Golden State: A Novel

by Richmond, Michelle

  37

  In early November, after daylight savings kicks the clock back an hour, it is already dark when I leave work just after five. From the parking lot of the VA I can see across the quiet avenues of the Richmond, over the long green swath of Golden Gate Park, and beyond that, the lights of the city glittering on the layered hills. Some nights it is warm, and the children at the school on the edge of the campus are getting in their last few minutes of play before their parents arrive to pick them up.

  In the first few days of early darkness, the playground vibrates with excitement. The children chase and squeal and whoop it up, as if they think they’re getting away with something, being outside with their friends after dark, when, by the looks of things, they ought to be in bed.

  One of my most vivid memories is of the playground at that particular time in that particular season, five years ago. It had been a difficult day at work. I had lost a patient—Mr. Drager, a Korean War vet, very frail. His wife and daughter were by his side when he died, and I was there, too, along with his favorite nurse, a middle-aged woman named Paula who used to cut Tootsie rolls into tiny pieces so that he could suck on them—his favorite sweet, something remembered from childhood. A few days before he died, his daughter watched him smile as the candy was placed on his tongue. She had flown in from Sweden two months before, expecting to stay for a weekend, but had found she couldn’t leave her father; she needed to be with him until the end.

  His death was a good death, as deaths go, and yet, that afternoon, I was feeling the grief of losing him. With some patients, I’ll admit, I feel no such thing. But I had liked Mr. Drager very much, had enjoyed hearing his stories of his childhood in the thirties in Chicago, where his father was a union man and his mother was a seamstress. He had been injured by a grenade, which left him with a metal plate in his left hip, a nail in his left knee, one blinded eye, and a permanent, pronounced limp. But he didn’t regret it. “I did my bit for my country,” he told me once, “and ever since, my country has been taking care of me in one way or another.”

  Mr. Drager had been coming in for years, since long before I began working there—sometimes for a couple of days at a time, sometimes weeks. His final stint had been his longest. In the end, we simply unhooked everything. It was what he had approved in his paperwork back when he was able, and something I had discussed with him at length when he was still lucid. When it came time to turn off the machine, my hand shook. I had done it many times; I knew it was the right thing, what he wanted, what his family wanted; and yet it was with deep sadness that I carried out his orders and watched the EKG go flat. He died at two forty-six in the afternoon. After that I still had rounds to make, patients to talk to, a brand-new intern to supervise.

  After work, I left the hospital and walked over to the school to collect Ethan. There were plenty of fancier child-care centers in the city, but Ethan was happy here, and I liked having him nearby. It made me feel complete, to have my working life in such close proximity to my home life. Picking him up was always my favorite part of the day, but that evening, as much as I wanted to see him, I would have given anything for half an hour to sit alone in a quiet room with a glass of wine and process the day’s events.

  As I walked across the parking lot, I could see the children on the playground, could hear their happy squeals. I stopped just outside the tall chain-link fence and spotted Ethan, pushing a plastic tractor through the sandbox. “Garbage guy is coming,” he said to no one in particular. “Out of the way, garbage guy coming through.” My heart flooded with joy. I lingered outside the fence, watching him, until another child spotted me and called, “Ethan, your mommy’s here!”

  Ethan dropped the tractor and ran to the fence. I opened the gate and stepped inside, and he rushed into my arms, pressing his face against my shirt. Then he stepped back and asked me very seriously, “Am I on vacation?”

  “You’re not on vacation,” I said. “You’re at school. Does it feel like vacation?”

  “Look!” he exclaimed, pointing up at the sky. “It’s dark. There’s the moon! I never go to school at nighttime before!”

  “The time changed,” I explained. “Now that winter is coming, it gets dark earlier.”

  “I know!” he said. “Let’s have cake for dinner!”

  I scooped him up into my arms. “Good idea. We’ll make one when we get home.”

