“It was too preposterous,” I said. “It still is.”
He shook his head. “You deliberately kept this from me for weeks. Omitted it from every conversation we had at this table, on the couch, in our bed. You talked to your sister but not to me.” His fist came down on the pine table. “My God, Natalie, half my work comes from the University of California, and you never thought to mention any of this to me until you showed up at my office today?”
I had no defense, only this insight: “I suppose, down deep, I was afraid that if I told you, it might make it more than just wild paranoia. It might make it real.”
Eric had always been there for me, been on my side in every argument with the world. I waited for a signal that he understood, but he didn’t speak.
“Please try to understand,” I said, touching his knee. “Bobby’s not some abstract person. He’s my big brother. He held Julia in his arms at her christening.”
I tried to find the man who adored me in Eric’s eyes but he looked away. “I’ve got to get some sleep,” he said, rising from his chair.
chapter eleven
THE CHRISTENING had been something Eric’s mother wanted, and Eric, too, on some level. I went along. It was a chance to get dressed up, unite my family, and show off my new baby.
Bobby was back from Guatemala, working as a janitor. He hadn’t wanted anything to do with the christening. “Those rituals have the blood of millions of innocent people on them,” he said.
“The ceremony means nothing to me,” I pleaded. “But you being my baby’s godfather means everything.”
He caved, as I knew he would. I didn’t ask him for much, but when I did back then, I knew he’d never let me down.
They all came. My dashing father, still solid in build, imposing in his height—the cancer that would kill him a barely mutating cell—told me how proud he was. My mother feigned interest in my mother-in-law’s windy history of the christening gown. Sara had resisted showing up at what she called the Macy’s Day Charade, but she eventually did, stoned and wearing an overstated hat with flowers on the band.
Bobby looked gaunt in a suit my mother had bought him, his dark hair brushing his collar. With my whole family in the same place, my big brother at my side, I was ridiculously happy. My baby who kept me up all night, who made me frantic with self-doubt, had brought us all together.
My father, who could deliver a sermon with a baritone that would put the minister to shame, sat in the second row, believing not in God but in the power of churches to deliver votes. My mother sat next to him, her face beaming, her family together for what I now know would be the last time.
Bobby stood beside me at the font, surrounded by symbols that pained him, holding Julia with heartbreaking gentleness. He was doing it for me. It was the last thing he would ever do for me.
*
I AWOKE in tangled sheets. For a moment, still half asleep, I couldn’t remember what was wrong. A second later, fully awake, I knew.
Eric had already left for work. I heard Julia in the shower. I sat up. Nothing in my bedroom had changed. There was no hole blown out of the wall, no blood on the floor.
I cannot do it, I thought. I cannot get up, dress, make breakfast, and go back to work. But I did. Eric had left the Chronicle, still in its rubber band, on the kitchen table. I made myself open it. The victims of the Cal Bomber’s latest rampage stared at me. The oldest was twenty-eight. The luminous-faced girl was four years older than Julia.
I turned the newspaper facedown. Upstairs, Julia ran for the ringing phone. I couldn’t hear what she saying, just the excited tone reserved for friends. I had the crazy thought that if I flipped the newspaper back over, it might have another front page with news of a different yesterday. A yesterday in which those three young people were alive, and I had not betrayed my brother to the FBI.
On the drive to school, I had to slam on my brakes to avoid rear-ending a car.
“What are you trying to do, kill us?” Julia cried.
When I pulled up to her school, she ran off from us in her usual manner, unaware of anything outside her own head. But Lilly was uncommonly silent. She took my hand when we got out of the car at Mountaintop.
“Mommy, are you all right?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, wondering how much longer I could lie to her. I didn’t know if she even believed me.
“I’ve been worried about you,” Claire said when I checked in at the office. My closest friend, the one to whom I could confide almost anything. “You looked so pale yesterday. I tried calling you.”
