Golden State: A Novel (11 page)

“It’s weird,” she said. “Growing up, I imagined a totally different life. When everything happened, I had to get away, I had to do something extreme. I remember walking down Sloat trying to figure out what to do. I looked up and saw the army recruiting office. I didn’t even think. I just went inside. It seemed like a sign.”

By “everything,” I knew she really meant one thing. She meant Ethan. Of all the conversations I wanted to have with my sister, I wasn’t ready to have that one. Not yet. After all these years, the pain still felt too raw.

“I’ve got a few minutes,” I said instead. “Want to walk?”

When she stood up, my gaze instinctively went to her stomach.

“You’re real subtle.” She patted her belly. “Yes, the creature is still in here.”

“Does Mom know?”

“Lord, no. She’d have her whole church praying for me.”

I opened the back door of the cafeteria, and the salt air hit our faces, cool and sweet. I thought of the baby, growing day by day, a tiny collection of supercharged cells that might one day be my niece or nephew.

When I looked at Heather, if I pushed the scrim of my anger aside, I still saw the infant girl in my arms, the toddler stepping out into the street half a second before I reached forward and pulled her back, the eighth grader weeping about a boy who’d kissed her at the Fourth of July fireworks and then ignored her, the teenager who
called me to bail her out of jail after she got caught with marijuana, the college student who flunked out freshman year and was too scared to tell our mother, the young woman who always had some ill-advised boyfriend who didn’t treat her well and some crappy job that didn’t pay enough. The years of too much drinking and too many drugs. Things had never gone right for her; she had never been happy. Now maybe she could be.

Heather and I took the Battle of the Bulge trail again, through the blackberry vines and over the footbridge, down and down until we reached the wider Lands End path, with its grand views out toward the sea. She told me about a Christina Aguilera concert she’d attended on the base, and in the same breath, she told me about the terrible aftermath of a roadside bombing. “All of it runs together,” she said. “It’s hard to remember what came first.” She told me about a friend who had died when he jumped off the back of a truck and broke his femur. “His femur,” she said, incredulous. “A perfectly healthy twenty-five-year-old with a wife and baby at home. The break sent an embolism to his heart.” She shook her head. “I spent seven months sitting in Suwayrah playing Xbox and reading novels and practically peeing in my pants every time I heard an explosion. The place was a magnet for incoming rocket fire. The one bright spot was the food. We had Pakistani civilians cooking for us. They were amazing. I talked this one guy into giving me his recipe for Lahori beef karahi. You’ll have to come over one of these days so I can cook it for you.”

“Come over?”

“I’ve decided to stick around. A friend of mine is letting me borrow his place in the Mission while he’s back East.” She glanced up to gauge my reaction. “You don’t look too thrilled.”

“I’m glad you’re safe,” I said. “I really am. But you can’t expect everything to just magically go back to how it was.”

“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.

“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’re 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.