Golden State

by Stephanie Kegan

  When we were kids, our friends wished they had our lives in this big house with an upstairs and down, cookies in the kitchen, plays in the backyard, trees you could climb, parents benignly indifferent to kids and noise. My friends and I could dismantle the furniture over my mother’s head and she’d never come up to check. “I don’t want to know unless there’s blood,” she said.

  “We had the best and the worst kind of childhood,” Sara once said to me. “Parents who paid no attention to us.”

  The old oak tree still stood beside the house. Sara used to crawl out her window and down the tree to sneak out of the house at night. She wasn’t like me, or even Bobby. She wasn’t afraid of getting into trouble. She was agile, physically fearless, and she had places to go after midnight.

  When I was five she took me under the oak to tell me how babies were made. She spared me nothing. “They call it fucking,” she said. I cried and called her a liar. But when I ran inside to my mother, I couldn’t tell her what the matter was. It was too terrible to say and I knew it was true.

  Sara would never sit outside this house in a car with the window rolled down, shivering in the juniper-scented air, longing for what she could not have. She would never have allowed any husband of hers to hand Bobby over to the FBI.

  *

  I CRAWLED INTO bed beside Eric, who did not wake up when I whispered, “I’m home.”

  I’d been so tired driving back from Sacramento that I’d feared I might fall asleep. Now in my own bed, sleep seemed impossible. I lay still, trying not to think, not to imagine tomorrow or the days after that. It was two o’clock, then three. I thought I heard Lilly calling mommy. “Everything’s okay,” I said aloud before I remembered that she wasn’t even home.

  When I was Lilly’s age, the girls drew pictures of houses and the boys drew pictures of bombs falling from airplanes. The teacher hung them around the room, the airplanes, then the houses, side by side. When we played dolls, the husbands were always away at war. We didn’t need those husbands. War was a good place for them. We got tired of the dolls, too, left them outside, our babies, where they could drown in the rain, asphyxiate in the heat, get chewed by dogs. We wore dresses to school with bows in the back and the bows became untied and trailed behind us as we ran for the swings and the hanging bars. I was good at the bars. We toughened our hands for them, delighted when our blisters oozed blood.

  In the dark, I felt for calluses on my hands. I had only one now, under my wedding ring.

  *

  I DIDN’T KNOW how late I’d slept, or even what time I’d fallen asleep. The sunlight behind the curtains was bright. The clock radio by the bed said twelve thirty. When I went downstairs, I saw that Eric had rehung the blanket I’d taken down from the kitchen window the day before. Just before the reporter came over.

  I had to find a way to tell Eric. I sat in a kitchen chair and phoned him at his office. He answered on the first ring with his name, the ordinary last name he shared with thousands. For the first time in twenty years, I wished I’d taken it.

  He sounded impatient. He was in the middle of something. I’ll tell him about the interview tonight, I thought. I was brief. I let him know that Sara and my mother were on their way to DC and that I was going to pick up Lilly. I said I didn’t care about the television crews.

  “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” he said.

  “I am,” I said. I wanted my daughters back. I telephoned Eric’s mother, and left a message for Julia at Donna’s house.

  It was four o’clock by the time I reached Los Gatos. When Eric and I first began dating, my in-laws had just moved into their house fronting the endless green of their country club. What should I wear? I asked Eric when I was going to meet them for the first time. I was twenty-­eight but my wardrobe ran only to jeans and little teaching dresses. I don’t remember what he said or what I wore. Only that I was either too dressed up or dressed down for Eric’s mother in her culottes and sleeveless polo shirt, with her Nancy Reagan hairdo.

  Now I went around back to the sliding door of the huge room that served as a combination kitchen, dining, and family room. Their family portraits hung on the wall: Mom and Dad, suntanned and self-satisfied; Eric and Richard as they progressed from babyhood to law school without so much as a hint of irony in their eyes. There was no Sara in their family, no in-your-face, pot-smoking, aging hippie. God knows, there was no Bobby, not even a me, tainted by the two of them. Politics was an unimaginable pastime in their spotless house. No little men with cigars pictured on that wall. No gals who swore. My in-laws were old but their politics belonged to the present. My parents’ New Deal–style liberalism had fallen out of fashion long before Bobby made us outcasts.

