Golden State: A Novel by Michelle Richmond Read Free Book Online

from the window, angling the left side of her face toward me. “Sorry?”
    “You’re favoring your left ear,” I said, and it dawned on me that she’d been doing it all along.
    She frowned. “IED. My right ear is shot. The doctor called it sensorineural hearing loss.”
    “Didn’t they give you a hearing aid?” I asked.
    “Yes, but I hate it.”
    “Are you okay otherwise?”
    “Ten fingers, ten toes,” she said. “I’m okay. There are little things, of course. I’ve started getting headaches.” She tapped the newspaper in front of her. “I have to read the same paragraph over and over. I can’t remember the last time I made it through a novel.”
    I thought of her as a child, all those Nancy Drew mysteries and Judy Blume books and Chronicles of Narnia volumes stacked onthe floor beside her night table, how she’d read them into the wee hours, so that I’d have to drag her out of bed in the morning and practically dress her for school myself.
    “Besides the headaches,” she continued, “I can’t always control my temper. I get really mad about the dumbest things. The last VA doc I saw said the temper doesn’t have anything to do with the explosion, that it’s typical PTSD, but I’m not sure.”
    “If I were deaf in one ear, I’d be pissed, too,” I said.
    Heather grinned. “I see you haven’t lost your winning bedside manner.”
    I didn’t tell her that I see ravages of PTSD every day: drug addiction, alcoholism, domestic violence, depression. I didn’t tell her about the kid who ended up in the ER every couple of months for repeated suicide attempts. The last one succeeded.
    “What really gets me is that I can’t remember the punch lines to my favorite jokes,” she said. “I’ll start telling one, and I’ll get halfway through it before I realize I don’t know how it ends.” Jokes had always been Heather’s way of saying hello, saying goodbye, flirting, even apologizing. As a kid, she would spend hours at the kitchen table, scribbling jokes in a bright red notebook.
    “Anyway, here I sit, right? All in one piece. With a sexy war wound to boot.” She brushed aside her bangs, and I repressed a gasp. There was a three-inch scar just above her left eyebrow.
    “Jesus, who did that?” Someone had botched the stitching, leaving a jagged, raised line along her forehead.
    “It wasn’t the medic’s fault. Our convoy was on patrol near the COB, driving down this rural road. It was deserted, or so we thought—nothing to see for miles around. It feels like something’s crawling around in my helmet, so stupidly, I take it off, just for a second, and this kid, couldn’t have been more than ten, eleven years old, steps out from behind a tree, grinning. He’s covered in dust, because everything and everybody there is covered in dust, but even so you can tell he’s a beautiful kid, big brown eyes, wavy hair, like he just stepped out of one of those old Benetton catalogs. He reaches into his pocket and lobs this big, sharp rock at me. It splits my skinright open. I’m bleeding like crazy, and then these older kids—fourteen, fifteen years old—start coming out of nowhere, only they don’t have rocks, they have guns. Our guys return fire, the kids start dropping like flies, and the driver just floors it. In the chaos we couldn’t find the medical kit, so somebody closed the wound up with superglue as we were barreling down the road. By the time I got to the field hospital, there wasn’t much they could do, aesthetically speaking.”
    “I can’t imagine what you’ve been through.” The words were inadequate. I’d known it all along of course, in the abstract. But being with her, hearing her stories, seeing the scars, made it real.
    “They were just kids,” Heather said, shuddering. “Anyway, you were asking me about something?”
    “Buddy,” I said, feeling foolish. I’d confronted this feeling many times with my patients. The conversation would turn to serious matters,