Golden State: A Novel (26 page)

“I’ll be damned. That’s where my ex-girlfriend lived. Room 215. Whatever you do, don’t eat in the cafeteria.”

“If you live in Connecticut, why’d you have a girlfriend at Mississippi State?”

“Harry’s big brother introduced us. What can I say? I like southern girls.” His gaze traveled from my face, down to my breasts, my
hips, my legs. I felt my cheeks turning red. “I like the way you walk, like you’ve got nowhere you need to be. The girls I know back home are always in a hurry.”

“Maybe I’m in a hurry,” I said.

“You sure don’t look like it.”

He shut off the engine. His hands were small, his nails manicured. In his left ear he wore a tiny gold stud. From his rearview mirror hung an air freshener shaped like a star.

“Isn’t that redundant in a convertible?” I pointed at the air freshener.

“You’re funny.”

He seemed harmless. His skinny good looks were growing on me. I couldn’t imagine him ever throwing a football, much less quoting the Bible, and I liked that. In Laurel, even the bad boys could recite John 3:16 in their sleep. I took a step toward the car.

“Take off your sunglasses,” I said.

“It’s too bright,” he replied.

“Take them off,” I insisted. “I can’t see your eyes.”

I imagined myself in another body, another person altogether, the person I surely would be by the time I came home from college the following summer: confident, self-assured, adept at carrying on witty conversations with men who didn’t know a thing about me.

He relented. As soon as the glasses came off, I realized why he’d been so eager to keep them on. He was cross-eyed. The right eye looked straight at me, dark green and strangely beautiful, while the left eye pointed down toward his nose. I hoped the surprise didn’t register on my face. He put the glasses back on hastily, blushing, and I realized that in that brief moment, with that revelation, I’d gained the upper hand. Everyone has something to hide. Once that thing is exposed, a person is at a disadvantage. The trick I learned at that moment is to discover the other person’s secret before he discovers yours.

“How about that ride?” he said. “We can take a little detour through town, have a burger at the Barnette Dairyette.”

I thought about what it would be like to ride slowly down Oak
Street in the red Camaro next to the handsome out-of-towner. Everyone would wonder who he was, and how we’d met, and whether he was my boyfriend. For a few minutes I’d be someone else.

But something stopped me. My better instincts, maybe. My sense of self-preservation. “I have to go,” I blurted.

“Suit yourself.” He started the car and peeled away, the star-shaped air freshener spinning in the breeze.

When I told the story that night at the supper table, Heather chewed her butter beans thoughtfully and said, “He sounds nice. Why didn’t you get in the car? I would. It would be an adventure!”

Mom reached across the table and slapped Heather’s hand. “You most certainly would not get in a car with him or anybody else. Never accept a ride from a stranger, young lady, do you hear me?”

“Yes, Mama,” Heather said. But even then, I could see something in her eyes. I knew we were two very different people.

11:09 a.m
.

One bit of advice I sometimes give my patients who are in acute pain: concentrate on small details around you, the sights and sounds and smells. Focus on something external to distract your mind from the pain. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Now I put my advice into practice and notice a small cardboard contraption hanging from a tree, beneath a sign that says,
DO NOT TOUCH. SUDDEN OAK DEATH STUDY IN PROGRESS
. A plastic Coke bottle is nestled beneath a bush, filled with yellow liquid—most likely someone’s urine. A black squirrel scampers so close that the thought of rabies crosses my mind.

All of my body’s energy seems to be concentrated at the excruciating intersection of the fibula and the talus. By the time I make it to Crossover Drive, I’m biting my lip so hard I can taste blood. The road, which runs the width of the park north to south, connecting the Richmond District with the slightly bleaker and grittier Sunset District, is free of cars. A few protestors are on the road, making their way who knows where. I exit the park at Fulton. There’s no crowd here, but there’s something uneasy, not quite right, about the silence. I remember a hurricane in Biloxi, Mississippi, where we’d gone to visit a friend of my father’s when I was very small. My parents and I huddled with my father’s friend in the tiny closet while
the storm raged outside, and suddenly, the wind subsided. “The eye is passing over us,” my father explained to me. We stepped into the front yard, into an eerie calm. The yard was strewn with tree limbs, and the front porch swing had been torn off its hinges. My father pulled me closer. The air was still and hot, and smelled beautiful and green. We stood there for a few minutes, feeling awed and fearful, until the wind picked up again, and we rushed inside, back into the closet, to wait out the other side of the storm.

