Time also had the photos showing that Bobby was once someone else, my stories of our childhood, and me as the sister. I came across as anguished, conflicted, self-deluding, but essentially decent, married to a man who was the anti-Bobby, an attorney in San Francisco’s oldest and most prestigious firm, defending the sort of clients my brother might have wanted to bomb out of existence.
“What’s up with Daddy?” Julia, small in her oversize pajamas, was suddenly next to me.
I handed her the Newsweek. She stared at the cover. “So much for the unbiased press,” she said. “You need glasses to read the word suspect below all those capital letters above Uncle’s Bobby head. I feel sorry for him.” She moved to get up, giving me back the magazine.
“Wait.” I handed her the Time. “Your friends might ask you about this.”
She stared openmouthed at the cover. “This is us,” she said. She glanced to the shelf where the photo had always been. “How’d they get this?”
I took a breath. “I gave it to them.”
She hit her index finger smack on her infant self in Bobby’s arms. “Why would you give them a picture of me? What do I have to do with any of this?” Her face was flushed. “How could you betray my privacy like this?”
“I had no idea they were going to put that picture on the cover,” I said.
“I don’t believe you,” she said, jumping up. I could feel the outrage in her breathing. “I’m plugging in the phone. I don’t care what you say. I’m calling Donna.”
“Go ahead,” I said. I didn’t blame her for wanting to talk to someone outside this house. As soon as Julia disappeared upstairs, Lilly was at my side, pulling on my sleeve. Sometimes, the kids pulled on me so hard they left bruises. “There’s nothing to eat and I’m hungry,” she said.
*
I HEARD THE squeak of pipes in the morning, the shower turning off, followed by Eric’s heavy footsteps. Thank God, I thought. I looked toward the space that should have been mussed from his sleeping there. The sheets and blankets were undisturbed.
He came into the bedroom, moving slowly, quietly, dressing for work. I could tell by the light that it was early.
I sat upright. Our king-size bed felt enormous.
“Where were you last night?”
“I went back to the office,” he said.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been, but I was relieved.
He clipped on his watch. “I’ve got a long day today. Don’t wait up.” He did not kiss me or even say the word good-bye.
chapter twenty
I LISTENED TO the front door shut, the slap of Eric’s wordless departure. Going back to sleep seemed impossible. Cold beyond the chill of morning, I put on hiking socks with my slippers and a sweater over my robe. It was barely six o’clock. I tried not to think how long the day would be. Eric had made coffee—he’d made the coffee all the years of our marriage. I poured a cup, carried it to the family room, and opened the Newsweek I’d shoved under the couch the day before. They wanted to know what had turned this “shy, gentle genius into a diabolic killer,” and they had an answer from a criminal psychologist: family pathology. Only two words, but they held my eyes until they burned. How dare he smear my parents like that, this Freudian know-it-all, who’d never even met us? I wanted to pay him back with such intensity it actually made me wonder if he was right. If my brother could do what he was accused of doing, what was I capable of?
The magazines made a big deal of Bobby never having had a girlfriend, as if he blew things up because he couldn’t get a date. They said his loneliness turned to rage at the world, that he developed his philosophy to rationalize his acts.
They had everything backward.
It wasn’t his loneliness that drove his thinking. It was his thinking that made him lonely. When he was teaching at Columbia, he told me that there were only a hundred mathematicians in the world who understood his work and half of them were in Israel, and that if he kept pushing ahead there would be none.
*
“WHAT ARE you reading?” Julia asked cautiously, Lilly padding along behind her. It was past ten a.m., the kids were finally up, and I was thrilled not to be alone any longer. A box from the attic lay at my feet.
“It’s a commemorative copy of Governor Brown’s first inaugural address,” I said, showing too much enthusiasm. I ignored the look that said Julia was sorry she’d asked. “Listen to this: ‘The essence of liberalism is a genuine concern and deep respect for all people.’ ”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “Please don’t read me any more.”
I handed her a photo from the box. “This is me when I was your age.”
“Maybe you’d like me to put it on the cover of Time magazine,” she said drily.
What had I been thinking? That Julia would be interested in my past? My past was strangling her.
But Lilly wanted to see the picture. “You looked pretty,” she said. I replaced the photo and the speech I’d read too many times this morning, closed the box. Julia put My Fair Lady back on the video player. I didn’t stop her.
Halfway through the video, our doorbell rang. “Don’t answer it,” I said.
Julia rolled her eyes. “Are you going to act this scary forever?”
The ringer was persistent, one long bell followed by another. My breathing went shallow. Last year a couple from Los Angeles had bought an Italianate house at the end of our street and put in a security fence. The neighborhood was appalled. Now I wished I had one.
I looked behind the blanket covering the window, and saw the mailman patiently waiting. Cowed, I opened the door.
“You’ve got a registered letter,” he said as if I’d answered the door like a normal person. It was from our auto insurance company. I’d never reported bashing into the side of another car.
I filled out the insurance form. Percentage my fault: one hundred. I wasn’t even looking.
