Golden State: A Novel (6 page)

“Mmmm,” Heather said, turning her head. “Smells like Mississippi.”

I couldn’t help smiling. “Remember Buddy? I wonder what ever happened to him.”

She turned away from the window, angling the left side of her face toward me. “Sorry?”

“You’re favoring your left ear,” I said, and it dawned on me that she’d been doing it all along.

She frowned. “IED. My right ear is shot. The doctor called it sensorineural hearing loss.”

“Didn’t they give you a hearing aid?” I asked.

“Yes, but I hate it.”

“Are you okay otherwise?”

“Ten fingers, ten toes,” she said. “I’m okay. There are little things, of course. I’ve started getting headaches.” She tapped the newspaper in front of her. “I have to read the same paragraph over and over. I can’t remember the last time I made it through a novel.”

I thought of her as a child, all those Nancy Drew mysteries and Judy Blume books and Chronicles of Narnia volumes stacked on
the floor beside her night table, how she’d read them into the wee hours, so that I’d have to drag her out of bed in the morning and practically dress her for school myself.

“Besides the headaches,” she continued, “I can’t always control my temper. I get really mad about the dumbest things. The last VA doc I saw said the temper doesn’t have anything to do with the explosion, that it’s typical PTSD, but I’m not sure.”

“If I were deaf in one ear, I’d be pissed, too,” I said.

Heather grinned. “I see you haven’t lost your winning bedside manner.”

I didn’t tell her that I see ravages of PTSD every day: drug addiction, alcoholism, domestic violence, depression. I didn’t tell her about the kid who ended up in the ER every couple of months for repeated suicide attempts. The last one succeeded.

“What really gets me is that I can’t remember the punch lines to my favorite jokes,” she said. “I’ll start telling one, and I’ll get halfway through it before I realize I don’t know how it ends.” Jokes had always been Heather’s way of saying hello, saying goodbye, flirting, even apologizing. As a kid, she would spend hours at the kitchen table, scribbling jokes in a bright red notebook.

“Anyway, here I sit, right? All in one piece. With a sexy war wound to boot.” She brushed aside her bangs, and I repressed a gasp. There was a three-inch scar just above her left eyebrow.

“Jesus, who did that?” Someone had botched the stitching, leaving a jagged, raised line along her forehead.

“It wasn’t the medic’s fault. Our convoy was on patrol near the COB, driving down this rural road. It was deserted, or so we thought—nothing to see for miles around. It feels like something’s crawling around in my helmet, so stupidly, I take it off, just for a second, and this kid, couldn’t have been more than ten, eleven years old, steps out from behind a tree, grinning. He’s covered in dust, because everything and everybody there is covered in dust, but even so you can tell he’s a beautiful kid, big brown eyes, wavy hair, like he just stepped out of one of those old Benetton catalogs. He reaches into his pocket and lobs this big, sharp rock at me. It splits my skin
right open. I’m bleeding like crazy, and then these older kids—fourteen, fifteen years old—start coming out of nowhere, only they don’t have rocks, they have guns. Our guys return fire, the kids start dropping like flies, and the driver just floors it. In the chaos we couldn’t find the medical kit, so somebody closed the wound up with superglue as we were barreling down the road. By the time I got to the field hospital, there wasn’t much they could do, aesthetically speaking.”

“I can’t imagine what you’ve been through.” The words were inadequate. I’d known it all along of course, in the abstract. But being with her, hearing her stories, seeing the scars, made it real.

“They were just kids,” Heather said, shuddering. “Anyway, you were asking me about something?”

“Buddy,” I said, feeling foolish. I’d confronted this feeling many times with my patients. The conversation would turn to serious matters, something terrible that had happened to them in the war; there would be a window of vulnerability, of honesty—and then it was as if a switch would flip, and we were supposed to go back to discussing mundane things. As a physician, I should have been able to make the transition, but in all my years of practicing medicine, I’d never gotten used to it.

“From Laurel,” I added. “The kid who used to cut our grass for free because he had a crush on you.”

She nodded, seemingly happy to change the subject. “I heard Buddy moved to Birmingham. He married a girl from New Jersey, and they own a Krystal franchise.”

