Golden State: A Novel (31 page)

Sandy returns, shaking her head. “Girl, you’re not going to like this picture.”

The X ray shows a medial malleolus fracture, which explains why I’ve been in so much pain. “Maybe walking across the city on it wasn’t such a great idea.”

“You think?”

I suck in air through my teeth as she applies the cast. Then she wheels me into an empty room and helps me onto the clean, hard bed, propping my injured ankle up on pillows. When she leaves, everything is so quiet. Too quiet. Two boats somewhere in the distance call out to each other. Another ship adds its response, and another. The wind subsides slightly, and the rain stops suddenly. Three hundred and ninety billion gallons of seawater rush in and out of the bay each day, and yet, for the moment, I hear nothing. Just silence. I consider that split second between high tide and low tide when the water is still, unsure which way to go, as if the world, for a moment, has stopped.

I lie back on the bed beneath the thin blanket and try to push thoughts of Dennis out of my mind. And Eleanor. She wasn’t married, but there must be someone I should call to offer condolences. It startles me to realize how little I knew her.

I got through this, I tell myself.
We
got through this. Rajiv is okay. So is Betty. Heather delivered a healthy baby girl. A perfect baby girl.

People are dying right now all over the country, all over the
world, right here in this city. You can’t save everyone. Death is a fact of life. It’s terrible, but it happens. I’m a doctor; I know this. And yet, I was in no way prepared for what happened today.

I think of those first moments when I fell through the door of the hotel, my world split open by gunshot. I think of the long trudge up the stairs and down the hallway, not knowing what I would find.
We made it
, I tell myself again.

But when I close my eyes, I picture Eleanor’s bloodied corpse. I see Dennis, lying on the grass. The wound in his forehead, the blood soaking his hair. I clench my fists and tell myself to hold it together. All these years, I’ve been trying to hold it together. And through everything, any time I felt the temptation to crawl into a corner and weep, or go outside and scream, I’ve always believed I was holding it together for someone else: my patients, my students, Ethan, Heather, Tom.

But now I understand the truth. The resilience on which I prided myself was never selfless. I shut down my emotions because I was terrified what might happen if I let go, even for a moment.

Now the tears come, slowly at first, and then torrential. Sobs tear through my body, and ragged guttural sounds emerge from my throat. I pull the blanket tightly around myself, curl into a ball, and close my eyes.

What have I done?

I wake to a San Francisco sunrise—more the suggestion of sun than anything else, a vague yellow glow emanating from the fog.

The hospital is eerily quiet. I slowly make my way to my office. The room smells of cleaning fluid, but blood still stains the floor. In the center of the desk is a small box wrapped in red paper. It has been opened—by the police or FBI, I imagine—and taped back together. Inside the box is a small card. I recognize the handwriting:
Happy birthday from your old friend
. Beneath the card is a slender gold bracelet inset with a tiny pearl—my birthstone. I lay the bracelet and card back in the box, close it, and place it carefully in the top drawer of my desk.

Tom’s red Panasonic Toot-a-Loop is perched on the bookcase. You can tell a lot about a marriage by the objects it accumulates. With our marriage, it was radios. I’m not sure what that says about us, but I do know there’s something comforting in the feel of the dial beneath my fingers, the static fuzz as the receiver works to pick up the signal from outer space. A song is playing on KMOO, something I don’t recognize.

I go over to my window and pull open the blinds. Once again, I find myself looking down at the rooftop of the school. My gaze follows the line of the roof over to the hotel, to the balcony where I
stood yesterday. Out there, everything looks the same—the hills of Marin, the ocean meeting the bay, the grand orange bridge spanning the divide. I think of the ships that lie buried beneath the water, their cargo and all those lives relegated to a distant past.

The song comes to an end, and Tom’s voice flows from the radio—a voice so sweet, so familiar, the sound of my life. And it occurs to me that yesterday, while I was on that crazy journey across town, I kept wanting to talk to him. This morning, my first urge was to call him and say, “You’ll never believe who showed up to see the baby.” I wanted to tell him about the beautiful baby girl. I wanted to tell him how surprised I was when the governor walked into the room. Invariably, after the truth set in, Tom would ask about the governor’s hair, and I would assure him that it was perfect.

More important, though, I wanted to tell Tom about Eleanor, and Dennis. I needed to tell him what I had done. I needed to tell him about the choices I made.

All these months he’s been gone, and yet he’s still the first thing I think of when I wake up in the morning, the last name to cross my mind before I go to sleep at night. When I was falling through the door, Tom was the one I longed for.

For so long I believed that we needed a child of our own. After we lost Ethan, having a baby seemed like an essential measure of our love—the ability to combine our DNA and pass it on to another person, who would carry that imprint forward into the world; the ability to completely join our two selves together. But I failed to see the truth: Tom is a part of me already.

I think of the cross-eyed stranger that summer in Mississippi, the one who urged me to get into his car. I think of all the chances I had to try something different, to do something totally unplanned, but didn’t. How might the arc of my life have been altered if I had accepted his peculiar invitation, or any number of other invitations over the years? What if I had veered from my chosen path? I guess this could be the part where I lament my lack of adventure, the part where I wish I’d lived a different life. But I don’t wish any such thing. The straight and narrow suited me. I chose my path and took
it. It led me to this particular life in this particular place, to a career I love and to a marriage I don’t regret.

I never expected to find myself here, on the edge of the continent—forty, childless, possibly jobless, with broken bones and a broken marriage, citizen of a broken country. But here I am, and I must make something of it. That’s really the only choice one has: make something of it, or don’t—a choice my mother failed to make after my father died, a choice my sister has completely embraced.

