“Are you all right?”
“I might throw up.”
I patted his arm. “Thank you for getting us out of that. You were amazing.”
“It was too close,” he said under his breath.
I didn’t know how to comfort him. Where I saw escape from a near miss, he saw something much darker. He headed back without looking at me, the girls watching from the car. I stopped him, the traffic blowing our clothes. “Maybe Lilly would be better off coming home with us.”
“That’s a laugh,” he said.
Lilly’s tantrum had given way to a quiet sobbing she kept up all the way to Los Gatos. When we got to Eric’s parents, she refused to get out of the car. I went to her door, just wanting to hold her, but she locked it on me. We had to go inside without her.
Eric’s parents looked strained but greeted us as if this were any normal visit. “I’ve made tuna sandwiches with homemade pickle relish,” his mother said. Eric said he’d just like a beer, and I said that’s all I wanted, too.
“I’d like a sandwich, Grandma,” Julia said.
Eric and his father went to the den and shut the door. “Where’s Lilly?” my mother-in-law asked. When I explained, she said, “I’ll get her.”
“You could have at least shown some appreciation for her sandwiches,” Julia said in the kitchen after Eric’s mother left.
“I hate pickle relish,” I said. Julia sat with her back to me and wolfed down her sandwich. She couldn’t have possibly been that hungry.
Eric’s mother led Lilly into the kitchen by the hand, my daughter’s face red and snot smeared. My mother-in-law sat, pulling Lilly into her lap, and told her all the fun things they were going to do: make cookies, dye Easter eggs. Uncharacteristically, Eric’s mother didn’t make a fuss about our not staying long. Lilly clung to her grandmother’s waist, wearing the same look of resigned betrayal she had given me when I left her at the kindergarten door.
*
BY THE TIME we dropped off Julia, it was dark. Eric and I approached our own house as furtively as robbers. Our neighbor had collected our newspapers and stacked them in front of the door. He did this whenever we were away, and we did it for him, except this time the newspapers had my brother’s picture on the front page.
Inside, the drapes we always left open were drawn tightly, giving the place a dark, unhappy air. The belongings scattered about—a pair of shoes by the door, a sweater tossed casually over a chair, a magazine lying open on the floor—seemed to have been left behind by some other family.
Eric carried our bags upstairs, and I wandered into the kitchen. When the phone rang, I jumped, answering it to stop the ringing. It was Sara.
“What did you think, Natalie?” she said without greeting. “That I didn’t merit being told that you’d turned my brother over to the FBI?”
I was so afraid of this conversation that the fierce beating of my heart hurt my chest.
“It wasn’t like that,” I said. “It was the day of the Berkeley bombing. I felt I had no choice but to talk to the FBI. Once I did, I couldn’t tell anyone else. I really believed that Bobby would be eliminated as a suspect and I could tell you everything.”
The sound of her breath through her silence was worse than anything she could say.
“You went ahead and made the biggest decision of our family’s life without even talking to me? Without giving me even the courtesy of a heads-up? Did you even talk to Mother? Or did you let her hear like I did?”
“I can explain,” I said.
“Natalie, you are piece of work. I have just one last question.” She hit the last hard, and I had no doubt she meant it. “Did you turn me in, too?”
“What are you talking about? Turn you in for what?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Sara was shouting at me now. “Pot smoking. Income tax evasion. Not wanting to see my brother dead.”
“They aren’t going to go after the death penalty,” I said desperately. “The FBI assured us of that.”
“And you believed them?” She didn’t wait for my answer. “Fuck you,” she said quietly. She hung up on me. I collapsed into a chair, still clutching the receiver, an awful tightness in my throat. I don’t know how long I’d been sitting like that when Eric came into the room with an armload of blankets and towels. I got up, and together we strung them across the kitchen windows.
chapter seventeen
SHOUTS PIERCED my troubled sleep. I heard the furious slam of the front door, footsteps on the stairs. Then Eric was in the bedroom. He was dressed for his morning run, but I could tell by his dry T-shirt that he hadn’t taken it.
“They’re vultures,” he said. “They won’t be happy until they pick us dry.”
I raised my head from the pillow and squinted at the clock. Six forty-five. “I opened the front door and they dive-bombed.” He sat on the edge of the bed, his head in hands. “And people think lawyers are scum.”
He turned to me. “I think you should consider staying home today,” he said.
The prospect of having to get past the news crews camped outside terrified me, but I wasn’t staying home. If I had learned one thing from my parents, it was that no matter what, you get up in the morning, put one foot in front of the other, and go to work. Even Bobby, I imagined, got up every morning, got dressed, and went to work doing his research, tending his garden, and I didn’t want to think what else.
As I left the house, what I dreaded facing, almost as much as the reporters, were our neighbors. I dashed out the kitchen door to the car and backed down the driveway as quickly as I dared. I sensed commotion, cameras coming toward me, but I didn’t divert my focus as I turned sharply into the street. I drove away before I could see what was going on in front of my own house.
At Mountaintop, I parked in the lot and overdid a wave to a passing parent. The sun was already brilliant, and when I entered the office, it took a moment for my eyes to focus on the group huddled in front of the secretary’s desk. I was as much an insider at this school as insiders got. The people in the tight circle, talking about me, were my friends.
