Golden State: A Novel

by Richmond, Michelle

  “No,” I laughed, “I read it in Glamour.”

  Even as he spoke, his fingers were tapping to the beat. Tom glanced at the ceiling, just for a second, and I knew from the look on his face that he was silently admiring the song. He had a talent for distractedness that had always driven me nuts. I’d be spilling my heart out, thinking he was right there with me, but then I’d realize his mind was miles away.

  “You’re just going to Norway,” I said, shaking my head.

  That got his attention. He stopped tapping his fingers, looked me in the eyes. “I swear I’m not.”

  Going to Norway—our code phrase for some dream Tom plans to pursue but doesn’t follow through on. One of the things I loved about him when we met was his relentless energy, his endless dreaming. He was always coming up with some big plan, and it took me a while to realize that the more manic his enthusiasm was for a project, the less likely he was to implement it. “Let’s go to Norway for our anniversary,” he announced to me during our first year of marriage. “We’ll spend two weeks. We’ll see the fjords, we’ll drink hot chocolate in Bergen.” I loved the idea. I bought travel guides, researched plane fares and lodging, invested in thick down coats for both of us, began mapping out an itinerary. As my plans grew more concrete, Tom’s enthusiasm waned. When it came time to confirm our reservations, he hedged. “Listen,” he said, “I think we need to do something closer to home this year. Work is busier than I expected. Let’s save Norway for next year.” So we went to Mendocino. Instead of two weeks in Norway, we spent three nights in a bed-and-breakfast by the sea. I was hugely disappointed, but I figured we would go to Norway the following year. We didn’t. When our third anniversary rolled around, those travel books were still on the bookshelf, and the big down coats, which we’d tried on only once, laughing at our Michelin Man physiques, had never left the closet.

  Long after I’d come to understand that what my husband said wasn’t necessarily what he did, I still admired the boldness of his ambitions—everything from buying a piece of land in Hopland (which he did) to starting his own radio station (which he didn’t) to building a beautiful set of bookshelves by hand (which he did) to learning how to surf Kelly’s Cove (which he didn’t). I was the type to calculate all the obstacles in my way and, using those calculations, decide whether something was worth pursuing. I had always secretly liked the fact that for Tom, the next big possibility was always just around the corner.

  Now he had it in his head that the next big possibility was, once again, us, but I saw the warning signs.

  “Admit it,” I said. “I always know when you’re going to Norway.”

  He pulled my chair closer. “It’s an art, not a science. You have been wrong.”

  “I’ve got to get some sleep. Wake me up before you leave.”

  “You can sleep anytime,” he said, frowning. “I’ll make some coffee. We can talk.”

  I’d heard it before. He stays up all night and sleeps during the day—a pattern he established long before he became the Voice of Midnight. A small percentage of the population is neurologically wired to be nocturnal; surely, Tom belongs to that subset. He would never admit it, but I know he views my work schedule suspiciously. In the beginning of our marriage, I made an effort to go to shows with him as often as possible. I was never cut out for it, though, even in my twenties: staying out until three in the morning listening to some band he insisted I’d be crazy to miss, then waking with a monster headache and pounding back coffee and aspirin before morning rounds. Eventually, I stopped going to the shows with him. One night several years ago, when I bowed out of backstage passes to an Ogres show at the Bottom of the Hill, Tom couldn’t hide his disappointment. “You’re not as fun as you used to be,” he complained.

  “I’m doing a diagnostic lecture with seventy-five first-year residents tomorrow morning. I need to sleep.”

  “Right.” He turned away. “I forgot what an important person I’m married to.”

