Golden State

by Stephanie Kegan

  Eric lifted his head. “Get your sister so we can talk to you both.”

  “I think maybe you should take the kids and go somewhere until this blows over,” he said when she left.

  “Blows over?” It was the first feeling of anger I’d had, but it was directed at the wrong person. “This is never going to blow over.”

  “What’s the big deal?” Julia asked when she came back with Lilly. She was barefoot in big jeans and a tiny top, her hair wrapped in a pink towel. With her head covered and a dust of freckles on her nose, she looked twelve instead of fifteen.

  “Sit down,” Eric said. The phone rang, and Julia bolted to answer it. “Let it ring,” Eric said. “Come back here.”

  “Oh, great,” Julia said, her arms folded protectively across her small chest. “What have I done now?”

  “Do as you’re told,” I said.

  She sat scowling in the rocking chair. “Does she have to be here?” Julia pointed at Lilly. But Lilly, her breath shallow, had already gotten it. This wasn’t about Julia. This wasn’t about anything usual.

  “Your uncle Bobby has been arrested,” Eric said in a voice that was even and soft, and to me utterly false. “The police think he may have made bombs that killed people. If he did, and we don’t know that he did, it’s because he’s not well, his brain is sick. Mom and I helped the FBI find him.”

  I felt Lilly shrink, but I couldn’t look away from Julia.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Her eyes were enormous in her small face, pleading for me to take it all back. “Are you seriously trying to tell us that your brother sent those bombs to Berkeley and UCLA? That he killed those people?”

  “We don’t know that for sure,” I said, my voice breaking.

  “You don’t know for sure?” Julia threw up her hands. “They’ve arrested him.”

  “Will my uncle make a bomb and kill us?” Lilly asked.

  “No,” Eric and I answered together, too quickly. I couldn’t bear the thought of my children frightened of Bobby. I still couldn’t believe they had a right to be.

  Eric laid down the law. The girls were not to answer the phone. Julia was not to call her friends. We’d eat dinner. They’d do their homework and get into bed.

  “I can’t believe this,” Julia said, red-faced and crying, jumping to her feet. “My uncle could be a mass murderer. You turned him over to the FBI, and you never told me. Our dysfunctional family’s going to be all over the news, and I’m supposed to what? Just live my life? My life is ruined.”

  I grabbed her, the way I did my out-of-control third graders, and held her against me, trying to absorb her wild confusion. Finally, she broke away and ran to her room.

  I don’t know how we managed it, but we sat down to dinner. Julia ate silently and quickly. Lilly talked about school as if nothing were wrong. Eric and I gulped our wine and poured more.

  After dinner Eric spent an hour on the phone with Stu, at first furious, then sounding as if this were just another legal battle to be fought and won.

  I put Lilly to bed, lying next to her until she was asleep.

  “I’m not going to school tomorrow,” Julia said when I went to check on her.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “But I can’t miss school.”

  “Okay,” I said. It was all so familiar, the circular argument, her clothes all over the floor, my wanting to go to bed. It could have been any night.

  I sat beside her. “We can talk about this,” I said.

  “How? You can’t even grasp the implications of this for yourself, much less for me.” I couldn’t bring myself to reprimand her for speaking to me that way. She was right.

  “How long have you thought Uncle Bobby might be the Cal Bomber? Since he came to Grandma’s when I was nine?”

  “Of course not,” I snapped. We were a breath away from fighting. It would’ve been the easier route to take.

  “But we never talked about him,” Julia said. “You brushed me off when I tried to ask. I had this mythical uncle, who was supposed to be a genius, and was great to you when you were a kid. But the only time I met him he looked like this scary homeless person, and you just expected me to normalize it.”

  Had I really given her that message? I put a hand to my mouth, too overwhelmed to even consider the possibility.

  “All I can tell you is that we’re going to get through this.” I looked away, determined not to cry.

  I felt Julia’s hand on mine. “He’s your brother, Mom. I can’t even imagine how you must be feeling.”

  I took her in my arms, kissed her good night. She hugged me back. Then I turned out her light, every question, even about school in the morning, unresolved.