It’s like that now. It feels as if I’ve stepped into the unpredictable eye of the storm, and I don’t know what to expect on the other side.

The pain and exhaustion and terror blend into one; the sun glints off the ocean in the distance.
Swing, step, swing, step, swing, step
. Passing an abandoned bus stop, I find myself thinking of an afternoon in Budapest, when Tom and I, four days into our honeymoon, stood in the rain waiting for a bus to Eger. A woman stood beside us, seeming not to notice the rain, eating bread from a paper bag. The bread smelled wonderful, and the bag was like a canvas, dark spots appearing where the raindrops fell. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around where I was, couldn’t understand how I had ended up so loved, and so completely happy.

As I move slowly past the avenues, the whitecaps of Ocean Beach visible at the bottom of the hill, it occurs to me that Ocean Beach, like the VA campus, is federal land. This part of town gets a bad rap for the fog, which is so dense in the heart of summer that you can’t see ten feet in front of your face. But October always brings a slew of warm, sunny days, so blue and bright you forget that winter is coming. Tom and I used to go to the beach with Ethan on days like that, and we’d build castles and dig moats in the wet gray sand. When we grew tired we would feast on Mexican soda and thick sandwiches from Fredy’s Deli. Those were wonderful days. After we lost Ethan, we stopped going. Just a year ago, while cleaning out the garage one morning, I found a stash of Ethan’s plastic buckets and shovels, still sandy. One of the buckets was filled with shells and sand dollars. I sat down on the floor, overwhelmed by memories. Tom found me there in the afternoon, still sitting among Ethan’s things. Without a
word he helped me to my feet. He guided me upstairs and into the bathroom, where he ran water in the tub, so hot the tiny bathroom filled with steam, undressed me gently, layer by layer, and helped me into the water. “Is it too hot?” he asked.

“It’s perfect.”

He sat on the edge of the tub. “Remember when we used to go there?”

“How could I forget? Ethan loved it.”

“No,” he said. “Before Ethan, I mean. Just the two of us.”

“Oh.” The memory slowly returned. He was right. We’d done it many times in the early years of our marriage. We would take a blanket and a bottle of wine, and we would watch the sun go down over the Pacific. Somewhere, there are photographs, in which I tried to capture the incredibly soft, velvet blue of the water. I wonder if I will come upon them someday and regret the path I’ve taken—away from those perfect moments on that perfect beach.

Finally, I reach Thirty-eighth Avenue. “Please let her be okay,” I mutter. I collapse on the bench at the abandoned bus stop and take a deep breath. Five hard blocks, and I’ll be there.

One Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago, I was supposed to meet Heather at Bi-Rite for ice cream. It was an unusually gorgeous, hot day, and everyone was out in shorts and tank tops. As usual, the line at Bi-Rite stretched down the block. I didn’t see Heather, so I got in line and waited. Ten minutes passed. I was sweating. As my turn drew nearer, with no sign of Heather, I called her cell. Getting no answer, I texted. Still no reply. I told myself not to worry—she hated answering the phone. Still, it was unlike her, these days, to flake on me when we had solid plans. When it came to appointments of any sort, she still had a military mindset. I called again and left a message.

A few minutes later, worried, I decided to walk to her sublet apartment just a few blocks up Valencia. I knocked on the door and waited. There was no answer. The curtains were drawn, so I couldn’t peek in the windows. I began to feel nervous.

I tried the door. It wasn’t locked. Inside, the place was dark and smelled of lavender. I called her name, but there was no answer. The apartment was small—one bedroom with a kitchen, bathroom, and living room. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves were packed with books. More freestanding bookshelves lined the hallway. It was a terrific apartment, nice hardwood floors and high ceilings. There
was a big bay window looking onto the street. I opened the curtains, and the room filled with light.

“Heather?”