  Later, he apologized, but his barb had struck the heart of a fundamental difference between us. He’s the perpetual big kid, always up for fun; I’m the serious one. During the years with Ethan, we were more in sync than at any other time in our marriage. I’d finally found a way to let my guard down, experiencing the world through Ethan’s eyes. I worked saner hours and learned to say no to unnecessary commitments—conference appearances, weekend volunteer work. For a while, I stopped publishing, surprised to discover that I didn’t really miss it. Meanwhile, Tom became more settled. He took wholeheartedly to the role of father; when he wasn’t working, he was home. He no longer felt the need to see every new act that came through town. We developed an affection for places that had held no interest for us before: the zoo, the Discovery museum, the old cannons of the Presidio, where Ethan loved to climb. To our astonishment, domesticity suited both of us.

  And then we lost Ethan. If there was one defining rupture in our marriage, an unforeseen event that rearranged everything, it was this. A loss that neither of us was prepared to face. One that we failed to see each other through.

  After that, the ground shifted so slowly, I’m not sure either of us noticed it for what it was. I retreated into my work, into the seriousness of my days, while Tom started going out more often, staying out later, hanging out with an increasingly rowdy crowd. He’d do things that were completely ordinary in his world: the occasional line of coke, a weekend here and there in Vegas, snowboarding trips to Tahoe with guys from the station on slopes way beyond his skill level, one of which ended in a broken collarbone. It was nothing extreme, really, but it was enough to make me wonder, sometimes, what we were doing together. When he watched me fall into bed at nine o’clock at night, exhausted from a day with patients, uninterested in the new Wilco album he wanted to play for me, he must have wondered the same thing.

  “Sometimes I feel like I’m married to my college boyfriend,” I’d said last year, after a long argument that had left us both drained and weary. “It’s as though you think less of me for not doing the beer bong when I have finals in the morning.”

  “And sometimes I feel like I’m married to my college professor,” he snapped. “Like you’re evaluating every move I make, judging whether or not I measure up.”

  When your marriage breaks up, you look for easy answers. Not long ago, I was fooling around online when I came across an interesting study involving factory workers in Boston; it found that marriages in which one partner works the night shift and the other partner works the day shift are twice as likely to end in divorce. I forwarded the article to Tom, who sent back a one-word response, tongue-in-cheek: bingo.

  Sometimes, a divorce is a series of failures piled one upon another, a laundry list of hurts and disappointments and missed communication, and other times, something big happens, some cataclysmic event that tests the foundations of your marriage. But how do you know, before it happens, whether or not you’re prepared? San Francisco burned in 1906 because the city was built of wood, and the existing infrastructure was unequipped to deal with the flames that followed the quake. The Bay Bridge collapsed in 1989 because it hadn’t been built properly to begin with. Californians are always waiting for the big one. In the hall closet, we have a large Rubbermaid box that serves as an emergency kit, containing water, canned food, first aid items, flashlights, important phone numbers, five hundred dollars in cash, and one of Tom’s hand-crank radios. But there’s no emergency kit for marriage. No neat plan you can turn to when the ground shifts beneath your feet.

  10

  “Last time I saw you,” Dennis says, “you and your sister weren’t exactly on speaking terms. What changed?”

  “A lot,” I say, turning down the volume on the phone.

  “ ‘A lot’? That’s all I get?”

  Heather is sitting on the edge of the bed, holding her stomach, trying to breathe through the pain.

  “What do you want from me, Dennis?”

  There’s a pause. “I’ve had a bad day. A really fucking bad
day. I came to the hospital this morning to give you a birthday present, but when I got here, they gave me the runaround, like they always do. They told me you weren’t here.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  He doesn’t seem to hear me. “They refused to page you. I went over to the hotel, but Eleanor said she hadn’t seen you.”

  “She was telling the truth.”

  “That’s the problem, Julie. I don’t know who’s telling the truth anymore. I can’t even be sure you are. Everything’s so fucked up.”

  “I wouldn’t lie to you, Dennis. I’ve always been straight with you.”

  “Remember how you used to tell me stories?” he asks. From the sound of his voice, he might be crying.

  “I remember.”