Claire saw me first. “You’ve come in,” she said, too evenly. The others, trying to behave as if this were any other awkward moment, made sympathetic faces. Claire motioned me toward her office. “I’ve been so worried about you,” she said when we were behind her door. “This whole thing is unbelievable.”
We sat on her couch. I looked down at the familiar fabric.
“We went to the FBI because we felt we had to,” I said, my eyes glistening. “They weren’t supposed to swoop down on him like that on the basis of our puny tip. They were never supposed to reveal my name. We’ve got news vans outside our house.”
“Oh my God, what you’re going through,” Claire said, enclosing my clenched hands in hers.
“I can’t believe my brother would hurt anyone,” I said. “I can’t believe any of this. I’m sure they’ll find him innocent somehow.”
Claire didn’t seem to know what to say. I imagined she couldn’t believe it either.
*
WHEN MY STUDENTS filed in, I was frozen in front of the board, unable to wipe away the assignments I’d put there just the week before. The children seemed unusually orderly. They looked up at me, waiting, I supposed, for me to make everything all right.
The first thing in the morning, we generally had circle, the third-grade version of sharing time. The kids seemed relieved when I directed them to our usual spot on the floor. Despite everything that had happened, I remembered that it was Benjamin’s turn to start.
“I saw your brother get arrested on TV,” he said.
“I saw it, too,” I said, my legs folded on the rug under my big skirt. I told them I’d take questions. To make them feel safe, I reminded them of the rules they knew by heart—no talking out of turn and to raise their hands if they wanted to speak. Hands shot up.
Would my brother bomb the school?
No.
Was he Lilly’s uncle, too?
/> Yes.
Could they meet him?
No.
Was he mean to me when we were little?
Not even one time.
Did I know how to blow things up?
No.
Would Lilly be coming back to school?
Yes.
Was I still going to be their teacher?
It was the first question that made me wince. “I would like to,” I said.
At lunch Claire came in to tell me there were satellite vans outside. “I don’t think we dare dash out for food,” she said.
“I don’t know what I was thinking coming in today,” I said. But I did. I couldn’t bear the alternative.
“You belong here,” she said. “We’re your family.”
But I wasn’t Claire’s family in this, and she wasn’t mine. Maybe for the rest of my life everything would come down to that, a line the color of blood between family and not.
She came back just before afternoon break. It was my day for playground duty, but Claire had asked another teacher to take over for me. “I wish I knew how to handle all this,” she said after the kids went outside. She seemed so nervous I wondered what she was holding back. I’d already heard the nonstop ringing of the school phones all day. Now I pictured telephoto lenses peeking over the playground fence.
“Maybe you should take the rest of the week off?” she said as if she were not sure how I’d take the suggestion. “By the time we come back from spring break, all this will have blown over.”
“We don’t know that,” I said. I couldn’t bear to think about how long it might go on. I didn’t want to leave my job. The kids needed me. I needed them. But my presence here was disrupting the whole school.
“I think it’s best,” I said, “better for the school, fairer to the children, if you find someone to take my class until June.”
Claire tried to argue, but she knew I was right.
At dismissal time, I lined up the kids and hugged each one good-bye. Claire escorted them out. When they left, I sat at my desk and began working on notes for whoever would take over my class: Annie is afraid to read aloud. Benjamin reads at the adult level. All the boys look up to Tom.
I stayed until the notes were finished, waiting out the news vans.
Then I cleared out my desk and erased the board.
*
I WAS SO out of it when the phone beside the bed woke me Tuesday morning that I thought the man from Newsweek was trying to sell me a subscription.
“I can’t talk to you,” I said, when I grasped what he wanted. “I’m sure you can understand,” I added politely, before I hung up on him.
I unplugged the phone next to the bed and slid back under the covers. Eric came in naked and glistening from the shower. His body had softened with middle age but he was still a powerful man. I lay quietly watching him. He dressed quietly, slowly transforming himself with each article of clothing into a man who made money. He stood at the dresser without moving, staring at nothing. Then he put his wallet and keys in his pockets and clasped on his watch.
I’d given him that watch with my first paycheck as a teacher, before he was even a lawyer. He’d exchanged his canvas briefcase for a leather one, his Toyota for a Lexus, but he’d kept the watch. Years ago, when he was an athlete and I had never dated a man so quiet and steady, he’d made me feel graceful. I wanted to tell him that now. But I felt too unsure to even let him know I was awake when he kissed me on top of the head.
I lay still as I listened to him leave, the pillow damp beneath my face, waiting for something to pull me back from where I had drifted and make me normal again. But the house was enormous in its silence.
I forced myself out of bed, wandered down the hall. I stepped into Julia’s room and stood in front of her empty bed. Her wall was covered with pages torn from magazines, sexy photos of young men with tousled hair and long-legged young women in stiletto heels. I’d never really looked at the pictures before, and now I didn’t know what I was seeing except that she was leaving us, that every year I would know her less, and it was possible one day I wouldn’t know her at all.
