Golden State: A Novel (18 page)

On a more personal level, will everyone at the VA be out of a job? The VA has been my home for my entire medical career. The staff and residents and patients are my extended family. It’s impossible to imagine packing up and moving to a different hospital, navigating the unfamiliar corridors and labyrinthine politics of a new facility.

And of course, the biggest question: Which flag will we salute? Last night, I did a test, just to see what it would feel like to say it: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the Republic of California …” It sort of sounded right. It sort of didn’t.

My first allegiance: my mother. In the foyer of the church on the day of my father’s funeral, I am standing at her side, so close I can feel the soft fabric of her dress brushing against my face. She’s wearing dark plum instead of black, my father’s favorite dress. The eyelet hem hits high above her knees. Into the slots of her penny loafers—she is flat-footed and can’t abide heels—she has tucked two shiny nickels to match her silver necklace, earrings, and bracelets. People are coming in, saying things to her in hushed voices, looking down at me as though I’m a poor lost puppy. They touch my hair, and their voices shake when they tell me what a sweet girl I am, how much they adored my father. Enormous Myrtle May says, “Girl, I remember when you brought the weather. Your daddy couldn’t have been prouder.”

I am five years old, and I don’t understand why we’re putting my father in a box deep in the ground. I’ve been told this is a funeral, “to say goodbye to Daddy,” but I don’t know where he’s going, or how long he’ll be gone.

“That old oak out in front of First Federal,” whispers a lady from the church, fanning herself with an ugly pocketbook. “That branch just fell clean off like an act of God. Bless Tudy’s heart, she’ll be bankrupt come Sunday.”

I don’t know what “bankrupt” means, but hearing my mother’s name, I feel fiercely protective.

The cemetery is next to a pasture, and it has been raining all week. The air smells of hay, manure, rainwater, and trees—a sweet, familiar smell. As we’re walking to the grave site, our shoes stick in the mud. Mine are white with kitten heels, my first “big girl” shoes, bought special for Easter Sunday, and I’m upset that they’re getting ruined. My mother and I sit in folding chairs right in front of the casket, so close, I think, I could reach out, open it, and climb in next to Daddy. He always lies in bed with me until I fall asleep, but last night he wasn’t there. The pastor talks and talks; my mother cries and grips my hand, then pulls me into her plum-colored dress so close I can hardly breathe. At last the pastor says, “And herein we conclude this service.” At precisely that moment a cow in the pasture lets out a long, solitary moo. I laugh out loud, certain it is my daddy, come to wish us well.

“Hush up,” my mother says gently.

Then we’re walking back to the car. Our shoes make soft sucking sounds in the mud.

“What’s ‘bankrupt’?” I say, too loud.

My mother squeezes my hand and looks down at me, so serious, and she says just as loudly, for the whole world to hear, “Don’t you worry. I have two hands and a brain. I can work. No one in this family is going bankrupt.”

In the car, she pulls me close to her and buries her face in my hair, all her bravery gone. I can feel her tears on my scalp. “Don’t you ever leave me,” she says.

Neither of us could have known that, only ten years later, I would be plotting a permanent escape.

Of course, we still talk every other Sunday, in the afternoon, after she gets home from church. I haven’t told her about my divorce, and am at a loss as to how to go about it. What would she make of the notion that a marriage can simply be discarded, so essential an allegiance betrayed? This is a woman who still wears her wedding ring, thirty-five years after her husband died. I imagine she’d advise me to make things right, to take Tom back, to do whatever’s necessary to hold the family together. She would likely say something about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. But this is where the domestic equation breaks down:
Without a child, are we even a family?

8:57 a.m
.

The cable car moves slowly but steadily for a few blocks, then screeches to a stop. A crowd has gathered at the intersection of California and Hyde. It’s not the usual swarm of people in a hurry, heading to work. The helicopter circles overhead, its white bundles of propaganda falling like snow. There’s that sense of restlessness, as if, at any moment, this whole thing might erupt.

Teenagers in school uniforms are chanting, “Let us go!” Several middle-aged women with pro-union signs have gathered around the students. A confrontation appears to be imminent.

