Golden State: A Novel (16 page)

For weeks after that, the sound of the phone ringing tied my stomach in knots. Every time, I was terrified it would be her. But the phone call never came, and, gradually, I began to relax. After that visit, we didn’t hear from her for more than a year, and I began to believe that she wanted nothing more to do with Ethan.

“It must be so hard to think about giving him up,” people would say when they learned of our situation. “I could never do it.”

And I would think,
I can’t do it either. If it ever comes to that, I won’t be able to
.

On the radio, the song comes to a close, John Lennon singing softly about his beautiful boy.

And then Tom is on the air, saying, “I know a girl who thinks I’ve forgotten. That was my mistake. But here’s the thing: I never forgot.”

“So you and your sister have reconciled?” Dennis asks.

“Something like that.”

“Then why is she staying at the VA hotel? Why isn’t she staying with you?”

“She thought it would be easier this way.”

“Right,”

I don’t like the way he says it—like he’s judging me, judging us.

When the guy whose apartment Heather was borrowing returned home a few days ago, I invited her to stay at my place, but she refused. “It would be weird,” she said.

“Weird how?”

But as soon as I said it, I realized she was probably remembering the last time she spent the night, when everything went to hell.

“The VA hotel is clean and cheap,” she said. “Anyway, I like being around the other vets. I feel at home there.”

It’s not what I would have chosen, Heather having the baby with me at the VA, but she insisted.

“I haven’t delivered a baby in ages,” I’d pointed out months ago, when she’d first made the request.

“But you
have
done it,” she said. “It was part of your training, right?”

I nodded. “One month on the maternity ward at San Francisco General.”

“It freaked you out the first time,” she reminded me. “Placenta all over the floor, shit on your surgical gloves.”

“Right,” I said, remembering it as clearly as if it had been yesterday. “They came in too late for an epidural, and the father was screaming at me to do something about his wife’s pain. I think his exact words were ‘Can’t you do something to put her out of her goddamn misery?’ ”

“The baby was fine,” Heather reminded me. “The mom was fine. The dad hugged you at the end and gave you a coupon for a free salad bar at Fresh Choice. By the time your month in the ward was up, you told me you could have delivered babies in your sleep.”

“It was a very long time ago.”

“You’ll be great, Julie. Like riding a bicycle.”

“The VA doesn’t even have a maternity ward.”

“I don’t need the bells and whistles,” Heather said. “Women have babies at home in the bathtub every day. Need I remind you of the lowly circumstances of your own birth?”

She was talking about a supermarket in Jones County, Mississippi, where my mother had been hiding out from a tornado when she went into labor with me. The very thought of my seventeen-year-old mother on her back in the storage room, being coached through her contractions by a middle-aged store manager named Ryan Ranahan, who kept repeating, “There’s nothing to it, honey,” made me queasy. Our mother used to say that I’d summoned the weather. “All drama from the word go,” she’d say. “Not Heather. Heather came along quiet as a feather.” Which was true. My sister made her entrance following two hours of labor in a near-empty maternity ward, took one blurry look at my mother, and fell asleep.

“Heather was the sleepy one,” our mother used to say. “You were the hungry one.” Moments after my entrance into the world, while the storm ripped the roof off the store and the manager fumbled around in the dark for a pair of scissors to cut the cord, I’d climbed my mother’s slick belly and latched onto her breast with a ferocity
that astounded her. Tree limbs plowed through the windows, produce flew like ammunition, and I drank.

“That was a different time and place,” I told Heather. “Mom did what she had to do. There’s no reason for you to have anything but the very best care.”

“You’re my sister,” she countered. “Who’s going to take care of me better than you?”

“Think of the red tape,” I said. “There’s paperwork, there’s protocol.”

“Are you telling me that if a woman walked into your hospital in labor—a veteran, no less—you’d turn her away?”

“No, but—”

She reached over and grabbed my hands. “Listen,” she pleaded, and I knew there was more she wasn’t saying. “This is really, really important to me.”

Her eyes were wet, her expression so hopeful. I saw the jagged scar on her forehead, the way she turned her left ear toward me. I thought of all the time she’d spent in the army, trying to atone.

