Golden State: A Novel (25 page)

I worried that he would think I had abandoned him, had simply given him up. I took the next two weeks off from work and withdrew Ethan from the child-care center, so I could spend every minute with him. Tom had someone fill in his shifts and postponed the next taping of
Anything Is Possible
. Everything became magnified in those remaining days with Ethan, his presence sweeter and more painful.

I tried to teach him the things he would need to know in his new house, where the rules would certainly be stricter than they were in ours. “Share your toys,” I reminded him. “And ask permission to leave the dinner table.” He cried when I told him that his aunt Allison might not know the night-night song. “You can sing it to yourself when you go to bed,” I said. “I’ll be singing it too, even if you can’t hear me.” It was a song that I’d made up, one that I sang to him every night, and when I’d tried to talk to Allison about it, and about the fact that Ethan was accustomed to one of us lying down with him until he fell asleep, she said, “Well, he’ll just have to learn to fall asleep on his own. He’s not a baby anymore.” It made me physically ill to think of Ethan alone in a strange bed, a strange house, with none of his comforting rituals.

“Who’s Aunt Allison?” he said once, though we’d discussed it many times. He still didn’t understand. “I don’t want a playdate with those big kids,” he added. And I realized that when I talked about “Aunt Allison’s house,” he thought he was just going for a playdate.

One afternoon, when he was going to the bathroom on his little plastic potty, I said, “I’ll close the door so you can have privacy.”

“No,” he said. “Stay with me.”

“Why?” I asked.

He grinned. “Because I love you.”

I sat down on the bathroom floor in front of him, and he clapped his hands on my cheeks, laughing. As I helped him pull up his pants and wash his hands, I thought about how these small ministrations, the daily acts of love, had become all-consuming. Caring for a small child was exhausting, but it also made life immeasurably sweeter. I had wanted so much from life, and I had gotten it; now what I wanted more than anything was this.

On the day we took him to the family services offices to go home with Allison, he clung to me, screaming, “Mommy, Daddy, don’t make me go!” He was terrified, too young to understand why we were letting this strange woman take him away.

Overseeing the entire thing was Marina, the stoic-faced social worker with her steadfast belief in rules and reports, her unwavering faith in the supremacy of blood ties. “Please,” I begged, as she pulled him out of my arms.

“It’s out of my hands,” she said—seeming, for the first time, uncertain that she held the moral high ground.

As Tom and I drove home that afternoon, I thought of a vacation we’d taken to Vieques, Puerto Rico, before we were married. On the fourth day of our trip, on a deserted beach near our small hotel, something had happened to jolt us out of the blissful state in which we had spent our first days there. We were walking hand in hand, talking about the impossible, otherworldly blue of the water, when Tom’s grip on my hand tightened, and as I stepped forward, he pulled me back. My eyes had been on the horizon, where a white boat was cutting elegantly through the blue, but now I turned my head and saw what had caused him to stop in his tracks—not ten feet from us, a bull.

The animal was breathing heavily, looking straight at us, and I wondered why I hadn’t heard his wet, ragged breath before I saw him.

We backed away very slowly, our eyes on the bull, his eyes on us. I couldn’t be sure whether the panting I heard was the bull’s or my own. My heart raced, and my hand in Tom’s was slippery with sweat. When we had put fifteen yards or so between us, there was a sound in the thicket, a breaking of twigs. The bull lost interest in us, turned toward the sound, and ambled away. As we walked back to our room in silence, I felt exhilarated and frightened, certain that we had just been spared some terrible incident. Our waiter that night confirmed my suspicions. The bulls on the beach had become a serious problem, he said. A tourist had been gored just two months before, and had died.

My life, in many ways, was like the incident in Vieques. I’d grown up with nothing, and then, as it turned out, things had gone so well for me, better than I’d ever imagined they might. I often felt
that I had just narrowly escaped some terrible fate, some metaphorical bull in the thicket that I hadn’t seen. My own father’s completely random and unexpected death had taught me at an early age that terrible things lurked just around the corner. For the longest time, I felt lucky but afraid. How long could this sort of luck hold out?