  I downed two Tylenol PMs, before phoning my mother from the edge of my bed. She refused to answer. “Mom, please call me,” I pleaded on her tape. I put the receiver down. I didn’t have the stomach to call Sara.

  Eric came in and slumped onto the bed next to me. “I should’ve known better than to trust the FBI,” he said. “I should have kept us out of this.”

  I put my arm around him. “This isn’t your fault,” I said, my voice soothing. This, too, was everyday life, my role as wife and comforter. But neither of us really had any idea what was happening.

  chapter sixteen

  I’m running for the swing, pink sandals on my chubby feet. A boy shoves me out of his way. I hit the ground hard, tasting blood. I am alone in the world, sobbing in the dirt, but then suddenly I am scooped up. The boy who pushed me cowers in the face of my big brother’s anger. When Bobby carries me home, his shirt against my damp face smells like the clothesline.

  I wasn’t sure whether I had been dreaming or remembering. I got out of bed, went to the bathroom, and sat on the toilet lid, crying as I had not since the night my father died. There was an old prescription vial in the medicine cabinet with a single Vicodin inside. I swallowed it and went back to bed.

  I dreamed that Julia was calling me but that I couldn’t wake up to go to her, and then she was at my side shaking my shoulder. “There are people sneaking around in the yard,” she said, her voice urgent.

  “No they’re not.” My tongue felt enormous. “Go back to sleep.” I couldn’t stay awake. A loud noise came from downstairs. I thought it was Julia, but she still had her hand on my shoulder. Someone was pounding on our front door. Eric raised his head from the pillow.

  “It’s the police,” I said to him. Only the police rapped on a door that way. Our alarm sounded. It was six thirty. Eric got up and pulled on a pair of pants and a sweatshirt. “Stay here,” he said. At least he was home, not away on a business trip.

  Julia climbed into his spot in bed, grabbing on to me. “I’m scared,” she said.

  Downstairs there was yelling. I heard Eric shouting, “Get the fuck off my porch,” the door slamming, and then my husband’s furious steps on the stairs.

  Julia and I huddled together like small children.

  “Get dressed,” Eric said when he came back. His face was pale but his voice was calm. “Now,” he said to Julia. “And close your blinds.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked. It was too noisy outside.

  “It’s news slime. Get dressed. You have to see this.”

  As I followed Eric down the stairs, I saw he had drawn the curtains to the front windows that we almost always left open. We peered between the drapes.

  Satellite vans were parked in front of the house. Clusters of what I presumed were newspeople stood on the sidewalk with their gear. Beyond them our neighbors in their robes and jogging outfits chatted in small groups, their dogs on leashes, all of them looking up at our house. I had my hand over my mouth. There was no reason to laugh, but once I started, I couldn’t stop.

  “Jesus, Natalie, will you get hold of yourself?” Eric said.

  I could see how angry he was, how frightened, and I tried to look serious, but the effort just kept me laughing. Couldn’t I just go back to sleep and deal with this in the morning? Except t
hat it was morning.

  “There’s a man looking in the kitchen window,” Lilly said, coming toward us in her flannel nightgown, her hair a tangle of dark curls, her teddy bear under her arm.

  Eric pulled her into his lap, staring at me fiercely, as if to say, Get it? This is real.

  It had the intended effect.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked, suddenly sober.

  “We can’t stay prisoners in here,” he said.

  “I have to go to work and the kids have school.” But as I said it, I thought, we really don’t have to do anything. Our old life is gone.

  As if he were a lieutenant commanding us, Eric snapped into control. “I want everyone packed with an overnight bag and ready to leave in ten minutes.”

  I didn’t even think to ask where we were going. I threw a nightgown and some work clothes in a duffel bag. I got Lilly dressed and packed. I checked on Julia. She was still in her nightgown, on the floor of her room, crying on the telephone.

  “Hang up,” I said.

  “Everyone knows,” she said.

  “Get dressed,” I said. “Put your nightgown and a change of clothes in a bag. Now.”