“Let them go” has become the rallying cry of a particularly virulent right-wing movement that views California as an affront to the values of the country. Their disciples, who camp out at public parks and churches and even schools, shouting angry insults, point gleefully to the fact that California is on the verge of bankruptcy.

The governor has used this slogan to his benefit. “We grow more than half of their fruits and vegetables, and yet they say, ‘Let them go,’ ” he wrote in his most recent open letter to California voters. “We send hundreds of billions of dollars to the federal government each year, and the welfare states receive our gifts without complaint, and yet they say, ‘Let them go.’ We’ve sent more than fifty thousand soldiers to fight their wars, and yet they say, ‘Let them go.’ We create
the technology that builds their computers and their smartphones, and they say, ‘Let them go.’ The finest medical minds in the world are at work in our institutions of higher learning, developing biotechnology that will save their children’s lives, and they say, ‘Let them go.’ Well, we agree.
Let us go!
”

The conductor clangs the bell and shouts into the crowd, trying to clear a path, but it’s obvious they’re not going anywhere. From here I can see the tower of St. Francis hospital three blocks away. Three long blocks, but still.

I push my way off the cable car, down into the crowd. Leaning against a newspaper kiosk, I send a text to my old med school friend Kim, who’s a general internist at St. Francis.
Are you at the hospital? Need help
.

I’m counting steps to keep my mind off the pain—one and two and three and four. My ankle is on fire. Halfway there, a man thrusts a pink pamphlet toward me. As I dodge him, he calls out, “Dr. Walker?”

I search his face, trying to find the connection.

“You don’t remember me, do you?”

Blue eyes, dark hair, mid-thirties. Medium height. Denim jacket. I’ve seen thousands of patients over the years. He could be any one of them—except, of course, he can really only be one of them. When he turns his head, I see the scar on his neck. A long, red welt, stretching from just below his right ear nearly to his Adam’s apple. I was twenty-six years old and just out of medical school, doing my first year of residency, on rotation at San Francisco General, when he stumbled into the ER at three
A.M
., bleeding all over the floor.

The sight of the scar makes me uncomfortable, guilty. I remember how petrified I felt as I punctured his skin with the needle and pulled the thread. I remember worrying that he would bleed to death on my watch.

Gradually, the details come into focus. It was the girlfriend who did it, with a serrated kitchen knife. When they came into the ER, he was calm, but she was screaming and hysterical. Only when security
took her out of the room did the man say under his breath, “Crazy bitch. I’m not taking her back, I don’t care if the bitch begs on her knees.”

Half an hour later, she returned with vanilla ice cream from the cafeteria, touching his cheek and sobbing that she was sorry. He smiled at her through the haze of the anesthesia and said, “I love you, baby.” Watching him eat the ice cream with the tiny wooden spoon, it occurred to me that there was so much I didn’t know, so much I had to learn.

“Right,” I say. “You had the girlfriend with the knife skills.”

“Bingo,” he says, running his fingers along the scar. “Your hands were shaking. When the stitches came out and I saw what was left, I cried like a baby. What can I say? I was young and vain. Want to touch it?”

“What?” I say, startled. I glance impatiently at my phone. No text from Kim.

“Your handiwork here.” He points at the scar.

I’m not sure what compels me to reach out and run my fingers over the jagged edges. The skin is slick and tight. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s my good-luck charm. I’ll be sitting in a bar, minding my own business, and some woman comes up and asks me what happened to my neck. They think I’ve been inside.” He smiles. “One thing leads to another.”

“Whatever happened to the girlfriend?”

He laughs. “I married her. Didn’t last.”

My phone buzzes, a text from Kim.
I’m here
.

“Where you headed?” he asks. “Looks like you’re in pain.”

“Down to St. Francis. I tore up my ankle this morning. I need to get it wrapped so I can go deliver a baby. Long story.”

He stuffs his stack of pamphlets into his messenger bag. “Let me help.”

“Really?”

“That’s what I’m all about these days!” His enthusiasm feels oddly off, as if he’s following a script.

