Golden State: A Novel (2 page)

Both of us are startled by the footsteps on the stairs. Our eyes lock.

A knock on the door. I open my mouth to answer, but Heather brings a finger to her lips.

The knock again, more insistent this time.

“Dr. Walker?” I recognize the voice—Greg Watts from security. Relief washes over me. I shove the desk away from the door just enough to let him in. At sixty going on forty-five, Greg has the slim, athletic build of a runner. He looks me over quickly, grimacing.

“You okay, Dr. Walker?”

“Fine.”

He glances at Heather. “What about her?”

“We’re managing. It would be great if we could get a nurse and supplies.”

“Nobody wants to cross that parking lot,” he says. “Not after Eleanor. Not after he shot at you.”

“
You
crossed the parking lot.”

Greg holds up a cellphone. The blue Mute light is flashing. “Special delivery. He wasn’t going to shoot his own messenger.”

I look at the phone, uncomprehending. “What?”

“He wants to talk to you.”

“Shit.”

“He says if he can’t talk to you, someone’s going to get hurt.”

“Where is he now?”

“He broke into your office.”

I take a shaky breath. My office. I think of the photos on the desk, the art on the walls, the radios from Tom, the sand dollar from an afternoon on the beach with Ethan. If he wanted to get inside my head, he’s done it.

“Anyone else?”

“Betty Chen.”

Betty’s worked ICU for twenty-six years. A nice woman, a gifted nurse, very calm, four kids and eleven grandkids spread out all over the country. Every year, she and her husband travel by RV to Florida, New Jersey, Ohio, and Montana to see all of them.

“Better staff than patients.”

Greg shakes his head. There’s something he doesn’t want to tell me. “He’s got Rajiv.”

My heart sinks. Twenty-seven years old, in his final year of residency, Rajiv is my chief resident and my favorite student. In a couple of months, he’s getting married. I’ve been looking forward to the wedding.

I press the Mute button and take a deep breath.

“Hello?”

“So,” a familiar voice says, “I finally got your attention.”

6:27 a.m., June 15

For several moments everything seems normal—the smell of bacon from Lee’s, the streetlamps on Spear Street, the damp air against my skin. Then a plume of smoke to the west catches my eye. A fire. I try to calculate the distance from here to there, try to draw a map in my mind.

A curb—such an ordinary thing: five inches from sidewalk to street. I’ve stepped off this particular curb into this particular street hundreds of times, and yet today, in my distraction, I misjudge its location. My right foot comes down hard, twisting inward. A snapping sound. A jolt of pain from ankle to knee.

I move quickly, counting steps to distract myself from the pain: a full step on the left foot, a half step on the right. Suddenly, my run-down Jeep Cherokee, the one I can’t bring myself to get rid of, seems like a luxury. Once I get to the Jeep, everything will be fine. It’s only seven miles across the city, from one end to the other. Seven miles to Heather, who texted me minutes ago:
It’s time
.

Customers are already seated at the counter of the deli. Lee’s usually doesn’t get busy until later, but on this day, people want to be together. The door is open, the small television above the cash register is tuned to CNN, and CNN is tuned to California.

I limp down Spear Street, across Folsom, grateful for the sun
glinting off the tall glassy buildings, the briny smell drifting in from the bay, the rumble of traffic moving over the bridge. How many times have I walked these two blocks at precisely this time of morning? In the first year of our marriage, I did it once or twice a week, after spending the night at the radio station with Tom, keeping him company before my own workday began. He stowed a blanket and pillow in the closet for just this purpose, and I would fall asleep on the couch, the sound of his voice a pleasing background music to my dreams. Later, there were the years with Ethan, when the station was the furthest thing from my mind. In those days, I would tuck Ethan into bed, lie down beside him until he fell asleep, then curl up on the sofa with a book or, more often, a medical journal, listening for the sweet, miraculous sound of his breathing. Those nearly perfect years, when we felt, so briefly, like a family.

Up ahead, the Jeep comes into view. Just one more block, and I can rest my ankle. I’ve sprained it before—last year, in fact, running a half-marathon—but this is different. The snapping sound, the feel of something ripping beneath the skin. A level 3 sprain, at least; more likely, it’s fractured. The initial treatment is simple, straightforward, one of those medical school basics you never forget: RICE—rest, ice, compression, elevation. But there’s no time now.