  “Tell me one now. Is that too much to ask? One last story before—”

  “Before what?” I ask gently, and I’m scared.

  But he doesn’t answer. I can hear him breathing on the other end of the line. “Don’t leave anything out,” he insists.

  I glance at Heather. She is silent, staring at the wall.

  I go into the bathroom and shut the door behind me. “She came back eight months ago,” I begin.

  That morning at the VA, as Heather and I made our way down the trail behind the cafeteria, she stopped and turned to me.

  “You asked why I’m here,” she said. “It’s this.” She placed a hand on her stomach.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Ha,” she quipped. “No immaculate conception here. Just your garden-variety mortal baby.”

  “Congratulations.” I was struggling to wrap my mind around the idea.

  “Thanks, but I’m not so sure congratulations are in order.”

  “How far along?”

  “Five weeks, give or take.”

  “You’ve been to a doctor?”

  “Does this count?”

  “You’re taking your prenatal vitamins? Folic acid?” In my mind, I sorted through a litany of concerns. “You’re not drinking, I hope. A glass of red wine every now and then is fine, but you can’t be too careful—”

  “Not so fast,” she interrupted. “I’m not sure I’m going to keep it.”

  “But you have to keep it.”

  Where had those words come from? I was a physician, not a Sunday school teacher. The more rational side of me chimed in to say she most certainly did not have to keep it; after all, her past actions in no way indicated that she would be a good or responsible mother.

  “Julie,” she said. “Put your own history aside.”

  My own history. Years of infertility and failed longing summed up so succinctly, like a gaping hole in a résumé. All those years I’d tried to have a baby after we lost Ethan. All the consultations with fertility specialists, all the pills and shots and calendars. All the planning and plotting and praying, the endless strain on my marriage, the arguments, the feeling that I had turned into a person I didn’t even recognize. All of it for nothing. And here she was, my little sister, pregnant. And not necessarily in a position to be grateful for what, to me, would have been a miracle.

  I said the most rational thing I could think to say, the same thing I would say to a patient in these circumstances: “Have you talked with the baby’s father?” Old-fashioned, maybe, but Heather, of all people, knew what it felt like to grow up without one.

  She resumed her brisk pace. The path was narrow, but instead of following behind I fell in step to her left, so that she could hear me with her better ear. “That’s where things get tricky,” she said.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t know who it is.” I regretted it as soon as I’d said it.

  “Give me a little credit.”

  “I’m sorry. What is it, then?”

  “Use your imagination.”

  “He’s married?”

  Her silence confirmed my guess. “I see.”

  “Jeesh—you don’t have to say it like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you could have seen it coming. Like, of course Heather went and got knocked up by a married man.”

  “I was just thinking it’s going to be complicated, that’s all.”

  “He’s separated,” she said. “He lives out here, and his wife is on the East Coast. They don’t have kids. It’s not like I’m a home wrecker.”

  “If they’ve been apart so long, why don’t they just get divorced?”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “No, I guess it never is.”

  By now we’d reached the bottom of the trail. We’d been together for no more than half an hour, and already the tension was bubbling beneath our words. There was a bench at the bottom of the path. I sat down and patted the seat beside me. “Sit.”

  “I’m not five years old. You can’t boss me around.”

  “I’m a doctor, and you’re overexerting.”

  “According to week five in What to Expect When You’re Expecting, I can pretty much do anything I want right now short of shooting heroin.”

  “And stinky cheese,” I said. “Seriously.”

  She held her hand up, Girl Scout–style, and said solemnly, “I swear I will not shoot heroin or eat stinky cheese.”

  I took a deep breath. I could tell her my life stood still after we lost Ethan. Four years, two months, I could tell her, and not a day went by that I didn’t think of him. I could tell her what it had done to my marriage, and I could tell her that I still hadn’t figured out a way to forgive her. But if I told her these things, I feared I might never see her again.

  She glanced at me and pulled a hard candy out of her pocket. “Butterscotch?”

