Golden State: A Novel (8 page)

“Last time I saw you,” Dennis says, “you and your sister weren’t exactly on speaking terms. What changed?”

“A lot,” I say, turning down the volume on the phone.

“ ‘A lot’? That’s all I get?”

Heather is sitting on the edge of the bed, holding her stomach, trying to breathe through the pain.

“What do you want from me, Dennis?”

There’s a pause. “I’ve had a bad day. A really fucking bad day. I came to the hospital this morning to give you a birthday present, but when I got here, they gave me the runaround, like they always do. They told me you weren’t here.”

“I wasn’t.”

He doesn’t seem to hear me. “They refused to page you. I went over to the hotel, but Eleanor said she hadn’t seen you.”

“She was telling the truth.”

“That’s the problem, Julie. I don’t know who’s telling the truth anymore. I can’t even be sure you are. Everything’s so fucked up.”

“I wouldn’t lie to you, Dennis. I’ve always been straight with you.”

“Remember how you used to tell me stories?” he asks. From the sound of his voice, he might be crying.

“I remember.”

“Tell me one now. Is that too much to ask? One last story before—”

“Before what?” I ask gently, and I’m scared.

But he doesn’t answer. I can hear him breathing on the other end of the line. “Don’t leave anything out,” he insists.

I glance at Heather. She is silent, staring at the wall.

I go into the bathroom and shut the door behind me. “She came back eight months ago,” I begin.

That morning at the VA, as Heather and I made our way down the trail behind the cafeteria, she stopped and turned to me.

“You asked why I’m here,” she said. “It’s this.” She placed a hand on her stomach.

“Jesus,” I said.

“Ha,” she quipped. “No immaculate conception here. Just your garden-variety mortal baby.”

“Congratulations.” I was struggling to wrap my mind around the idea.

“Thanks, but I’m not so sure congratulations are in order.”

“How far along?”

“Five weeks, give or take.”

“You’ve been to a doctor?”

“Does this count?”

“You’re taking your prenatal vitamins? Folic acid?” In my mind, I sorted through a litany of concerns. “You’re not drinking, I hope. A glass of red wine every now and then is fine, but you can’t be too careful—”

“Not so fast,” she interrupted. “I’m not sure I’m going to keep it.”

“But you have to keep it.”

Where had those words come from? I was a physician, not a Sunday school teacher. The more rational side of me chimed in to say she most certainly did not have to keep it; after all, her past actions in no way indicated that she would be a good or responsible mother.

“Julie,” she said. “Put your own history aside.”

My own history. Years of infertility and failed longing summed
up so succinctly, like a gaping hole in a résumé. All those years I’d tried to have a baby after we lost Ethan. All the consultations with fertility specialists, all the pills and shots and calendars. All the planning and plotting and praying, the endless strain on my marriage, the arguments, the feeling that I had turned into a person I didn’t even recognize. All of it for nothing. And here she was, my little sister, pregnant. And not necessarily in a position to be grateful for what, to me, would have been a miracle.

I said the most rational thing I could think to say, the same thing I would say to a patient in these circumstances: “Have you talked with the baby’s father?” Old-fashioned, maybe, but Heather, of all people, knew what it felt like to grow up without one.

She resumed her brisk pace. The path was narrow, but instead of following behind I fell in step to her left, so that she could hear me with her better ear. “That’s where things get tricky,” she said.

“Don’t tell me you don’t know who it is.” I regretted it as soon as I’d said it.

“Give me a little credit.”

“I’m sorry. What is it, then?”

“Use your imagination.”

“He’s married?”

Her silence confirmed my guess. “I see.”

“Jeesh—you don’t have to say it like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you could have seen it coming. Like, of course Heather went and got knocked up by a married man.”

“I was just thinking it’s going to be complicated, that’s all.”

“He’s separated,” she said. “He lives out here, and his wife is on the East Coast. They don’t have kids. It’s not like I’m a home wrecker.”

“If they’ve been apart so long, why don’t they just get divorced?”

“It’s not that easy.”

“No, I guess it never is.”