As I hobble forward, I imagine how my ankle would look in an X ray: the ligaments stretched and torn, blood from the ruptured vessels spilling into the surrounding tissues. Visualizing the X ray gives me comfort—a point of reference, a matter of perspective. Every pain has its cause. That’s what I tell my patients when a diagnosis is elusive. For most, it comes as welcome reassurance: something specific is making them suffer, and I will do my best to find it.

Later, at the VA hospital, after all is said and done with Heather, I’ll have one of my colleagues set the foot. There will be a cast or boot, the awkward fact of crutches. Any other day, I’d take something strong to reduce the swelling and dull the pain, but today, Tylenol will have to do. I don’t want anything to blur my mind or blunt my senses. I want to be fully present, absolutely alert, for the task at hand.

The drive should be a straight shot down California Street. Normally, it would take half an hour, tops. Now there’s no telling. The most unsettling part of all of this is the uncertainty. At this time tomorrow, where will we be? I mean this in the broadest sense: not just my husband, my sister, me, but also our state, our country.

A thundering racket fills the air. It’s a helicopter, wobbling overhead like some big, clumsy bird. A white bundle drops. My breath catches; a baby is falling from the sky. But then the bundle breaks apart, and the sky is aflutter with something white and snowlike. The chopper shifts; a second bundle drops. The helicopter moves inland in its jerky, graceless way. One of the snowflakes drifts down and settles at my feet. A rectangular piece of white paper, printed with the image of the California flag. Beneath the flag, a slogan is printed in thick red letters:
VOTE YES FOR SUCCESS!

The smoke in the distance has grown darker, taller. Where is it, exactly? How far might it spread? And how fast? No good jumping to conclusions. More than likely it’s a garden-variety emergency—a kitchen explosion, a cigarette left smoldering on a mattress. There have been rumors, of course, predictions—riots, destruction, looting—but I have to believe that the whole thing, whatever its outcome, will go off in an orderly fashion. I’m not alone in this thinking. “This is, after all, a reasonable state,” our governor said last night, “and we are a reasonable people.”

But there’s something wrong: glass on the ground, lots of it. It looks as though someone has taken a baseball bat to the line of cars parked along the curb. Three cars in a row, all vandalized—the Prius in front of me, the BMW behind, and in the middle, my humble Jeep. The windshield has been smashed, a sunburst of broken glass. The driver’s door is open. The stereo—just a year old, a gift from Tom—is gone. Both back tires are flat. Despite all the dire warnings, I envisioned a day of relative calm, the voters going peacefully about their business. It’s true that what we’re doing here has polarized the nation. “Save the Union” rallies in other states have degenerated to angry shouting matches. A pro-secession organizer was shot dead in New York, the campaign office of a sympathetic congresswoman
was torched in Florida, and the governor of California has been deluged with hate mail. For the past two months, it seems, the whole country has been simmering. Still, deep down, I wanted to believe that California could get through this without a hitch, that in the midst of the storm, we could be civilized.

I dial my husband. “Call me when you get there,” he said when I walked out the door. One of those matrimonial habits that will be so hard to break. The constant communication, the endless mundane updates: I’m here, or we need bread, or I’ll be home late, or I’m safe.

Last night at the station, he used my cellphone to call his, which he’d lost again. He was always asking me to help him find his keys, his watch, some novel he was in the middle of reading. How many hours have I reclaimed since he moved out, by not having to help him find his lost things? What I’ve done with those hours, I can’t say. You think you’re so busy until you’re alone, and then you discover the disconcerting phenomenon of time on your hands. Last night when he dialed his number a song started playing, muted, from another room, and we followed the tinny music to the staff lounge, where we found the phone buried beneath a sofa cushion. “When did you change the ring tone?” I asked. For years his ring tone for my number had been set to Steve Forbert, “Romeo’s Tune.” He chose it for that line about southern kisses, and because Forbert is from Meridian, Mississippi, fifty-eight miles from my hometown.

Last night, it played a different song—some instrumental I didn’t recognize. “It’s Ryuichi Sakamoto,” he said. “ ‘Put Your Hands Up.’ ”

“Going mellow in your old age?”

