I shifted the grocery bags in my arms. “I can’t face walking Lilly into school tomorrow.”
He stopped clipping, his hand taut on the shears. “What can you do?” he asked.
I was thankful that he left unsaid besides putting our family on the cover of Time magazine.
He waited for my answer. It was the first time we’d looked eye to eye in days. He’d been blond when we met. Now his hair was white in the sunlight. In his bleached-stained sweatshirt and old jeans, he looked like a guy who drove a beat-up van and fixed things. I pictured us in an alternative life, one where we worked for cash and didn’t wait until five o’clock to start drinking, a life where the waste was right out in the open. I wanted to touch his face, to feel the sting of bristle against the inside of my wrists.
“I can take the groceries inside,” I said.
He turned back to his reckless cutting.
I put the bags on the kitchen floor. There wasn’t much in them. Upstairs, the girls were fighting. They were like inmates now, nothing passed unchallenged. I stood at the kitchen table staring at a slender crack snaking down the wall. I didn’t know whether I was dreading or craving the moment when they’d call out for me.
The noise I anticipated came not from upstairs but from Eric. A sharp yelp followed by the sound of the garden hose. He’d cut himself.
It wasn’t blood that bothered me so much as bleeding, the idea of what was supposed to be inside of you coming out. Eric came in the house through the kitchen and turned on the water at the sink. He didn’t react when I walked up behind him, his hand under the faucet, water running red down the drain.
“What possessed you to start gardening today?” I said, furious with fear.
“I couldn’t stand looking at those dead hydrangeas,” he said.
I suppose I should have been grateful that he was raging at hydrangeas instead of me, but I was afraid. I watched the blood pour from his hand, and change hue under the water. I wanted to call him an idiot. Instead, I said, “Let me see.” My voice was at odds with my pounding heart, but I recognized the tone. It was my calm teacher’s voice, the quietly certain mother’s voice that I feared my children no longer trusted.
Eric let me examine his hand. The cut went deep into the flesh above his thumb. I could see the tendon.
“I’ll drive you to the emergency room,” I said.
“I can go myself.”
“I said I’d drive you.”
Eric yanked open the dish-towel drawer, searching through the pile for one of the older towels. Even bleeding, he was unfailingly considerate.
In the car, aware of my panic, and wishing I was steadier in an emergency, I looked over at Eric. His skin was gray against the white of his unshaved stubble. The dish towel around his hand was soaked red. He stared ahead, not returning my glance.
I dropped him in front of the emergency room and found a place to park. In the waiting room, Eric was attempting to fill out a hospital form on a clipboard in his lap. I finished it for him, my leg touching his for the first time in days. “A person could bleed to death in a place like this,” I said. Eric laughed a little.
Finally a tall woman in blue scrubs called his name. As if Eric were one of the kids, I went with him. The nurse put us in a small room with metal chairs, a table, and too much light. She sat Eric at the table and made a lot of noise putting on latex gloves. Then she unwrapped his hand. “Oh,” she said with a sharp intake of air. I looked past her at the jars of cotton swabs and tongue depressors. Say “ah,” my grandfather used to say when we were small. He pressed our tongues with a stick he unwrapped from his black bag. Sara said the stick made her gag. But I liked it, the taste of smooth wood against my tongue, the sense that I was holding my mouth open just right.
The emergency room doctor was too fat for his white coat. He had a German accent and he winked at me in my metal chair by the door. He seemed to belong to some other era, to some jollier world. He took a long time with Eric’s hand, then told us that a surgeon should look at it, too.
I could leave this room. I wasn’t the patient. Eric was angry with me. He wasn’t dying. “I think we need to take care of you,” the nurse said, standing over me. She stared at my hand. I did, too. It shook all by itself, my rings rattling against the metal arm of my chair. She took me out of the room to a gurney in the hall, and strapped on a blood pressure cuff. She squeezed it too hard, shaking her head.
“Calm down,” she said. “We can’t let you leave until you do.”