By now we’d reached the bottom of the trail. We’d been together for no more than half an hour, and already the tension was bubbling
beneath our words. There was a bench at the bottom of the path. I sat down and patted the seat beside me. “Sit.”

“I’m not five years old. You can’t boss me around.”

“I’m a doctor, and you’re overexerting.”

“According to week five in
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
, I can pretty much do anything I want right now short of shooting heroin.”

“And stinky cheese,” I said. “Seriously.”

She held her hand up, Girl Scout–style, and said solemnly, “I swear I will not shoot heroin or eat stinky cheese.”

I took a deep breath. I could tell her my life stood still after we lost Ethan. Four years, two months, I could tell her, and not a day went by that I didn’t think of him. I could tell her what it had done to my marriage, and I could tell her that I still hadn’t figured out a way to forgive her. But if I told her these things, I feared I might never see her again.

She glanced at me and pulled a hard candy out of her pocket. “Butterscotch?”

“No, thanks.”

She sat down beside me and stared out at the ocean, working the candy between her teeth.

“What a view,” she said. “Can you believe you get to work here? Do you ever pinch yourself? It’s about as far as you can get from Laurel.”

“Strange words from a woman who just returned from a war zone.”

“Granted.” She tilted her head, looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read. “You’ve lost your accent, you know.”

“It wasn’t intentional,” I said, somewhat defensively, but that wasn’t entirely true. “What was it like over there?” I asked, changing the subject.

“You don’t want to know.”

“Actually, I do. I kept waiting for an email, just something to say you were still alive. I recorded
News Hour
every night, I never missed it.” I didn’t tell her that I held my breath each time the television’s
sound went mute and the names of the soldiers lost in action began to scroll across the screen. That the roll call of the dead always gutted me.
It could have been her
, I thought, every time.

“If anything had happened to me, you would have heard it from Mom. Anyway, I made it out, didn’t I?” She shook her head. “Three tours. When I joined, I had no clue what I was in for. Then I get to basic training and I’m in with all these kids, these boys, eighteen, nineteen years old, full of themselves and all gung ho to go to war and start blowing people’s heads off. I was only twenty-five, but they made me feel old.”

“I was stunned when you signed up. I guess I never thought of you as patriotic in that way.”

“It wasn’t about that. By the time I joined, September eleventh was a distant memory. One of the guys who’d been there for a few years said what all of us were probably thinking. He said, ‘You don’t walk into a tent in Suwayrah and think of planes hitting the World Trade Center. You walk in and think, ‘Where did all these fucking flies come from?’ ”

“So all that God-and-country stuff. None of it applied to you?”

“My reasons were more selfish. The army was an escape.”

“Hawaii is an escape. Paris, maybe. The Middle East, not so much.”

She laughed. “In a lot of ways, being home is harder than it was over there. At least there I had a purpose. Each day I woke up and had a job to do. Sometimes it was the most menial, tedious task you can imagine, but I knew what was expected of me.”

“What was your job, exactly? Mom mentioned you did some writing.”

“I guess somebody figured out I could string sentences together, so they put me in the press office. It was new for me, having something I was good at. And it was interesting, meeting people, shaking hands with senators. Then I come home, and when someone finds out I’ve been over there—civilians, I mean—they get this look, almost as if they’re embarrassed for me.”

“I’m not embarrassed for you,” I said. “I’m proud.”

Heather stretched her arms in front of her, elbows locked, and cracked her knuckles two at a time—that old familiar gesture. She was herself, but different. She’d always been strong-willed, but now she seemed capable, composed. It was difficult to see in her the girl who had needed so much for so long, the difficult girl who had always been a crooked counterpoint to my straight and narrow.

“Why here?” I asked. “Why didn’t you go home?”

She smiled wryly and sang a line from that Steve Forbert song about Laurel—“
It’s a dirty stinking town, yeah
.… Anyway, it’s not my home now any more than it is yours.”

“There’s Mom,” I pointed out.