I had to answer her, to come up with some sort of decision. Was I sick, or well? Just dropping Lilly off, or working?
“Natalie? Are you feeling okay?”
I said I was, but I couldn’t look at her. Claire and I told each other all sorts of things. We didn’t sugarcoat our feelings about thoughtless friends, thankless children, and the young school parents who thought they knew more than we did. We weren’t afraid to joke about our own shortcomings. We’d never pretended our families were perfect, but I couldn’t tell her this.
*
MY SENSES were so acute that I could barely tolerate the brilliance of fluorescent lighting in my classroom, the buzz of it in my ears, but I was a person who knew how to do a job. Although they try to convince you otherwise, children require order—circle time, math, break. I, too, clung to that order.
At the store with Lilly after school, I leaned over the meat cooler, staring at the flesh in plastic wrap, telling myself that the FBI would find that the only crime Bobby had committed was plagiarism. When I turned around, Lilly was lying on the floor, tears streaming.
“What’s wrong?” She didn’t look as if she’d been hurt.
“You don’t listen to me,” she said.
I got her off the grocery-store linoleum, and coaxed her to tell me what I hadn’t heard before: her friends had moved up to the next reader and she’d had to stay behind.
“I’m sorry, Mommy, I’m not smart,” she said.
I moved us out of the cart traffic. Learning to read was complicated, there was so much to it. “I’m a teacher and I know who’s smart and who isn’t, and you’re smart,” I told her. “You’re every bit as smart as I was at your age, as smart as your dad.”
I didn’t say as smart as Julia. None of us was even close to her. Except Bobby.
When we got home, I left the groceries in sacks on the kitchen floor and opened a bottle of beer. The more I swallowed, the longer I left the groceries, the better I began to feel about yesterday’s meeting with the FBI. They hadn’t behaved as if we’d solved their case, as if our information was as devastating as we imagined. Bobby might never even learn he was under suspicion.
I watched the local news at five. Channel 7 was airing an interview with the wife of the young Indian professor killed in the Berkeley blast. She sat with a child in her lap, another clinging to her side. “The children want to know why their father isn’t coming home,” she said.
My throat closed and tears burned my eyes. I turned channels, searching for footage of federal agents in flak jackets breaking down my brother’s cabin door. I flipped from one news show to the next.
“What’s with you?” Julia asked. “You’re watching TV all bug-eyed.”
I clicked off the set as if I’d been caught viewing porno. Julia picked up the remote and changed the channel to one of her shows. Suddenly I felt grateful for the way kid life blotted out everything else. I finished making dinner, and fed the girls. I jumped when the phone rang, but it was just one of Julia’s friends. I gave Lilly a bath, put her to bed, and then lay beside her when she asked.
Eric came home at ten to nine. “It smells good,” he said. He walked to the stove, peering into the copper pot. “You didn’t have to do this, Nat.”
“I wanted to.”
He slumped into a chair. “Where are the girls?”
“Lilly’s in bed,” I said, handing him a glass of the good wine I’d opened. I
dropped into a chair beside him. “Julia’s holed up in her room.”
For a ludicrous moment, I thought one or the other of us might say, So how was your day?
Eric gazed into his glass. “Stu talked to his buddy at the Bureau.”
One of the things I’d always admired about Eric was that, given half a chance, he went straight to the point.
He looked up. “They don’t think Bobby’s their man.”
This is what I’d been waiting to hear, praying to hear. Now I was certain I’d known it all along. I felt the lifting of weight, the glimmer of normal life ahead. But Eric’s expression, still quietly grim, made me cautious.
“He doesn’t fit their profile,” he said. “They’re looking for a younger man, someone of average intelligence without a college education. They’re going to investigate, but they’re not on fire. Over the past twelve years, they’ve had four thousand leads on this case that have gone nowhere.”
Four thousand false leads, each one of them given by someone as sure and as terrified as I had been. “I knew it,” I said. “I knew it couldn’t be Bobby.”
