“Fair enough.” She broke a twig from an overhead branch. “But maybe you should let me know just how long you plan to keep punishing me.”
“I’m not punishing you.”
She tossed the broken halves of the twig into the underbrush. “It sure feels like it.”
Was she right? Was I was measuring out some sort of long overdue punishment for the hell she’d put us through? I just didn’t know how to be with her, how to act. Every time I looked at her, I thought of Ethan, and the anger came rushing back.
We walked in silence. Finally, I asked, “Have you thought more about what you’re going to do?”
“Of course—I think about nothing else.” She turned to me. “One day I want to have the baby, the next day I don’t. Here’s the thing: if it was five years ago, it would be easy. Back then, I would have just ended it. But I’m twenty-nine, more than old enough to take care of a child. At some point along the line somebody decided that you have to go out and live this whole productive life, make a ton of money, satisfy all your desires, travel the world, and sell your start-up before you can have a kid. But think about it: Mom was twelve years younger than I am now when she had you.”
“How does the father feel?”
“He’s hard to read. When I first told him, he was ecstatic. Now I’m not so sure. But his wife never wanted children, and that’s been very difficult for him. He loves kids.”
“How do you know his wife didn’t want children? You can’t exactly trust a man you’re having an affair with on the subject of his marriage.”
“Julie, I’m not naïve. And technically, it’s not an affair.”
“You’re sure he’s being straight with you? If it’s really over between them, why aren’t they divorced?”
Heather brushed my words aside with a wave of her hand. “He’s spent a long time getting to where he is. If the story got out about an extramarital affair, with a love child to boot, it would completely derail his career.”
“That sounds like a convenient excuse,” I persisted. “People get divorced all the time.”
“This is different.”
“How?”
“He isn’t—” She paused, searching for the right words. “He isn’t normal.”
“What does that mean? You make it sound like you were impregnated by an Oompa-Loompa, or Edward Scissorhands.”
“Funny. What I mean is, he’s kind of a public figure.”
“Seriously? How public?”
“Very.”
“Really,” I said. I wanted to give her an out, a chance to tell me that she was kidding, to stop this train before it ran off the tracks.
“Yes, really,” she insisted, a defensive note in her voice. “It’s a weird situation. That’s why I want to have the baby at the VA, with you. It will be just you and me and the father, maybe a nurse. No cameras, no crowds, no one who might keep a reporter on speed dial.”
I’d been convinced that she had changed, that she had gone into the army and come out a new person. And in so many ways, she had. But clearly, she hadn’t lost her ability to lie with a straight face, to tell a story completely out of step with reality and then all but dare me to call her on it.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll play along. He’s famous. He’s beyond famous. He’s the fucking king of England.”
“I hate it when you get like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like you know everything about everything.”
As we walked, the wheels in my brain were turning, producing a mental slide show of all the lies she had told in the past, big and small, years and years of lies. Heather and I had reached the cliffs. The Golden Gate Bridge, in the distance, was almost entirely obscured by fog, only the tops of the two orange towers visible. But the water directly below the cliffs was bathed in sunlight. We sat on a bench to rest, and for a couple of minutes we said nothing, just staring out at the view.
“So you’ve come back because you want me to talk you into something,” I said finally. “Or maybe talk you out of it. But you’ve got the wrong person. I can’t claim to be the voice of reason. I can’t claim to be impartial. I’ll tell you straight up that I really hope you’ll have this baby. If you do, I’ll be there for you every step of the way. I’ll babysit whenever you need me. I’ll help you pay for child care if you want to go to work, and if you want to stay home with the baby for a while, that’s fine, too. I’d help you find a good place to live.”
I was practicing the same method with her that I use with my patients. Once a diagnosis is made, there are generally any number of variations on a course of treatment, multiple paths one might pursue. Sometimes the choice is so obvious, you need present only one scenario. Often, however, the case is less clear. As a physician, I have my preferences and prejudices, treatments that I believe, for reasons beyond mere scientific data, to be the wiser choice. In such instances, I may present more than one option, but I weigh my words in such a way as to make the decision, for the patient, seem almost clear-cut. It is a subtle deception practiced by every physician I know. Most of us rationalize these deceptions with the knowledge that our words are geared toward providing the best possible outcome: the ends justify the means. With Heather, though, my motives were far from pure. But she’d always been too good at reading me.
“I don’t get it. If you’re still so mad at me, why are you willing to help me?”
I could tell her that she was my sister, my responsibility. I could spin off some lie about how I was ready to put the past to rest. But that wasn’t it; she must have known it as well as I did.
“After we lost Ethan, I completely lost hope for a while. I worked nonstop and tried to push him out of my mind, but he was pretty much all I thought about. I told myself that I could move on, that I could really get past it, if only I could have a baby. The baby was going to be my answer, my magic potion. But I’ve faced the fact that I’m never going to have a baby; my body just won’t cooperate. Tom is dead set against adoption. After what happened—”
Heather looked away.
“For him, it has to be our biological child or no child. I’m never going to be a mother, but I’d make a damn good aunt.”
