Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

I am halfway through my cigarette looking up at the stars and down at my phone and sending Engin a loving WhatsApp message and feeling virtuous for not having spent hours scrolling through BabyCenter even though it’s only the Wi-Fi situation that has prevented me from doing so and not any abstemiousness on my part. I hear the sound of an engine in the distance and it grows louder and closer until a truck materializes in front of Cindy’s house and discharges Cindy and Ed. It seems decades since we were together in the courthouse.

“How did it go,” I call to her as they make their way up the cement walk next door. “We did it!” she says with un-Cindy-like enthusiasm, something like glee. “Five to one in favor.”

I feel big and full of love to spread around so I say “My goodness!” with a faint sense of secondhand victory on her behalf until I absorb the import of this, one small step gained for a crypto-racist dream of separateness and economic independence for what is probably the poorest county in the state and the largest per capita user of social services. At what point does neighborliness become capitulation cowardice etc. Too late. “Congratulations, I guess,” I say to them. “I’d, um, be sad if California split up, though, personally.” Cindy shrugs and Ed nods sort of sympathetically. “Well, we don’t know what’s going to happen,” Cindy says, and they go in the house and then five minutes later they are out again. “We’re heading down to the Golden Spike if you want to come,” Ed says, I daresay almost hopefully, or maybe I’m imagining it, and I point to the house and say, “Got the baby.” “Okay then. Have a good night.” “Good night, good night.”

I know that I have to be careful vis-à-vis my water intake relative to my screwdriver intake and I go inside and have two glasses of the airless mineral-tasting water that comes out of the tap. I get the Diamond ice cream out of the freezer and the Hershey’s out of the cupboard and I fix a huge bowl, making dense scribbles of syrup across the ice cream’s uncanny yellow. I carry it back outside and eat it while watching the videos of Honey from daycare on my WeChat app. I have videos on this app from her first weeks at daycare after Engin left for his course, when she was eight months old and at the peak of babyness and they are precious precious precious but I cannot figure out how to get them out of the phone and onto the computer where I might feel more assured that they will last and I spend a lot of time worrying about this. In the first one she is wearing a onesie I bought her at the consignment store that is covered with tiny planes trains and automobiles. “You are going to be a baby who goes places,” I told her, when we put her in it for her first day, although her dad is the one who was going places and so far she has mostly stayed right where she was born. In the videos Honey is wearing the onesie and sitting on a play rug next to another baby of about the same size. “Baby Bianca!” I say aloud as that is the baby’s name and now like Honey she is a rangy almost-toddler, with a little ponytail of black hair sticking up in a plume from her head. She speaks Chinese with her mom and maybe one day with Honey, I hope. Honey has a beatific smile on her face. The video is a fourteen-second loop and I play it over and over again while tears run down my face.

By and by the ice cream is finished and I want to have a cigarette but know from experience that the fatty dairy scum on the inside of my mouth will be inharmonious with the cigarette and I think I can sluice it out with a final screwdriver to cap off the evening. I sashay inside and prepare this and come back outside and take a big swig and then see that the ashtray is brimming over and this is upsetting to my sense of orderliness because truly there is nothing worse than an overflowing ashtray on the deck of a mobile home and I set down my drink and pick up the ashtray and walk around the deck to the back of the house where the trash can lives.

But somewhere along the three short steps off the deck I pitch forward and land with the full weight of an adult body in motion on my eyebrow and right shoulder. My head bounces off the concrete path that leads to the carport and I see black and hear rather than feel some concussive force inside my head. It is the kind of fall where people would normally surround you and hasten to pick you up look in your face dust you off hold up fingers and ask if there is someone to call but there is no one to call only a riot of stars that I see across my vision against the riot of real stars in the sky above me when I roll over onto my side and then my back, gripping my brow and wondering if there is blood. I lie there for a minute then roll back onto my side and then onto my front and I put one knee up and one hand, and then the other knee and other hand and I stand very slowly with one hand over my throbbing eye. There is a lot of pain and I stand there feeling it and I feel my wits shaking themselves off and swimming against the current of alcohol in my blood and after a minute or two they slowly congregate and say Well here we all are and what are the signs of concussion and shouldn’t we stay awake in case we should never wake up again and then I feel reassured and then I feel afraid.

I slowly get up and take another moment to steady myself and on wobbling feet make my way up the stairs and back into the house and turn on the light in the other bathroom and inspect myself, a very white face and red weal around my eyebrow, but all in all the lack of evidence of what has happened is surprising given the clamoring inside my head. I go back outside to the corner of the deck where I can get Cindy’s Wi-Fi and google “what to do in a concussion” and apparently it is wait two hours before you go to sleep which is two hours I can spend reading about the percent of people who develop brain bleeding and blood clots and never wake up. What’s her name who was married to Liam Neeson fell down from a standing position and a few hours later she was gone. I consider what will happen in this contingency and it would be Honey trapped in her Pack ’n Play screaming and screaming into an empty room and I put my head in my hands.

The problem is that if this happens no one will know for a very long time because Engin will give me a couple of days before freaking out and Uncle Rodney won’t think anything of it if I continue to not call and Meredith has no idea about geography and I am not in very good touch with my small assortment of friends from high school college grad school scattered across the earth. Cindy and Ed are out carousing. I could leave a note for Cindy but what if she doesn’t come home and spends the night howling at the moon with Ed. I could call the police but I don’t want to put it in anyone’s mind that I am an unfit mother a drunk etc. There is a dinky little medical center here thanks to a parcel tax of $200 a year that all the live-free-or-die types were persuaded to vote for because otherwise there would be no hospital for three hundred miles, but you can’t deliver a baby there or have anything but the most rudimentary of surgeries and it’s closed now anyway. Suddenly something emerges from the depths of my throbbing head and I consider Alice. Alice the crone.

I look at the time on my phone and it is 10:30 which is egregious but hopefully not unforgivable. I remember she is staying at the passable-is-all-you-can-say-about-it Arrowhead and I take the chance that I can use Cindy’s Wi-Fi to make at least a voice call. I look up the number of the Arrowhead and copy it and then paste it into the Skype keypad, my right eye closed and my hand over my eyebrow which I feel forming a knot. I hear the click as Skype kicks into gear and the sound of a phone ringing. “Arrowhead,” someone says curtly. “I’m… trying to reach one of your guests, her name is Alice. An older lady. Really old. I know it’s late. I don’t know her room number… if you could just put me through. It’s a little bit of an emergency.”