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

to me that the guy who started the station in the fifties was from Montana, where he’d made his money on cattle.
    “I’m looking out my window, and I can see a big ugly cloud of smoke out near the Marina. Call in if you know the scoop. Let’s be calm, people. Let’s be civilized. There’s no need for this thing to be rancorous. Just ask lawyer Linda.”
    That last part’s for me. I’ll miss them, all those coded messages coming through the airwaves. I wish I’d written them down over the years, a secret history. After the divorce, how long will it take for him to replace me with someone else, to direct his mercurial comments to someone with whom he’s building a new, perhaps better, history? And how long will it take for me to truly start over, to find my way in unfamiliar terrain? The problem with marriage is that it provides a false sense of security. When you have walked down the aisle, when you have spent years building a life together, when your finances and emotional interests are so intricately intertwined, it can seem as if an essential part of your existence on this planet has been mastered. With the matter of love taken care of, you think you can concentrate on other things. It’s not that love is forgotten, only that it seems set in stone. Until you realize it isn’t.
    My old mentor, Dr. Bariloche, comes to mind.
    It was June, and I had just graduated from medical school. I should have been with the rest of my classmates, who were having a party to celebrate before everyone scattered to do residencies at hospitals around the country. There was a general feeling among us that one weight had been lifted, while another, more serious weight would soon be on our shoulders. The party promised to be a raucous affair, a fitting end to four hard years. Instead, I was at a funeral.
    At sixty-five, Dr. Bariloche was still a substantial woman, tall and sturdy. She and her husband, a graphic designer nine years her junior, had planned to travel the world together as soon as she retired. That afternoon, as Dr. Bariloche and I stood on the damp lawn outside the church, she said to me, with tears in her eyes, “I picked him young so he wouldn’t die on me. Honestly, if I’d known he would have a heart attack at fifty-six, I’m not so sure I would have married him. Is that wrong?”
    “Not at all,” I reassured her, though I was thinking that maybe it was.
    I held her arm as we navigated to the limousine and joined the procession of cars headed back to her house, where her niece had organized the mourners. At some point, several hours later, I noticed that Dr. Bariloche had disappeared. I found her sitting alone in the bedroom, drinking a glass of wine, examining the books on the shelf.
    “Come in,” she said, motioning for me to sit on the bed beside her. She reached out and ran her fingers over the books on the shelf, stopping on a worn blue spine. “I remember when this book came out,” she said. “I’d just started my residency, my first day on the job. I was walking back to my apartment from the hospital, and there was a large display in the window of the bookstore, stacks and stacks of this book. I went in and bought it. A man had bled to death in front of me that day. He’d been stabbed, and the orderlies wheeled him in, and as the blood was pouring out of a wound in his side I froze for several crucial seconds. Afterward, I walked around in a daze. I bought the book because I needed something to distract me.”
    I sat there in silence, feeling the warmth of her body next to me on the bed. The room was cold and smelled of vanilla candles. Though she had never been easy on me, had at times, in fact, made my life miserable, it is fair to say that I loved her.
    “The day I bought this book was the end of one life, the beginning of another,” Dr. Bariloche said. “The day I met my husband was another beginning. The day he died, another ending. And here I am unfortunately, beginning again. The problem