Golden State: A Novel by Michelle Richmond

she was staying, but she promised to meet me in the cafeteria again the following Wednesday.
    Meanwhile, I braced myself for the possibility that she wouldn’t be back. I couldn’t stop thinking about the baby. I fantasized about holding it, rocking it to sleep, feeding it bottles, carrying it through the city in a sling, its warm body snug against me. It was a leap, I knew, one that assumed so many things: that Heather would decide to have the baby, that she would remain nearby, and that she would allow me to be involved.
    So when I walked into the VA cafeteria on the scheduled day and saw her sitting there, fifteen minutes early, I sighed with relief.
    I slid into the booth across from her. “Since when are you a morning person?”
    She folded up her paper. “There’s a lot you wouldn’t recognize about me. On the forward operating base in Kandahar, we had to be up at five. It’s amazing what you can accomplish in a day if you get up with the sunrise.”
    The army. Of course. It was the same answer she would give over the next few weeks for so many fundamental changes: her disciplinedexercise routine, her orderly finances, her complete sobriety. I’d heard different variations on the same theme from my patients. Aimless or troubled kids who went into the army because it was their last option and found peace and purpose in the intense drills, the set-in-stone hierarchy of command, the unrelenting requirements for the maintenance of one’s uniform, work station, and living quarters. During the years of her aimlessness, I’d thought what Heather needed was a college education, a career path, and a steady relationship. It turned out that what she needed was more drastic and far more simple: orders to follow, a clear path set by someone else, a purpose beyond herself.
    “It’s weird,” she said. “Growing up, I imagined a totally different life. When everything happened, I had to get away, I had to do something extreme. I remember walking down Sloat trying to figure out what to do. I looked up and saw the army recruiting office. I didn’t even think. I just went inside. It seemed like a sign.”
    By “everything,” I knew she really meant one thing. She meant Ethan. Of all the conversations I wanted to have with my sister, I wasn’t ready to have that one. Not yet. After all these years, the pain still felt too raw.
    “I’ve got a few minutes,” I said instead. “Want to walk?”
    When she stood up, my gaze instinctively went to her stomach.
    “You’re real subtle.” She patted her belly. “Yes, the creature is still in here.”
    “Does Mom know?”
    “Lord, no. She’d have her whole church praying for me.”
    I opened the back door of the cafeteria, and the salt air hit our faces, cool and sweet. I thought of the baby, growing day by day, a tiny collection of supercharged cells that might one day be my niece or nephew.
    When I looked at Heather, if I pushed the scrim of my anger aside, I still saw the infant girl in my arms, the toddler stepping out into the street half a second before I reached forward and pulled her back, the eighth grader weeping about a boy who’d kissed her at the Fourth of July fireworks and then ignored her, the teenager whocalled me to bail her out of jail after she got caught with marijuana, the college student who flunked out freshman year and was too scared to tell our mother, the young woman who always had some ill-advised boyfriend who didn’t treat her well and some crappy job that didn’t pay enough. The years of too much drinking and too many drugs. Things had never gone right for her; she had never been happy. Now maybe she could be.
    Heather and I took the Battle of the Bulge trail again, through the blackberry vines and over the footbridge, down and down until we reached the wider Lands End path, with its grand views out toward the sea. She told me about a Christina Aguilera concert she’d attended on the base, and in the same breath, she told me about the