  Suddenly, I no longer felt that I needed half an hour alone. I only wanted to be with Ethan, this sweet boy who had been delivered under such terrible circumstances into my life. I loved the way he saw the world. I loved the fact that the smallest change in routine could become an event, worthy of celebration. From an early age, ambition for me had been a slow burn, the thing that kept me going and gave me pleasure, the thing that marked my place in the world. As I carried Ethan to the car, I understood how it happened that well-educated women suddenly abandoned hard-won careers, devoting themselves to domesticity; something about mothering a small child softens the edges of ambition, mutes the desire to race ahead. When I was with Ethan, I wanted to stop time.

  Later that night, watching Ethan devour the chocolate cake we’d made from a box when we got home, I thought of Mr. Drager’s daughter, who had traveled thousands of miles to be with her father when he died. Ultimately, wasn’t this what it meant to have a child? You raise them up, you suffer every time they suffer, you’re happy when they’re happy, you make cake together, you marvel at the moon, and the reward is this: when you are old, you don’t have to die alone.

  38

  “I like the pretzels,” Dennis says, “but the M&M’s were better. Why’d you switch?”

  On the other end of the line, I can hear him chewing.

  “Health kick,” I reply.

  The truth is, Betty, who swore off sugar last year, had been giving me a hard time about the candy jar on my desk. “You’re pushing forty,” she’d reminded me a few months ago as she’d dumped the M&M’s into the garbage and refilled the jar with pretzels. “One of these days, you won’t be able to count on your metabolism.”

  “I run,” I reminded her.

  “Your patients don’t. You’re supposed to set an example, remember?”

  I smile at the memory. Betty’s always been a little bossy, but not in an irritating way. Something about her delivery softens the blow. I wish I could go back in time, somehow head Dennis off at the pass. “How is everyone?” I ask.

  “Oh, we’re fine. These two are quiet, but they were getting a little jumpy, so I had Betty tie up Rajiv’s hands and feet. Then I tied up Betty. Just in case they got any ideas.”

  “Dennis,” I begin, but I don’t know what to say next. If anything happens to Betty and Rajiv—

  “You been to church lately?” Dennis cuts abruptly into my thoughts.

  “You know I don’t go to church, Dennis.”

  “That’s right. I witnessed your crisis of faith.”

  I don’t remember how I ended up sitting in the back row of the VA chapel, hoping for some revelation or, at the very least, some comfort, two days after we lost Ethan. But I do remember the chaplain’s patronizing words as he patted me on the hand: “We don’t always understand God’s plan for our lives.”

  I thought of all the patients I’d sent to him, thinking he might be able to help ease their burden. Was this the kind of spiritual fluff he was peddling?

  After leaving the chapel that day, I ran into Dennis in the cafeteria. “Coffee?” he asked.

  “Actually,” I replied, “I could really use a drink.”

  Half an hour later we were sitting in a sticky vinyl booth at the 500 Club in the Mission, and a couple of hours after that I was plastered. I left my car parked on the street, and Dennis, who was on a carb-free diet and had stuck with club soda, drove me home. In the street in front of my house, before I got out of the car, he held me close. Drunk, I sobbed into his shoulder. I knew, as I did so, that I should be leaning on Tom instead. But he was hurting so much already. I didn’t want to
burden him with my grief, too. Losing Ethan felt like a shared failure; being with Tom only intensified the sadness. On top of it, there was my own guilt to contend with: it was my sister who had caused everything.

  39

  In the Southern Baptist church Heather and I attended as children, forgiveness was held up as the ultimate act of Christianity—so essential to the faith, it was included in the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” We recited the prayer on Easter morning, and on Sunday night four times a year before commemorating the Lord’s Supper with grape juice and oyster crackers. Even now the taste of grape juice takes me back to those hushed evenings in the humid, crowded church, the clink of tiny shot glasses and the rustling of the deacons’ suits.

  Before Ethan was taken from us, my capacity for forgiveness was never really tested. Until that day, I would have insisted that I could forgive Heather for anything.