I was so desperate to have everything be all right that it clouded my head. I was expecting Eric to apologize for railroading us into talking to the FBI.
“I’m not saying this isn’t good news,” Eric said, sounding like it wasn’t.
I stiffened. “But?”
“At this point, I think you and I have to assume that it is Bobby.”
“I don’t get it,” I said, my voice rising. “You just said it’s not him.”
“If there’s a one-in-a-thousand chance that he’s the guy …” he said. “Or if he knows that guy, then for safety’s sake, we have to make sure he never finds out we talked to the FBI.”
Instantly I was on my feet. “Bobby would never hurt me or my children,” I said, hitting the my hard in anger. “He’d never hurt anyone. That’s how I know it’s not him.” Then I was crying, wiping my eyes with the back of my hands. I turned away from Eric. He came up behind me, held my shoulders.
“Bobby can’t ever know I’d accuse him like that,” I said. “It would destroy him. They’d never tell him, would they, the FBI? They promised not to reveal our identity. They’ll just investigate, clear him, and move on without giving him any details, right?”
“I’m talking about us.” He said us but I knew he meant me. “Don’t say anything to your mother or Sara.”
I turned around. “You think I want them to know what we’ve done to Bobby?” I held my gaze on Eric, made him look away.
That night I saw my father in a dream. He stood in the hall of our old house. He wore his tortoiseshell glasses, his gray summer suit with the vest, his hair still dark. I threw my arms around him, felt the light wool of his jacket on my cheek. He smelled of Mennen Skin Bracer in the green bottle, but he did not speak to me. He would not tell me what I needed to hear: that everything was going to turn out all right.
I awoke crying. Although it was cool in the bedroom, my nightgown was damp and sticking to me. Eric was on the other side of the bed, and either he or I, in our sleep, had put a pillow between us.
chapter twelve
WHEN WE FIRST MET, our senior year of college, Eric was a football player, and the only sport that interested me was conversation. All we had in common was an evening class and the rides home he offered me. He drove a boxy Toyota with a stick shift rising from the floor. I’d never seen anyone drive like him—as if his hands and feet were part of the mechanism of the car. I told him as much because it was true. But I wasn’t flirting. I had a boyfriend.
There was an out-of-fashion directness to Eric’s good looks. Cut off his shaggy blond hair, and I could see him going off to World War I. I enjoyed looking at him, studying him the way a child might.
Our class ended on a cold night in spring. On the ride home we were more serious than usual—we had the specter of graduation hanging over us. Neither of us had any idea what we wanted to do. Eric had Vietnam and the draft to worry about.
He parked the car on the curb opposite the house on Dana Street where my boyfriend and I shared an apartment on the first floor. The lights were on in our place and I could see into the living room. Ron would be inside waiting for me, our dishes from the past week piled high in the sink, a pot with burned brown rice on the stove.
“Have you ever thrown out a perfectly good pot just because you didn’t want to wash it?” I asked.
“Sure,” Eric said easily. “Everybody has.”
His arms and legs were long and solid. He wore a corduroy jacket over a blue work shirt tucked into jeans. I was twenty-two and thought it seemed like a grown-up outfit, as if he were already halfway out in the world. I huddled in a pea coat, jeans, and a sweater. He reached his arm across the back of the seat, and I had the crazy idea that he was thinking of kissing me. I looked over his shoulder and saw Ron walking through our living room. I hadn’t realized how easy it was to see inside our house from the street.
Eric asked about the paper I’d written for our class. As he listened, he absently fingered a wayward strand of my hair. Then his lips were softly on mine, and I was kissing him back. He unbuttoned my coat, and I slipped out of it because I was warm and there was nothing wrong with taking off a coat. His hand went under my sweater, and I thought, this is why I stopped wearing a bra. Not because everyone else was doing it, but for this moment. So that a hand under my sweater caressing my breast would be as easy, as casual, as a kiss.