I picture my mother on the grocery store floor in Laurel, the baby in her arms. “She’ll be an ambitious one,” the store manager had said, to which my mother replied, “Lord, I hope not. There’s pain enough in this world without getting your hopes up.” But what if it turns out, instead, that the pain lies in not hoping—in refusing to believe that anything is possible?

In the days before I first left for medical school, my mother walked around in a cloud of sadness. Although I knew it would never happen, one night I suggested that she and Heather come with me to San Francisco. I remember the look she gave me, as if I had said the most ridiculous thing in the world. “Sweetheart,” she said, “I could never leave this town, I could never leave your father.”

I was confused, concerned for her. “Daddy’s not here.”

“Yes, he is, silly. Every time I walk into the Arabian Theatre, where we had our first kiss, he’s there waiting. Every time I wander through Pinehurst Park, where we had our first fight, I sense him around me. He’s here for me sometimes when I need him, and sometimes when I don’t.”

Years later, when Tom and I had flown in to help Heather out of another jam, I finally understood what she meant. We were in a rental car, driving in from the airport, when I saw the Barnette Dairyette up ahead, under the crackling neon lights. I asked Tom to pull over so I could pee, but at first, I couldn’t bring myself to get out of the car. “Is everything all right?” he asked. I couldn’t explain to him that this was the very essence of the life I had known, the very essence of awkward high school nights and happy childhood days. Hesitantly, I got out and headed inside. The bathroom key
was in the same spot on the blue counter, still tied to the same big mixing spoon. I unlocked the door and stepped inside the tiny bathroom—same medicinal smell, same weird, dark lighting, probably the same graffiti. As the heavy door slammed behind me, I felt paralyzed; it was as if not a single day had gone by since I was last there. It was as if nothing had changed at all.

“Remember whose you are,” my father used to say. And after he died, my mother said it, too—an admonishment to remember that my words and actions reflected on the parents who raised me, and on the God they raised me to believe in. Good advice, but it needs a simple addition: Remember
who
you are.

Two nights ago, as I drifted in and out of sleep on the couch at the radio station, Tom leaned down and mumbled into my ear, “What are you dreaming about?”

“The Barnette Dairyette.”

“Oh, I remember that place,” he said, surprising me. “Great milk shakes.”

When I left Mississippi, I believed that I could slice my life neatly down the middle. Between my past and my future, there would be a clean divide. But there is no such divide. I will always carry this inside me: the truth of my origins. Tom is a part of me, but so are my mother, my sister. I am a doctor, but I am also a teenager on Christmas Eve, staring into the charity box that contains the old, used sweater of a girl who never liked me.

I have been a mother, a wife, a sister, a physician. The layers accumulate, the layers fall away. Not everything fits. Some things drift away. Others hold tightly.

I don’t know if I still have a job. I don’t know what will happen to my state, my country. But I know I’m going to buy those tickets to Norway. I know now that I was the one who pushed Tom away, and it is my responsibility to try to bring us back together. I know that, through everything, he never stopped loving me. We’ll begin at the Grand Hotel in Oslo, where Ibsen often held court. We’ll take the Flåm Railway through the mountains, stop overnight at the tiny village of Aurland. We’ll take a boat through the fjords. And
finally, we’ll drink hot chocolate in Bergen, just like we planned, all those years ago. We’ll begin there, and see where it leads.

Eighteen years ago, alone and new to California, I wandered along the cliffs of Point Reyes in the freezing fog, and stood gazing out at the roaring Pacific. I followed a picket fence for several hundred yards, curious where it led. And then, without warning, the fence abruptly ended. A narrow ditch ran perpendicular to the fence, splitting the ground in two; on the other side, some distance away, the fence continued. A middle-aged man stood on one side of the ditch, a boy of about seven on the other. They held hands across the divide. I imagined the earth moving in one swift, startling motion, rearranging everything in an instant. You wake up one day, and you’re forty, and nothing is the way you’d planned. The ground shifts. It comes together, it pulls apart, and there’s nothing to do but dig in and grab hold of something, whatever is closest and best.

I think of my infant niece, surely asleep in my sister’s arms. And now I know what it was that I wanted to say to her. There is a simple truth, and it is this: Somehow, we must move forward, always carrying with us who we are, always looking forward to who we might be.

I would like to thank my wonderful agent and friend, Valerie Borchardt, for her intelligence, persistence, great sense of humor, and ongoing faith in my work. I’m also indebted to my amazing editor, Kate Miciak, for pinpointing the heart of this story, encouraging me exactly when I needed it most, and shining a light in the labyrinth.

Thanks to Caitlin Alexander, who read many early drafts of this novel, and to Bonnie Thompson and Janet Wygal. Thanks to the Random House family for providing a supportive home for my work, and to the amazing independent booksellers who make Northern California such a good place to be a writer and a reader.

Gurpreet Dhaliwal, MD, graciously allowed me to shadow him and his residents at the San Francisco VA Medical Center. My friend Ted Morton provided insight into military life.

The epigraph at the beginning of the book is from my former mentor John Balaban’s translation of “Spring-Watching Pavilion.” collected in
Spring Essence: The Poetry of Hồ Xuân Hu’o’ng
.

For resources and information on issues affecting veterans, visit
craigconnects.org/military-families-and-veterans
.

As always, thanks to Kevin, for everything.

M
ICHELLE
R
ICHMOND
is the author of
The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress
,
Dream of the Blue Room
,
The Year of Fog
,
No One You Know
, and
Golden State
. She is the recipient of the Hillsdale Award for Fiction and the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. A native of Alabama’s Gulf Coast, she makes her home with her husband and young son in Northern California.

michellerichmond.com