An hour later, the bell rang a second time. “Here we go again,” Lilly said. I waited, then checked the porch from behind the blanket. An enormous spray of flowers sat in front of the door. Eric had sent flowers, at least a hundred dollars’ worth, I thought, bringing the display inside. He was sorry. He’d forgiven me. I felt like a girl with a new boyfriend.
There was a letter attached to the bouquet, but it wasn’t from Eric. It was from the Today show. They wanted me to appear on their program to tell my story. They’d make all the arrangements, fly me first class, and put me up in New York.
The phone rang upstairs. I heard Julia’s footsteps bolting for it, even though I’d told her not to answer, to unplug it after she used it. I ran upstairs, got to her room as she hung up. I clutched the doorframe, trying to control my anger.
“I’m sorry,” she said, moving quickly to unplug it. “I forgot. It was just Cindy. Don’t be so mad.”
“This is the last time,” I said, as if that made any sense.
Julia followed me at a distance back downstairs.
“Can I spend the night at Cindy’s house? It’s okay with her mom.”
I couldn’t think. I didn’t know what to do about the flowers, whether Eric was even coming home.
Julia looked at me. “I love you, Mom, but I have to get out of here.”
“Go,” I said.
She was out the door in less than five minutes. I watched her go. I wanted to run like that, out the door, down the street, my back to this house.
Instead, I grabbed a thirty-gallon trash bag and started sorting mail, tossing the easy stuff. There was a letter addressed to me in a child’s penmanship, my name misspelled, with no return address. I opened it. No salutation, just a note on a small piece of paper. You bich. I hope you get whats coming to you. Only scum sells out their own.
I laughed, probably too hard, before throwing it away. I opened the FedEx from ABC. They wanted to give me a full hour to tell my story. They’d help me with hair, makeup, clothes, even provide medication for stage fright if I wanted. I needed only to fly out first class, and if I couldn�
�t do that, they’d come to me.
I saw myself quietly glamorous, medically calm, making everything all right with the power of my words, what had been nightmare transformed into advantage—Bobby saved from death, my mother and Sara appeased, forgiveness from Eric, my girls proud. But even as fantasy, I couldn’t buy it. All I had to do was look at what the last interview I’d given had done.
The scent of the bouquet perched amid the mail on the table was overly sweet, the roses, tiger lilies, and baby’s breath mingling into a single funereal scent. I didn’t want Eric to see them. I considered throwing out the bouquet, vase and all, but the flowers in the overwrought display were lovely. I heard Bobby’s voice in my head: It’s not the flowers’ fault.
For the first time that day, I had a clear idea. I called Lilly from her endless video watching to help me. We got out all the vases in the house, washed and dried them. Then we took the arrangement apart, flower by flower.
*
“YELL AT ME,” I said when Eric and I were finally alone on Tuesday night. “Swear, anything.”
“I’m too defeated,” he said.
He lay on our bed, staring at the ceiling. I touched his shoulder. “We could be defeated together,” I said. He rolled onto his side, his back to me. “I have to get some sleep,” he said.
The next evening, I finally reached my mother. It had been a week since I’d fled her house, a week without a word. “Why haven’t you called?” I asked. I knew better than to lead with my chin but I’d done just that.
“I saw your interview in Time,” she said. “Not that I could have missed it.”
I sucked in my breath, and like a child, waited to hear how much trouble I was in.
“Did Eric put you up to it?”
“Eric?”
“To justify what the two of you did?”
I sighed. There would always be that. What the two of us had done.
“Eric had nothing to do with it,” I said. “I wanted people to know the real Bobby.”
“The real Bobby? Or the real you?”
Was that true? Was the understanding I’d sought less for Bobby than for me? Did everyone understand me better than I understood myself?
Her tone softened. “We’ve got two of the best federal public defenders in the country for your brother.” She described them, a man and a woman, each with a string of victories behind them, dedicated public servants courageously opposed to the death penalty.
The phone carried my mother’s sigh. “Even with public defenders, a good defense doesn’t come cheap,” she said. “I hope you weren’t expecting an inheritance.”
I have an inheritance, I thought without emotion. This.
*
NIGHT AFTER NIGHT of that somber spring break, I sat downstairs alone in the dark, an afghan around my shoulders, breathing the eucalyptus-scented air. The clutter of rooms reduced to lines, I sifted through my memory, my own kind of anthropologist, determined to find the place where the old Bobby ended and a new one began.
I was just out of college when Bobby invited me to visit him in Guatemala. It was my first big solo trip. I pretended to be fearless, struggling to find the bus in Flores, on the hours-long ride on impossible roads, arriving at the hotel, which was just a room in the back of a four-table café. I waited a day for my brother to collect me, the local men eyeing me. I never thought to complain. It was a rite of passage, living up to Bobby.
He took me to a village at sunset. We watched the candlelight procession, a plaster Virgin Mary held aloft at the lead. They carried placards with photos of their children—a village of them dying from the measles. I remember the fury in his voice when he said, “They’re praying to the Virgin Mary when they should be praying to Eli Lilly to donate their vaccine.”