“I’m perfectly calm,” I said.
“Who’s your doctor?” The way she asked the question made it sound like an accusation.
Doctor? I couldn’t think.
When I didn’t answer her, she said. “Wait here.”
As soon as she disappeared, I climbed down from the gurney. I slipped out through a side door and found a bench outside. An ambulance pulled up and I looked away. Eric found me fifteen minutes later, his arm in a sling. “Are you okay?”
My face was damp with tears. I did not look up. He sat beside me.
“Are you going to leave me?” I asked.
“I could ask you the same thing,” he said.
I clutched the inside of his thigh, sliding my icy fingers upward. “I was so scared when I saw your hand.”
He nodded, growing hard against my touch. I felt the worn denim of his jeans, the metal track of his zipper, his firm outline. We kissed. I knew he hadn’t forgiven me, but it was something.
“Look what I got,” he said when we broke apart. He shook a pill vial in his good hand. “Vicodin.”
“You’ll have to share,” I said, only half kidding.
*
MONDAY, the alarm woke me but Eric slept as if unconscious, his face in the pillow, his bandaged hand above his head. He wasn’t driving anyone to school. I got up feeling as if I’d taken the Vicodin instead of him.
At breakfast, Lilly moved so slowly, ate so little, I put my hand on her forehead. She pushed it away. “I can’t miss any more school,” she said. She’d understood my wish before I did, my desire to keep her with me, to avoid walking her into the school where I no longer had a job.
Julia asked to be dropped two blocks from her campus. “I need the exercise,” she said.
At Mountaintop, I signaled to turn into the teachers’ parking lot. “Don’t park,” Lilly said, her voice too even. “Just drop me off like everyone else.” I’d told Eric I couldn’t do it, walk Lilly into school, face everyone. Now I grieved the end of that walk.
Eric was up when I got back, dressed for work. He had an appointment at ten with a doctor to treat his hand. “I can take you,” I said. “I don’t have anything else to do.”
“Ease up on the self-pity,” he said.
I didn’t argue. Eric didn’t hang around the watercooler complaining like the rest of us. He just kept on working quietly at his desk.
*
THE WAITING ROOM of the surgeon’s office was cushy with new magazines, a large aquarium, and a closed-caption television hanging from struts, tuned to CNN. An older, softly gray-haired woman, trim in jeans and tennis shoes, sat a few seats down watching the silent television. Eric talked with clients on his cell phone, one call after another. When the nurse called him, he went in still talking on the phone. I rolled my eyes. The woman seated near me caught my expression and we traded smiles.
I picked up a shiny Architectural Digest. I’d always liked trying to imagine our house perfectly done, the next house we’d have, but now these pictures led me nowhere. I closed the magazine and stared at the television.
Suddenly my brother was on the screen in an orange prison jumpsuit, his hands and feet shackled, his glance downward. The magazine slipped from my lap. I walked over to the set, and stood right in front of it so that I could see everything. A federal grand jury in Idaho had indicted Bobby in five Cal Bomber explosions.
The woman sitting behind me cleared her throat. I was blocking her view of the set. For once I didn’t care
about people knowing who I was. “He’s my brother,” I said. “I’m the sister who turned him in.”
“I thought you looked familiar,” she said cautiously, as though I might be dangerous myself.
I returned to my chair, my eyes fixed on the television as if this were a disaster and I needed to be told where to go. The governor of California, resolute and unsmiling, was on the screen speaking to the press. I couldn’t hear his tone of controlled anger but I read it in his captioned words: “The Cal Bomber chose Californians as targets of his heinous crimes. If federal officials don’t think they have a case that warrants the death penalty, the state of California does.” Underneath him a crawling headline read: GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA SEEKS TO HAVE CAL BOMBER EXECUTED.
My brother hadn’t even been tried and already they were fighting over the chance to kill him. The gray-haired woman looked at me, then glanced away. I grabbed my purse, and left. Sitting in the car, I scanned stations on the radio, hearing the same news over and over, when what I wanted was to be told something else entirely.
