Free Golden State: A Novel by Michelle Richmond

woman who just returned from a war zone.”
    “Granted.” She tilted her head, looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read. “You’ve lost your accent, you know.”
    “It wasn’t intentional,” I said, somewhat defensively, but that wasn’t entirely true. “What was it like over there?” I asked, changing the subject.
    “You don’t want to know.”
    “Actually, I do. I kept waiting for an email, just something to say you were still alive. I recorded
News Hour
every night, I never missed it.” I didn’t tell her that I held my breath each time the television’ssound went mute and the names of the soldiers lost in action began to scroll across the screen. That the roll call of the dead always gutted me.
It could have been her
, I thought, every time.
    “If anything had happened to me, you would have heard it from Mom. Anyway, I made it out, didn’t I?” She shook her head. “Three tours. When I joined, I had no clue what I was in for. Then I get to basic training and I’m in with all these kids, these boys, eighteen, nineteen years old, full of themselves and all gung ho to go to war and start blowing people’s heads off. I was only twenty-five, but they made me feel old.”
    “I was stunned when you signed up. I guess I never thought of you as patriotic in that way.”
    “It wasn’t about that. By the time I joined, September eleventh was a distant memory. One of the guys who’d been there for a few years said what all of us were probably thinking. He said, ‘You don’t walk into a tent in Suwayrah and think of planes hitting the World Trade Center. You walk in and think, ‘Where did all these fucking flies come from?’ ”
    “So all that God-and-country stuff. None of it applied to you?”
    “My reasons were more selfish. The army was an escape.”
    “Hawaii is an escape. Paris, maybe. The Middle East, not so much.”
    She laughed. “In a lot of ways, being home is harder than it was over there. At least there I had a purpose. Each day I woke up and had a job to do. Sometimes it was the most menial, tedious task you can imagine, but I knew what was expected of me.”
    “What was your job, exactly? Mom mentioned you did some writing.”
    “I guess somebody figured out I could string sentences together, so they put me in the press office. It was new for me, having something I was good at. And it was interesting, meeting people, shaking hands with senators. Then I come home, and when someone finds out I’ve been over there—civilians, I mean—they get this look, almost as if they’re embarrassed for me.”
    “I’m not embarrassed for you,” I said. “I’m proud.”
    Heather stretched her arms in front of her, elbows locked, and cracked her knuckles two at a time—that old familiar gesture. She was herself, but different. She’d always been strong-willed, but now she seemed capable, composed. It was difficult to see in her the girl who had needed so much for so long, the difficult girl who had always been a crooked counterpoint to my straight and narrow.
    “Why here?” I asked. “Why didn’t you go home?”
    She smiled wryly and sang a line from that Steve Forbert song about Laurel—“
It’s a dirty stinking town, yeah
.… Anyway, it’s not my home now any more than it is yours.”
    “There’s Mom,” I pointed out.
    “The last thing Mom needs is more of my problems.” She picked up a pinecone from the ground beside her foot and began to pluck away the seeds. “I saw a lot, you know, terrible stuff. The day the kid hit me with the rock was by no means the worst. But for some reason that’s what I remember most vividly from all three tours of duty. I saw him step out from behind the tree, and I knew instantly that something was wrong, but he was a boy. A little boy. I was trying to get my helmet back on when the rock hit me, and for several seconds I didn’t know it was just a rock. I thought I’d been shot in the head. I really don’t even know how to