  Like escaped convicts, the four of us dashed across our own back lawn to the garage. The girls and I slumped in Eric’s car with our heads down. A news van blocked the end of the driveway. Eric cut across our neighbor’s lawn and over their curb. The newspeople shoved cameras at the windows of the car, yelled questions at us. Eric gunned past them. This too-familiar picture would be on the news tonight, except it would be us running away, not some anonymous others. Us. People I hadn’t seen since junior high, old boyfriends, acquaintances I couldn’t stand, would see us on the news and say, “I know her.” They’d have a story for their friends. Maybe I shouldn’t have cared, not in the face of what Bobby was going through right then, but I did. I tore the address labels from magazines I discarded because I was afraid of strangers knowing too much. I wondered how upset the neighbors would be about the tire marks we were leaving on their lawn.

  “You and the girls stay out of school today,” Eric said when we were safely on Marin. We didn’t argue, not even Julia. I used Eric’s cell phone to call work.

  “Oh my God, Natalie,” Claire said.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you before. And that I can’t talk now.”

  “Whatever I can do,” Claire said. I thanked her. I felt so far from her and the world outside our car that it was a relief to say good-bye.

  “Could we at least listen to the radio?” Julia asked from the backseat.

  “No,” Eric and I said in unison.

  We got on the freeway heading south. The sun was breaking through the clouds over the San Francisco Bay. I cracked open the window to smell the water. The dread-thickened air of the past weeks had given way to the in-the-moment specificity of disaster.

  I felt suddenly liberated, giddy, on the lam.

  “Where will we go?” I asked Eric.

  “I have to go in to work,” he said.

  I stiffened. I didn’t even know why I was so angry. “Why?” I asked, but I sensed the answer in the tense grip of his hand on the steering wheel. I pictured the partners’ meeting, the grim discussion of damage control.

  “Don’t give me a hard time on this,” he said.

  “We can’t just hang around your office all day.”

  “I know,” he said, sidestepping the anger in my tone. “I think you should go down to my folks’.”

  I wanted to say, because of what my family’s done, I have to be taken in by yours? But I thought better of it, the kids too quiet in the backseat. I glanced over my shoulder. Lilly was clutching Julia’s hand. “The girls and I are going to spend the day in the city,” I said. “We’ll meet up with you after work.”

  I was stalling, improvising, but Eric didn’t argue. We parked in the garage beneath his office. When we said good-bye, I felt lighter, then lighter still walking away from the reflecting glass of his tall building. The sky had become an unambiguous blue. The girls and I turned on Sutter toward Union Square, grateful to be anonymous. I told them we’d have breakfast at Sears Famous Pancakes. They were quiet, Lilly hanging on to Julia rather than me, neither one complaining about having to stand in line for a table.

  “This is so bizarre,” Julia said, staring at her plate. “What are we supposed to do all day?”

  “I thought we’d do some shopping.”

  “At the Gap?” she asked, brightening for the first time.

  I pretended to think it over before saying yes. I’d give them anything they asked for.

  It didn’t take them long to catch on. When we’d worn ourselves out shopping, we went to the movies. I let them buy candy and ice cream. I got cash out of the bank machine to give them money to play video games.

  I reserved a room under my married name for all of us at a hotel in Half Moon Bay. I’d stayed there before. It had a heated pool; the girls could go swimming in their brand-new suits. It made as much sense as anything else. When we met up with Eric after work, he quietly went along with the plan.

  Our room had a rose-colored carpet, queen beds with floral-print spreads, and overdone window treatments. I found it oddly comforting. The girls put their things in dresser drawers. Even Eric unpacked. I was the only one who never unpacked no matter where we were.

  “How much is this place?” he asked after the girls had run off to the pool.

  ”Does it matter?”

  He let it drop but I understood. On top of everything else, he was worried about his job. “Tell me what happened at work,” I said.

  “Damage control.” He described the meetings, the phone calls. “They want me to hand off my UC work for now.”

  I nodded. “A bit awkward, I guess, having the brother-in-law bombing the client.” Eric actually laughed, and I loved him for it.