The alarm, still set for work, went off down the hall in my bedroom. It felt like I’d been up for hours, days, weeks, but it was only seven fifteen.
Blankets and drapes still covered the windows, shutting out the light, but it would be worse to remove them. I didn’t know how I was going to live like this: sealed up, dodging the phone, afraid of the doorbell, the day endless.
The house unbearably stuffy, I felt like I was in prison. But Bobby was the one locked in a cell. He hated not having fresh air. Even on the coolest of nights, he had always slept with his windows open. He couldn’t tolerate noise. Fluorescent lighting agitated him to the point of illness. He said fluorescent lighting was one of the factors that made school agonizing for sensitive children, and as a teacher, I knew that to be true. I couldn’t bear thinking about how frightened my brother might be in jail—or how furious at me. No matter how hard I tried to imagine otherwise, Bobby had to know what I’d done to him by now.
*
THAT EVENING, Eric presented me with a cell phone of my own. “I don’t want an argument,” he said as I was about to protest the unnecessary expense. “Just keep it with you.”
“You make it sound like a gun,” I said. Neither of us cracked a smile.
On Wednesday, I slept through Eric’s leaving for work. I felt as if I’d been drugged when I finally woke up groggy at ten thirty. I went downstairs in my robe and finished a full carafe of coffee, surprised I could hold so much. Finally, I slipped the Chronicle out of its rubber band. There was a first-page story on the case against my brother. Defiantly, I started reading: show me what you’ve got. What they had were bomb components and a completed bomb ready for mailing.
Inside the paper was a photo: an emaciated, hollow-eyed man against a height marker that made him seem too short. Bobby had been bedraggled when I’d last seen him, but I didn’t even recognize this person.
You didn’t know him before, I’d said to Eric so many times over the years. You didn’t know him when he was like a young Jesuit, narrow-shouldered, fine-featured, head bent in quiet contemplation, his hair falling onto his brow. You didn’t know him when he showed me how to find Orion in the night sky, naming the stars in his belt, in his sword, how protected I felt, how I get a little of that back each fall when I see Orion return to the sky. You didn’t know him when he made me feel I mattered in a house of giants.
When the kitchen phone rang, I answered. I shouldn’t have, but I thought it might be one of the girls. The woman’s voice on the other end was so warm, so natural, I listened for longer than I should have. She was a reporter from Time. She’d tracked down former colleagues of Bobby’s, read me quotes testifying to his gentleness and his genius. She made me believe the story she was after was not about a terrorist captured, but an understanding of my gifted brother’s descent, his transformation from a professor of mathematics at Columbia into the man arrested on TV. I was talking when I should have been silent, charged by her premise. She said she wasn’t far away. When she asked if she could come by, I heard myself saying yes.
I phoned Eric, and pleaded “call me” on his voice mail, an idea forming in my head so big I feared it was crazy: this interview could help change the public perception of Bobby, make people understand the truth of who my brother really was.
I jumped in the shower, dressed, made fresh coffee, dug up an unopened box of cookies, and pulled the blanket down from the kitchen window. I hid the mess of our lives behind closet doors, and waited for the call from Eric that would bring me to my senses. But it never came.
The reporter was at my door in less than an hour. She hadn’t given me time to change my mind. Maybe that had been her plan. Maybe it was mine. She’d had to work her way through the television people, a pair of them following her to the door.
“My goodness,” she said, after I’d gotten her in and shut them out.
; “Yes,” I said simply. I didn’t embellish. She’d seen it for herself.
She was older than I expected, at least my age, with an ordinary name, Maureen. Her hair was cut simply, dyed dark, her roots showing gray. She wore slacks, a sweater, and an ordinary chain necklace. I didn’t know whether it was her gray roots or the necklace, but I was seized with a wobbly hope that I could trust her.
She went straight to the rocking chair in the living room. “Is this an original Stickley?” she asked, rubbing her hands across the grain.
I nodded. “It was my grandfather’s.” She looked around. I saw her picking out the good things, calculating fair market value. “The old pieces belonged to my grandparents, then my parents,” I said. “You don’t want to know about the Craftsman furniture my sister and I decoupaged when we were teenagers.”
She laughed, and I thought, Good.
I offered coffee and a small plate of cookies. “I never turn down a cookie,” she said, taking one. I sensed she was playing at being a regular gal, that she had the act down pat, yet I bought it anyway.
She reached into a leather bag that seemed half purse, half briefcase, and took out a notebook, a small tape recorder, and a pair of glasses. She sat back against the couch pillows as if we’d known each other since high school. She asked about my childhood. Anxiety chilling my fingers, what came to me in memory was heat. Heat so thick, you could see it rising from the sidewalk. “It was hot in the Sacramento Valley where we grew up,” I said. “My father was in politics, but his parents were farmers.”
She already knew about my father, probably my grandfathers. Certainly, this woman, this successful journalist, was not interested in a weather report. She wanted the same thing as the government. She wanted Bobby. But I wanted him, too.
I was trying to make her understand that Bobby came from a real place, a valley that was hot, where people farmed and bought solid furniture they passed down to their grandchildren. Four generations of my family had helped build this state.
Golden State Page 9