The bedroom door was closed. I was about to step down the narrow hallway and knock on the door when a photograph on the table beside the sofa caught my eye. I was sure it hadn’t been there before. It was a grainy five-by-seven in black and white, portraying a smiling Heather in desert fatigues, her hair pulled back in a high bun. She looked tired, but at the same time she looked vibrant, happy. The photo had been taken inside a room that seemed strangely palatial, with a high ceiling and a big chandelier, and shot from across a large, gilded coffee table. From the odd angle of the shot, I guessed that the camera had been propped up and set on self-timer mode.

I picked up the photograph, not quite believing my eyes. Heather was sitting next to a man, someone whose face I recognized from other, more public photographs, from TV and newspapers. It was the governor, looking strangely unlike himself behind a three-day beard. He was wearing a denim button-down with the sleeves rolled up; on TV, I’d never seen him in anything other than a suit. He wasn’t facing the camera. He was gazing at Heather, as if he was about to tell her something.

“Impossible,” I whispered.

I searched the photo for seams, for signs that it had been doctored, inexplicable alterations in light and shadow. I studied the hand draped over Heather’s shoulder, the proportions and probability. My first instinct was to marvel at the intricacy of the lie, the precision of the ruse, the bold lengths to which Heather would go to keep her story intact. But then a thought crossed my mind: What if, this time, she was telling the truth?

The bedsprings creaked, a doorknob turned, and Heather stepped into the hallway, her belly huge under an old T-shirt, her legs bare. She rubbed her eyes. “Shit. I’m sorry. I was supposed to meet you for ice cream. After lunch I was so tired I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I lay down to take a quick nap, and I was out like a light.”

She noticed the picture in my hand. She smiled, as if to say she’d
won this round but she wasn’t going to gloat. “I’ll go change,” she said. “The salted caramel cone is calling my name.”

She went back into the bedroom. I set the picture down. I had to recalibrate. There was no denying that it was my sister in the photograph. There was no denying that the man beside her was the governor.

As dresser drawers opened and closed down the hall, I thought of Tom’s show,
Anything Is Possible
. In the early days, Tom used to try his topics out on me. Invariably there would be a debate—me playing the role of the skeptic, Tom playing the role of the one who believed in endless possibilities: time travel, heaven, ESP, peace in the Middle East. It was almost always easy for me to argue against him, because his topics frequently struck me as absurd, just myths and mirrors, the stuff of imagination, not science. But slowly, over time, Tom began to wear away at my doubt: a general from the NASA Ames Research Center came on the show to explain why we would colonize Mars by 2025; a well-known neuroscientist and former atheist described his own near-death experience, which had caused him to reconsider the possibility of life after death.

I’d grown up in a world where even the most mundane things sometimes seemed impossible, and where dreams were always tamped down by reality. “Medical school?” one teacher had scoffed during my junior year of high school. “Don’t get your hopes up. There’s a good nursing school in Jackson, though.” There was a hometown boy who’d left Laurel in the 1950s and made a name for himself in Hollywood, and he was still revered in the town as a kind of miracle, an anomaly. Another local boy had briefly stood at the helm of a wildly successful Fortune 500 company. The town was proud of these unusual native sons, but also mistrustful. That the actor ultimately met an unfortunate end in a drunk driving accident and the Fortune 500 executive ended up in jail for insider trading seemed fitting; if you aimed too high, you were bound to pay the price.

In my mother’s mind, fame and even simple good fortune happened to other people, from other places. After all, she and my father had dared to dream: his job at the bank, the briefly owned
Lincoln Continental, the golden ideal of growing old together. None of it had come to fruition. The idea of our family’s hard luck was so ingrained in her that when I was accepted to medical school, she told me there would still be a place for me at home “if it doesn’t work out.” And she really seemed to believe that it wouldn’t. She had a certain idea of how the world was supposed to operate for people like us. My life, to her, seemed unfathomable, some fantasy bubble that was bound, eventually, to burst.

I thought I had trained myself not to think like that. My own life served as evidence that it was possible to break the chains of circumstance, that one could rise above expectations. But as I stood in Heather’s apartment, looking at the photo of her and the governor, struggling with my own disbelief, I had to wonder if, perhaps, I was more like my mother than I thought. Had I become too doubtful, too closed off to see what Tom liked to refer to as “the endless possibilities of the world”?