Golden State

by Stephanie Kegan

  I took a framed photo from the circular table that had once stood in my father’s study and gave it to Maureen. It showed my father in his office in Sacramento, papers covering his desk, leaning back in his chair. I always thought he looked like Gregory Peck. You can see it in the photo, the dark hair and eyebrows, the square jaw. My father is laughing, enjoying a joke with the man standing over him. That man is the governor of California.

  “In my family, politics wasn’t this thing separate from life,” I said. “It was life. My father was one of the architects of the California Master Plan for Education. He helped get it through the legislature. Higher education accessible to every Californian. That plan became a model for the nation.”

  I told Maureen about our house on Forty-Sixth Street, the noise of three children running on hardwood floors, how Bobby as a teenager held his own with the senators and journalists and scientists who came to dinner. I described how my mother served our guests the same meat loaves and stews she served the family. Once I started talking about the past, I couldn’t stop.

  “Bobby taught me to ride a bike by drawing a diagram,” I said. “He told me that if I kept the picture in my head, I’d never fall, and I didn’t.” She wrote this down, and I pretended not to notice, not to be pleased.

  I told her about Princeton, how Bobby had come home early.

  “You’re saying he had some sort of breakdown?”

  “I’m not sure. I was only ten at the time.”

  “Your parents, what did they think?”

  “They thought it was a mistake that he’d gone to Princeton so young. That it was too much for him being so far away. That all he needed was rest.” They thought that barely leaving his room for ten months was normal behavior for a seventeen-year-old boy.

  Maureen shifted on the sofa, and for the first time, I sensed impatience with what I was giving her. I wanted off the subject of my parents, and what they did and did not do for Bobby. I glanced at the clock. I’d been talking for nearly an hour, and we still had thirty-seven years to cover.

  “Bobby went to Berkeley the following year,” I said.

  “Did you ever visit him there?”

  Suddenly there was an image in my head. Before I could bury it, Maureen was on the trail, probing for what I wanted to hide.

  “He was living alone in a room. There were dirty dishes everywhere, layers of stuff on the floor.” I held back the full picture, Bobby at his desk hunched over, barely speaking, certainly not to me, or to my father, who was grim-faced and disgusted with him. There was my mother, bustling around, collecting dirty plates, carting them off with a stubborn cheerfulness.

  I looked away. I didn’t want these memories showing on my face. This was no therapy session. Maureen wanted something from me, and I from her. I returned to Bobby’s biography. His dissertation won a prize. Columbia hired him as an assistant professor of mathematics. The chairman of the department said Bobby was among the top twenty of the new PhDs in the nation that year. But Bobby quit after three years, telling my parents he was giving up mathematics. I told her that he moved to Guatemala for six years before coming home to work as a janitor.

  “He wrote me anguished letters from Guatemala about the Indians, how their way of life was being destroyed.”

  I got up again, to show Maureen the framed photo from Julia’s christening. In it, Bobby is holding Julia in her christening gown, and I am clutching his arm. Eric stands slightly apart from us, his hair longish, his face shockingly young.

  “Can I borrow these?” she asked. I nodded, handing her the photographs that portrayed the brother I wanted people to know, the man who held my baby in his arms.

  “My father died four years after the christening,” I said. “Bobby refused to come to the funeral. My mother told everyone he had the flu.”

  I didn’t need to expose my mother like that, and I regretted it immediately. But Maureen wanted to know why Bobby didn’t come to the funeral.

  “He’d pulled away from the family by then, not wanting to see any of us, returning our letters. I don’t know why,” I said truthfully. “We were like a lot of families, I suppose. We didn’t talk about it.”

  I told Maureen about the money my father had left us, how Bobby had bought his land in Idaho with his share.

  “What did you do with yours?”

  “We put it into savings for the girls’ education,” I said, not knowing why I was lying. I’d used my inheritance to remodel the kitchen.

