Golden State

by Michelle Richmond

  “It’s only maybe,” I reminded her. I kept waiting for her to leave, but she didn’t. “The heat is off at my place,” she ventured finally. A question, a nudging.

  I looked at the clock. It was late, and it was so cold out, I’d had the heater running all day. Danielle’s place by the beach must have been freezing. “You can stay in the guest bedroom tonight. I’ll talk to Tom in the morning, when he gets home from work.” What was I doing? I wasn’t sure. Nothing in medical school had prepared me for this.

  After making up the guest bed with fresh sheets, I stood in the doorway of the living room, watching Danielle. She had showered and changed into flannel pajamas I’d lent her. She’d even consented to eat a few bites of a grilled cheese sandwich. Clean and fed, she was now calm, quiet, and totally oblivious to me. Ethan had fallen asleep in her lap, and she was cradling him, crying softly.

  That night as I drifted off to sleep, I felt strangely comforted by the knowledge that Ethan was asleep down the hall, warm and safe.

  When I woke up early Monday morning, Danielle wasn’t there. A note lay on the kitchen table, and on top of the note a key. She’d scrawled a message on the back of an envelope. I’m sorry for not saying goodbye, the note read. Here’s a key to the apartment so you can pick up Ethan’s things. Please don’t bring Ethan. If he comes home he will want to stay.

  That was it—no phone number, no further explanation. I read the note over and over again, feeling a strange mix of nervousness and happiness. When I saw Ethan curled in the guest bed, mouth open, breathing loudly, I felt oddly at peace. I lay down beside him. There was a smudge of bright pink lipstick on his ear.

  When Tom came home from work, I was still watching Ethan sleep.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, standing over us, thoroughly baffled.

  “We need to talk.”

  Tom made a pot of coffee, and I explained everything, then laid out my case: it would only be a few weeks. We could hire a sitter for the daytime while I was at work. I’d take some vacation days. “Wouldn’t it be fun to have a child around?” I said, desperately hoping that he felt the same. “Sort of like a trial run.”

  Tom pulled me toward him, wrapped me up in his arms, smiling. “Uh-oh,” he said. “Are you getting baby stars in your eyes?”

  “Maybe.”

  He wandered into the bedroom where Ethan was sleeping. We stood by the bed, watching him. “He’s a cute kid,” Tom said finally.

  “Insanely cute.”

  “Thirty days?” he asked.

  “Thirty days.”

  He wrapped his arms around me again. “Why not?”

  At that moment, I loved him more than ever.

  “Will you two be okay while I’m at work this morning?”

  “Don’t worry about us,” he said. “We’ll kick back with some Sesame Street and Cream of Wheat.”

  And I didn’t worry. That was one of the best things about Tom: he was always up for anything.

  20

  7:40 a.m.

  I glance over at the baby in the backpack, who has fallen asleep, his head bobbing against his father’s neck. The father is on his cellphone, texting. I long ago got past feeling envious at the sight of parents of babies and young children, parents whose very nonchalance is evidence of their good fortune. Instead, I feel a tug of desire.

  This morning, more than usual, the city feels so raw. Every corner holds some memory I can’t escape. The cable car lurches forward again, and the sudden motion sends a shooting pain up my leg. We don’t get far. Up ahead on California Street, a crowd has gathered. The driver keeps pushing uphill, but our progress is glacial. Several passengers decide not to wait, jumping off the cable car in the middle of the street. A few policemen are trying unsuccessfully to disperse the crowd.

  I can’t stop checking my watch, thinking of Heather. It takes nineteen minutes to travel a single block.

  21

  “I have to set the phone down again,” I say.

  “Don’t hang up.” Dennis’s voice sharpens.

  “I need to check on my sister. I’m not hanging up. I promise.”

  “You better not.”

  I think of Rajiv and Betty. Are they sitting? Standing? Where are they in relation to Eleanor’s body? Rajiv never enjoyed treating Dennis, who was always a bit belligerent with him. But he did it anyway, as a favor to me. How much time do I have before Dennis hurts someone else?