“I’ll think about it.”

“Okay,” she said, grinning in that way she used to as a kid, when she knew she’d gotten her way.

“If you’re honest,” Dennis says, “there’s a little part of you that wishes someone else was delivering the baby. Am I right, Doc?”

I glance over at Heather, who is standing beside the bed, leaning on the mattress for support. “No, I don’t think so.”

“And a little part of you,” he says, “that wants to take the baby and run.”

After Heather’s return, she met me every Wednesday at the VA. She would be waiting in the cafeteria when I arrived before my morning shift, the day’s
Chronicle
spread on the table in front of her. The paper would be covered with pen marks; she insisted on reading, despite the headaches, and had worked out a system of summarizing each paragraph in the margin before moving on to the next.

“I’m trying to teach myself how to remember again,” she told me.

Beside the newspaper would be a plate of eggs and bacon, hash browns smothered in ketchup, an empty milk carton. In the past, she’d been a stingy eater, preferring cigarettes to meals. It pleased me to see her enjoying her food, filling up for the baby’s sake. While she finished her breakfast I’d order two coffees from the Starbucks—regular for me, decaf for her—and we would walk the rocky path down to the cliffs. We settled into the routine as if by accident, without any discussion, and I began looking forward to our weekly walks, during which my sister and I slowly got to know each other again.

For me, it was a process of discovery more than one of reacquaintance. Heather had changed in so many ways, it was difficult to recognize in her the young woman who had walked out of my life
more than four years before. The one thing that mercifully had not changed was her accent. Heather could still draw a two-syllable word out to kingdom come. When we were together, I found my own accent creeping back.

There was much we could say to each other, and much that, still, we could not. On the subject of our childhood, and of our mother, of the father who died and the one we never knew, as well as the subject of the town that we had both left behind, we talked extensively. Sometimes, caught off guard, she might talk about the army.

“What I remember most from my first tour is the darkness,” she said once. “At night, it was pitch-black. There was no outside lighting at the base, and there was nothing nearby to provide even a smidgen of light. Some guy had brought
The Dark Side of the Moon
with him, and he’d play that song “Brain Damage” over and over again in the middle of the night, and we’d all be lying there in our cots in the blackest black you can imagine, complete darkness, complete silence except for Pink Floyd, and the words would get inside my head—you know the song.” And Heather sang a few lines.

I tried to imagine her lying there on a cot in the dark, but all I could conjure was an image of Heather at six, climbing into my bed in the middle of the night, too scared to sleep alone.

As for the matter of what happened to drive us apart, we were less vocal, as if we had made some silent agreement never to discuss it. While Ethan was clearly there between us—an accusation and an apology—it was as if we both feared that, by saying his name aloud, we might destroy our fragile newfound peace.

We instead settled into a gentler parody of our old selves—batting soft insults back and forth, allowing affection to seep in through the cracks instead of expressing it outright. It worked for us, felt more natural than the emotionally direct conversations sisters always have in movies, tears flowing without embarrassment. I couldn’t imagine talking to Heather that way. We both inherited this sense of emotional distance from our mother, who hugged us quickly each night before bed and saved her I-love-yous for birthdays and special occasions.
It always caught me slightly by surprise on Christmas morning, when the meager presents had been opened and the floor lay strewn with wrapping paper, and our mother, seeming truly happy, would look at each of us in turn and say, “I love you, Julie. I love you, Heather.”

Gradually, Heather began stopping by the hospital unannounced. In the early evening, after my shift had ended, I would find her sitting on the bench near the entrance, and I would take her to dinner, or we would go see a movie at the Balboa. A couple of times, I went over to her place in the Mission and she made the Lahori beef, which was just as good as she’d promised. At first, I told Tom every time I saw her. But gradually, as his disapproval grew, I stopped mentioning our meetings.

Eventually, my lies of omission led to more outright dishonesty. One Saturday, when Heather called to ask if I wanted to meet her for lunch, I told Tom that I had to go in to work. I was surprised by how easily the lie rolled off my tongue.