I shut off the radio and stared into the sunlight, remembering myself as a child on our front steps, waiting for Bobby to come home. He’d come up the walkway smiling, a package of Bazooka in his pocket. He’d sit and read the comic to me, give me the paper to smell. Then he’d split the pink gum down the line in the middle and teach me how to blow bubbles.
*
“YOU’VE BEEN CRYING,” Eric said when he got in the car.
“Bobby’s been indicted,” I said.
Eric was quiet in a way that meant he was thinking. “It’s not hopeless,” he said finally. “There’s his mental state. We don’t know that the government’s evidence means what they say it does. Despite what they’re claiming, it’s not a slam dunk.”
I looked at Eric in his striped, button-down shirt, his bandaged hand in a sling. For all he’d been through in the past weeks, the last twenty-four hours, he looked better. Rested. Resolved. This was the Eric his clients saw, and I clung to his words.
“There’s more.” I told him what the governor had said.
Eric’s laugh was short and sarcastic. “Guess he’s decided to run for president.” He took my hand. “Bobby’s got good lawyers. They know how to use pretrial prejudice to their advantage.”
I nodded, willing our marriage back to the way it had been before, the two of us on the same side of every significant thing.
“Look, the pretrial motions can go on for months,” he said. “In the meantime, Bobby’s going to be sleeping in a clean bed, getting enough to eat, having medical attention.” He paused, looked at me. “And we’re going to get back to a normal life.”
I understood his words as a command. “Yes,” I said. Until that moment I hadn’t realized how badly I’d wanted someone to tell me what to do.
He seemed surprised at the passion in my kiss in the car outside the BART station. “You don’t need to go in today,” I said.
“I’m a lawyer,” he said. “I don’t need a left hand.”
I watched him leave. I hadn’t been looking out for his health. I was picturing us back in bed. But I didn’t mind that he hadn’t picked up on the possibility. That it had entered my imagination was enough.
*
WHEN I GOT HOME, I phoned my mother. She answered on the first ring.
“You heard,” she said at the sound of my voice.
“On CNN.”
“There’s so much wrong with their case,” she said. “The FBI never told the judge who issued the warrant that they had other suspects.”
“Good,” I said. “I mean for Bobby’s defense.”
“He’s coming home,” she said.
“To your house? There’s bail?”
She sighed as if my idiocy were too much to bear. “To the Sacramento County Jail to wait for his trial.”
My neck pulsed. Idaho was far away. It wasn’t real. But I knew just where the Sacramento County Jail was. It was two blocks from my father’s old office.
*
THAT EVENING, we sat down to an actual dinner, Eric and the girls overpraising my pot roast. Once again, he and I had gotten it backward. We weren’t imposing structure on the girls as much as they were imposing structure on us. Julia had already given our new, unlisted phone number to all her friends, and we were in the business of playing secretary to her again. Lilly’s best friend had found a new best friend in the time Lilly was absent. Lilly and I schemed to get her back. The old arguments about homework, dishes, and bedtime returned as if we’d never been on the cover of Time.
Eric resumed his position as the parent-in-charge in the morning, making breakfast, hurrying the girls, and driving them to school. In their early-morning noise, the stomping down the hall, the running of water, the banging of doors, they asserted their membership in the real world, the world of people who had somewhere to be in the morning. But now in the sounds of their departure from the house, I heard their eagerness to leave.
It had barely been three weeks since my brother’s arrest. The world was continuing on but I’d been cut adrift.
“Do you have time to go over some things this evening?” Eric asked on Friday. His anger at me had been replaced by resignation. The anger had been easier to bear. “Can you get together what we owe on everything so we can look at where we stand?”
Eric worried about his job in normal times, the finicky blue-chip clients, the prestige firm whose plush carpets and stunning floral arrangements hid a relentless demand for billable hours. I rubbed the shirtsleeve that smelled of his anxiety. “Tell me what’s going on,” I said, bracing myself. He explained how the department head had come into his office and shut the door.