  I set the phone down and lift the blanket. Heather is dilated about eight centimeters. “You’re doing great,” I say. “It won’t be long.”

  “Go,” she says, pointing at the phone.

  I pick the phone up. “I’m back.”

  “I don’t like it when you do that.”

  “Listen, Dennis, my sister’s going to give birth any minute.”

  His voice softens. “I remember when my Isabel was born. They had to do an emergency C-section. We weren’t sure she was going to make it.”

  I contemplate my next words carefully. “You know, Betty worked neonatal at Mills before she came to the VA. I could really use her help right now.”

  There’s silence on the other end. I close my eyes.

  “Betty,” Dennis says.

  “Yes?” Betty’s voice, soft and calm.

  “Julie tells me you used to help out with the babies. Is that true?”

  “Yes.”

  “She asked for you, but you know what?”

  I hold my breath.

  “I like you, Betty. I feel better having you here with me.” He laughs softly, and I remember how he used to do this, laugh at the most inappropriate times. “Did you hear that, Julie? Betty’s not coming.”

  “Okay, Dennis.” I realize I’m trembling. “That’s fine.”

  “You only told me the happy part of the story,” Dennis says. “I want to hear the rest.”

  I close my eyes. “Not now, please.”

  “Yes, now.”

  22

  That morning on grand rounds at the hospital, my mind kept drifting to Ethan. I asked someone to cover my afternoon shift and drove over to Danielle’s apartment to pick up his things. As I turned the key in the lock, I felt, once again, an uneasy sense of boundaries crossed. What was I doing? How would I explain this to my colleagues at the clinic? I decided I wouldn’t explain it at all. A month would come and go very quickly.

  I was relieved to find the apartment quiet, clean. Danielle must have already checked into rehab. The thought crossed my mind that she might have run, that I might have been played for a fool. But no, it wasn’t possible. She would never leave Ethan behind.

  The place smelled like the beach, a good, salty smell, but the wet cold coming off the Pacific cut through the apartment. The cold was especially intense near the windows, where the wind whistled through. A light bumping sound was coming from out back, or maybe from a neighbor’s apartment; I couldn’t tell.

  In the bedroom, I found a small suitcase packed with Ethan’s clothes. Beside the suitcase was a cardboard box filled with toys and books. There was something so tender in the arrangement of the toys, and in the clothes folded neatly in rows—shirts, pants, pajamas. What must it be like for Danielle to love him so much and yet be unable to be the kind of mother he needed?

  The kitchen was tidy, a note taped to the coffeemaker: All set, just turn it on. I opened the lid and saw that Danielle had filled the tank with water and put ground coffee in the filter basket. A white mug stood on the counter, and beside the mug a few wrinkled packets of sugar, a carton of nondairy creamer, and a spoon. I was touched by the gesture—so ordinary, so polite—and for an instant I glimpsed a different kind of life, the life Danielle might have had. I flipped the red switch on the coffeemaker, and it began to gurgle.

  A neighbor’s door opened, closed. There were loud voices in the hallway—teenagers, cursing. The voices died down, and the mysterious bumping sound continued. A door led from the kitchen onto the back patio. I glanced through the small, square window, but I could see
only a corner of the patio—a potted plant on a low table. I walked through the apartment once again, making sure the lights were off, the appliances unplugged.

  I wandered into the living room, where an old futon covered with a yellow quilt faced a small television perched on a milk crate. Beside it was another crate, this one filled with books—The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Mister Seahorse mixed in with Breaking the Cycle of Addiction and A Beginner’s Guide to Résumés. I picked up a Bible with a red leather cover, Danielle’s name embossed in gold. Inside the Bible, a bookplate said, “A Gift of Glide Memorial Church.” A satin ribbon marked a page in Isaiah, where Danielle, or someone, had underlined chapter 1, verse 18: “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” I remembered the verse from childhood, how the words had frightened and thrilled me. And then I recalled something else: that I had once won a Bible drill with that very verse. Every Sunday morning, I would stand at attention with the other children in front of the congregation, Bible in hand, listening to the preacher call out a book, chapter, and verse number, my finger itching to find the page. I rarely won, but it didn’t matter, because the reward was usually a letdown anyway: a crocheted bookmark or a little gold lapel pin in the shape of praying hands. But once, upon being the first to find Isaiah 1:18, I’d won a Chinese finger trap, which I’d kept in my treasure box for years, even after the red paper had lost its weave.