  Then Maureen asked about me, a series of ordinary questions leading up to the big one: why I’d turned Bobby in.

  “Because I was scared,” I said. “I never wanted to do anything that would hurt my brother. But I was afraid that if he really was the bomber, and I didn’t say anything, more people could die. The FBI promised that my identity would be kept absolutely anonymous, that my brother would never know. Now he does.”

  Maureen nodded sympathetically. “The government seems pretty certain that they have their man,” she said gently, as if I were some poor soul who couldn’t handle the truth.

  I didn’t wait for whatever question she might be forming.

  “I’m not in a position to know,” I said coolly, “but what I do know is that my brother is mentally ill.”

  I watched her write this down. I’d planned to say this. It was the point I had to get across. If Bobby had truly murdered these people in cold blood, this was the only possible explanation for it. Yet, I was telling the world something that had never even been spoken in my family. I knew the characterization would do more than wound my brother. It would infuriate him.

  Maureen said she’d had just one more thing to ask. “Did your brother’s brilliance have an impact on you when you were young?”

  The question surprised me. No one had ever asked me that before. “He deconstructed things in his head,” I said slowly. “Then he put them back together in a way I could understand. Brilliance is seeing what others can’t and rendering it simple. My brother never spoke down to me.”

  There was another memory, my earliest, but I did not tell the reporter. My brother’s face over my crib, his arms reaching toward me, lifting me over the bars and out into the world.

  I looked away, toward the clock. It was nearly three, the time the girls and I normally would be getting out of school. Maureen had seen the horde of reporters outside. I told her that they’d been also been at my school and that we’d sent the kids to stay with friends and family. She looked the faintest bit abashed, and then she thanked me. She removed my photos from their frames, and put them in her bag along with her tape recorder and notebook. I walked her to the door, locking it behind her.

  I had thought I’d feel better after talking to her, that it was the right, the moral thing to do what I could to save my brother’s life. Instead, I sank back onto the couch, overwhelmed by the sense that I’d just betrayed everyone I had ever loved.

  chapter eighteen

  I HAD DONE this thing without talking to Eric first, and now I’d have to make him understand. No matter what Bobby might have done or not done, if we hadn’t gone to the FBI, he’d still be safe in his shack. More than anything, I wanted him to be innocent. But even if he’d killed a thousand people, he was still my brother. I needed Eric to see that when the opportunity to defend him came to my door, I had no choice but to open it.

  It was just four o’clock. If the kids had been home, I wouldn’t have been able to think for the noise. Now I couldn’t think for the silence. The package of cookies I’d opened for Maureen sat on the kitchen counter. I took one without thinking, and then ate another and another. I could have eaten cardboard. I wanted my girls home.

  Despite my queasiness, I started planning dinner. If I cooked for Eric, a real meal with salad and vegetables, then we might feel as if we still had our old life. He might even agree that talking to Maureen had been the right thing to do. Besides, dinner meant shopping, preparation, forcing shape and discipline onto the hours of waiting. The thought made
me willing to make another run past the reporters camped outside.

  I felt like I’d accomplished something when I found a parking space right in front of the store after my getaway from the house. I didn’t much like this market but it was close to home. I knew the checkers, where everything was. But, as I reached to unbuckle my seat belt, I realized the obvious: people recognized me in there.

  I threw the car in reverse, felt a thud. When I looked behind me all I could see was the shiny green of the car I’d just hit. It took me a moment to understand that I’d backed up while staring straight ahead. A small crowd was forming. The other driver was a woman, a trim blonde in office clothes, upset but clearly not going to yell.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. I’d bashed in the passenger door of her new car. I felt terrible, but my continued apologizing only seemed to annoy her more. We exchanged information. A man came forward to vouch that the accident was entirely my fault. “She wasn’t even looking,” he said. The blonde took his card and drove away. I followed her out of the lot with my dented bumper, making a show of cautious driving, wishing I could disappear.