Could Ron see us? No, we’d just be shadows in a car parked across the street.
I could kiss this guy and it would be okay because I wasn’t ever going to see him again. I knew I should stop, but I thought, what’s the harm in a few more minutes?
His hands were against my bare back, pulling me into him. Mine pressed into the corduroy of his jacket. I wanted to lose myself, to forget, just for a little while longer, but I couldn’t. “We have to stop,” I said. “I have a boyfriend.” What I did not say was that I had a boyfriend I lived with and that he was just behind the window across the street.
“Too bad,” he said.
I thanked him for the ride.
“Good-bye,” he said, reaching to kiss me once again. I kissed him as if I never expected to see him again, which I didn’t. Then I ran from the car.
I had learned something new about myself that night. I was the kind of girl who could kiss another guy practically under her boyfriend’s nose, and do it easily.
I hesitated on the porch, knowing that Eric was watching me, and then I stepped inside. Ron was lying on the couch with a book. I looked out the window. With the lights on, all I could see was a large pane of darkness.
*
FIVE YEARS LATER, Eric and I happened to stand in line together for the same plane out of Oakland. We hadn’t seen each other since that night in the car. Ron was long gone. I’d just spent four years in a European adventure of housecleaning, babysitting, and hitchhiking that had landed me penniless and back at my parents’ house.
Eric had grown sideburns and a drooping mustache. He looked like a revolutionary, except he was carrying golf clubs. I’d never known anyone who golfed, at least not anyone under sixty. He recognized me right away, but I pretended I didn’t quite remember him. We sat together on the plane, not talking about the kiss in the car. He said he was coaching high school football and giving golf lessons, but his parents had browbeaten him into applying to law school. I said mine had cowed me into going back to school for a teaching credential. He bought me a drink on the plane, and took my phone number.
Eric was different from me. He had a clear way of thinking. If he liked you, he showed you. He thought I was glamorous and edgy because I’d lived in Europe. He told me I was beautiful. He didn’t keep secrets, or waste time with needless debate. We were married two years later. I had been flailing and he reached his solid arms out to steady me.
chapter thirteen
AS SOON AS I heard the male voice on the phone asking for me,
I knew it was the FBI. It had been two weeks since we’d met with them, two weeks in which Eric and I had monitored every word we spoke. Sharing this secret hadn’t brought us closer, it had only made us careful with each other.
Agent Miller’s voice still carried the slight tentativeness of youth, although he must have been forty. I held my breath waiting to hear what he had to tell me.
“We’d like to talk to your mother,” he said. “With you there, of course.”
They wanted letters from Bobby, as well as a record of the dates my mother had seen him and any money she’d given him. “Then maybe we can clear all this up,” he said. He spoke like a doctor who’d seen cases far worse than ours, and I clung to his reassurance.
When Eric came home, I told him about Miller’s call. The kids were upstairs, but I wondered if they’d noticed how often their parents spoke in whispers now. “If the FBI wants to interview your mother, they’re going to do it, whether you set it up or not,” he said.
I waited until the girls had gone to bed before I went into my bedroom and shut the door. I dialed the phone, my mouth dry.
It was after ten. I never phoned my mother this late, but when she answered, her voice carried no trace of apprehension. “Is it raining there?” she asked. I sat on the edge of my bed as she chattered on about the weather. She must have sensed something was wrong.
I didn’t know how to begin. I hadn’t rehearsed what I would say. If I had, I knew I couldn’t have made the call. When I finally began, I rushed the words. The bombing two weeks before. The three people killed. Bobby’s letter to her—the one she’d photocopied and sent to Sara and me. How I read the bomber’s manifesto and compared it to the letter. My trip to Eric’s office. The FBI.
“Natalie, I don’t understand a word you’re saying.” Here at least was the mother I knew, a woman who did not prattle about the weather but gave the impression she controlled it. I took a deep breath and went back over the same territory more coherently, this time trying to make her understand what I’d done, and why.
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