  How strange it was to come upon these words now, in another place and time, so far removed from the context in which I remembered them. I wondered about the Chinese finger trap, if I might still find it in some dusty corner of my mother’s house in Laurel. Occasionally, she would send me notes in the mail, quoting Bible verses or Baptist catchphrases she feared I had forgotten. “Once saved, always saved,” she might write—an admonishment to me and also, I imagined, a balm to herself, for my abandonment of the church had confused and saddened her. When I visited home, there would be pink envelopes addressed to me from the church I’d attended as a child, with my name typed across the front, a blank place where I was supposed to write in my tithe. I hadn’t tithed in more than twenty years, and still, they wasted these envelopes on me. Sometimes she would forward me emails from radical political campaigns, claiming our country was being punished for taking God out of the schools. My mother’s voice, her face, her mannerisms, had changed little since I’d left home—and yet we had, it seemed, become strangers to each other. I sometimes wondered if that was inevitable, when a child grew up and moved away—or could it have been avoided? Had I failed her in some fundamental way? After Heather joined the army, I tried to call more often and visit a couple of times a year, but I was always uncomfortably aware of my mother back in Laurel, alone in the shabby duplex in an increasingly dodgy neighborhood she refused to leave. “This is home,” she would insist.

  Back in the kitchen, I poured the coffee, black, and sat down at the rickety table, which bore tiny handprints in green paint. As I sipped the coffee, I had a strange feeling of having sat down to another life. Why had my life turned out one way and Danielle’s another? What determined the paths we took? Danielle had been raised by her grandparents. She, too, had a sister, one who was apparently doing fine. Nature versus nurture—that baffling old question. What had led to Danielle’s unraveling? Was it something neurological, an ingrained predisposition to addiction? Or was it something else, simply a matter of one bad choice leading to another?

  The bumping continued. Probably some issue the landlord needed to fix. Didn’t it drive Danielle crazy at night? How did she sleep?

  I stood to look at the photographs on her refrigerator. All of them were of Ethan, mostly snapshots but also one of those studio portraits from Olan Mills, with Ethan propped awkwardly against a fake plastic fence in front of a background of painted trees, even the requisite windmill. A calendar thumbtacked to the wall was still on the previous month. I took it down and flipped backward through the months, forming a picture of Danielle’s life—home visits from the child services worker, visits to the clinic, hastily scribbled phone numbers beside the names of a dozen or more men: Eduardo, Rick, Dwayne. Were they suppliers? Worse? I was ashamed to realize I was making all the obvious assumptions, wondering how Danielle paid the bills.

  Outside, the wind grew stronger, the bumping louder. Now I felt certain that the sound was coming from the back patio. I finished my coffee, rinsed the cup in the sink, and went outside to investigate.

  My gaze fell first on the potted plant. But then I looked left, toward the section of the patio not visible from the kitchen window. I reached out to steady myself against the door frame. I must have cried out, I don’t remember. The rope was fastened to a large metal hook that had been drilled into the underside of the roof. The hammock that used to be suspended from the hook lay crumpled in the corner. She hung there, the rope digging into her skin. There was blood where the rope had cut into her neck. The stool she must have stood on, which she must have knocked over in a moment of brutal determination, lay on its side a couple of feet from her. Instinctively, I reached up and felt for her pulse.

  I had seen so many dead bodies before—hundreds of dead bodies. As a physician, it was a thing you were supposed to get over, and, to a great extent, I had. They take care of that in medical school. One is trained, on the dissection table, to see not a person but a cadaver. “A body is not a soul,” Dr. Bariloche pointed out to me on the occasion of my first dissection, when I turned pale and couldn’t keep my hands from shaking. “A body is a matter of study, of science. Bone and tissue, organs and arteries: no longer a person.”