“Unlike me, you mean.”
Yes, I thought viciously, unlike you.
Had I gone too far, said too much? She’d lived with her guilt for more than four years. It wasn’t something we talked about, but we both knew it was guilt that had driven her halfway across the world, to a war zone where people were dying horrible, violent deaths daily. Now a hope for reconciliation had driven her here, to me. And yet, instead of telling her that everything was even, instead of welcoming her with open arms, no conditions, no questions asked, I was asking more of her. Demanding further payment on that old debt.
17
“Dennis.” I’m having trouble catching my breath, understanding what just happened. “What have you done?”
“Something I should have done a long time ago: put Eleanor out of her misery.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
It can’t be true. Not this. “I know you,” I say, still not wanting to believe it. “You wouldn’t.”
“Oh, you’re wrong about that, Doc. Just ask Rajiv. I’m putting him on the phone.”
“It’s me,” Rajiv says, his voice unsteady.
“Did he really—”
“Yes. She’s dead.”
I fight the urge to vomit. “Are you okay?” I whisper, but before he can answer, Dennis comes back on the line.
“Satisfied?” he demands.
How did it get this far? Everything has changed. I never realized Dennis was capable of this.
“You were on crutches,” he says. “Why?”
It takes me a moment to register his question. How can he go on so calmly, after what he has done?
“I hurt my ankle,” I say quietly.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“You have to watch where you’r
e going.” He says this without a trace of irony, as if he has totally forgotten that, less than an hour ago, he shot at me. “You’ll never guess who I’ve been listening to.”
There’s some shuffling on the other end of the line, and then my husband’s voice comes through. “There’s a protest on the Golden Gate Bridge, but before you join the throngs, you might want to consider the morning of May 24, 1987, the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the bridge, when three hundred thousand souls surged onto the span, flattening the upper bow.” Dennis must have turned on the radio on my desk. It’s a red Panasonic Toot-a-Loop, a gift to Tom from one of his fans. I picture it in Dennis’s hands; I picture Eleanor’s lifeless body.
“The whole thing might have collapsed,” Tom continues, “but somebody had the good sense to see what was happening and usher the crowds back to dry land. I’m just saying, the water’s cold. And very far down.”
“I always liked Tom,” Dennis tells me. “Weird, huh, considering he has something I’ve always wanted? Did I ever tell you I’m a big fan of Anything Is Possible? I listen every week. But when you met him, if I recall, he was still just the Voice of Midnight over at KMOO, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, Dennis.”
“He sure has come a long way. Every time I listen to him, I just keep thinking the same damn thing.”
“What’s that?” It’s an effort to keep my voice even. They never taught us what to say after a hostage has been killed, where you’re supposed to go from there. I picture Rajiv and Betty in my cramped office with Eleanor’s bloody body. They would have tried to find something to cover her with. Rajiv probably used his white coat as a shroud; it must be soaked with blood.
“I just keep thinking that if I’d been the one you chose, instead of Tom, maybe I’d be the one who got rich and famous, and Tom would still be some fly-by-night DJ.”
“Maybe so, Dennis.”
Of course, I know he is wrong. Tom always had the talent for bigger things; he just needed a little nudging. It was eleven years ago that his star really started to rise. He’d been popular as the Voice of Midnight for several years when he came up with an idea for a show called Anything Is Possible, wherein he invited experts on the air to discuss everything from the colonization of Mars to the invention of a forgetting pill to the eradication of world hunger. The point of the show was that things that seem completely out of reach might actually not be so far-fetched.
I remember the night he came up with the show. We were at a party in Mill Valley when a guy walked up and threw his arms around Tom. He was thin and enigmatic, wearing a long wool coat too warm for the weather, looking more like a secret agent than the software designer he claimed to be. Tom introduced him to me as Wiggins, an old friend from Serra High. They talked about old times, the good-looking nun who taught them American lit, their days on the baseball team, a girl they’d both dated briefly. There were other names I’d heard before—Mike Potter, Tom Dugoni, whom I knew from UCSF, the multitalented Walt Bankovitch, and, of course, Barry Bonds. “He wasn’t even the best guy on the team,” Wiggins said, which is what guys from Tom’s class at Serra always said, though I never really believed it.
That night I leaned in close, feeling the buzz of Wiggins’s nervous energy. Amid the noise of the party I strained to hear bits and pieces of his raucous stories, in which my husband appeared at seventeen, skinny and out of context, downing a six-pack every night, “and no luck at all with women,” Wiggins claimed. He pulled me close, as if we, too, were the oldest of friends, and confided in my ear, “Clearly, that has changed.”
Wiggins seemed on the top of the world. At some point he corralled us both and said, “Don’t tell anyone, but last month I won three point five in the lottery.” Tom thought he was fooling around, so to prove that it was real, Wiggins took us outside to see his car. It was an orange Avanti in pristine condition. “You remember how badly I always wanted one of these?” he said. The three of us went for a ride, speeding over the Golden Gate Bridge into the fog, then winding past the bay, through the Presidio, into North Beach. We ended up on Vermont Street, and as we took the twists and turns I felt an odd sense of elation. Wiggins’s joy was contagious.
