve taken to the airport.’ And she says, ‘But I’m not pregnant.’ And he says, ‘Yes, but we haven’t reached the airport.’ ”

  I couldn’t help smiling. “Good one.”

  She glanced out the window. “This view is amazing.”

  “I know. Hard to believe I kept those blinds closed for years.”

  “Why on earth?”

  “Look down and to the right.”

  She did. “There are kids everywhere,” she said. Then it appeared to dawn on her and she bit her lip. “Oh, it’s a school,” she said quietly.

  “When Ethan was with us, I used to go to that window and look down at the school a dozen times a day. After we lost him, I shut the blinds so I wouldn’t have to see it. But then, a couple of years ago, a young resident was in here with me. I was called to the floor, and I left him alone for a few minutes. When I came back, he was standing by the window, and the blinds were open. For a couple of seconds I felt furious—as if he had breached some invisible boundary. The sun was pouring in, and I could see the tip of the Golden Gate Bridge far in the distance. It was a shock to look at the view again from that particular spot—not just the bridge but the wooden play structure down at the school, the sandbox, the orange roof. And it suddenly occurred to me that I’d been denying myself that beautiful view of the ocean for two years, just to avoid thinking about Ethan. But the thing is, I think about him anyway. He’s just there; he’s in my mind all the time. Since then, I’ve kept the blinds open.”

  Heather picked up a framed photo on my desk: Tom, Ethan, and me, playing chess on a giant chessboard at a seaside inn in Monterey. After I’d opened the blinds, I’d allowed the pictures back into my life, too—an attempt to remember the good, instead of remembering only the loss.

  Heather placed the picture gently back on the desk.

  “Did I ever tell you about Camp Leatherneck?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “I was there on my second tour. Imagine turning sixteen hundred acres of burning sand in the middle of nowhere into a huge base. It’s like something out of a sci-fi movie. You’ve got dozens of bulldozers out there, moving around these massive walls of sand, and lines of soldiers, hundreds of them, swinging hammers like a chain gang. And there’s the issue of water, right? There just isn’t enough water to support all this construction. We were building this massive parking lot for choppers, not to mention a runway, and the dirt had to be packed down before these huge sheets of metal could be laid on top of it, but it’s the middle of the desert—it’s not like you can just tap into some magical water line. So you’ve literally got soldiers out there with buckets, collecting water from the kitchens and showers to use to compact the dirt on the building sites. But one freezing cold night, the guy who’s supposed to make sure the water’s running at a trickle in my section of the camp forgets to do so, and when we wake up the next morning, the pipes are frozen. We can’t brush our teeth, we can’t cook, and that might all be okay, except for the fact that we can’t build the runway, either. We’ve got no water to compact the dirt. Even during t
he day, the temperature doesn’t get above thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit. It takes three days for the pipes to thaw, three days that we’re just sitting there freezing our asses off, twiddling our thumbs, because one guy forgets his piece of the puzzle.”

  I nodded, unsure where she was going with this.

  “Anyway,” she said, “I’ve been thinking about Leatherneck a lot lately.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I guess I’m just stuck on the idea that there’s this monumental machine, and we’re all part of it. Most of the time, we don’t even stop to think about how it works. We just go about our business, doing our part, trusting that everyone else will do their part, and the machine will keep functioning. But all it takes is for someone to come along who isn’t thinking straight, someone who’s not paying attention, or worse, hell-bent on self-destruction, and everything turns to shit.”

  There were tears in her eyes, and she was looking at me intently. “I’m trying to say something here,” she said, “but I don’t know how to say it.”

  I stared at the floor, focusing on the coffee stain on the carpet that had been there for more than a decade. A familiar point of reference. “We don’t have to go there,” I said.

  “But we do, Jules. I’m so sorry. About everything. If I could take it back, I would.”

  “I know.”

  “I thought the army would make me forget. But in the middle of all of it—the patrols, the firefights, the endless days of boredom—I’d find myself remembering how much I’d hurt you and Tom.”

  She picked at her cuticles and looked at me pleadingly. I looked at the coffee stain again. I didn’t know what to say.

  “I don’t deserve it, Jules, but I need you to forgive me.”

  The hem of her skirt was frayed. Under the beautiful Vera Wang coat, she’d been wearing the same skirt the last few times I’d seen her—she said it was the only thing that didn’t make her uncomfortable. Why had I never thought to buy her another skirt?

  “I’m trying,” I said. “I’m really trying.” She wanted to know that I forgave her. Why couldn’t I give her this? I realized that maybe that was what she’d been waiting for all along, maybe that was why she came back.

  Later that afternoon, we found ourselves on the cliffs at Lands End at low tide, the time of day when that frigid stretch of coast is prone to giving up its secrets.

  “What’s that?” Heather asked, pointing to a bit of steel poking up from the shallows about a hundred yards offshore.

  “There are dozens of old shipwrecks around here,” I said. “That’s most likely the Lyman Stewart, or maybe the Ohioan. The one that’s always fascinated me is one you can’t see, the Rio de Janeiro.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It was a foggy morning in February 1901. The ship originated in Hong Kong with two hundred and ten passengers and crew. It hit a submerged rock at Fort Point at about five o’clock in the morning and disappeared within a few minutes. Two hours after the wreck, an employee for the Merchants’ Exchange who was waiting for the Rio de Janeiro at the port of San Francisco saw a life raft emerging from the fog.”

  “There were survivors?”

  “Eighty-two.”

  Heather absentmindedly laid a hand on her stomach. “Any kids?”

  “It was mostly the men who survived. Years ago, Tom gave me a book, Great Shipwrecks of the Pacific Coast. I sort of got hooked. One of the passengers who died was a mail-order bride—Mary Catherine Carraher—on her way to marry Tom’s great-grandfather.”