I drape my arm around his shoulder. He puts an arm around my waist, I lift my bad ankle off the ground, and like this we proceed down the sidewalk.

“No offense, but maybe you ought to watch where you’re going next time.”

“And maybe you ought not marry girls who try to kill you.”

“Right, Doctor Lady.”

At the hospital, he insists on escorting me into the ER waiting room. “You ever find yourself in need of anything, call me,” he says. He pulls a pamphlet out of his messenger bag, scribbles his phone number on the bottom, and presses it into my palm.

It’s always the same. I see someone out in public, someone who appears to know me. They look at me as though our relations have been intimate, as though there is some secret in our past tying us together. Even after all these years, it takes me a few moments to realize that it’s not someone I know, really, just a former patient. But the strange thing is that I do eventually remember. Not names, but faces. I have an uncanny ability to put a face with an ailment or injury, to remember where I saw the patient and what I treated him or her for. It’s a strange way to go through the world, knowing so much about other people’s lives when they know so little about mine. Yet the imbalance has always suited me—always better to be the observer, not the observed.

As he turns to leave, I read the bold print on the pamphlet, surprised to discover that it has nothing to do with the vote.
So, why can’t you achieve your goals? You can!
Below that exhortation, the image of a fleshy, balding man stares back at me. Under that, in a smaller font, is the message:
Dianetics reveals the source of all your unhappiness and self-doubt, and shows you how to get rid of it
.

I toss the flyer into the trash and try, for the umpteenth time, to get through to Heather.

“I met him in Kabul,” Heather said that night at my house while the pot roast simmered in the oven. All this time, I’d been waiting for her to identify the father, and now that she had done so, it was even more outrageous than I’d expected. She was smiling mischievously—as if to admit, almost, that she was pulling my leg.

“My unit was stationed at an FOB just outside of town, doing security for a reconstruction team and training the local police, when my commanding officer told me that we were going to have a visit from a very important person.”

The potted plant that she had brought as a hostess gift sat on the table between us. I sipped my wine. I didn’t believe her, but I was still intrigued by the story, eager to see how she would get herself out of the hole she had dug. “I see.”

“You can look it up,” she said, defiantly spearing a broccoli floret from the appetizer tray. “I’m sure there must have been articles in the paper about his trip.”

How long had she been working on this fairy tale? Had she rehearsed it again and again, gearing up for the day when she would present it to me, or was she making it up on the spot? Had she told it to others, or was I getting the first draft? I thought of the stories she’d told me in the past. For as long as I remembered, she had lived
in a fantasy world, populated by improbable meetings with celebrities and hairbreadth escapes from death. When she was small, it had been charming: she could tell you with a straight face that she had met Jimmy Carter at the K&B, or that a lion had crossed her path when she was walking home from school. Each tale came with vivid details. When she was small, her stories delighted me, and I, like our mother, took them as a sign of budding talent. “You’ll be a writer one day,” I used to say, but she’d never taken an interest in writing her stories down. I think it was the immediate reaction she enjoyed—the look on someone’s face when she told her lies, the challenge of convincing a person that what she said was true.

As she got older, the stories became milder, as if they had been calculated to be both dramatic and credible. The kind of stories that
could
have been true, if a person was inclined to believe her. I once heard her tell a new boyfriend about the time she was walking down the street and saw a group of workmen installing a plate-glass window several stories above, and in the next instant the big pane was suddenly in freefall. According to her story, the big pane shattered on the ground just inches behind her, spraying the street with shards but leaving her completely unharmed. “A split-second difference in my pace,” she had told the mesmerized boyfriend, “a moment of hesitation as I walked, and the glass would have taken off my head.” There was also the one about how she met Kevin Bacon while stopped at a red light in Oxford, Mississippi, and he took her out for a burger and fries. “He was the nicest guy in the world.”

Heather lived in a dramatic world of her own making. The most frustrating thing about her stories was that, while I didn’t believe them, there was no way to disprove them. Whenever I expressed doubt, she acted greatly wounded. “What, you don’t think Kevin Bacon would find me interesting?”