That night in bed, Tom nudged me awake, eager to share his new idea. “We become so accustomed to the patterns we create for ourselves,” he said, his voice full of excitement. “We become so used to the way things are—scientifically, cosmically, personally—that we can’t imagine things being any other way. But there’s always another way. Common wisdom is, don’t buy a lottery ticket, because no one wins the lottery. But here’s the thing: someone always does win the lottery. Common wisdom is, get a real job, but there’s Barry Bonds, just a regular guy from my high school, breaking Hank Aaron’s record.”
“And you,” I reminded him. “Spinning records for a living.”
“That, too,” he said. “I want to do a new show, a show entirely devoted to the idea that what we think is out of reach is actually attainable.”
I put my arms around him and buried my face in his neck. “I can tell you something that is extremely attainable at this very moment.”
“Hmm?”
“Guess,” I said, climbing on top of him.
“I know what I’m going to call the show.” He unbuttoned the old shirt I’d worn to bed. “Anything Is Possible.”
The show quickly caught on locally, and that was good enough for Tom. After the first season, he was ready to call it quits and go back to doing nothing more than his late-night DJ spot, which he could practically do in his sleep, and which allowed him plenty of free time to spend on his land in Hopland, near the Russian River. I was the one who pushed him to pursue a second season. The second season was even better than the first, netting a slew of awards. The third season topped the previous two. I convinced him to hire a publicist, who helped him create a marketing kit and DVD. Before long, his show was in syndication. By the fourth year, Tom’s voice could be heard on dozens of stations across the country.
One thing led to another, and he began doing voice-overs on the side for national television commercials. As a result, he has one of those maddeningly recognizable voices. I can’t count how many times we’ve been at a restaurant or a party and the waiter or some new acquaintance has turned to Tom and said, “Do I know you?” Sometimes I’ll be flipping channels and find myself strangely drawn to a car or a vacation destination or some brand of toothpaste, and then I’ll realize that it’s my husband’s voice I’m hearing. Every time it happens, I feel a flush of pride.
I used to think Tom was proud of it, too.
“You know, I was happy just being the Voice of Midnight,” Tom said out of the blue a few weeks before he moved out. It was a beautiful, cloudless day, and we were walking in Golden Gate Park. It was the third time in as many weeks that he’d suggested we go for a walk, and each time, he brought up some new grievance. In hindsight, I understood that those walks were a prelude to his leaving. Maybe he was trying to fix us, or maybe he was just trying to confirm for himself that we were unfixable.
“What?” I said, confused. “Your fans love Anything Is Possible. It’s what made you famous.”
“Did it ever occur to you that maybe I didn’t need to be famous?”
“You were on the radio when I met you. You already had a following. Can you honestly say that you didn’t want a bigger one?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe you. You were ambitious.”
“No,” he said emphatically. “You had enough ambition for the both of us.”
“What’s wrong with ambition?”
“Nothing, as long as it’s your own. Your drive got you out of Mississippi—I understand that. All those certificates on your walls, the honorary dinners, the accolades—you thrive on that stuff. It’s like you need it to feel valid somehow. You’ve always had something to prove.”
Was he right? I still felt the sting of the accusation I’d found scrawled across my Trapper Keeper in fourth grade:
poor white trash. I’d tried to use nail polish remover to erase the insult, but it only smeared the ink.
“But I never had anything to prove,” Tom continued. “I had you. I had my audience. I had my land, my music. I was happy where I was.”
“You’re happy now,” I protested weakly, but obviously, he wasn’t.
He shook his head. “When Ethan was with us, I’d see you taking him to these music classes and Chinese lessons and Soccer and Smiles—”
“He loved Soccer and Smiles.”
“Yes, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like when he got older, where it would end. I always felt that wherever Ethan went to college and whatever he decided to do would be fine, as long as he was happy. But I knew it wouldn’t be good enough for you. He’d have to go to Stanford, he’d have to be a doctor or a composer or the next Bill Gates for you to feel that you’d succeeded.”
I felt sick to my stomach. “That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it?”
18
7:31 a.m.
The cable car is cresting Montgomery Street when Josh Rouse’s “Sweetie” begins to play. We’ll sleep on rooftops, we’ll ride on bicycles, Rouse sings. A man in a Giants jersey stands on the running board, one foot dangling over the street. I stifle an urge to caution him. Every now and then a tourist breaks a leg, or worse, mistaking our city’s most famous form of public transportation for an amusement park ride.
I want to call Tom and say, “Don’t do this.” I want to remind him that we had figured it all out. We’re going our own ways; case closed. We’ve come too far to turn back now.
“You should come by the loft,” Tom suggested a few weeks ago, over lunch at Hog Island Oysters. We sat outside, watching the ferries in the bay. A tray of beautiful oysters on the half shell gleamed between us. The beer was so cold, the day so warm, it reminded me of the South.
“I’ll make you dinner,” he said. “I’ll open an outrageously expensive bottle of wine.”
Golden State Page 9