  I drove aimlessly down San Pablo and pulled into a car wash. I felt like people were staring at me. I wanted to be invisible, yet I’d just given a private photo of my family to Time magazine.

  A small white-haired man, too old to be working at a car wash, hand-finished my car with a diligence the task did not deserve. “Stop,” I said, crossing the damp pavement toward him. He pointed to the opposite side of my car still covered with droplets. “It doesn’t matter,” I said, pressing some folded bills into his palm. He did something odd. He clutched my hand. Like a child, I gripped his in return, holding on without thought or shame. When I got back into my car, I understood that I wasn’t going to phone my insurance company. I wasn’t going to make dinner. I wasn’t even going home.

  I pulled onto I-80 because the on-ramp appeared in front of me. I sat in traffic with everyone else, and phoned Eric from the car. He apologized for not getting back to me. I said I understood. I told him I was going to my mother’s because it seemed a logical thing to say. “It’s a good idea,” he said. “Take some time, relax.” I’ll give you anything you want; he’d said when he asked me to marry him. I hadn’t believed him, but I liked the way it sounded. Now I just wanted for one night not to have to confront him—or what I’d done behind his back.

  I drove to my mother’s, so at least that part of what I’d told Eric would be the truth. Instead of waving me past this time, though, the guard at the gatehouse picked up his phone. “You can go through,” he said as gravely as if we were at the entrance to the White House.

  I hesitated when I saw Sara’s Volvo parked outside my mother’s condo. I didn’t want to have to face her. I doubted she’d softened her judgment about what I’d done. I tried not to dwell on the fact my mother had wanted Sara here and not me.

  Mother’s door was locked. I rang the bell.

  “What are you doing here?” my mother asked. I studied her face for a moment. It gave no clue to what she was going through. I didn’t offer any answer—maybe she didn’t expect one. I kissed her on the cheek and followed her inside. The kitchen table was set for two. “Sara’s here?” I tried to sound nonchalant.

  “We’re flying to Washington, DC, tomorrow to interview federal public defenders.” My mother’s voice cracked. She looked away from me. “Ones with experience in death penalty cases.”

  I wanted to argue, to set her straight, to say: We don’t know that he’s even guilty! But all I could do was stare at my lap.

  “Your sister’s out jogging,” my mother said, in control of herself once again. “You know how athletic she is.”

  Yes, I thought. She’s in great shape, and she didn’t turn Bobby in.

  “How about a beer?” she said, opening her shiny black refrigerator. She must have known I’d say yes.

  All her appliances matched. Her kitchen was as clean and uncluttered as a picture in a brochure. I couldn’t help thinking of the old house. My mother’d had the same cleaning woman there for thirty years, a Japanese American who wore her pearls to mop floors, and, although she never spoke of it, had been interned at Manzanar. Despite her efforts, the dark wood of our old house was perpetually layered in dust.

  I wanted to talk about anything other than where my mother was going tomorrow and why. I wanted to reminisce about our old kitchen, how much I’d loved the massive O’Keefe & Merritt range with the griddle in the middle, the books and papers piled on the green tile counters, and my mother’s work spread across the table. But Sara was coming through the door.

  “Well” was all she said when she saw me. She had on a faded, baggy T-shirt, worn gym shorts, and running shoes. Her wavy salt-and-­pepper hair was pulled into a braid down her back, an old sweatband across her forehead. She had the weathered face of a pioneer woman, but her legs were still those of the high school cheerleader she once had been. She looked old. She looked young. I was suddenly afraid of her.

  Sara went to the cupboard, took a tall glass, and filled it with water from the tap while Mother left to pack. Maybe she really did have things to get done, I thought, maybe she just didn’t want to hear what Sara and I had to say to each other. Sara drank with her back to me, staring at the sky, now dark outside the kitchen window.

  “How long have you been here?” I tried to make the question conversational, my fingers busy peeling the beer label from the bottle.