  “Agent Miller called,” he said. “He said he didn’t know how your name got out to the press. He said he felt personally betrayed. I told him his was the last call we’d ever take from the FBI.”

  “Good,” I said.

  Eric took my hands. “Bobby was arraigned in Boise this afternoon on a charge of possessing bomb components.”

  “They found bomb parts at his place?” I asked as if there were a different answer to be had.

  Eric nodded.

  “He really did it?” I was no longer Bonnie on the lam with the Barrow gang. I was me again, my eyes flooding, my head thick.

  “What we know,” Eric said carefully, “is that he’s guilty of something.”

  I had tried to run, but I’d gotten no farther than a hotel room in Half Moon Bay. Maybe it was as far as I would ever get. I was shaking, sobbing, out of control. Eric put his arms around me while I struggled to compose myself.

  “I can’t let the girls find me this way,” I said.

  “They’ll take their cues from us,” he said. I let him talk. He was trying to make me feel better, make himself feel better, but there was fear in his voice. As I was grieving for what I’d lost, he was terrified by all we stood to lose.

  “I have to try to get through to my mother,” I said as soon as I could speak again.

  I pleaded with my mother on the answering machine to pick up until finally she did. Her voice was thick with tears but her words were steely. “You girls made fun of me when I moved into a gated complex, and now thank God I did. Otherwise I’d have those damned reporters at my front door. I couldn’t call you back because I had to find a lawyer for Bobby.”

  “I could stay with you,” I said. “Leave the kids with Eric. Help however.”

  “I don’t need any help.”

  We hung up. There was nothing more to say. “I don’t know if she’s punishing me or trying to protect me,” I said to Eric. “Or both.”

  We ordered pizza when the girls came back. Julia and Lilly exchanged their swimsuits for pajamas. We watched pay-per-view movies and let the kids eat candy from the minibar, the four of us clinging to one
another until it was time for bed.

  By Saturday afternoon, we’d decided: Eric and I would go home, but we weren’t going to put the girls through that kind of exposure. Lilly, who could miss the last week of school before spring break, would go to Eric’s parents. Julia, who could not, would stay at her friend Donna’s. I trusted Donna’s mother.

  We were quiet in the car on Sunday, me dreading facing Eric’s parents. “I don’t want to stay at Grandma and Grandpa’s,” Lilly said as if she could read my thoughts from the backseat. I wondered how long she’d been mulling this over, and calmly explained, again, that it was just for a week until the reporters stopped bothering us.

  “Okay,” Lilly said, my sweetly reasonable child. “I’ll stay there if Julia does, too.”

  “I’m staying at Donna’s,” Julia said. She wasn’t being bratty, just thoughtlessly matter-of-fact.

  “Then I’m staying at …” Lilly considered her options. “At Brittany’s.” I tried not to laugh. Brittany’s mother was notorious for always being too exhausted from her own self-importance to have other kids over.

  “I thought Tessa was your best friend now.”

  “Okay, Tessa’s house.”

  “Another time. This week you’re going to see your grandparents.”

  “You can’t make me,” she said, kicking the back of my seat hard.

  “Stop it,” I said, craning my neck to look her in the eye. She let loose, slipping down in the seat, screaming and thrashing, a full-on tantrum. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d thrown one.

  Julia yelled at her to shut up. Eric looked over his shoulder and yelled at both of them. Lilly kept on kicking my seat. Eric reached his arm out to stop her. I cradled my head, feeling sorry for myself. I glanced up just in time to see brake lights flash in front of us.

  “Eric,” I screamed. I braced myself. I don’t know how he did it. There wasn’t enough time. He swerved into the next lane, cut off a car, the driver honking, my heart pounding, the girls silenced. The miss was so close that my eyes welled. Eric maneuvered the car two lanes to the right and stopped on the shoulder. He got out and walked around the back to where Lilly sat. I jumped out after him. I thought he was going to hit her. Instead he stepped over the metal barrier into a patch of bright wildflowers. I followed him across.