“The last thing Mom needs is more of my problems.” She picked up a pinecone from the ground beside her foot and began to pluck away the seeds. “I saw a lot, you know, terrible stuff. The day the kid hit me with the rock was by no means the worst. But for some reason that’s what I remember most vividly from all three tours of duty. I saw him step out from behind the tree, and I knew instantly that something was wrong, but he was a boy. A little boy. I was trying to get my helmet back on when the rock hit me, and for several seconds I didn’t know it was just a rock. I thought I’d been shot in the head. I really don’t even know how to describe it—you feel certain that you’re dead, and then you realize that you’re alive. And at that moment, do you know who I thought of?” She didn’t wait for my response. “I thought of you.”

I didn’t know what to say. Why was she here? What did she want from me? It felt tremendously manipulative, her sudden reappearance in my life, her unspoken demand that I allow her back in, forgive and forget. As relieved as I was to see her, I was also angry.

We sat for a couple of minutes in silence. Finally, I ventured another question. “Really, who’s the father?”

She didn’t look at me when she said, “You won’t believe me if I tell you.”

In the past, I’d discovered that if my sister preceded a statement with “You won’t believe me,” there was a pretty good chance she was right. But some nugget of truth was always buried in the fiction.
The challenge was in figuring out where the lies ended and the truth began.

“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Dennis says, jerking me back into the present.

“No.”

“Just like old times. Didn’t it feel good to get it off your chest?”

“Yes,” I lie. I open the bathroom door and go to Heather. She’s still sitting on the edge of the bed, her face pinched with pain.

“You know what I miss?” Dennis says.

“What?”

“You used to need me. When we talked, it was like you could relax and really be yourself. You said it was the best therapy. I bet Tom didn’t know, did he?”

“Know what?”

“How close we were, Julie. How much you revealed in our little heart-to-hearts.”

7:04 a.m
.

The gripman releases the brake, and we begin to move. The businesses are closed, but the sidewalks are already bustling. There is a man selling bear-shaped balloons, a scantily clad woman on stilts dressed like a sexy Uncle Sam, waving a banner that says,
DIVIDED WE FALL
on one side and
HAPPY HOUR ALL DAY AT EDINBURGH CASTLE
on the other.

The line on the sidewalk beneath the cable car sign has grown. The wind has picked up, a wet, stinging, San Francisco cold. The man with the baby stuffs his book into his messenger bag and retrieves a red fleece blanket, which he pulls over the backpack, concealing the baby’s head completely. The baby bobs around under there, laughing.

As the cable car screeches to a stop in front of us, the conductor opens the latticework gate, shouts “All aboard!” and steps back to let the passengers file on. The inner compartment fills up fast. When I was a kid in Mississippi, I used to watch movies on TV—
The Birds, I Love a Soldier
—and dream of being Tippi Hedren in a tailored suit or Paulette Goddard in overalls, making my way up and down the steep hills of this city by cable car. In my childhood daydreams I held on to a strap, balancing elegantly on the sideboard, but in reality I edge my way into an open seat on the outer bench, relieved to take
the pressure off my ankle. I lift my foot so that it is suspended a couple of inches above the floor. Passengers are still finding their seats when the conductor grabs the rope and jerks it back and forth with a whipping movement of his wrist.

I frantically text Heather.
You OK?

“I’m sitting in your chair, Doc,” Dennis says. “I’m looking at your calendar. You’re a really busy woman.”

I cringe at the thought of him touching my things.

Years ago, I underwent an intensive one-week training seminar in dealing with patients who became belligerent or threatening. The training had been mandated following an ugly scene at the Denver VA hospital that left three staffers and a patient dead. Two days of the seminar had been devoted to dealing with hostage situations. We used to have a one-day refresher course each year, but the course went the way of comprehensive psychiatric services and our full-time crisis counselor: it was lost to budget cuts.

One thing I do remember is the importance of establishing rapport with the hostage taker. But in this case, our rapport is the root of the problem. If we hadn’t been friends all those years ago, if I hadn’t climbed into his bed when I was twenty-two and lonely, if I hadn’t spilled everything to him after we lost Ethan, then he wouldn’t be in my office right now, holding three people I cared about at gunpoint.

“You let them get too close,” Betty warned me, years ago, when Dennis started getting weird. “This isn’t the first time.”