Now, in the rearview mirror, I could see Ethan’s empty car seat. Thousands of times in the past two and a half years, I had glanced up and looked at his reflection. I had taken such joy in seeing him there, had felt such a sense of security and completeness, having him with me, knowing that he was safe. Seeing the empty seat, I understood that the dreaded thing had happened; the bull in the thicket had finally caught up with me.

In the weeks after he was taken away, I fantasized about rescuing him. At night, unable to sleep, I came up with outlandish plots to whisk him away, back into the safe, loving life we had built for him. We could go into hiding, leave the country, start fresh. Crazy thoughts, but most of the time they seemed more sane than the alternative: life without him.

Everything, during that time, was about Ethan and his absence. I hardly had room in my mind to consider Heather, much less forgive her or offer sound advice. For the first few weeks after the incident, she called repeatedly, always crying, always apologetic, but I didn’t want to talk to her, didn’t want to see her. A few days after we lost Ethan, she called to tell me she had joined the army.

“Don’t,” I said.

“It’s done.”

Soon thereafter, she left for training at Fort Bragg. In a way, it made sense. It was the ultimate act of turning one’s life around, the ultimate act of reinvention. And also, I knew, an act of self-punishment. Heather cherished nothing more than her freedom. She didn’t like being told what to do, where to be. The thought of her at basic training—rising before dawn, donning fatigues and heavy black boots, standing in line and subjecting herself to the
whims of her commanding officer—was unfathomable. I understood that this was her attempt at contrition, her cry for atonement. And I have to admit—a part of me was relieved. I wouldn’t have to see her or hear her voice. I wouldn’t have to look her in the eyes and pretend I wasn’t filled with rage.

“Why didn’t you try to find him?” Dennis wants to know.

“I did, Dennis. You know that.”

“Tell me again,” he insists.

On the bed, Heather is lying on her side, her eyes shut tight against the pain. It’s getting so close; any minute I will have to put the phone down. But for now, Rajiv and Betty need whatever time I can buy. I think of all the codes I’ve run, how you quit whatever you’re doing, put everything else out of your mind, and concentrate on that single patient, on saving that one life. To be a physician is to be an expert in compartmentalization; every patient, every action, every feeling has its place.

“One patient at a time,” Dr. Bariloche used to say.

I don’t want to tell this story, I don’t want to share anything else with Dennis. But I will. Anything to stall for time. Lives depend on it. On me.

“I went to Glendale a month after Allison took Ethan away,” I begin. “She had to let me see him.”

“And what were you going to do if she didn’t?” I pause.

“I was prepared to do anything.”

“What about Tom?”

“He stayed home. He said that if he saw Ethan, he wouldn’t be able to walk away.”

“And you would?” Dennis asks.

“I hadn’t planned that far ahead.”

I found an address, made the drive to Glendale in six hours, walked up to the door, and, in a state of disbelief, not knowing what I would say, rang the doorbell. I had no idea how Allison would react, but I knew she wouldn’t be pleased.

When an elderly Japanese man opened the door, I felt the beginning of panic. “I’m looking for Allison Rhodes,” I said.

“She doesn’t live here anymore,” the man said. “They moved away.”

“Where?” I asked, feeling as if the ground had shifted beneath me. I was too late.

“Arizona?” the man said uncertainly.

After that, I scoured the Internet for Allison Rhodes, but she was impossible to find. I couldn’t find her on LinkedIn or Facebook, or any of the other social networking sites, and the people who showed up on search engines bore no biographical resemblance to her. She seemed to have vanished. I paid an investigative service that promised to turn up addresses and all sorts of personal information, but even that led nowhere. How was it possible, in the digital age, for a person to leave no trace?

I contacted our old caseworker, Terry. “How can she just take him away and not even leave a number or address?” I asked. “Is that even legal?”

“I’m afraid it is,” she answered. “As Ethan’s former foster parents, unfortunately, you have no legal right to see him.”

After I finish telling Dennis the story, he doesn’t say anything for several seconds, and I recall something else they taught us in the crisis course: if you leave a pause in the conversation, the hostage taker will fill the silence. But it’s not Dennis who fills the silence now. Once again, we fall into the old patterns.