“How did he put it?” Eric asked sarcastically. “The client has some understandable concern that you might not be as focused as you need to be right now, and they’d like Carl to take over.”
I was outraged. “How can they treat you like that after all the cases you’ve won for them?”
“They’re the client,” Eric said. “They can treat me any way they want.”
I wanted to reassure him that this was only a bump in the road, but we both knew better. Instead I gathered the bank statements, bills, and loan notices, and brought them to the kitchen table. I gave Eric figures and he wrote them down on his yellow legal pad. We were like most everyone we knew. We lived a sliver beyond our means. Two kids in private schools, an old house that endlessly needed repairs, vacations that maybe we shouldn’t have taken, but the kids were only young once. We’d believed in a future of rising salaries and appreciating homes.
“Do you blame me?” I asked.
“For what?”
“This thing with Bobby. Not fighting to keep my job.”
“It’s not your job I’m worried about,” he said.
“But without this …” I flipped my hand so that I wouldn’t have to say my brother’s name again.
He shrugged. “I’m smart, I work hard, but I’ll never be more than a midlevel partner at Sterling, Talbot. I’m one of the fungibles not one of the indispensables, and that’s got nothing to do with you or your brother.”
“We’ll tighten our belts,” I said. It was our joke, the line that always closed our let’s-look-at-the-bills meetings, the line that led to one of us suggesting dinner out, the line that made us laugh, that reassured us we were still young and foolhardy.
But this time, we didn’t laugh.
chapter twenty-three
OUTSIDE, the May breeze carried the scent of geraniums and rosemary. Inside, I slept with my head under my pillow to keep out the light, my dreams hot and jumbled. When the phone rang, I reached for it, clearing my throat. I didn’t want anyone to know I was sleeping the morning away. I said hello, trying to approximate the tone of someone who’d been up for hours doing meaningful things. No one answered. Before I hung up, I heard what sounded like squealing.
Downstairs, in my flannel nightgown, so wrong for the hour, wrong even for the season, I poured a c
up of not-quite-hot coffee from the carafe, and watched the digital clock on the stove turn eleven. When the phone rang, I answered with a hint of furtiveness, as if the caller could see what I was wearing.
There was the same squealing sound as before but louder. Then a man spoke, his voice adult and hard. “You know what happens to little piggies who squeal, don’t you Natalie Askedahl?”
I slammed the receiver into its cradle. There had been threatening messages before, but we had an unlisted number now. My hand was still on the phone when it rang again. I pulled it from its metal plate on the wall, heard our other phones ringing. I used my cell to call the police, my voice shaking from the sense that I was the one who’d done something wrong. They said they’d send an officer. To take the squealer’s report.
*
WHEN THE doorbell rang, I was still in my nightgown. I hadn’t expected the police to come so quickly. I threw on yesterday’s clothes and answered the door barefoot.
My sister stood in front of me, her gray, curly hair loose on her back, her body fit in shorts and a T-shirt. She had a sweater tied around her waist, a worn canvas grocery bag on her shoulder, and rubber flip-flops on her feet. Sara hadn’t been to our place in years. We hadn’t spoken since she’d all but banished me from Mother’s house six weeks before.
I couldn’t read her expression, her eyes behind dark glasses in outdated aviator frames. Something’s happened to Mother, I thought.
“I’ve got to pee,” Sara said, pushing past me. She took off her sunglasses and squinted, trying to remember where the bathroom was.
She was back quickly. Sara never lingered. She gave me an appraising look.
“Been out of the house lately?” she asked with more good humor than not. “You seem a bit”—she wiggled her fingers—“musty.”
I glanced down, and saw a spot on my shirt, but of course that wasn’t what she meant. She looked around as if trying to square the room with her memory. “You got a new couch?”
“Four years ago.”
She tilted her head as if making a calculation.
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