We traveled to the Mayan ruins at Tikal. I would have never seen them without Bobby. At least, not like that, with no other people around and howler monkeys swinging above us. “In ten years, there’ll be tour buses here,” he said. “There’ll be McDonald’s in the rain forest.” I looked to see if he was kidding but his expression was grim under the straw hat he wore.
During my entire visit, I never saw where my brother lived. He didn’t show me his room or his neighborhood. I never met any friends he might have made, or even someone who knew him. When he said good-bye to me at the bus, I clung to him, as if to assure myself that he was still there, that nothing had changed.
chapter twenty-one
I WAS TEN and Bobby sixteen that last good summer at our family’s cabin in Gold Run. Sara was queen of the teens at the WPA pool. Bobby and I were on strike from swimming, from even venturing outside. Deathly bored, I was reduced to slapping the couch around Bobby with a flyswatter, squinting and saying, “I missed.” It must have taken ten swats to get a reaction. “Knock it off,” he yelled over his book.
“Go outside, both of you, and stay out,” Mother ordered.
Bobby asked for the car to go to the library in Auburn. Mother said only if he took me. I was drunk with happiness, high on my own power to make things go my way.
My parents didn’t care about having new cars. My mother’s was ancient, with upholstery on the ceiling, a stick shift topped by a two-tone knob on the floor, and windows that took all your strength to crank. I hated my usual seat in the back, but now I was up front, windows down, hot air blowing through my sleeveless blouse, our channel, not my mother’s, on the radio.
“I don’t want to go the library,” I said.
Bobby shrugged. “Got any money?”
I didn’t but I scooted forward, opened the glove box, and came up with forty-six cents and grit under my nails. Bobby seemed pleased. “We can get a couple of Cokes,” he said. He asked me what I had against the library in Auburn. I relayed a long story about being upbraided for reading a book from the adult shelf without a note from my mother, telling my brother how I’d defended myself to the librarian.
“You were thinking outside your head,” he said of my defense. “That’s how I try to operate.” He must have realized that I didn’t understand, because he elaborated. “Physical stuff like fear, self-consciousness, even hunger inhibits thinking,” he said. “Pure thought happens outside your physical self. I train myself to think that way. You just did it naturally.”
I wasn’t sure that I had. I’d embellished the librarian story. Still, the moment was so large all I could think to do was make it bigger.
“Teach me to drive,” I said.
I never thought he’d agree, but when he did, I knew I couldn’t back down. He turned off the highway onto a country road, pulled over, and told me to put my hands up as if we were playing patty cake. He demonstrated how to use the foot pedals by having me push against his hands. He said he’d push the stick. I’d steer and do the foot thing. We traded places. Bobby didn’t get angry when I stalled the car. He told me to think outside my head, and I must have because the car lurched forward.
“Turn left,” Bobby said, and I did, immediately. It took a moment to grasp that we were airborne. “Oh, Jesus,” Bobby hooted as we hit the ground, tearing through a field of foxtails, his hand slapping his thigh, mine glued to the steering wheel.
“I meant turn left at the corner,” Bobby said, holding his stomach. I’d never seen him laugh so long or so hard.
He had to flag down a pickup truck to tow us out of the field. “I was teaching my kid sister to drive,” Bobby said to the guy who helped us.
“You could have been hurt,” the man said.
“I almost bust a gut laughing,” Bobby said.
I wanted to keep on laughing like that forever but Bobby said we had to keep our cool to avoid suspicion. My mother didn’t notice the new scratches on the car. A few days later we went home to Sacramento. And a week after that Bobby left for Princeton.
chapter twenty-two
I’D WITNESSED the suffering of friends, wondered how they could endure. I’d held my children tight and counted myself lucky.
Now that the life upen
ded was mine, I lacked the specificity of grief, the focus of terror. In their place was the dull, unending sense that I was dreaming.
On Sunday, I drove into Oakland to shop at a grocery store where I wouldn’t bump into anyone I knew. In the cereal aisle, a woman called my name. It was Jane from my book group. “What are you doing shopping clear over here?” she asked as her squeaky-wheeled cart trapped me against the Raisin Bran.
My eyelid pulsed and I put a finger on it to make it stop.
“I feel so terrible for everything you must be going through.” She hesitated. “I thought what you did was very brave.”
Brave? The sympathy in her eyes seemed genuine. Something was being asked of me, and I didn’t know how to deliver it. This was how it must have always been for Bobby, I thought, the strain to fake behavior that comes naturally to everyone else.
“Thank you for thinking of me,” I said. It sounded right but I didn’t mean it. I didn’t want her thinking of me. It seemed like a kind of invasion. The only thing she and I had ever shared was a dislike of The English Patient. My heart was off its rhythm, stuttering. I was afraid of never getting out from behind her basket, or worse, bumping into her in aisle after aisle, and then in the parking lot. When we finally parted, I went straight to the checkout stand, my shopping less than half done.
Eric was in the side yard clipping dead hydrangeas when I got home. He hadn’t shaved all weekend, and the white in his stubble gave him a grizzled look.
“What’s with the gardening?” I asked, sounding more sarcastic than I meant. Except for the occasional sweeping of leaves, I’d never seen him do yard work.
“It needed to be done,” he said, keeping his back to me.
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