  She was visiting San Francisco, staying with us for a couple of weeks. Since flunking out of college, she had followed a meandering, often rocky path. She’d moved back home for a few months, then followed one boyfriend to Atlanta, another to Nashville. She spent a couple of years there, singing with the boyfriend’s band and waiting tables. When the relationship fell apart, she left the band and returned home to Laurel, where she’d been living ever since, working retail at Sears and picking up hostess shifts at the Catfish Cabin.

  At the time of Heather’s visit, though, she was in unusually good spirits. It was as if something had finally clicked, and she had decided to get her life on track. “I woke up one day and realized I was twenty-five years old, living with my mother, smoking pot five times a week, and selling heavy-duty bras at Sears,” she told me. “It might not have registered if it weren’t for the fact that Carl Renfro showed up one day and asked me to drop acid.”

  “Renfro?”

  “He was standing there on the lawn in cutoff shorts and no shirt, just like the last seven years hadn’t happened. He hadn’t changed a bit, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t, either.

  “All that mess I was involved in, that’s behind me now,” Heather said. “I want this.” She spread her arms and looked around to indicate my house, my dishes, my books, my family, everything. “I admit I’ve spent a lot of years thinking that I got dealt a shit hand. But you were dealt the same cards, and it never seemed to bother you. It was as if you were only half there, as if your head was always ten years in the future. Mom always knew you would leave. That’s probably why she let me get away with so much.”

  “I didn’t mean to leave you,” I said, feeling that old guilt flood back. “I just meant to leave our situation. If I didn’t get out, I’d have gone insane.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Heather said. “Not now, anyway. I’ll never forget the morning some jerk showed up to repossess our car, and I watched Mom standing there in that old First Federal T-shirt she used to sleep in, begging him not to take it. Instead of feeling sorry for her, I just felt ashamed. And mad. I’d always known we were poor, but it wasn’t until you left that our lives really started to fall apart.”

  “I’m so sorry.” It was too little to say, it did her no good, but I was sorry. And yet, I knew that if I were faced with the same decision again, I wouldn’t change anything.

  “For years I had this fantasy in which my dad walked into my life and fixed everything,” Heather said. “I imagined he had a very good explanation for why he’d been gone all those years—like he was running from the law, or he never knew he had a child, or he’d been sending me letters all along and Mom had been tearing them up. In my fantasies, he would show up from out of the blue and he’d be loaded.” She laughed. “He’d be driving some fancy car, he’d hand me a wad of cash and tell me to go buy myself something nice, and Mom would suddenly become a happy person.”

  “God, Heather,” I said. “I had no idea.”

  “How could you have known? By the time I was old enough to begin to process any of it, you were long gone, Jules. I love Mom to death, I know she did her best, but I hated not having a dad, I hated how hard she worked, and I especially hated that winter when someone from the Daughters of the American Revolution came by on Christmas Eve and gave us a box of toys and clothes.”

  That I remembered. Mom standing in the doorway with a strained smile on her face, saying thank you, but after the woman left, while Heather and I silently arranged the presents under the tree, Mom went into her bedroom and shut the door. I was sixteen, mortified by receiving charity. I recognized one of the sweaters, a pale blue cardigan with yellow daisies embroidered on the yoke. It belonged to a well-to-do, horse-faced girl in my class named Sarah Bender, who had always been particularly mean to me.

  “For a long time all of that stuff has been my excuse for everything,” Heather said. “But you and I came from the same place, and look at you. Somehow, you figured it out. You’ve gotten everything you wanted. The job, the husband, Ethan.”

  “I won’t breathe easy until all the papers are signed, the judge has made his decision, and Ethan’s completely, legally ours.”

  “You’re almost there,” Heather said.

  “Knock on wood. What about you?”

  “I’ve been dying to tell you,” she said, smiling. “I’m going back to Southern Miss in the fall. I’m not slowing down until I have that degree in my hand. I already applied, and I’m turning in my financial aid forms next week.”

  College. I liked the sound of it, and I hoped this time she’d follow through. She did seem more mature than I had ever seen her, far more responsible. She had arrived at the airport bearing gifts for Ethan: a pack of Crayons, a pop-up book about dragons, a Nerf football. During her visit, she didn’t drink, she’d even given up cigarettes. On previous trips to San Francisco she would always wander off, meet some guy, and come home drunk or stoned at some ridiculous hour, or not at all. But this time she was totally different. She seemed mature and confident and ready to face the world.