  “Do us both a favor,” she said. She turned to face me. “Don’t make this into some who-does-Mommy-love-best ordeal.” She refilled her glass and sat at the table. “Mother doesn’t want me here any more than she wants you. But she’s almost eighty. She needs help getting around DC.” Sara removed the sweatband from her head and wrapped it around her wrist. “And I want to see what I can do to keep them from killing Bobby.”

  “They’re not going to kill him,” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” Sara said. “The FBI promised you.”

  “This isn’t my fault,” I said, too frantically.

  “Spare me,” Sara said. “Without you and Eric doing what you did, I can’t see that any of us would be where we are tonight.”

  “You’re acting like I’m the one who fucked up your life by talking to the FBI,” I said. “Not Bobby, who might have been killing people.”

  Sara’s look was hard. “Tell me something, Natalie. Did you spend even one minute thinking about Mom? About what this would do to her?”

  “That’s not fair,” I said, my voice high and desperate. “Two college kids and a professor were blown to bits in Berkeley.”

  “Bobby didn’t do that.”

  “I hope to God he didn’t,” I said. “But if he was involved, I couldn’t sit back and take the chance more people might die.” I stopped myself from saying that even Julia could have been a victim.

  “You mean Eric couldn’t take any chances with his career in the corridors of power at Sterling fucking Tea Service,” she said. “What did you two think? That you could hire an FBI agent the way you hire a plumber, and have him clear up the problem for you?”

  We’d been trying to keep our voices low, conscious of Mother in the other room, but now, in our anger, we forgot about her. “You handed them Bobby,” Sara said, her voice raised. “It doesn’t matter that he’s not their man. They’ll make him their man.”

  “They found a bomb and explosive parts at his cabin.”

  “Or so they say.”

  “Why would they lie?” I shot back. But even as I said it, I realized: they had lied. They’d told the world my name. Now they might be planning to celebrate Bobby’s death, just as they’d celebrated his arrest.

  “You could have at least talked to me before going to the FBI.” Sara slammed her fist against her thigh. “Given me that consideration. He’s my brother, too.”

  “Telling you would have been the same as not doing it. You would have talked me out of it and I would have been grateful.”


  “Right,” Sara said, rolling her eyes.

  “You think this hasn’t torn me apart?”

  Sara didn’t answer. We sat without speaking, my sister with her defiant glass of tap water, me with my empty beer bottle, its label now torn to shreds. Sara was comfortable with silence. It was one of her great strengths, greater even than the moral certainty she was using to damn me.

  “I shouldn’t have come,” I said. “I’m leaving.” Sara didn’t try to stop me.

  I went to my mother’s room to say good-bye. She was zipping her small, wheeled bag on top of the bed. My mother loved to pack and she’d taught me to love it, too—just enough clothes carefully folded, the one change of shoes in a plastic bag, the travel-size toiletries, the miniature sewing kit, every contingency planned for, your life under control.

  “I’m not going to stay,” I said.

  “I wish you and your sister would try to get along.” She turned from me and sat on the bed, covering her face.

  I felt helpless, wanting to plead, Please don’t cry. I touched my mother’s shoulder, felt her stiffen. When she looked up, her eyes had dried. “Drive carefully,” she said.

  Sara caught up with me outside my car. Wildly, I hoped she was going to make everything all right between us.

  “I’m giving you a gift,” she said. I couldn’t help it, I looked to her empty hands.

  For the first time, she smiled. “I’m taking responsibility for Mother, for whatever we have to do to defend Bobby. You’re free to live your life.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “You don’t want me around because you blame me for everything.”

  She shrugged. “If that’s how you want to see it,” she said.

  I got in the car and drove away without looking back. I passed the entrance to the freeway and kept driving.

  *

  I TRAVELED MILES along Folsom Boulevard, before turning right onto Forty-Sixth Street. I should have been going home, and in a sense I was. There were no lights on when I parked at the curb. I waited in the dark, staring at the house I grew up in, wanting what I could not have: someone to open the door and call me inside.