  My father-in-law, reading the Wall Street Journal in his easy chair, looked up and waved at me through the glass. I realized I’d just been standing there.

  I slipped in the door. My mother-in-law stood at the counter arranging slivers of celery on a vegetable tray. They expected me, but total surprise would have played no differently in this kitchen.

  Lilly lay on the floor coloring in the kind of flowers-and-baby-­animals book she’d outgrown in kindergarten. “Oh, hi,” she said icily before turning back to the coloring book my mother-in law had bought her. I dropped to my knees, kissed her on the head, but she just kept looking at the page she was working on. An Easter bunny. I’d forgotten Easter was this Sunday.

  I sent Lilly to get her things. She was sullen but did as she was told. Eric’s mother picked up a knife and began cutting radishes to look like roses. She asked how my mother was. “I feel so terrible for her,” she said. “I just can’t imagine.”

  “Yes,” I said, the politeness in my tone a lie, my anger unexpected. My parents had devoted their lives to the vision of California that my country-club in-laws had proudly voted to undo. I doubted my mother could tolerate the pity of this woman who couldn’t even imagine having a son like Bobby.

  Lilly came back dragging her small duffel and the huge Easter bunny Eric’s mother had bought her. She played out an elaborate and prolonged good-bye scene for my benefit. Eric’s mother gave her a baggie of radish roses, Lilly accepting as if they were chocolate bunnies.

  “I didn’t know you liked radishes,” I said when we were out the door.

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” she said.

  I wanted to kneel right there, go eye to eye with her, find out what it was I didn’t know, but I recognized the person heading up the drive toward us. No, I thought. I didn’t want to have to face my sister-in-law. Kelley threw her arms around me. “I’ve been trying to reach you,” she said.

  I knew. I hadn’t returned her calls. Another person I’d let down. “I haven’t been able to talk to anyone,” I said. It wasn’t an apology. It was a confession. I meant my own husband. I sent Lilly to the car.

  “I don’t blame Eric for not talking to Richard about any of this,” Kelley said. “My husband doesn’t know how to deal with anything that’s beyond his control.”

  I looked down at the driveway. I didn’t like thinking that Eric might be ashamed to talk to his own brother.

  “What I wanted to say is that I’m here if you want to talk, and that I understand if you don’t,” she said.

  My knees went weak from the desire to fall against her, to tell her about Time magazine, to tell her everything, to never stop talking. But I was hiding too much, and she was Eric’s brother’s wife.

  Instead, I looked toward Lilly, waiting in the car, letting Kelley be the one to say, “Of course, you need to go.”

  chapter nineteen

  WHEN I WAS A GIRL, I had a way with words. Vaccinated with a Victrola needle, my mother said. A born pol, my father said proudly. A liar and a tattletale, Sara said. I still had a talent for explaining, for convincing myself as well as my listener. I was a salesman’s mark, Eric said, because I was a salesman myself. Lilly didn’t make it as far as the first McDonald’s out of Los Gatos before I’d won her back, bu
t then she was only eight.

  It was late when we turned up our driveway. The light was out on the kitchen porch, the house completely dark. I fumbled for the right key on my chain.

  “You go in first,” Lilly said.

  This isn’t my house, I thought, when I turned on the lights inside. Blankets and towels strung across the windows. Who would live like this? The warm, sunny kitchen, the room we’d so lovingly remodeled now reeked of stale air. The kitchen table where no one had sat in days was covered with unopened mail.

  I tugged hard at a blanket on the window to bring it down, but it didn’t budge. I looked up and saw that Eric had nailed it in place.

  I’d brought my little girl home to this.

  “Tell me again,” Lilly said. “Why did we put these blankets up?”

  “For privacy,” I explained. “But, we’ll take them down tomorrow because everything’s back to normal now.”

  Julia phoned to say she couldn’t come home before Friday evening. She had too many plans. I looked to the blanket-covered window and said I understood.