One Sunday three months after Heather’s reappearance, she asked, “What do I have to do to get invited over?”

“Come over this weekend,” I said impulsively.

“Really?” she said, her eyes lighting up.

When I told Tom, he was furious. “I told you back then that I never wanted her to step foot in this house again, Julie. I haven’t changed my mind.”

He stood at the kitchen counter, stirring sugar into his coffee.

“Let’s go out then,” I persisted.

“No thanks.”

“Where does that leave me?” I asked, setting my cup on the counter so hard coffee sloshed over the edge. “She’s my sister. She’s part of my life.”

“That’s a choice you’ve made,” he replied, “but I don’t have to be involved.”

“If you had a sibling, you’d understand. It was four years ago! She went to war, for God’s sake.”

“You didn’t make her go.”

“Maybe not, but she went
because
of me, and now that she’s back, it just feels right, having her around. She’s my family!”

“
I’m
your family.”

“That’s different. Heather is my blood.” What I didn’t say was that the thing he and I had together didn’t feel much like family anymore.

“What about Ethan?” he said. “No blood ties, but we were a family.”

“Don’t bring him into this,” I spat, furious.

“Isn’t this all about him, when it comes down to it? When we lost Ethan, I lost you, too.”

“I’m still here.”

“No, you’re not! And do you know what really kills me? You’ve got it in your head that this terrible thing happened to you, but it happened to
us
, Julie. I loved that little boy every bit as much as you did.” He was shaking with anger. “All these years, I’ve tried to move on, for us, because before Ethan, we were good together. We were so in love. Don’t you remember?”

“Of course I remember,” I said, taking a step toward him.

Tom backed away, putting his hands up to block me. “But after we lost him, you shut down on our marriage. It’s been
years
, and I keep waiting for you to come around. I’ve been so goddamned patient. But you never come around, Julie. You brought this child into our lives, and even though I wasn’t ready to be a dad yet, I said yes, because you wanted it so much. I put everything into being a father to that little boy—
everything
. And it’s like it never occurred to you that I have every right to be really furious with you, because it was
your
sister who fucked everything up for us. You knew her better than anyone.”

He lowered his voice to almost a whisper and delivered the final blow: “All this time, you’ve never taken any goddamned responsibility for what she did.” He flung his spoon into the sink, and it clattered against the stainless steel.

Now I was the one who was shaking. I collapsed into the kitchen
chair. Something dawned on me with a slow and terrifying force. “You blame me. All this time, you’ve blamed
me
.”

He was silent.

Outside, there was the sound of empty cans rattling; someone was going through our recycling. Because there were no windows in our kitchen, just a skylight, the room was subject to the whims of fog and clouds; it suddenly grew dark.

“What about when the baby comes?” I asked finally. “What if she wants to bring the baby over here? Are you going to forbid that, too?”

“What the fuck, Julie!” He walked to the table and stood towering over me. He grabbed my chin and turned my face toward him. “Look at me!”

His face was glowing with anger. He’d never touched me like that before, so rough, so implacable. I was too stunned—too scared—to pull away. “She destroyed us once,” he said, his voice so cold it gave me chills. “Now you’re letting her do it again.”

That weekend, Heather did come over. Tom cleared out before she got there. When she arrived, I was still cleaning, rearranging. She thrust a spider plant into my hands. “I never know what to get for a hostess gift.”

“It’s perfect. I’ll try not to kill it.”

She slipped off her jacket—soft blue suede, big pearly buttons.

“This is gorgeous,” I said, sneaking a peek at the label as I hung the jacket in the hall closet. Vera Wang. “Where did you get it?”

“A gift,” she said.

“At least we know he has good taste.”

She wandered into the living room, stopped to take it all in. “It’s different,” she remarked.

“We painted, moved the furniture around.”

She walked over to the sofa, put one arm out behind her, one arm on her stomach, and eased herself down. Even though she wasn’t very big yet, she already moved differently, aware of her growing belly. She’d always been a naturally graceful person, and it was strange to see her so awkward. She ran her hand over the leather grain of the sofa. “It’s softer than it looks.”