  “I guess it’s lucky for Tom she didn’t make it.”

  “Long story short, the Rio de Janeiro vanished. A few bodies washed up onshore after it happened, and over the years, bits and pieces of it floated to the surface, but the hull was never found. All sorts of stories circulated about treasure buried at the bottom of the sea, but to this day no one knows where the wreckage is located. Now whenever I’m out here, I find myself subconsciously searching for the Rio de Janeiro. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I have this fantasy that one day, I’m going to make a great discovery.”

  36

  10:01 a.m.

  A couple of blocks downhill from St. Francis Memorial Hospital, I stop in front of a motorcycle shop. A single light shines inside, casting its glow on a dozen bikes, chrome gleaming. The door to the motorcycle shop swings open, and a man pulls out on a Harley. He looks to be in his late forties, with blue eyes and close-cropped brown hair.

  I hobble over, and he cuts the engine. “Please tell me you’re not an apparition,” I say.

  “Unfortunately, I’m really here. Picking up my money pit.”

  “I thought Harleys were indestructible?”

  “Not quite. My wife says that’s what I get for having the poor taste to indulge a midlife crisis. I’m a marine biologist in my real life.” He gives me a once-over, his eyes settling on my bandaged foot. “Looks like you’ve got your hands full.”

  “I don’t suppose I could ask you a favor?”

  “Let me guess: you need a ride.”

  “It’s kind of an emergency. I have to get to the hospital at Forty-third and Clement to deliver my sister’s baby.”

  He adjusts the rearview mirror. “Sure. We’re going to have to jog around the roadblocks and see how we do. I can’t make any promises, but I should at least be able to get you a few blocks west of here.”

  “Great. Thanks so much.”

  “No problem. We’ll just strap your crutches down.” He winds a bungee cord around the crutches. “I’m Ted, by the way.”

  “Julie Walker.”

  He tightens the cord. “That should do it. But you’re going to need a helmet.” He runs inside the shop and comes out with a hot pink helmet. “Sorry,” he says, smiling. “I take it you’re not a hot pink kind of lady.”

  “I love it.” It feels like some brilliant disguise, like trying on a new life, if only for a minute. I pull the strap tight and climb on behind him, bracing my hands on the back of the seat.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” Ted says, “but you might want to hold on to me.”

  I wrap my arms around his waist, feeling timid at first, but once we get going I lean into him, surprised by how much I like the unfamiliar sense of dependence, my own safety entirely out of my control. I think of Paul, a pediatric oncologist I’ve known for years. A few days after Tom revealed that he had slept with the “Hallelujah” woman, I ran into Paul in the hallway after my weekly lecture at UCSF. He asked if I wanted to go out for coffee. Over cappuccinos at Reverie, he told me he’d just gotten divorced. He and his wife had two children in middle school, a house in Millbrae, a vacation home in Tahoe, season tickets to the Giants, sixteen years of marriage under their belts. Tom and I had attended their Christmas party a few months earlier. The wife was the principal of a public high school; the children were polite and smiling. Even the dog, a golden retriever named Zito, seemed made-for-TV perfect. From the outside, everything looked fine.

  “It hit me like a ton of bricks,” Paul said.

  “I know what you mean.”

  He looked at me as though a light had switched on in his brain. “Hey, you want to have dinner with me this weekend?”

  “Why not?”

  As I was dressing for the date, putting on my best lingerie, I realized I was more nervous than I’d been in years. The last time a man had seen my naked body for the first time, it was Tom, and I had been twenty-five years old.

  As it turned out, we didn’t go to bed together on that date. But a couple of weeks later, we met for drinks at the Claremont in Berkeley. Well into our third glass of wine, Paul looked at his watch and said, “If we don’t leave now, we’re going to miss our reservations. Chez Panisse Café doesn’t tolerate tardiness.”

  “I don’t really feel like dinner,” I said.

  We skipped the dinner reservations and checked into a room at the Claremont. It started off steamy and sexy, but once we got past the kissing and unzipping, it quickly turned awkward. E
ven though Paul was in great shape and knew all the right buttons to push, I didn’t have much fun. I felt too self-conscious, as if we were following a script in which we had both decided to cheat on our cheating spouses but we’d been miscast.

  The next morning, when I rolled over and got my bearings—registering the small shock of finding myself in bed with another man—I realized that I was going to ask Tom for a divorce. This decision had little if anything to do with Paul, who, I realized, was merely a diversion, a mildly pleasurable means to an inevitable end. Paul and I showered separately, dressed, and went down to breakfast, where we agreed that, while it had been a good night, a therapeutic night, we didn’t want to turn it into a relationship.

  “Just promise me one thing,” I said, raising my mimosa in a toast.

  “Hmm?”

  “It won’t be weird when we see each other at work.”

  “Other than the fact that I’m going to imagine you naked every time I see you, it won’t be weird at all.” And, oddly enough, it wasn’t.

  We hit roadblock after roadblock, slowly winding our way west. Even with my poor sense of direction, I can tell we’re getting closer to Forty-third Avenue, but farther from Clement. By the time Ted pulls over to the curb across the street from Golden Gate Park, it feels as though something with very sharp jaws has taken hold of my ankle and won’t let go. Ted cuts the engine, climbs off, and helps me with my crutches. “I’m really sorry. I wish I could have gotten you closer. Good luck with that baby.”

  I thank him and turn to face the crowd. As Ted and his bike rumble away, I have the sinking feeling that my best chance for getting to Heather on time has just vanished. A brick wall sections off the park at Stanyan and Fulton. In order to enter, I’ll have to navigate the two crowded blocks to the Arguello Gate. I think of Rilke again, his pregnant woman making her way along the wall in the middle of the bombed-out city. The world doesn’t stop for a baby, but surely, it does at least make some concessions.