  I put Lilly in the bathtub, aired out her room, tucked in her sheets, and pulled a flannel nightgown from her dresser. We read stories in her bed, one after another. The whole time, I dreaded the sound of Eric’s key in the door and having to tell him about my interview. At ten o’clock, I finally turned out her light. Lie down beside me, she asked. “Just for a minute,” I said. I wrapped my arms around her, breathing in her shampooed hair. I’ll get up in a minute, I thought.

  *

  I TRIED TO grasp where I was. Eric, in shorts, his T-shirt damp from running, stood in the doorway, smiling. He seemed so glad to see me there in our daughter’s bed that I flushed with guilt. I got up and glanced at my jeans. “I just lay down for a minute.”

  “I tried to wake you,” Eric said, “but you were completely out.”

  Lilly looked up. “Mommy slept with me all night,” she said triumphantly before scrambling to Eric. He held her with one arm and me with the other. “I have my Lilly back,” he said.

  “I’ll just take a quick shower,” I said, backing away from his grip.

  “Later,” he said. “I’ve got breakfast.”

  I started to gather the mail on the kitchen table, picking up a bright FedEx envelope. It was from ABC in New York. All I could think to do was bury it inside the stack I was transferring to the dining room table.

  Eric sliced bagels from a brown bag and put them on the table with cream cheese. We didn’t talk. Lilly did it for us. She spoke as if she’d just been released from a vow of silence, one thought tumbling joyously into the next. I wanted to cry from the realization of all she’d been holding inside.

  “Mom and I are taking down the blankets today because everything’s back to normal,” she said. Eric smiled indulgently but said nothing.

  “I think she’s glad to be home,” I said after she ran off. I took a breath. “We need to talk.”

  He nodded. “Not a good idea taking the blankets down,” he said, pointing to the window. “People have been driving by, getting out of their cars to stare.”

  “Oh God,” I said. I hadn’t noticed, but then I hadn’t been looking. I wanted to make sure Lilly was all right, but she’d just left the room.

  “I’ve gone through the phone messages,” he said. “We’ve gotten some really nasty ones. I’ve applied for a new, unlisted phone number. Until it’s installed, let’s keep the phones unplugged.” I nodded. “Then there’s the mail,” he said. It was starting to dawn on me: we were suddenly getting a lot of mail, even for us. “Don’t open anything from people you don’t know.”

  I stared at my lap, groping for words to tell him what I had to confess.

  “I’m sorry to have to leave you with all this,” Eric said. “That I can’t be around.”

  For the first time in days, I looked straight at him. His face was etched with exhaustion. I didn’t have to listen carefully to hear what he was telling me—the Monday deadline, all the hours, the late nights he had to work between now and then. He sounded beaten.

  I squeezed his hand. There was time. The article wouldn’t come out until the middle of next week. My confession could wait until Monday. I told myself that I’d made the decision out of kindness.

  Lilly and I picked up Julia on the way to dinner, Julia making it clear she wanted no greeting fuss from me. Eric met us at an Indian restaurant near the campus. Julia, unable to decide on her order, kept the server waiting. Lilly wasn’t happy with her chair. Julia sulked because the waiter brought her the wrong soda, but she refused to ask him to change it. Lilly whined and leaned too close to her sister even though she knew Julia hated being crowded.

  “It looks like everything’s back to normal,” Eric said. I laughed but I couldn’t look at him.

  Eric rode the BART back to work, and I took the girls to a movie. This was family life in full throttle. The napkin is dropped, the bill is paid, the popcorn is bought. She said, you said. I want, I need, I love, I hate. Children take up all your time and attention, and I was grateful.

  At home, I put Lilly to bed, and then went into Julia’s room. She was already under the covers. I sat beside her. “How’s it been for you at school?” I left the rest of the sentence unspoken, since Bobby’s arrest.

  “The teachers acted weird around me, like they were trying too hard to be normal. But the kids were cool. I got popular.” If you asked Julia a direct question, you got a direct answer.

  “Well, the popular part sounds nice,” I said cautiously.

  “I just want the whole thing over and never have to talk about it again,” she said quietly.