“Sometimes I think back to that day in Glendale and wonder what would have happened if I had found them,” I say.

“We’re not so different,” Dennis replies.

Maybe Dennis is right. You think of yourself as one kind of person, abiding by a certain set of rules. And then, something happens to shake that foundation to the core.

The summer before I left for college, I sometimes wandered the streets of Laurel for hours in the wet, sticky heat. It was something to do, a way to stave off the boredom. Heather, eight years old that summer, had a new best friend named Molly who lived in a big house with a swimming pool. Most mornings, I’d drop Heather off at Molly’s house, where Molly’s mom would spend the day doting on the girls, bringing them sandwiches and iced tea. My shift at the Piggly Wiggly didn’t start until afternoon. Freed from babysitting duty and school, I found that the day contained endless hours to do with as I pleased.

I loved walking, the way it calmed me, gave me space to think. My new identity—the one I hoped to forge on campus, among people who did not know me—did not come without a sense of guilt. Putting my feet on familiar paths, stepping in the same spots I’d stepped along hundreds of times, took my mind off the fact that I was leaving my mother and sister behind.

At the intersection of two roads—one paved, one a simple country affair of packed red earth—a car pulled up beside me. It was a red Camaro with the top pulled down and, in the driver’s seat, a man in mirrored sunglasses.

“Do you need a ride?” the man said. He must have been about twenty-five—which seemed very old to me.

“No, thanks.”

“It’s a long way to anywhere from here.”

“Not really.”

I was on guard, but not exactly afraid. After all, I’d just finished my senior year of high school. By then, I knew a few things about boys. I also knew the neighborhood. Just a few yards behind me was a thick stand of pine trees. If I cut through the trees and started running, it would take me less than a minute to arrive at the home of Martin Dilts, who’d been a friend of my mother’s since their grade school days, had even proposed to her once. Martin was fiercely protective of my mother, and of me and Heather. In his house, he kept a closet full of guns. Every year at the beginning of deer season, he’d arrive at our house with dozens of pounds of meat, wrapped neatly in white paper, labeled with the date and the cut. He’d pack it carefully in our freezer, then sit with my mother in the kitchen, drinking Coca-Cola and talking. She used to tell me, “If anything ever happens to me, there are two people you girls can count on, no matter what: your uncle Curtis and Martin Dilts.”

The guy in the red convertible was good-looking, though I couldn’t see his eyes. Clean-shaven, slender, wearing a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. He had pale skin and a funny accent.

“Where are you from?” I asked. I stayed a good ways back from the car, which idled there at the dirt intersection, the radio playing softly, engine humming.

“Connecticut.”

“Connecticut?” I repeated, dumbfounded. “Why on earth are you here?”

“I’m visiting family.”

“What family?”

“The Keymans.”

“I know them,” I said. “Harry went to my school.”

Tall, skinny, towheaded Harry, whose parents owned a store that sold ribbons in every imaginable color and fabric, had never struck me as the sort of guy who might have a cousin in Connecticut. It might as well have been Europe, it seemed so exotic.

“Small world,” the man said.

“Small town’s more like it.”

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know,” I lied. In fact, I knew exactly where I was going: right on Old Bay Springs Road, right on Twelfth Street, then I’d follow the road past the cemetery, past the Burns place, a big horse property with a grand old house and an elaborate ironwork sign that said
THE PONDEROSA
, all the way to the west side of town. Eventually, I’d end up at the Piggly Wiggly, where I’d spend the next five hours ringing up bread and milk and Pampers and reduced-for-quick-sale ground beef, counting down the minutes. Back home that night, I’d mark off one more square on my calendar, one day closer to getting out.

“What grade are you in?”

I found the question insulting. I’d graduated, after all. “I’m in college.”

“Oh!” He was genuinely surprised, perhaps disappointed. “Where do you go?”

“Mississippi State.”

“You live in the dorm?”

“Yes,”

“Which one?”

“McKee.” In truth, I had no idea whether I would get a spot in McKee, but I had marked it down as my first choice on the forms I’d mailed in weeks before.