She gathered the sections of her paper into a neat pile and placed it carefully in the center of the table. Then she wiped the table with a napkin, which she folded and tucked into her coffee cup. “Do you have time to go for a walk?”

I glanced at my watch; it was still forty-five minutes before morning rounds. I’d been coming in early for months, avoiding the moment when Tom walked in the door from his night shift at the radio station. I didn’t quite know how to face him anymore in the early hours, those hours that had once been so intimate. I used to stay in
bed longer than I should, just to feel him curl up beside me, his skin layered with the smells of the station, his hair out of whack, his breath smelling of chocolate milk.

As I followed Heather out of the cafeteria, I wondered if she could sense how wary I was. Waiting to hear her latest angle, her newest troubles. Waiting to suss out the truth from the fiction. Ever since I’d left Mississippi, eighteen years before, Heather had never shown up on my doorstep without needing something. Each time she arrived, there were always lies, and something bad happened. I’d always managed to put it behind me, until the last time, with Ethan, her one mistake that was too big to forgive.

6:52 a.m
.

I hobble up to the intersection of Front and California, my ankle throbbing. The brisk, briny smell of the bay mingles with the scent of chestnuts from a stall. A small crowd has already gathered at the cable car turnaround, in the shadow of the towering office building at 101 California. The building, with its distinctive pleated façade, has a tragic history: in 1993, a businessman named Gian Luigi Ferri entered the offices of the law firm Pettit & Martin and began firing with two handguns and a pistol. He roamed several floors, killing eight people, before shooting himself. In the aftermath, the California legislature passed some of the most stringent gun laws in the country. Later, Stephen Sposato, whose wife, Jody, died in the attack, would carry their infant daughter in a backpack while testifying before Congress. The man with the motherless baby in the backpack helped Barbara Boxer push the Federal Assault Weapons Ban through Congress. The expiration of the ban in 2004 is in the news every time there’s a mass shooting, one more piece of emotionally charged evidence the secessionists use to point out the fundamental differences between California and the rest of the country.

Now another young man with a backpack stands at the end of
the line, intently reading a worn copy of
Home-Grown Medicine: A Marijuana Primer
. There’s a reason San Francisco has a reputation; half of what people say about this city happens to be true.

The backpack moves, a tiny hand pops out, and a baby appears.

My stomach does that weird looping thing it always does at the sight of a baby. I settle on the sidewalk to wait. My ankle is on fire. I turn on the Bakelite, hoping to distract myself from the pain. Tom’s on the air, all control and good humor. You’d never know that he’s been up all night, that his personal life is falling apart.

“Thanks for tuning in to KMOO on this highly unusual Tuesday morning,” he says. I always thought the call letters were bizarre, a strangely rural reference for an urban station in a city teeming with vegans, until Tom explained to me that the guy who started the station in the fifties was from Montana, where he’d made his money on cattle.

“I’m looking out my window, and I can see a big ugly cloud of smoke out near the Marina. Call in if you know the scoop. Let’s be calm, people. Let’s be civilized. There’s no need for this thing to be rancorous. Just ask lawyer Linda.”

That last part’s for me. I’ll miss them, all those coded messages coming through the airwaves. I wish I’d written them down over the years, a secret history. After the divorce, how long will it take for him to replace me with someone else, to direct his mercurial comments to someone with whom he’s building a new, perhaps better, history? And how long will it take for me to truly start over, to find my way in unfamiliar terrain? The problem with marriage is that it provides a false sense of security. When you have walked down the aisle, when you have spent years building a life together, when your finances and emotional interests are so intricately intertwined, it can seem as if an essential part of your existence on this planet has been mastered. With the matter of love taken care of, you think you can concentrate on other things. It’s not that love is forgotten, only that it seems set in stone. Until you realize it isn’t.

My old mentor, Dr. Bariloche, comes to mind.

It was June, and I had just graduated from medical school. I should have been with the rest of my classmates, who were having a party to celebrate before everyone scattered to do residencies at hospitals around the country. There was a general feeling among us that one weight had been lifted, while another, more serious weight would soon be on our shoulders. The party promised to be a raucous affair, a fitting end to four hard years. Instead, I was at a funeral.

