Golden State: A Novel by Michelle Richmond Page B

felt my head would burst with information, depressing shifts at the community clinic. But I remember with tremendous clarity that night at the Fillmore—the throb of the music, the heat, the bodies pressed against me, the unwilling horizontal flight over the crowd. I remember the hands around my waist, the feeling of floating in space—and Tom. We had two weeks to get to know each other before I started my summer rotation with the National Health Service Corps in Oakland, two short but densely packed weeks during which I fell completely, unquestionably, in love with him.
    The best thing about my relationship with Tom from there on out was that we had no messiness between us, no drama. After that night, I never dated anyone else. There were no ugly breakups and subsequent makeups, no questions of exclusivity. Our relationship felt like something I’d fallen into by some divine kind of luck.
    Years later, driving home from the VA hospital late on a summernight, I was startled to hear Tom telling the story of how we met on air. He played my pot-infused crowd-surfing for laughs, but when it came to his own role in the story, he didn’t whitewash a thing. “I thought I was getting a one-night stand,” he told his listeners. “Instead, I got a life.”

14
    Tom and I were in bed when I told him about Heather’s return. He was leaning against the pillows, reading
Q Magazine
. I sat beside him, rubbing lotion into my hands. It was a cool night, but the window was open anyway, the sea air drifting in through the screen. The foghorns were bellowing. I could see the neighbors' yappy dog relieving itself in their purple hydrangeas. “Buster boy,” the neighbor called in his thick Cantonese accent, “come here, Buster boy.” It was part of the nighttime litany of our life, the sound of the neighbor calling in the dog, and I imagined that if I lived anywhere else I’d have a hard time falling to sleep without it.
    Our house sits on a hill thirteen blocks from the Pacific Ocean, sandwiched between two similar houses, attached on both sides, the long narrow properties separated by wooden fences. Our bedroom—my bedroom now—is on the second floor, with a view to the backyard, and the neighbors’ yards, and beyond the yards the streets and houses sloping down to the long sands of Ocean Beach. The room is dominated by a very tall, long sleigh bed that we’d picked up at an estate sale in Berkeley during the first year of our marriage. At nighttime, especially with the foghorns going and the moonlight shining on the yards down below, the bed feels something like a ship, adrift on the edge of the city. Back then, it was the only placeI knew we could talk with no distractions, the only place quiet enough, and intimate enough, for me to share the startling news.
    Years before, when Heather had left to join the army, Tom had said he didn’t want to see her again. He’d meant it.
    “She’s back,” I said. There was no good way to tell him what had happened, no way to ease into the subject.
    “Who’s back?” he mumbled, still absorbed in his magazine.
    “She’s finished her active duty.”
    He put the magazine in his lap and stared at me, confused.
    “She came to the VA today,” I said.
    “She just showed up?”
    Down in the yard, Buster ran across the grass. Mr. Yiu stood by the fence in his sweatpants and T-shirt, waiting for the dog. Mr. and Mrs. Yiu had children and grandchildren in Fremont who came over on weekends, and they had brothers and sisters and parents and friends who joined them every Saturday night for mah-jongg. The room where they played was next to our bedroom; late into the night we’d hear the tiles slapping the table, the loud, happy voices, the Chinese opera they played on a very old tape deck.
    I often envied the liveliness of that house. Ours had once been lively, too—when we had Ethan. The sweet, incessant chatter, the playdates, the songs. In those days, the stereo was always on; Tom and I