  A week into Heather’s stay, having seen how good she was with Ethan—a perfectly responsible aunt—I made reservations for the night of our wedding anniversary at a small hotel in Napa.

  “Heather’s going to babysit,” I told Tom excitedly, showing him the photos of the hotel online.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” He looked worried.

  “They’ll be fine,” I assured him.

  We left at six o’clock on Friday night and planned to return on Saturday afternoon. It was our first overnight since Ethan came into our home. I’ve returned to that decision a thousand times, from a thousand different angles.

  40

  10:41 a.m.

  It takes me ten minutes of pushing and shoving to get from Stanyan to Arguello. The sidewalk is blocked by a gang of teenaged boys clad in identical T-shirts bearing the slogan ANARCHY IS THE ANSWER.

  I pull myself onto the wall at the Arguello Gate in order to see over the crowd. The throng stretches blocks down Fulton. It will be impossible to get through using the road. Even though it’s a longer route, I’ll have to go through the park. The strap of my messenger bag is cutting painfully into my shoulder, and I pause to adjust it. That’s when I realize that the zipper is open, and something is missing—my phone. And that’s not all. I’ve lost the Bakelite too. Shit. I search frantically in my bag, scan the ground around me, but they’re gone.

  It feels as though I’ve lost something significant, something essential. No more Tom in my ear. No more Voice of Midnight. No more songs meant just for me, coded messages in a language only we understand. I depended on his music, his voice, the auditory proof of his presence in a booth across town. For so long, I depended on him for so much. There’s no denying the fact anymore: I really am alone. Of course, for all intents and purposes, I’ve been alone for months. And I know I can’t blame Tom. It’s my fault, too. He’s the one who left, but I’m the one who made it so hard for him to stay. When he told me he was leaving, I asked him not to, I
suggested marriage counseling—but my protests were halfhearted. By then I was so tired of fighting, so tired of the disappointment I read on his face each day. Our marriage was like a chronically ill patient. It suffered from a cantankerous, nagging pain that wouldn’t go away. Our marriage seemed to resist all cures; it had worn us down slowly, over time, exhausting us to the point that both of us, on some level, wanted out.

  Nine weeks after he left, Tom said, over a cup of coffee, “If you had begged me to stay, I would have.”

  “I did ask you to stay,” I said.

  “You weren’t very convincing.”

  By then, Tom’s life had already begun to change. It was through an accidental slip on the air—or maybe not so accidental—that I discovered just how much. “I spent the weekend in the country,” he said late one Monday night. “The only thing better than a picnic under the stars is a picnic under the stars with live musical accompaniment—no guitar, no piano, just a perfect voice. Here’s the Lemonheads, with ‘The Outdoor Type.’ ”

  I listened to the whole song—one of our songs. He’d put it on a tape for me years before. I called his cell.

  “Don’t tell me you took the singer to Hopland.”

  His silence confirmed my suspicion.

  “How could you?”

  “You never liked it,” he said, as if that were a valid line of defense. “It was my dream, not yours.”

  I imagined Tom on his knees in the dirt with the “Hallelujah” woman, pulling weeds and planting seeds. I’d grown up in the country and had happily left it behind; for me, that kind of life held no charm. I needed the city around me, the sidewalks and shops, the lights of passing cars sliding across the living room ceiling at night, the sound of the neighbors coming and going. He was right, in a way. Our dreams did not always match up. How had we not noticed that when we got married? When we met, I loved the fact that he wasn’t a doctor, that his work was so different from mine. I knew doctor couples who ended up in a kind of silent competition—one spouse racing ahead, earning accolades and higher and higher salaries, while the other was left behind. I was happy that Tom could have his dreams and I could have mine, and the success of one of us would never feel like the failure of the other. But over time, I began to wonder if we weren’t too different, if our marriage didn’t suffer from a lack of common ground.