“You’d like him,” he promised. “I’ll make you a CD.”

He will, too. In a few days, I’ll come home from work to find a padded envelope in the mailbox, a CD with a playlist, something on which he’s spent hours, each song containing a message I’ll be tempted to try to decipher. “It’s just songs,” he’s told me a hundred times. “There’s no secret message.”

I imagine him sitting at his new desk—a small, sleek, modern affair—writing our address on the envelope. The desk came with his
loft, a six-month lease south of Market, fully furnished. The place looks like a midcentury-modern showroom, everything tasteful and angular and somewhat cold, none of it scaled quite right for Tom. At six foot five and solid, he has a knack for making ordinary tables and chairs look like children’s furniture.

Last night, over Thai take-out at the radio station, he made a proposition: “We can start over. Dinner, movies, late-night games of Monopoly and Life.”

What I was thinking, but didn’t say, was that we’d already played the game of life. We’d had a nice go of it, too—the house, the sex, the dinner parties, the risks and rewards, even, for a while, the child. I imagine the board game, the colorful spinning wheel and the clunky buildings, the hopeful couple in a little plastic car, a blue peg in the backseat—a happy family. In the end, though, it didn’t hold.

Tom answers the phone. “Everything okay?”

“Someone broke into the Jeep. Glass everywhere. Can I take your car?”

Add that to the list of matrimonial habits that die hard: communal property.

“It’s not here,” he says. “I took the bus. For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’d get far. I just heard there’s a police blockade at Stockton—a protest turned violent, and now they’re dispersing the crowd.”

“How do they do that?”

“Tear gas, apparently. It’s ugly.”

So much for being civilized in the midst of the storm.

“Your best bet is to walk to California and Davis,” Tom says, “catch the cable car to Van Ness, then pick up whatever bus is heading west.”

“That’s not as easy as it sounds. I just busted up my ankle.”

“Seriously? Hold on.”

Some clicking and whirring in the background as he changes the song, and then his voice is so clear through the phone that he could be standing beside me: “A little Chris Isaak to get us in the mood this morning, folks. Quintessential California.”

For as long as I’ve known Tom, there have been two of him—the public and the private—and I have felt by turns proud and grateful to be a part of his real and secret life, the one lived off the air. Although sometimes, it’s true, the boundaries have blurred. Like when a colleague at work would ask how I’d enjoyed my meal the night before at such-and-such restaurant, though I was certain I hadn’t told anyone I was going to eat there. Or they’d mention my problems with the roof, which had to be replaced.

“I never reveal anything too personal,” Tom used to say when I protested. Still, I felt exposed. Now, Chris Isaak is singing “San Francisco Days,” and my husband is back on the line. I half-expect him to spill out the details of our divorce on the air, to list, item by item, all the ways we failed to make it work.

“Want me to come down and get you?”

“And do what? Carry me across town?”

“It’d be just like old times. Except, of course, it wouldn’t. You never needed me to carry you anywhere.”

“End on an up note,” I say.

“Jules.”

“Hmm?”

There’s a pause on the other end, a sigh, while Chris Isaak croons,
I still love you, I still want you
. The message is one of surrender, of complete devotion; but the words never quite fit the moment. There’s always something lost in translation between lyrics and real life.

“Jules, are you sure you want to go through with this?”

Tom always could speak my name in a way that drowned out all the background noise. It’s that voice, bred for the radio. His father is a natural crooner, a successful businessman who sings Johnny Cash tunes at local fairs and corporate events in his spare time. He sang a couple at our wedding—“I Walk the Line” and, because he’s not without a sense of humor, “Folsom Prison Blues.” My husband doesn’t sing, he talks, but it doesn’t matter what he says. He could be reciting the alphabet or reading the phone book, and people would listen. Even me. Even when he’s just saying my name. Especially when he’s saying my name.

“Jules, are you still there?”

End on an up note
. It’s what my residency adviser, Dr. Bariloche, used to say on rounds. No matter how bad the news, exit the room with a smile, she would tell us. In the early days, I took her advice as gospel, but over the years I came to realize she’d been mistaken. Sometimes optimism is not called for. Sometimes, what is needed is an acknowledgment of just how bad things are, and how much worse they might get.