  And she had been right. Over time, dead bodies ceased to be a source of discomfort for me. This was due, in part, to the fact that I worked at the VA and my patients were all adults, often elderly. I thought it must be more difficult for my colleagues in other fields—oncology, pediatrics. For the most part, I felt a kind of detached affection for the human body, the same way a mechanic might feel about a car that comes through his shop. There is the desire to understand the object, to make sense of it. One sees a dead body and understands that there is a history behind it—but as a physician, it is not the personal history that intrigues me so much as the physiological one: the body as a record of a physical life, the body as map.

  Despite this, I had seen very few dead bodies of people who were not my patients. There had been my father, all those years before, at the funeral—so disturbing in his casket, with his over-bright cheeks and too-smooth hair. There had been a friend whose body affected me deeply, because he was only in his thirties, and because when I saw him I remembered building houses out of hay with him in the pasture behind his house when we were children. And then there had been a handful of patients with whom I’d become close. But for the most part, a lifeless human body was a matter of professional duty, a matter of course. While it might elicit a degree of sadness, it did not often cause outright grief.

  When I saw Danielle, all those years of training melted away for one horrifying minute. Her eyes were open, her face terribly swollen. There were other things; she must have been hanging there for a long time, several hours. She must have clawed at her neck, desperate to loosen the noose.

  I fought back tears.

  I should have known, should have managed to stop her. I must not have been listening. It must have been in her eyes or her voice, or in the words she spoke to me, but I had failed to see or hear it. I had just been so tired, so angry with her for putting Ethan in harm’s way. When she’d said that Ethan would be better off without her, I had barely protested.

  As I turned to walk inside, something on the ground caught my eye—a beautiful wooden headband, the one she had been wearing on the day I met her. I picked it up. For some reason, I felt that it shouldn’t be trampled on.

  Back in the kitchen, the coffeemaker was still ticking. One of Danielle’s final acts, apparently, had been to prepare the coffee for me. Just moments ago I had sat
there drinking it, like it was no big deal. I picked up the phone and dialed 911.

  The day moved with glacial slowness. While waiting for the police, I searched for a suicide note but found nothing. I called Tom and told him what had happened. “Are you okay?” he asked. And then: “My God, poor Ethan!”

  The first police officers on the scene introduced themselves quietly, relieved to discover that I was not related to the victim. Over the next two hours, a slew of people shuttled through the apartment, taking photographs and collecting evidence. They left as dispassionately as they had come. The officers used a kitchen knife to cut Danielle down. She was so thin, but the tough-looking cops still struggled under her weight. I helped them cover her with a blanket I found in the bedroom. It didn’t quite reach her feet, and I turned away from the sight of her blue socks peeking out below the blanket. It took an eternity for the coroner to arrive. When she did, she was talking on her cellphone, eating a package of Little Debbies.

  It was late afternoon by the time I got in the car and drove home. Tom and Ethan were in the living room, racing Hot Wheels across the coffee table.

  Tom came over to me, and I collapsed into his arms.

  “Mama! Dada!” Ethan squealed, waddling over to us.

  Tom went into the kitchen and returned with a postcard. “This was in the mailbox.”

  It was one of those cards you can get for ten cents at Fisherman’s Wharf, with a blurry photo of Golden Gate Bridge on the front and a banner of white text: “Greetings from the City by the Bay.” On the reverse side was a note, written in smudged blue ink: I’ve gotten everything wrong, but I’m determined to get this right!!! I know you will take good care of Ethan. Please don’t let anyone take him from you! You will be a great mother!!! Danielle.

  I stared at the note, hands trembling. It had been postmarked Saturday afternoon. She must have known, when she came to see me on Sunday night, that she was going to end her life. No one had ever asked me for anything so big, so monumental. People trusted me every day with their lives. But this was different.