  “Me, too,” I said, sensing there was more.

  “Mom, I know you’re worried about how this thing with your brother is affecting me.” She hesitated and I braced myself. “But, I just want to feel normal, and your anxiety about me makes me feel that I’m not.”

  I tried to take this in. “I am worried about how all this is affecting you and Lilly,” I said. “Especially you, because you’re older.”

  “Well, it’s not helping me,” she said.

  I said I’d try to do better, not knowing if I could.

  Eric came home at eleven. By the time I joined him for bed, he was already asleep, his arm across his eyes. I got in beside him, touching his T-shirt where it fell against the sheet. My eyes wide open, I waited for nothingness.

  *

  ERIC WORKED all day Saturday and from morning until late into the night on Easter. Julia took off to be with Donna. Lilly and I made a picnic at the park with candy from her Easter basket for dessert. By the time the kids and I woke up on Monday, Eric had already been at the office for three hours. The girls pulled me out of bed. It was the first day of their spring break. We’d disconnected the cable and the Internet. They needed me for entertainment.

  I involved them in an elaborate breakfast which was really lunch, and then we moved to the family room couch, the three of us still in our pajamas at two o’clock. I could hear the birds chirping in the backyard, but I didn’t look between the drawn drapes to see what the day was like outside. We put on another video, My Fair Lady, and watched it as if we’d never seen it before.

  Halfway into the movie, Eric came through the door. My heart jolted. He was far too early. It wasn’t even four o’clock.

  “Why’s he home?” Julia asked in a tone that would ordinarily have gotten her a reprimand.

  “I just wanted to come home to my family,” he said evenly. He was lying. He looked ghastly, his face off-color, his suit wrinkled with his shirt sticking to him. The weight of his briefcase seemed too much for him to bear.

  I forced a smile and he looked away. “You girls take the movie and watch it upstairs,” he said. His voice was so eerily quiet, they did as they were told. I hadn’t moved since I’d heard him at the door. He opened his briefcase and hurled a pair of magazines into my lap with a violence I’d never seen in him. The magazines had bright liquor ads on the back, and
I could see where the sweat of his hands had bleached the color.

  I turned the magazines over. Newsweek’s cover was a photograph of Bobby, vacant eyed, his hair matted and filthy. His hands were cuffed and his feet were chained.

  “No,” I gasped when I saw Time, the photo on the cover so shockingly familiar, because I’d given it to them. Bobby in the center, Julia in his arms, Eric and me on either side, the day of Julia’s christening.

  Eric’s fist came down on the high back of the easy chair. “You put us on the cover of fucking Time magazine,” he said, “and you never even bothered to tell me.”

  “I can explain,” I said, although suddenly I didn’t think I could.

  “What were you thinking?” he asked. “That I wouldn’t notice a Time with our picture on the cover? That people wouldn’t be asking me about it all the goddamned day? Or did you just not feel like telling me?”

  “No, no, no,” I said. “You were working so hard. You had the court filing today. I was going to tell you tonight. I was so sure there was time.”

  Eric’s face was so incredulous, so angry, that I wondered if it was worth going on. “The reporter called on Wednesday. When she described the story she was working on, I thought I could use the interview to help Bobby, that it would be wrong not to. I tried to reach you.”

  Eric looked as if couldn’t comprehend my idiocy.

  “I never dreamed the magazine would be out in so few days, that they’d put that picture on the cover.”

  My husband swore, and then held his mouth as if to stop himself from saying more.

  I felt frantic. “I never meant to hurt you. Please, just sit down and let’s talk this through.”

  “I’m going out,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? Don’t be crazy.”

  “Don’t talk to me about crazy,” he said.

  “Please, don’t go,” I said, watching him leave. My chest heaving, I told myself he’d calm down and we’d work things out. Then, because I couldn’t not do it, I opened the Time. The magazine had Bobby on the couch, the center of a family melodrama, because that’s what I’d given them. Their story made a point of our family’s political connections and my father’s role in expanding California’s universities. I’d provided the dots, but they’d connected them: a messed-up son out to destroy his father’s lifework.