  “No, thanks.”

  She sat down beside me and stared out at the ocean, working the candy between her teeth.

  “What a view,” she said. “Can you believe you get to work here? Do you ever pinch yourself? It’s about as far as you can get from Laurel.”

  “Strange words from a woman who just returned from a war zone.”

  “Granted.” She tilted her head, looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read. “You’ve lost your accent, you know.”

  “It wasn’t intentional,” I said, somewhat defensively, but that wasn’t entirely true. “What was it like over there?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Actually, I do. I kept waiting for an email, just something to say you were still alive. I recorded News Hour every night, I never missed it.” I didn’t tell her that I held my breath each time the television’s sound went mute and the names of the soldiers lost in action began to scroll across the screen. That the roll call of the dead always gutted me. It could have been her, I thought, every time.

  “If anything had happened to me, you would have heard it from Mom. Anyway, I made it out, didn’t I?” She shook her head. “Three tours. When I joined, I had no clue what I was in for. Then I get to basic training and I’m in with all these kids, these boys, eighteen, nineteen years old, full of themselves and all gung ho to go to war and start blowing people’s heads off. I was only twenty-five, but they made me feel old.”

  “I was stunned when you signed up. I guess I never thought of you as patriotic in that way.”

  “It wasn’t about that. By the time I joined, September eleventh was a distant memory. One of the guys who’d been there for a few years said what all of us were probably thinking. He said, ‘You don’t walk into a tent in Suwayrah and think of planes hitting the World Trade Center. You walk in and think, ‘Where did all these fucking flies come from?’ ”

  “So all that God-and-country stuff. None of it applied to you?”

  “My reasons were more selfish. The army was an escape.”

  “Hawaii is an escape. Paris, maybe. The Middle East, not so much.”

  She laughed. “In a lot of ways, being home is harder than it was over there. At least there I had a purpose. Each day I woke up and had a job to do. Sometimes it was the most menial, tedious task you can imagine, but I kne
w what was expected of me.”

  “What was your job, exactly? Mom mentioned you did some writing.”

  “I guess somebody figured out I could string sentences together, so they put me in the press office. It was new for me, having something I was good at. And it was interesting, meeting people, shaking hands with senators. Then I come home, and when someone finds out I’ve been over there—civilians, I mean—they get this look, almost as if they’re embarrassed for me.”

  “I’m not embarrassed for you,” I said. “I’m proud.”

  Heather stretched her arms in front of her, elbows locked, and cracked her knuckles two at a time—that old familiar gesture. She was herself, but different. She’d always been strong-willed, but now she seemed capable, composed. It was difficult to see in her the girl who had needed so much for so long, the difficult girl who had always been a crooked counterpoint to my straight and narrow.

  “Why here?” I asked. “Why didn’t you go home?”

  She smiled wryly and sang a line from that Steve Forbert song about Laurel—“It’s a dirty stinking town, yeah.… Anyway, it’s not my home now any more than it is yours.”

  “There’s Mom,” I pointed out.

  “The last thing Mom needs is more of my problems.” She picked up a pinecone from the ground beside her foot and began to pluck away the seeds. “I saw a lot, you know, terrible stuff. The day the kid hit me with the rock was by no means the worst. But for some reason that’s what I remember most vividly from all three tours of duty. I saw him step out from behind the tree, and I knew instantly that something was wrong, but he was a boy. A little boy. I was trying to get my helmet back on when the rock hit me, and for several seconds I didn’t know it was just a rock. I thought I’d been shot in the head. I really don’t even know how to describe it—you feel certain that you’re dead, and then you realize that you’re alive. And at that moment, do you know who I thought of?” She didn’t wait for my response. “I thought of you.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Why was she here? What did she want from me? It felt tremendously manipulative, her sudden reappearance in my life, her unspoken demand that I allow her back in, forgive and forget. As relieved as I was to see her, I was also angry.