At sixty-five, Dr. Bariloche was still a substantial woman, tall and sturdy. She and her husband, a graphic designer nine years her junior, had planned to travel the world together as soon as she retired. That afternoon, as Dr. Bariloche and I stood on the damp lawn outside the church, she said to me, with tears in her eyes, “I picked him young so he wouldn’t die on me. Honestly, if I’d known he would have a heart attack at fifty-six, I’m not so sure I would have married him. Is that wrong?”

“Not at all,” I reassured her, though I was thinking that maybe it was.

I held her arm as we navigated to the limousine and joined the procession of cars headed back to her house, where her niece had organized the mourners. At some point, several hours later, I noticed that Dr. Bariloche had disappeared. I found her sitting alone in the bedroom, drinking a glass of wine, examining the books on the shelf.

“Come in,” she said, motioning for me to sit on the bed beside her. She reached out and ran her fingers over the books on the shelf, stopping on a worn blue spine. “I remember when this book came out,” she said. “I’d just started my residency, my first day on the job. I was walking back to my apartment from the hospital, and there was a large display in the window of the bookstore, stacks and stacks of this book. I went in and bought it. A man had bled to death in front of me that day. He’d been stabbed, and the orderlies wheeled him in, and as the blood was pouring out of a wound in his side I froze for several crucial seconds. Afterward, I walked around in a daze. I bought the book because I needed something to distract me.”

I sat there in silence, feeling the warmth of her body next to me on the bed. The room was cold and smelled of vanilla candles. Though she had never been easy on me, had at times, in fact, made my life miserable, it is fair to say that I loved her.

“The day I bought this book was the end of one life, the beginning of another,” Dr. Bariloche said. “The day I met my husband was another beginning. The day he died, another ending. And here I am unfortunately, beginning again. The problem is, I have no idea where to start.” A lock of dyed black hair escaped her bun and fell into her eyes. She tucked it behind her ear, with a gesture I had seen her make hundreds—no, thousands—of times. “We tend to see life as a continuum, Julie, but really, it’s a series of phases, generating a series of different selves. You leave one life behind and start another. And each time, a different version of yourself emerges.”

It was unlike Dr. Bariloche to speak in such symbolic terms. She had a scientific mind; there was a hardness about her that put some of the other students off but that I had come to respect.

“When you arrived here four years ago, you were a very nervous young woman with great grades, a scholarship, and no confidence. To be honest with you, Julie, the first time I heard you speak in class, I doubted you were cut out to be a doctor.”

I squirmed uneasily. She’d never said as much, but I’d always suspected it.

“Now look at you.” She allowed one finger to settle lightly, fleetingly, on my knee. “Top of your class, flying colors and all that, and off to your next phase, your new beginning. I have to admit, I’m a little jealous.”

“I’m waiting for UCSF to tell me they made a mistake,” I said. “It was startling enough when they accepted me for medical school. To do my residency here too—it’s more than I hoped for.”

“You earned your spot,” she said.

I noticed then that her hands were trembling. I’d seen those hands intubate an infant, remove a bullet lodged centimeters from a man’s spine, hold down a screaming woman on dialysis, comfort
a thousand different patients. I’d never once seen them tremble. She looked up at me, and on her face was an expression I’d never seen there before. It took me a moment to identify it: fear.

“What will I do now?”

Of course, I didn’t have an answer. Nor did I, at that moment, imagine I would one day be in her shoes: starting over, out of context, with no clear path ahead.

“I heard a rumor,” Dennis says. His voice over the cellphone is oppressive, but I keep the volume up high, hoping to hear Betty or Rajiv, or Eleanor. I want to hear their voices, just to know they’re okay.

“What’s that, Dennis?”

“People say you’re getting divorced. Is it true?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“That should make me happy,” Dennis says. “But actually, it’s really fucking depressing. You and Tom looked like you had it all figured out, Doc. If you can’t make it work, where does that leave the rest of us?”